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Javier E

In This Snapchat Campaign, Election News Is Big and Then It's Gone - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...at-election-campaign-news.html

campaign election news journalism social media bias memory

shared by Javier E on 05 May 16 - No Cached
  • Every modern presidential election is at least in part defined by the cool new media breakthrough of its moment.
  • In 2000, there was email, and by golly was that a big change from the fax. The campaigns could get their messages in front of print and cable news reporters — who could still dominate the campaign narrative — at will,
  • Then 2008: Facebook made it that much easier for campaigns to reach millions of people directly,
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The 2004 campaign was the year of the “Web log,” or blog, when mainstream reporters and campaigns officially began losing any control they may have had over political new
  • Marco Rubio’s campaign marched into the election season ready to fight the usual news-cycle-by-news-cycle skirmishes. It was surprised to learn that, lo and behold, “There was no news cycle — everything was one big fire hose,” Alex Conant, a senior Rubio strategist, told me. “News was constantly breaking and at the end of the day hardly anything mattered. Things would happen; 24 hours later, everyone was talking about something else.”
  • Snapchat represents a change to something else: the longevity of news, how durably it keeps in our brain cells and our servers.
  • Snapchat is recording the here and the now, playing for today. Tomorrow will bring something new that renders today obsolete. It’s a digital Tibetan sand painting made in the image of the millennial mind.
  • Snapchat executives say they set up the app this way because this is what their tens of millions of younger users want; it’s how they live.
  • They can’t possibly have enough bandwidth to process all the incoming information and still dwell on what already was, can they?
  • Experienced strategists and their candidates, who could always work through their election plans methodically — promoting their candidacies one foot in front of the other, adjusting here and there for the unexpected — suddenly found that they couldn’t operate the way they always did.
  • The question this year has been whether 2016 will be the “Snapchat election,
  • Then there was Jeb Bush, expecting to press ahead by presenting what he saw as leading-edge policy proposals that would set off a prolonged back-and-forth. When Mr. Bush rolled out a fairly sweeping plan to upend the college loan system, the poor guy thought this was going to become a big thing.
  • It drew only modest coverage and was quickly buried by the latest bit from Donald Trump.
  • In this “hit refresh” political culture, damaging news does not have to stick around for long, either. The next development, good or bad, replaces it almost immediately.
  • Mr. Miller pointed to a recent episode in which Mr. Trump said a protester at a rally had “ties to ISIS,” after that protester charged the stage. No such ties existed. “He says ‘ISIS is attacking me’; this was debunked in eight minutes by Twitter,” Mr. Miller said. “Cable talked about it for three hours and it went away.”
  • “Hillary Clinton said that she was under sniper fire in Bosnia” — she wasn’t — “and that has stuck with her for 20 years,”
  • Mr. Trump has mastered this era of short attention spans in politics by realizing that if you’re the one regularly feeding the stream, you can forever move past your latest trouble, and hasten the mass amnesia.
  • It was with this in mind that The Washington Post ran an editorial late last week reminding its readers of some of Mr. Trump’s more outlandish statements and policy positions
  • The Post urged its readers to “remember” more than two dozen items from Mr. Trump’s record, including that he promised “to round up 11 million undocumented immigrants and deport them,” and “lied about President Obama’s birth certificate.”
  • as the media habits of the young drive everybody else’s, I’m reminded of that old saw about those who forget history. Now, what was I saying?
Javier E

What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

post-truth disinformation fascism rationality far right social media manipulation press alt-right psychology

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gamergate
  • The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect
  • ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.
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  • Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something?
  • it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess – an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.
  • fter all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.
  • Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry
  • The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence
  • no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online
  • In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt. Everything we’re seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.
  • With 2014’s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trump’s movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign
  • young men converted via 2014’s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos
  • These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything
  • The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.
  • Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didn’t have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate – forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle
  • Historically, that seems to be Breitbart’s trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.
  • The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness.
  • There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to “drain the swamp” of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent – identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist.
  • At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked.
  • Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make people’s lives hell, the outer shell – knowingly or otherwise – protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you don’t want to talk, or won’t provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.
  • In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannon’s critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The “post-truth” reality is not simply an accident – it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.
  • The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didn’t make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.
  • Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called “eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts – a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would – above all else – be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak
  • 2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns.
  • The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but they’ll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the “alt-right”, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist.
  • Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
Javier E

[Six Questions] | Astra Taylor on The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture ... - 1 views

harpers.org/...taylor-on-the-peoples-platform

monopoly Internet libertarian media market freedom capitalism Big Data discrimination centralization commercial

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Astra Taylor, a cultural critic and the director of the documentaries Zizek! and Examined Life, challenges the notion that the Internet has brought us into an age of cultural democracy. While some have hailed the medium as a platform for diverse voices and the free exchange of information and ideas, Taylor shows that these assumptions are suspect at best. Instead, she argues, the new cultural order looks much like the old: big voices overshadow small ones, content is sensationalist and powered by advertisements, quality work is underfunded, and corporate giants like Google and Facebook rule. The Internet does offer promising tools, Taylor writes, but a cultural democracy will be born only if we work collaboratively to develop the potential of this powerful resource
  • Most people don’t realize how little information can be conveyed in a feature film. The transcripts of both of my movies are probably equivalent in length to a Harper’s cover story.
  • why should Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google get a free pass? Why should we expect them to behave any differently over the long term? The tradition of progressive media criticism that came out of the Frankfurt School, not to mention the basic concept of political economy (looking at the way business interests shape the cultural landscape), was nowhere to be seen, and that worried me. It’s not like political economy became irrelevant the second the Internet was invented.
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  • How do we reconcile our enjoyment of social media even as we understand that the corporations who control them aren’t always acting in our best interests?
  • hat was because the underlying economic conditions hadn’t been changed or “disrupted,” to use a favorite Silicon Valley phrase. Google has to serve its shareholders, just like NBCUniversal does. As a result, many of the unappealing aspects of the legacy-media model have simply carried over into a digital age — namely, commercialism, consolidation, and centralization. In fact, the new system is even more dependent on advertising dollars than the one that preceded it, and digital advertising is far more invasive and ubiquitous
  • the popular narrative — new communications technologies would topple the establishment and empower regular people — didn’t accurately capture reality. Something more complex and predictable was happening. The old-media dinosaurs weren’t dying out, but were adapting to the online environment; meanwhile the new tech titans were coming increasingly to resemble their predecessors
  • I’m resistant to the tendency to place this responsibility solely on the shoulders of users. Gadgets and platforms are designed to be addictive, with every element from color schemes to headlines carefully tested to maximize clickability and engagement. The recent news that Facebook tweaked its algorithms for a week in 2012, showing hundreds of thousands of users only “happy” or “sad” posts in order to study emotional contagion — in other words, to manipulate people’s mental states — is further evidence that these platforms are not neutral. In the end, Facebook wants us to feel the emotion of wanting to visit Facebook frequently
  • these services aren’t free even if we don’t pay money for them; we pay with our personal data, with our privacy. This feeds into the larger surveillance debate, since government snooping piggybacks on corporate data collection. As I argue in the book, there are also negative cultural consequences (e.g., when advertisers are paying the tab we get more of the kind of culture marketers like to associate themselves with and less of the stuff they don’t) and worrying social costs. For example, the White House and the Federal Trade Commission have both recently warned that the era of “big data” opens new avenues of discrimination and may erode hard-won consumer protections.
  • I use lots of products that are created by companies whose business practices I object to and that don’t act in my best interests, or the best interests of workers or the environment — we all do, since that’s part of living under capitalism. That said, I refuse to invest so much in any platform that I can’t quit without remorse
  • there’s a pervasive and ill-advised faith that technology will promote competition if left to its own devices (“competition is a click away,” tech executives like to say), but that’s not true for a variety of reasons. The paradox of our current media landscape is this: our devices and consumption patterns are ever more personalized, yet we’re simultaneously connected to this immense, opaque, centralized infrastructure. We’re all dependent on a handful of firms that are effectively monopolies — from Time Warner and Comcast on up to Google and Facebook — and we’re seeing increased vertical integration, with companies acting as both distributors and creators of content. Amazon aspires to be the bookstore, the bookshelf, and the book. Google isn’t just a search engine, a popular browser, and an operating system; it also invests in original content
  • That it’s invisible or at least harder to track and prove. We haven’t figured out how to deal with the unique ways prejudice plays out over digital channels, and that’s partly because some folks can’t accept the fact that discrimination persists online. (After all, there is no sign on the door that reads Minorities Not Allowed.)
  • just because the Internet is open doesn’t mean it’s equal; offline hierarchies carry over to the online world and are even amplified there. For the past year or so, there has been a lively discussion taking place about the disproportionate and often outrageous sexual harassment women face simply for entering virtual space and asserting themselves there — research verifies that female Internet users are dramatically more likely to be threatened or stalked than their male counterparts — and yet there is very little agreement about what, if anything, can be done to address the problem.
  • What steps can we take to encourage better representation of independent and non-commercial media? We need to fund it, first and foremost. As individuals this means paying for the stuff we believe in and want to see thrive. But I don’t think enlightened consumption can get us where we need to go on its own. I’m skeptical of the idea that we can shop our way to a better world. The dominance of commercial media is a social and political problem that demands a collective solution, so I make an argument for state funding and propose a reconceptualization of public media. More generally, I’m struck by the fact that we use these civic-minded metaphors, calling Google Books a “library” or Twitter a “town square” — or even calling social media “social” — but real public options are off the table, at least in the United States. We hand the digital commons over to private corporations at our peril.
  • 6. You advocate for greater government regulation of the Internet. Why is this important?
  • I’m for regulating specific things, like Internet access, which is what the fight for net neutrality is ultimately about. We also need stronger privacy protections and restrictions on data gathering, retention, and use, which won’t happen without a fight.
  • I challenge the techno-libertarian insistence that the government has no productive role to play and that it needs to keep its hands off the Internet for fear that it will be “broken.” The Internet and personal computing as we know them wouldn’t exist without state investment and innovation, so let’s be real.
  • social inequalities that exist in the real world remain meaningful online. What are the particular dangers of discrimination on the Internet?
  • So it’s not that the Internet needs to be regulated but that these big tech corporations need to be subject to governmental oversight. After all, they are reaching farther and farther into our intimate lives. They’re watching us. Someone should be watching them.
qkirkpatrick

Can You Trust the News Media? - Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY - 1 views

wol.jw.org/...102013442

media news knowledge brain science technology

shared by qkirkpatrick on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • MANY people doubt what they read and hear in the news. In the United States, for example, a 2012 Gallup poll asked people “how much trust and confidence” they had in the accuracy, fairness, and completeness of the news reports of newspapers, TV, and radio. The answer from 6 out of 10 people was either “not very much” or “none at all.” Is such distrust justified?
  • Many journalists and the organizations they work for have expressed a commitment to producing accurate and informative reports. Yet, there is reason for concern. Consider the following factors:
  • MEDIA MOGULS. A small but very powerful number of corporations own primary media outlets.
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  • GOVERNMENTS. Much of what we learn in the media has to do with the people and the affairs of government.
  • ADVERTISING. In most lands, media outlets must make money in order to stay in business, and most of it comes from advertising.
  • While it is wise not to believe everything we read in the news, it does not follow that there is nothing we can trust. The key may be to have a healthy skepticism, while keeping an open mind.
  • So, can you trust the news media? Sound advice is found in the wisdom of Solomon, who wrote: “Anyone inexperienced puts faith in every word, but the shrewd one considers his steps.”
  • qkirkpatrick on 05 Jun 15
     
    Can we trust the news media?
Javier E

Opinion | Trump's Tweeting Isn't Crazy. It's Strategic, Typos and All. - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tter-biden-misinformation.html

trump conspiracy theory alt-right right-wing social media campaign language

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • And Mr. Trump’s typo? It was surely not accidental. That extra “i” circumvented Twitter’s efforts to hide the hashtag in search results. Called #typosquatting, this tactic is often used by trolls and media manipulators to get around the rules of social media platforms.
  • Constant repetition makes the charge sound true, and blunts accusations of unethical behavior against Mr. Trump’s own children. With the hashtag, Mr. Trump found a way to tell supporters: Here is all you need to know about the Democratic nominee.
  • The hashtag took a complicated issue with legitimate questions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine and China — and reduced it to a slogan that could also be used to spread falsehoods about Joe Biden
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  • #BidenCrimeFamily, and the typo, is a crash course in how to rally supporters around a conspiracy theory — while neutering the attempts of social media companies to stop it. Mr. Trump has used this same tactic to sow doubt about mail-in ballots and the integrity of the election.
  • On Wednesday afternoon, with the presidential race unresolved, a protester in Nevada interrupted an election official’s news conference by yelling, “The Biden crime family is stealing the election!”
  • #BidenCrimeFamily is part of a yearlong, effective disinformation campaign against Joe Biden. In the final days of the presidential race, the hashtag was used on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the darker parts of the web, including 4chan and Parler. It was repeated in the right-wing media ecosystem, like Steve Bannon’s podcast and The Gateway Pundit.
  • In the last month, on Facebook alone, it reached at least 277,000 people, according to CrowdTangle — and that’s only on non-private pages
  • Stage 2: Seeding on Social MediaIn any manipulation campaign, the second stage involves campaign operators strategically spreading the hashtag across the media ecosystem.
  • Stage 1: OriginsFor more than a year, right-wing media and partisans have pushed “Biden crime family” as a viral slogan. Media manipulation campaigns are usually conjured in small, hidden spaces by a few operators with an agenda. But in this case, it was influential media and political personalities who got the ball rolling.
Javier E

How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ting-the-big-things-right.html

role model intellectual independent critical thinking psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 24 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they didn’t need to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, a professor at the Mayo Clinic and the editor of the Blood Cancer Journal, couldn’t believe his ears.
  • “Here I am, the editor of a journal in a high profile institution, yet I didn’t have the guts to speak out that it just doesn’t make sense,” Dr. Rajkumar told me. “Everybody should be wearing masks.”
  • Ms. Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science with no obvious qualifications in epidemiology, came out against the C.D.C. recommendation in a March 1 tweetstorm before expanding on her criticism in a March 17 Op-Ed article for The New York Times.
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  • The C.D.C. changed its tune in April, advising all Americans above the age of 2 to wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Michael Basso, a senior health scientist at the agency who had been pushing internally to recommend masks, told me Ms. Tufekci’s public criticism of the agency was the “tipping point.”
  • Ms. Tufekci, a 40-something who speaks a mile a minute with a light Turkish accent, has none of the trappings of the celebrity academic or the professional pundit. But long before she became perhaps the only good amateur epidemiologist, she had quietly made a habit of being right on the big things.
  • In 2011, she went against the current to say the case for Twitter as a driver of broad social movements had been oversimplified. In 2012, she warned news media outlets that their coverage of school shootings could inspire more. In 2013, she argued that Facebook could fuel ethnic cleansing. In 2017, she warned that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm could be used as a tool of radicalization.
  • And when it came to the pandemic, she sounded the alarm early while also fighting to keep parks and beaches open.
  • “I’ve just been struck by how right she has been,” said Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School.
  • She told me she chalks up her habits of mind in part to a childhood she wouldn’t wish on anyone.
  • Mr. Goff was enthusing about the campaign’s ability to send different messages to individual voters based on the digital data it had gathered about them. Ms. Tufekci quickly objected to the practice, saying that microtargeting would more likely be used to sow division.
  • An international point of view she picked up while bouncing as a child between Turkey and Belgium and then working in the United States.
  • Knowledge that spans subject areas and academic disciplines, which she happened onto as a computer programmer who got into sociology.
  • A habit of complex, systems-based thinking, which led her to a tough critique in The Atlantic of America’s news media in the run-up to the pandemic
  • it began, she says, with growing up in an unhappy home in Istanbul. She said her alcoholic mother was liable to toss her into the street in the early hours of the morning. She found some solace in science fiction — Ursula K. Le Guin was a favorite — and in the optimistic, early internet.
  • Perhaps because of a kind of egalitarian nerd ideology that has served her well, she never sought to meet the rebels’ charismatic leader, known as Subcomandante Marcos.
  • “I have a thing that fame and charisma screws with your head,” she said. “I’ve made an enormous effort throughout my life to preserve my thinking.”
  • While many American thinkers were wide-eyed about the revolutionary potential of social media, she developed a more complex view, one she expressed when she found herself sitting to the left of Teddy Goff, the digital director for President Obama’s re-election campaign, at a South by Southwest panel in Austin in 2012
  • “A bunch of things came together, which I’m happy I survived,” she said, sitting outside a brick house she rents for $2,300 a month in Chapel Hill, N.C., where she is raising her 11-year-old son as a single parent. “But the way they came together was not super happy, when it was happening.”
  • “At a time when everybody was being stupidly optimistic about the potential of the internet, she didn’t buy the hype,” he told me. “She was very prescient in seeing that there would be a deeper rot to the role of data-driven politics in our world.”
  • Many tech journalists, entranced by the internet-fueled movements sweeping the globe, were slow to spot the ways they might fail, or how social media could be used against them. Ms. Tufekci, though, had “seen movement after movement falter because of a lack of organizational depth and experience, of tools or culture for collective decision making, and strategic, long-term action,” she wrote in her 2017 book, “Twitter and Tear Gas.”
  • One of the things that makes Ms. Tufekci stand out in this gloomy moment is her lack of irony or world-weariness. She is not a prophet of doom, having hung on to an early-internet optimism
  • Ms. Tufekci has taught epidemiology as a way to introduce her students to globalization and to make a point about human nature: Politicians and the news media often expect looting and crime when disaster strikes, as they did when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. But the reality on the ground has more to do with communal acts of generosity and kindness, she believes.
  • Her March column on masks was among the most influential The Times has published, although — or perhaps because —  it lacked the political edge that brings wide attention to an opinion piece.
  • “The real question is not whether Zuck is doing what I like or not,” she said. “The real question is why he’s getting to decide what hate speech is.”
  • She also suggested that we may get it wrong when we focus on individuals — on chief executives, on social media activists like her. The probable answer to a media environment that amplifies false reports and hate speech, she believes, is the return of functional governments, along with the birth of a new framework, however imperfect, that will hold the digital platforms responsible for what they host.
Javier E

It's True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider. And Humans Are to Blame. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...witter-fake-news-research.html

polarization business model social media fake news misinformation psychology research technology

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • What if the scourge of false news on the internet is not the result of Russian operatives or partisan zealots or computer-controlled bots? What if the main problem is us?
  • People are the principal culprits
  • people, the study’s authors also say, prefer false news.
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  • As a result, false news travels faster, farther and deeper through the social network than true news.
  • those patterns applied to every subject they studied, not only politics and urban legends, but also business, science and technology.
  • The stories were classified as true or false, using information from six independent fact-checking organizations including Snopes, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org
  • with or without the bots, the results were essentially the same.
  • “It’s not really the robots that are to blame.”
  • “News” and “stories” were defined broadly — as claims of fact — regardless of the source. And the study explicitly avoided the term “fake news,” which, the authors write, has become “irredeemably polarized in our current political and media climate.”
  • False claims were 70 percent more likely than the truth to be shared on Twitter. True stories were rarely retweeted by more than 1,000 people, but the top 1 percent of false stories were routinely shared by 1,000 to 100,000 people. And it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people.
  • the researchers enlisted students to annotate as true or false more than 13,000 other stories that circulated on Twitter.
  • “The comprehensiveness is important here, spanning the entire history of Twitter,” said Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University. “And this study shines a spotlight on the open question of the success of false information online.”
  • The M.I.T. researchers pointed to factors that contribute to the appeal of false news. Applying standard text-analysis tools, they found that false claims were significantly more novel than true ones — maybe not a surprise, since falsehoods are made up.
  • The goal, said Soroush Vosoughi, a postdoctoral researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab and the lead author, was to find clues about what is “in the nature of humans that makes them like to share false news.”
  • The study analyzed the sentiment expressed by users in replies to claims posted on Twitter. As a measurement tool, the researchers used a system created by Canada’s National Research Council that associates English words with eight emotions
  • False claims elicited replies expressing greater surprise and disgust. True news inspired more anticipation, sadness and joy, depending on the nature of the stories.
  • The M.I.T. researchers said that understanding how false news spreads is a first step toward curbing it. They concluded that human behavior plays a large role in explaining the phenomenon, and mention possible interventions, like better labeling, to alter behavior.
  • For all the concern about false news, there is little certainty about its influence on people’s beliefs and actions. A recent study of the browsing histories of thousands of American adults in the months before the 2016 election found that false news accounted for only a small portion of the total news people consumed.
  • In fall 2016, Mr. Roy, an associate professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab, became a founder and the chairman of Cortico, a nonprofit that is developing tools to measure public conversations online to gauge attributes like shared attention, variety of opinion and receptivity. The idea is that improving the ability to measure such attributes would lead to better decision-making that would counteract misinformation.
  • Mr. Roy acknowledged the challenge in trying to not only alter individual behavior but also in enlisting the support of big internet platforms like Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter, and media companies
  • “Polarization,” he said, “has turned out to be a great business model.”
knudsenlu

Huge MIT Study of 'Fake News': Falsehoods Win on Twitter - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555104

social media fake news us trump culture internet research

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” Jonathan Swift once wrote.It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study published Thursday in Science.
  • By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
  • “It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does.
  • “In short, I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt the study’s results,” said Rebekah Tromble, a professor of political science at Leiden University in the Netherlands, in an email.
  • It’s a question that can have life-or-death consequences.“[Fake news] has become a white-hot political and, really, cultural topic, but the trigger for us was personal events that hit Boston five years ago,” said Deb Roy, a media scientist at MIT and one of the authors of the new study.
  • Ultimately, they found about 126,000 tweets, which, together, had been retweeted more than 4.5 million times. Some linked to “fake” stories hosted on other websites. Some started rumors themselves, either in the text of a tweet or in an attached image. (The team used a special program that could search for words contained within static tweet images.) And some contained true information or linked to it elsewhere.
  • Tweet A and Tweet B both have the same size audience, but Tweet B has more “depth,” to use Vosoughi’s term. It chained together retweets, going viral in a way that Tweet A never did. “It could reach 1,000 retweets, but it has a very different shape,” he said.Here’s the thing: Fake news dominates according to both metrics. It consistently reaches a larger audience, and it tunnels much deeper into social networks than real news does. The authors found that accurate news wasn’t able to chain together more than 10 retweets. Fake news could put together a retweet chain 19 links long—and do it 10 times as fast as accurate news put together its measly 10 retweets.
  • What does this look like in real life? Take two examples from the last presidential election. In August 2015, a rumor circulated on social media that Donald Trump had let a sick child use his plane to get urgent medical care. Snopes confirmed almost all of the tale as true. But according to the team’s estimates, only about 1,300 people shared or retweeted the story.
  • Why does falsehood do so well? The MIT team settled on two hypotheses.First, fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from the all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them, the team found.Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126,000 contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust, they found.
  • It suggests—to me, at least, a Twitter user since 2007, and someone who got his start in journalism because of the social network—that social-media platforms do not encourage the kind of behavior that anchors a democratic government. On platforms where every user is at once a reader, a writer, and a publisher, falsehoods are too seductive not to succeed: The thrill of novelty is too alluring, the titillation of disgust too difficult to transcend. After a long and aggravating day, even the most staid user might find themselves lunging for the politically advantageous rumor. Amid an anxious election season, even the most public-minded user might subvert their higher interest to win an argument.
ilanaprincilus06

Social media copies gambling methods 'to create psychological cravings' | Technology | ... - 3 views

www.theguardian.com/...-create-psychological-cravings

social media technology psychology addiction

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Social media platforms are using the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in the lives of their users
  • create psychological cravings and even invoke “phantom calls and notifications” where users sense the buzz of a smartphone, even when it isn’t really there.
  • you get drawn into “ludic loops” or repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback — and the rewards are just enough to keep you going.
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  • “We have to start recognising the costs of time spent on social media. It’s not just a game – it affects us financially, physically and emotionally.”
  • The pull-to-refresh and infinite scrolling mechanism on our news feeds are unnervingly similar to a slot machine
  • “You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing,”
  • We cannot know when we will be rewarded, and more often than not we don’t find anything interesting or gratifying, much like gambling. But that’s precisely what keeps us coming back.
  • “The rewards are what psychologists refer to as variable reinforcement schedules and is the key to social media users repeatedly checking their screens,”
  • phone dependency, driven by high social-media usage, can lead us to think our phone is vibrating, or that we have received a message, even when we haven’t.
  • “There are whole departments trying to design their systems to be as addictive as possible. They want you to be permanently online and by bombarding you with messages and stimuli try to redirect your attention back to their app or webpage.”
  • Once a habit is formed something previously prompted by an external trigger, like a notification, email, or any sort of ring or ding, is no longer needed, Eyal remarked.It is replaced or supplemented with an internal trigger meaning that we form a mental association between wanting to use this product and seeking to serve an emotional need.
Javier E

Opinion | Trump, Musk and Kanye Are Twitter Poisoned - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-musk-kanye-twitter.html

twitter poison corruption infantilization social media psychology conditioning

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • By Jaron LanierMr. Lanier is a computer scientist and an author of several books on technology’s impact on people.
  • I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot.
  • When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.
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  • I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.
  • The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying.
  • The human brain did not evolve to handle modern chemicals or modern media technology and is vulnerable to addiction. That is true for me and for us all.
  • Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning, which is the underlying mechanism of social media addiction. This is the core mechanism analogous to the role alcohol plays in alcoholism.
  • In the case of digital platforms, the purpose is usually “engagement,” a concept that is hard to distinguish from addiction. People receive little positive and negative jolts of social feedback — getting followed or liked, or being ignored or even humiliated.
  • Before social media, that kind of tight feedback loop had rarely been present in human communications outside of laboratories or marriages. (This is part of why marriage can be hard, I suspect.)  
  • was around when Google and other companies that operate on the personalized advertising model were created, and I can say that at least in the early days, operant conditioning was not part of the plan.
  • What happened was that the algorithms that optimized the individualized advertising model found their way into it automatically, unintentionally rediscovering methods that had been tested on dogs and pigeons.
  • There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets.
  • What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning?
  • o be clear, whiners are much better than Stalins. And yet there have been plenty of more mature and gracious leaders who are better than either
  • When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground
  • When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults — over and over, because the algorithm has settled on that pattern as a powerful way to engage us — habit formation restimulates old patterns that had been dormant. We become children again, not in a positive, imaginative sense, but in a pathetic way.
  • Twitter poisoning makes sufferers feel more oppressed than is reasonable in response to reasonable rules. The scope of fun is constricted to transgressions.
  • Unfortunately, scale changes everything. Taunts become dangerous hate when amplified. A Twitter-poisoned soul will often complain of a loss of fun when someone succeeds at moderating the spew of hate.
  • the afflicted lose all sense of proportion about their own powers. They can come to believe they have almost supernatural abilities
  • The degree of narcissism becomes almost absolute. Everything is about what someone else thinks of you.
  • These observations should inform our concerns about TikTok. The most devastating way China might use TikTok is not to misdirect our elections or to prefer pro-China posts, but to generally ramp up social media disease, so as to make Americans more divided, less able to talk to one another and less able to put up a coordinated, unified front.
  • uide society. Whether that idea appeals or not, when technology degrades the minds of those same engineers, then the result can only be dysfunction.
  • Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist who pioneered research in virtual reality and whose books include “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” He is Microsoft’s “prime unifying scientist” but does not speak for the company.
summertyler

Why Facebook's News Experiment Matters to Readers - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...he-news-and-how-it-doesnt.html

facebook news experiment nytimes

shared by summertyler on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Facebook’s new plan to host news publications’ stories directly is not only about page views, advertising revenue or the number of seconds it takes for an article to load. It is about who owns the relationship with readers.
  • Tech companies have always stepped on one another’s toes to try to become people’s gateway to the digital world — the only place people need to go to get what they want.
  • all kinds of companies are now becoming tech companies
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Facebook’s experiment, called instant articles, is small to start — just a few articles from nine media companies, including The New York Times. But it signals a major shift in the relationship between publications and their readers. If you want to read the news, Facebook is saying, come to Facebook, not to NBC News or The Atlantic or The Times — and when you come, don’t leave. (For now, these articles can be viewed on an iPhone running the Facebook app.)
  • The front page of a newspaper and the cover of a magazine lost their dominance long ago. Web home pages are following suit. Increasingly, the articles, videos, photographs and graphics that media organizations publish are stand-alone fragments that readers happen upon one at a time, often on social media.
  • “In digital, every story becomes unbundled from each other, so if you’re not thinking of each story as living on its own, it’s tying yourself back to an analog era,”
  • summertyler on 02 Jun 15
     
    Should we trust social media with the news?
sanderk

New Studies Show Just How Bad Social Media Is For Mental Health - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...media-can-be-for-mental-health

social media psychology mental health

shared by sanderk on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Plenty of studies have found correlations between higher social media use and poorer mental health, including depression, anxiety, feelings of loneliness and isolation, lower self-esteem, and even suicidality. But two new studies underline this reality by showing not just correlation, but causation—in other words, that tweaking your time on social media actually has measurable effects on mental health.
  • As the researchers expected, people who limited their social media use to 30 minutes felt significantly better after the three-week period, reporting reduced depression and loneliness, especially those who came into the study with higher levels of depression. Interestingly, both groups reported less FOMO and less anxiety in the end, which the team suggests may just be a resulting benefit of increased self-monitoring.
  • What’s also important to point out, but was not studied here, is that making any kind of comparison—not just to people who you think are more attractive or smarter, but also people who you think are less attractive or smart (or anything) than you—is linked to poorer well-being.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The results confirm what others have suggested, with the added bonus of being one of the few studies to use a real experimental design, which has the power to show causation. Additionally, it seems to suggest that we don’t need to cut out social media use completely, but just to curtail it.
  • A really neat study a few years ago illustrated this, finding that the link between social media and depression was largely mediated by this "social comparison" factor.
  • Social media, especially spending long periods of time on it, is just not that good for us. We may not need to quit it completely, but limiting our time on social media considerably, and reconnecting with friends and family in real life, is definitely the way to go.
peterconnelly

The Supreme Court vs. Social Media - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...upreme-court-social-media.html

new york times supreme court social media

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Supreme Court handed social media companies a win on Tuesday by blocking, for now, a Texas law that would have banned large apps including Facebook and Twitter from weeding out messages based on the views they expressed.
  • Do sites like Facebook have a First Amendment right to allow some material and not others, or an obligation to distribute almost anything?
  • The First Amendment restricts government censorship, but it doesn’t apply to decisions made by businesses.
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  • Conservative politicians have long complained that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media companies unfairly remove or demote some conservative viewpoints.
  • Associations of internet companies and some constitutional rights groups said that the Texas law violated the First Amendment because it allowed the state to tell private businesses what kinds of speech they could or could not distribute.
  • Texas countered that Facebook, Twitter and the like don’t have such First Amendment protections because they are more like old telegraphs, telephone companies and home internet providers.
  • A federal appeals court recently deemed unconstitutional a Florida law passed last year that similarly tried to restrict social media companies’ discretion over speech.
  • written by Justice Samuel Alito that said: “It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.”
  • These cases force us to wrestle with a fundamental question about what kind of world we want to live in: Are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube so influential in our world that the government should restrain their decisions, or are they private companies that should have the freedom to set their own rules?
katherineharron

Pew Research Center finds widespread agreement about the 'made-up news' malady - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Survey people about a range of issues, ask which issues are a "very big problem for the country," and more Americans will cite "made-up news" than terrorism, illegal immigration, racism or sexism.
  • Of course, some point the finger primarily at President Trump while others blame irresponsible news outlets. People are using different definitions of "made-up." But the study shows a widespread awareness of what's sometimes called the War on Truth.
  • 1: Pew says "Americans blame political leaders and activists far more than journalists for the creation of made-up news but put the responsibility on the news media to fix it." Only 9% say the onus is mostly on the tech companies.2: When people bemoan made-up news, they're not just talking about politics: 61% of respondents said there's a lot of bogus content out there about entertainment and celebrities.3: "52% of Americans have shared made-up news knowingly and/or unknowingly." Almost everyone says they only found out the info was bogus after sharing.4: Here is a hopeful sign! 78% "say they have checked the facts in news stories themselves." More here...
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  • The attorney representing 10 of the families who lost relatives in the Sandy Hook massacre told me that he welcomed YouTube's Wednesday action, but said it was "too late to undo the harm" that has been caused to his clients from conspiracy theories circulating on the platform over the past several years. "Sandy Hook happened now nearly seven years ago, and so during that entire time the clients were subject to hostile postings on YouTube that disseminated this false narrative and caused undue harassment, threats, and fallacies as they were trying to heal," said the attorney, Josh Koskoff. "At the same time, better late than never."
  • Moving forward, it will be interesting to see if other social media company adopts guidelines similar to the ones YouTube announced on Wednesday regarding content that denies well-documented violent events like Sandy Hook. "All social media platforms who have not taken this step, should look in the mirror and decide whether they want to continue to facilitate harassment and hate in this day and age where that has serious consequences," Koskoff told me. And Pozner echoed that, saying that he hoped "Twitter and other hosting platforms will follow suit in implementing and enforcing more socially responsible policies."
Javier E

Is Facebook Bad for You? It Is for About 360 Million Users, Company Surveys Suggest - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...nts-facebook-files-11636124681

facebook research psychology addiction harmful

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Facebook FB 1.57% researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
  • These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known as internet addiction. They were perceived by users to be worse on Facebook than any other major social-media platform
  • A Facebook team focused on user well-being suggested a range of fixes, and the company implemented some, building in optional features to encourage breaks from social media and to dial back the notifications that can serve as a lure to bring people back to the platform.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Facebook shut down the team in late 2019.
  • “We have a role to play, which is why we’ve built tools and controls to help people manage when and how they use our services,” she said in the statement. “Furthermore, we have a dedicated team working across our platforms to better understand these issues and ensure people are using our apps in ways that are meaningful to them.”
  • They wrote that they don’t consider the behavior to be a clinical addiction because it doesn’t affect the brain in the same way as gambling or substance abuse. In one document, they noted that “activities like shopping, sex and Facebook use, when repetitive and excessive, may cause problems for some people.”
  • In March 2020, several months after the well-being team was dissolved, researchers who had been on the team shared a slide deck internally with some of the findings and encouraged other teams to pick up the work.
  • The researchers estimated these issues affect about 12.5% of the flagship app’s more than 2.9 billion users, or more than 360 million people. About 10% of users in the U.S., one of Facebook’s most lucrative markets, exhibit this behavior
  • In the Philippines and in India, which is the company’s largest market, the employees put the figure higher, at around 25%.
  • “Why should we care?” the researchers wrote in the slide deck. “People perceive the impact. In a comparative study with competitors, people perceived lower well-being and higher problematic use on Facebook compared to any other service.
  • Facebook’s findings are consistent with what many external researchers have observed for years,
  • said Brian Primack, a professor of public health and medicine and dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas
  • His research group followed about a thousand people over six months in a nationally representative survey and found that the amount of social media that a person used was the No. 1 predictor of the variables they measured for who became depressed.
  • In late 2017, a Facebook executive and a researcher wrote a public blog post that outlined some of the issues with social-media addiction. According to the post, the company had found that while passive consumption of social media could make you feel worse, the opposite was true of more active social-media use.
  • Inside Facebook, the researchers registered concern about the direction of Facebook’s focus on certain metrics, including the number of times a person logs into the app, which the company calls a session. “One of the worries with using sessions as a north star is we want to be extra careful not to game them by creating bad experiences for vulnerable populations,” a researcher wrote, referring to elements designed to draw people back to Facebook frequently, such as push notifications.
  • Facebook then made a switch to more heavily weigh “meaningful social interactions” in its news feed as a way to combat passive consumption. One side effect of that change, as outlined in a previous Journal article in The Facebook Files, was that the company’s algorithms rewarded content that was angry or sensational, because those posts increased engagement from users.
  • Facebook said any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem.
  • “Every second that I wasn’t occupied by something I had to do I was fooling around on my phone scrolling through Facebook,” Ms. Gandy said. “Facebook took over my brain.”
  • “Actively interacting with people—especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions—is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said.
  • The well-being team, according to people familiar with the matter, was reshuffled at least twice since late 2017 before it was disbanded, and could get only about half of the resources the team requested to do its work.
  • In 2018, Facebook’s researchers surveyed 20,000 U.S. users and paired their answers with data about their behavior on Facebook. The researchers found about 3% of these users said they experienced “serious problems” in their sleep, work or relationships related to their time on Facebook that they found difficult to change. Some of the researchers’ work was published in a 2019 paper.
  • According to that study, the researchers also said that a liberal interpretation of the results would be that 14% of respondents spent “a lot more time on Facebook than they want to,” although they didn’t label this group problematic users.
  • In 2019, the researchers had come to a new figure: What they called problematic use affects 12.5% of people on Facebook, they said. This survey used a broader definition for the issue, including users who reported negative results on key aspects of their life as well as feelings of guilt or a loss of control, according to the documents.
  • The researchers also asked Facebook users what aspects of Facebook triggered them most. The users said the app’s many notifications sucked them in. “Red dots are toxic on the home screen,” a male young adult in the U.S. told the researchers, referring to the symbol that alerts a user to new content.
  • One entrepreneur came up with his own solution to some of these issues. In 2016, software developer Louis Barclay manually unfollowed all the people, pages and groups he saw on Facebook in an attempt to be more deliberate about how he used technology. The process, which isn’t the same as unfriending, took him days, but he was happy with the result: an empty newsfeed that no longer sucked him in for hours. He could still visit the profile pages of everyone he wanted to connect with on Facebook, but their content would no longer appear in the never-ending scroll of posts.
  • Thinking other people might benefit from a similar experience on Facebook, he built a tool that would enable anyone to automate the process. He created it as a piece of add-on software called a browser extension that anyone could download. He called it Unfollow Everything and made it available on Chrome’s web store free of charge.
  • In July, Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter, which the inventor earlier wrote about for Slate, saying his tool was a breach of its terms of service for automating user interactions. It also permanently disabled Mr. Barclay’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts.
  • Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Mr. Barclay’s extension could pose risks if abused, and said Facebook offers its own unfollow tool that allows users to manually unfollow accounts.
sissij

War Goes Viral: The Atlantic's November Issue - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...503630

atlantic social media technology

shared by sissij on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • the use of social media as both a tool in conflict and a shaper of it, tracking how online chatter has begun to intersect with real-life violence in dozens of armed confrontations around the globe.
  • ISIS is a prime example...and many others are successfully taking cues from the ISIS playbook.
  • Many of the new connections in the coming years will be concentrated in regions most susceptible to violence and conflict.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In China, the “internet hive” no longer roils at foreigners alone, but also at China’s own military; and the U.S. military is now training for the “SMEIR” or “Social Media Environment and Internet Replication.”
  • How is Silicon Valley voting? Clinton: 88%; Undecided: 7%; Neither: 5%; Trump: 0%.
  • In the state, black students like Kenny are nearly four times as likely as their white peers to be charged with disturbing school. At least 22 states have disturbing school laws on the books, varying in their definition of the crime: whether it’s acting “in an obnoxious manner,” prohibiting “boisterous” behavior, or punishing students for “annoying conduct.”
  • sissij on 06 Dec 16
     
    This article talks about how media can be misused and weaponized using the example of ISIS. It also tangent on the politics within America as the media was so one sided during the election. I think the rate of support to Clinton showed by the silicon tech companies also reflects the overwhelming support on medias because they tech-based. --Sissi (12/6/2016)
Javier E

Jonathan Haidt on the 'National Crisis' of Gen Z - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lity-gap-childhood-11672401345

social media psychology research education crisis culture Gen Z mental health defense creativity

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”
  • He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood
  • Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”
  • Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)
  • Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”
  • He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”
  • That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.
  • Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.
  • Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.
  • The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”
  • Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.
  • Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”
  • “Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”
  • To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”
  • He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education
  • I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”
  • University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”
  • 56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.
  • This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”
  • Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”
  • The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”
  • something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.
  • “this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”
  • Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse
  • Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.
  • Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”
  • By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”
  • Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur
runlai_jiang

A New Antidote for Noisy Airports: Slower Planes - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-for-noisy-airports-1520429994

technology airplane noise

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220
  • It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.
  • Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The FAA says it’s impressed and is moving forward with recommendations Boston has made.
  • . A working group is forming to evaluate the main recommendation to slow departing jets to a speed limit of 220 knots during the climb to 10,000 feet, down from 250 knots.
  • New routes put planes over quiet communities. Complaints soared. Phoenix neighborhoods sued the FAA; Chicago neighborhoods are pushing for rotating runway use. Neighborhoods from California to Washington, D.C., are fighting the new procedures that airlines and the FAA insist are vital to future travel.
  • “It’s a concentration problem. It’s a frequency problem. It’s not really a noise problem.”
  • “The flights wake you up. We get a lot of complaints from young families with children,” says Mr. Wright, a data analyst who works from home for a major health-care company.
  • In Boston, an analysis suggested only 54% of the complaints Massport received resulted from noise louder than 45 decibels—about the level of background noise. When it’s relentless, you notice it more.
  • With a 30-knot reduction, noise directly under the flight track would decrease by between 1.5 and 5 decibels and the footprint on the ground would get a lot skinnier, sharply reducing the number of people affected, Mr. Hansman says.
  • The industry trade association Airlines for America has offered cautious support of the Boston recommendations. In a statement, the group said the changes must be safe, work with a variety of aircraft and not reduce the airport’s capacity for takeoffs and landings.
  • Air-traffic controllers will need to delay a departure a bit to put more room between a slower plane and a faster one, or modify its course slightly.
tongoscar

Coronavirus Live Updates: China Is Tracking Travelers From Hubei - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-coronavirus.html

shared by tongoscar on 14 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • To combat the spread of the coronavirus, Chinese officials are using a combination of technology and policing to track movements of citizens who may have visited Hubei Province.
  • Mobile phone owners in China get their service from one of three state-run telecommunications firms, which this week introduced a feature for subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited. That has created a new way for the authorities to see where citizens have traveled.At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu on Tuesday, officials in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages and then show their location information to the authorities before being permitted to leave the station. Those who had passed through Hubei were unlikely to be allowed entry.
  • Top officials in Beijing on Thursday expanded their mass roundup of sick or possibly infected people beyond Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, to include other cities in Hubei Province that have been hit hard by the crisis, according to the state-run CCTV broadcaster.
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  • Chinese officials reported Friday that a surge in new infections was continuing, though not as markedly as the day before, when the number of people confirmed to have the virus in Hubei Province skyrocketed by 14,840 cases.
  • Japan has confirmed its first death from the virus.
  • For a moment on Thursday, it seemed as if there might be some good news from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship being held in the port of Yokohama in Japan, when the authorities said they would release some passengers to shore to finish their quarantine.Instead, Japanese health officials announced the first death from the virus in the country, of a woman in her 80s. It was third death from the virus outside mainland China. The woman had no record of travel there.
  • The Centers for Disease Control said Thursday that a person under quarantine at a military base in San Antonio had tested positive for the virus, bringing the number of confirmed coronavirus patients in the United States to 15.
  • For the first time in a decade, global oil demand is expected to fall.
  • The travel industry in Asia has been upended.Image
  • Movie releases have been canceled in China and symphony tours suspended. A major art fair in Hong Kong was called off. And spring art auctions half a world away in New York have been postponed because well-heeled Chinese buyers may find it difficult to travel to them.
  • The U.S. reported its 15th case after a person under quarantine tested positive.
  • The arts world, too, is feeling the squeeze.Image
  • China ousted a provincial leader at the center of the outbreak.
  • China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday summarily fired two top Communist Party officials from Hubei Province, exacting political punishment for the regional government’s handling of the crisis.
  • A second citizen-journalist in Wuhan has disappeared.
  • A video blogger in the city of Wuhan who had been documenting conditions at overcrowded hospitals at the heart of the outbreak has disappeared, raising concerns among his supporters that he may have been detained by the authorities.The blogger, Fang Bin, is the second citizen journalist in the city to have gone missing in a week after criticizing the government’s response to the coronavirus epidemic.Mr. Fang began posting videos from hospitals in Wuhan on YouTube last month, including one that showed a pile of body bags in a minibus. In early February, Mr. Fang said he had been briefly detained and questioned. A few days later, he filmed an exchange he had with strangers who showed up at his apartment claiming to bring him food.Mr. Fang’s last video, posted on Sunday, was a message written on a piece of paper: “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”Last week, Chen Qiushi, a citizen-journalist and lawyer in Wuhan who recorded the plight of patients and the shortage of hospital supplies, vanished, according to his friends.
  • South Korea quarantined hundreds of soldiers who visited China.
runlai_jiang

In Some Countries, Facebook's Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acebook-news-feed-changes.html

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In Some Countries, Facebook’s Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News
  • SAN FRANCISCO — One morning in October, the editors of Página Siete, Bolivia’s third-largest news site, noticed that traffic to their outlet coming from Facebook was plummeting.The publication had recently been hit by cyberattacks, and editors feared it was being targeted by hackers loyal to the government of President Evo Morales.
  • But it wasn’t the government’s fault. It was Facebook’s. The Silicon Valley company was testing a new version of its hugely popular News Feed, peeling off professional news sites from what people normally see and relegating them to a new section of Facebook called Explore.
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  • Facebook said these News Feed modifications were not identical to those introduced last fall in six countries through its Explore program, but both alterations favor posts from friends and family over professional news sites. And what happened in those countries illustrates the unintended consequences of such a change in an online service that now has a global reach of more than two billion people every month.
  • The fabricated story circulated so widely that the local police issued a statement saying it wasn’t true. But when the police went to issue the warning on Facebook, they found that the message — unlike the fake news story they meant to combat — could no longer appear on News Feed because it came from an official account.Facebook explained its goals for the Explore program in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Serbia in a blog post in October. “The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content,” wrote Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s News Feed. “There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries.”
  • The loss of visitors from Facebook was readily apparent in October, and Mr. Huallpa could communicate with Facebook only through a customer service form letter. He received an automatic reply in return.
  • ech giant may play in her country.“It’s a private company — they have the right to do as they please, of course,” she said. “But the first question we asked is ‘Why Bolivia?’ And we don’t even have the possibility of asking why. Why us?”
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