Thanks to some LinkedIn connections, I discovered the website, and the soon to be released book, Calling Bullshit. It struck a nerve with me, mostly because I am one of those people who truly believes that you can convince people of just about anything if you throw enough statistics at them, without even needing to…
I’m sure many of you have seen the story, the Tweet with the incredibly poor math that talked about how for his $500 million dollar campaign Mike Bloomberg could have just given every US citizen a million dollar check. (Over 300 million people). If you haven’t, you can read about it here. Now the problem…
I’ve held this opinion for awhile, that no matter what Facebook does, there’s no way it’s going to be able to deal with the scope of fake news, harassment, etc. that rolls through their platform every day. (Or any other social media company.) Anything they do simply won’t scale. Let’s take fact-checking, for example: What…
What do we know about human nature, especially teenagers? Once they understand how an algorithm works, they’ll start messing with it. “Teenagers are using group accounts to flood Instagram with random user data that can’t be tied to a single person.” It certainly creates confusion for the algorithms in terms of what you might want…
I wrote about Section 230 last week. This comes from David French at Time. “It’s difficult to overstate how important this law is for the free speech of ordinary Americans. For 24 years we’ve taken for granted our ability to post our thoughts and arguments about movies, music, restaurants, religions, and politicians. While different sites…
I found this article from The Hill to be rather enlightening on the subject of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Because it shows that most of the critics of it, on both sides of the political spectrum, simply don’t understand what it is. Most of them seem to think it either: Frees big…