“Much has been written about the increase in loneliness and isolation that has accompanied the internet. This is said to be caused by shallow online friendships which are no substitute for genuine relationships. Being exposed to the heavily curated lives of others on social media has also been found to create feelings of depression and…
“So, for all of you complaining about fake news — a broad term with no real meaning, and which allows people to claim that anything they dislike, or anything with a small error in it counts as “fake news” — beware that you’re basically handing an easy tool of censorship to governments like China and…
“This sounds as though it’s modeled on similar arrangements around child pornography. Except that there are some major differences between child pornography and “terrorist content.” The first is that child porn is de facto illegal. “Terrorist content” is quite frequently perfectly legal. It’s also much more of a judgment call. And based on this setup,…
It’s been awhile since MailChimp retired their popular, and extremely useful, plugin that gathered up comments, likes, retweets, etc. from Facebook and Twitter and showed them right here on the blog. I continued to use it simply because tbhere is no other plugin that does both and does it so seamlessly. I knew, eventually, I…
In The Big Sort, Bill Bishop shows how, over the last 30 years, Americans have sorted themselves into like-minded neighborhoods. The same appears to be happening on the web. All the empirical research to date suggests that the reason is not the use of personalization algorithms per se. Algorithms can easily expose us to…
“The biggest weakness of this study is that it was entirely based on self-reporting. Asking Facebook users to report on their use of Facebook tends not to be as accurate as actually measuring a user’s actual use of the service, as people tend to show themselves in the most positive light possible. But what the…