Will Big Data Give Us a Whole Bunch of Questionable Correlations?

Will Big Data Give Us a Whole Bunch of Questionable Correlations?

I think, statistically speaking, there’s no way that it won’t. I’m listening to a recent episode of Seth Godin’s podcast entitled Sample Size http://aca.st/0d21e1. Go listen to it, really. What struck me from some of the examples that he gave, especially when talking about the football prediction sites, is that as we collect more and…

Why We Can’t Expect Facebook to Fact Check Our Feeds

Why We Can’t Expect Facebook to Fact Check Our Feeds

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…

Linked: Teens have figured out how to mess with Instagram’s tracking algorithm
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Linked: Teens have figured out how to mess with Instagram’s tracking algorithm

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…

Linked: How Facebook and Twitter’s Content Moderation Could Open a Legal ‘Pandora’s Box’
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Linked: How Facebook and Twitter’s Content Moderation Could Open a Legal ‘Pandora’s Box’

I would tend to agree with this statement, because it all started with the algorithm, the point where all of these platforms took it upon themselves to decide what to show you. ““The more extensive you make the guidelines, the more selectively you enforce them, the more discretion you start to exercise over your platform,…

Linked: Instagram Tests Hiding Like Counts to Reduce Focus on Vanity Metrics
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Linked: Instagram Tests Hiding Like Counts to Reduce Focus on Vanity Metrics

This is, probably, a decent idea, but I have a question for Instagram, and Twitter for that matter. Look at the rationale for getting rid of “likes”: “”Testing a Change to How You See Likes – We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get. During this…