One, this is clearly true. And two, if you use FB to follow a website, blog, or some other form of “page”, you’re probably not seeing most of what is posted there. Might want to look into email, RSS, or some other form of following. “Facebook’s never going to reach a point where they say…
One of the complaints that many people have had about Twitter and Facebook’s efforts to minimize the use of their platforms for illegal, or even just overly rude, behavior is that once they started down that path, the demands for them to add one more thing to focus on would never end. I was reminded…
This is some interesting stuff to think about: The students, part of a university honors class this semester called When Machines Decide: The Promise and Peril of Living in a Data-Driven Society, were tasked with creating a mobile app that teaches the public how a machine-learning algorithm could develop certain prejudices. “It was created to…
I read this recent quote from an article about Ev Williams this week and something seemed oddly familiar about it: The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like…
This story is appalling on many levels. It began with a BBC investigation in 2016, which found that paedophiles were using secret groups on Facebook to post and swap sexually suggestive images of children. Facebook promised improvements to its moderation policy, and said it was employing “thousands” of moderators to check the content 24/7. Having…
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…