We Have Met The Internet’s Enemy, and It is Us
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We Have Met The Internet’s Enemy, and It is Us

This is my conclusion after reading the “apology” from some of the founders of internet platforms. As an early blogger and social media fan, I too felt like these new tools would be a tremendous way to share information, learning, and connect with people to continue that learning. I still believe it is that, on…

Algorithms and the Human Inconsistency Problem

Algorithms and the Human Inconsistency Problem

The other day, as I was perusing various news sources, I happened upon back to back articles from Psychology Today. Now at first glimpse these articles might not seem related, but I think they are. Let me start by talking about Facebook though. Way back in his Harvard days, Mark Zuckerberg, the legend holds, started…

Twitter’s Pretty Much Tossing the Baby with the Bathwater at This Point
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Twitter’s Pretty Much Tossing the Baby with the Bathwater at This Point

As many of you probably know, Twitter is fighting a losing battle with fake news, trolls, etc. They’ve tried a lot of really stupid things to try and, well, to try and make people be something that we aren’t, but that’s another post. Recently, they’ve started putting some serious limits on accounts, limits that are…

Linked – More Governments Granting Themselves Extra Censorship Powers With ‘Fake News’ Laws

Linked – More Governments Granting Themselves Extra Censorship Powers With ‘Fake News’ Laws

Tim hits the nail on the head here, there’s a very fine line between trying to weed out “fake” information, and outright censorship. “Fake news is apparently everywhere. All over Europe, legislators and officials are trying to regulate content with “fake news” legislation and directives, as though the term could somehow be narrowly-defined enough that…

Linked – Huge MIT Study of ‘Fake News’: Falsehoods Win on Twitter
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Linked – Huge MIT Study of ‘Fake News’: Falsehoods Win on Twitter

It’s true, fake news spreads farther, and faster, than the truth, but it’s not really Twitter’s fault: “And blame for this problem cannot be laid with our robotic brethren. From 2006 to 2016, Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones, the study found. Fake news prospers, the authors write, “because…

Advertising Is Manipulation

Advertising Is Manipulation

Recently, I’m sure that many of us have read various articles about how Facebook, Google and other social platform algorithms are being manipulated by media companies, Russians, trolls, government agencies, and so on in one mass effort to manipulate us all to do one thing or another. There have been numerous calls for legislation, censorship,…