The Intercept: “…An unavoidable takeaway of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is, essentially, that everything is even worse than you thought. Even if you’ve followed the news items and historical trends that gird Zuboff’s analysis, her telling takes what look like privacy overreaches and data blunders, and recasts them as the intentional movements of a… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
Visualizing the Lifespan of a News Story
News Life Span: Which stories stay longest in the public view, and which ones fade away? – “In today’s “attention economy,” attention is a resource. Furthermore, trust in the media is at an all-time low—arguably the effect of the polarization of the political landscape and the spread of “fake news” in the Trump Era. Given this… Continue Reading
Hackers Are Passing Around a Megaleak of 2.2 Billion Records
Wired: “When hackers breached companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent years—stealing 71 million and 117 million passwords, respectively—they at least had the decency to exploit those stolen credentials in secret, or sell them for thousands of dollars on the dark web. Now, it seems, someone has cobbled together those breached databases and many more… Continue Reading
Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing
The New York Times – “Facebook and Google have been brutal to the news business. But this primarily reflects a failure of imagination. The tech giants are the world’s best distribution platforms and could be an answer for journalism instead of a grave threat. As readers have shifted to digital sources, the two companies have… Continue Reading
How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians
Preferred citation: Alison J. Head, John Wihbey, P. Takis Metaxas, Margy MacMillan, and Dan Cohen, “How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians,” Project Information Literacy Research Institute. (October 16, 2018). “The News Study research report presents findings about how a sample of U.S. college students gather information and engage with… Continue Reading
Study – The Welfare Effects of Unplugging Social Media
The New York Times – Planning on quitting the social platform? A major new study offers a glimpse of what unplugging might do for your life. (Spoiler: It’s not so bad.) – “… A recent study found that the average user would have to be paid $1,000 to $2,000 to be pried away for a… Continue Reading
Shutting down Google+ for consumer (personal) accounts on April 2, 2019
Google: “In December 2018, we announced our decision to shut down Google+ for consumers in April 2019 due to low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations. We want to thank you for being part of Google+ and provide next steps, including how to download your photos and other… Continue Reading
Examining junk news posted on Facebook, starting with the 2018 US Midterm Elections
The Junk News Aggregator: Examining junk news posted on Facebook, starting with the 2018 US Midterm Elections – Dimitra (Mimie)Liotsiou, Bence Kollanyi, Philip N. Howard (Submitted on 23 Jan 2019) arXiv.org > arXiv:1901.07920. “In recent years, the phenomenon of online misinformation and junk news circulating on social media has come to constitute an important and… Continue Reading
Facebook Graph Codes and Operators
Facebook Graph Search Operators – Collated by Paul Myers See also from the same author – How to use Facebook Graph Search – “Experienced researchers know that Facebook’s search box has very limited and unpredictable functionality. However, there are tricks that can be used to squeeze a better search out of the world’s most popular… Continue Reading
Does Journalism Have a Future?
Cue up the similar refrain – Do libraries have a future?… The New Yorker – In an era of social media and fake news, journalists who have survived the print plunge have new foes to face. “…In the past half century, and especially in the past two decades, journalism itself—the way news is covered, reported,… Continue Reading
2019 Edelman Trust Barometer
“The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that trust has changed profoundly in the past year—people have shifted their trust to the relationships within their control, most notably their employers. Globally, 75 percent of people trust “my employer” to do what is right, significantly more than NGOs (57 percent), business (56 percent) and media (47 percent)…… Continue Reading
Survey: Few Americans Willing to Pay for Privacy
Center for Data Innovation: “Only one in four Americans want online services such as Facebook and Google to collect less of their data if it means they would have to start paying a monthly subscription fee, according to a new survey from the Center for Data Innovation. Few surveys of Internet users’ attitudes toward online… Continue Reading
