“Antisemitism is on the rise across the world, emboldened by lax enforcement from social media and other digital platforms. Data shows that the fear and concern of social media users, especially Jewish users, are justified – more than 75% of reported antisemitic content remains online. CyberWell evidences the reality of online Jew-hatred in real time,… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Category Archives: Social Media
What to do (and avoid) after you’ve been scammed
Washington Post [read free] – If you’re not careful, the hours after a scam can lead to more lost money or stress – There’s a booming industry of criminals who target people at their worst moments, squeezing more money or information out of them in exchange for false hope. They’ll promise to get you back into… Continue Reading
Top 20 charts of 2023
Kevin Drum: “Unlike the photos, I had no problem finding ten interesting charts. In fact, I found 20. So at the risk of taking a good thing too far, here are the top 20 most interesting charts of 2023. By the way: by “interesting,” I mostly mean “something you might find surprising.”… 9. Americans don’t… Continue Reading
How to set up legacy contacts for your online accounts
Washington Post [read free]: “If you’ve got a few days this holiday season to help your family with tech chores, embrace an awkward but necessary task: Assign someone to take over a loved one’s online accounts after they die. “Legacy contacts” are trusted individuals who can manage an online account after the owner dies. Maybe… Continue Reading
2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse
The Verge: “There’s this picture from more than a decade ago that still goes viral on the web every once in a while. You’ve probably seen it: it was created by the venture capitalist Andrew Parker, and it compares a few dozen startups with subsections of Craigslist. Back then, Craigslist was all things to all… Continue Reading
Why people still fall for fake news about climate change
Grist: “In 1995, a leading group of scientists convened by the United Nations declared that they had detected a “human influence” on global temperatures with “effectively irreversible” consequences. In the coming decades, 99.9 percent of scientists would come to agree that burning fossil fuels had disrupted the Earth’s climate. Yet almost 30 years after that… Continue Reading
Facebook Is Being Overrun With Stolen AI-Generated Images That People Think Are Real
404 Media: “…In many ways, this is a tale as old as time: people lie and steal content online in exchange for likes, influence and money all the time. But the spread of this type of content on Facebook over the last several months has shown that the once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content… Continue Reading
How Verified Accounts on X Thrive While Spreading Misinformation About the Israel-Hamas Conflict
ProPublica: “…An investigation by ProPublica and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows how false claims based on out-of-context, outdated or manipulated media have proliferated on X during the first month of the Israel-Hamas conflict. The organizations looked at over 200 distinct claims that independent fact-checks determined to be misleading, and searched for posts… Continue Reading
Crowds Can Effectively Identify Misinformation at Scale
Martel, C., Allen, J., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2023). Crowds Can Effectively Identify Misinformation at Scale. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231190388 “Identifying successful approaches for reducing the belief and spread of online misinformation is of great importance. Social media companies currently rely largely on professional fact-checking as their primary mechanism for identifying… Continue Reading
Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore
The Atlantic [read free]: “You are currently logged on to the largest version of the internet that has ever existed. By clicking and scrolling, you’re one of the 5 billion–plus people contributing to an unfathomable array of networked information—quintillions of bytes produced each day. The sprawl has become disorienting. Some of my peers in the… Continue Reading
‘It’s totally unhinged’: is the book world turning against Goodreads?
The Guardian: “The influential user review site has suffered a year of controversies, from cancelled book deals to review-bombing, and exposed a dark side to the industry.” Continue Reading
Health misinformation is rampant on social media
The Conversation – Monica Wang: “The global anti-vaccine movement and vaccine hesitancy that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic show no signs of abating According to a survey of U.S. adults, Americans in October 2023 were less likely to view approved vaccines as safe than they were in April 2021. As vaccine confidence falls, health misinformation… Continue Reading
