PC Mag – The world’s largest social network is full of advanced features that you’re probably not using, so we dug deep into the settings menu to find the most useful ones for you. Despite its issues (and there are many), Meta’s Facebook remains today’s foremost digital public square. Politicians and journalists gravitate toward X/Twitter,… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
There’s a Trump Presidential Library at the National Archives and It’s Hiring
No words for this via Washingtonian – “Now here’s a fun job listing: This position is part of the National Archives and Records Administration. Incumbent serves as the Deputy Director of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library within the National Archives and Records Administration. Serves as a principal advisor to the Library Director. At the… Continue Reading
Platform Response to Disinformation during the EU Election 2024
Fundacion Maladista.es: Analysis of the responses of very large online platforms to debunked disinformation during the EU Election 2024. 1. Executive summary – The goal of this report is to evaluate how five very large online platforms (VLOPs: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube) have responded to debunked electoral disinformation about the European Parliamentary elections… Continue Reading
How Americans Get News on TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram
Pew – “X remains more of a news destination than other sites, but the vast majority of users on all four are seeing news-related content. Social media platforms are an important part of the American news diet: Half of U.S. adults say they get news at least sometimes from social media in general. But specific… Continue Reading
New database features 250 AI tools that can enhance social science research
Stubbs-Richardson, M., Brown, L., Paul, M., & Brenner, D., (2023). Artificial Intelligence Applications for Social Science Research. Scholars Junction, Mississippi State University. “Our team developed a database of 250 Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications useful for social science research. To be included in our database, the AI tool had to be useful for: 1) literature reviews,… Continue Reading
Post-January 6th deplatforming reduced reach of misinformation on Twitter
McCabe, S.D., Ferrari, D., Green, J. et al. Post-January 6th deplatforming reduced the reach of misinformation on Twitter. Nature 630, 132–140 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07524-8 “The social media platforms of the twenty-first century have an enormous role in regulating speech in the USA and worldwide. However, there has been little research on platform-wide interventions on speech. Here… Continue Reading
Operation Overload
Aleksandra Atanasova (Reset.Tech), Amaury Lesplingart (CheckFirst), Francesco Poldi (CheckFirst), Guillaume Kuster (CheckFirst) Published in June 2024 under the CC BY-SA licence. “This report exposes a large-scale, cross-country, multi-platform disinformation campaign designed to spread pro-Russian propaganda in the West, with clear indicators of foreign interference and information manipulation (FIMI). The narratives promoted by the actors are… Continue Reading
Bluesky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other with Bridgy Fed
TechCrunch: “An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved. Now, users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their… Continue Reading
OpenAI Is Just Facebook Now
The Atlantic [unpaywalled] “Facing one controversy after the next, the artificial-intelligence company enters a new phase. OpenAI appears to be in the midst of a months-long revolt from within. The latest flash point came yesterday, when a group of 11 current and former employees—plus two from other firms—issued a public letter declaring that leading AI… Continue Reading
Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter
DeVerna MR, Aiyappa R, Pacheco D, Bryden J, Menczer F (2024) Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter. PLoS ONE 19(5): e0302201. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0302201: “The world’s digital information ecosystem continues to struggle with the spread of misinformation. Prior work has suggested that users who consistently disseminate a disproportionate amount of low-credibility content—so-called superspreaders—are at… Continue Reading
The New Generation of Online Culture Curators
The New Yorker [unpaywalled]: “In a digital landscape overrun by algorithms and A.I., we need human guides to help us decide what’s worth paying attention. The current Internet landscape sometimes feels like the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker”: directionless, inexplicable, bound to change in confusing ways. Our social-media feeds don’t offer much except the… Continue Reading
If Google Kills News Media, Who Will Feed the AI Beast?
Vanity Fair [unpaywalled] – “Summarization tools from OpenAI and Google offer a CliffsNotes version of journalism that may further dumb down public discourse and deliver a brutal blow to an already battered media business…we’re on the cusp of a similar phenomenon with the new wave of AI summarization tools being launched by OpenAI, Google, and… Continue Reading
