NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights: “As the 2022 midterms approach, falsehoods about election fraud continue to spread via social media. The Big Lie that Joseph Biden did not legitimately win the presidency in 2020 has mutated into a forward-looking belief among many Republicans that American democracy more generally no longer functions fairly.… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
Massive LinkedIn Study Reveals Who Actually Helps You Get That Job
Scientific American: “If you want a new job, don’t just rely on friends or family. According to one of the most influential theories in social science, you’re more likely to nab a new position through your “weak ties,” loose acquaintances with whom you have few mutual connections. Sociologist Mark Granovetter first laid out this idea… Continue Reading
This site tells you if photos of you were used to train the AI
Tech Crunch: “Deepfakes, AI-generated porn and a thousand more innocent uses — there’s been a lot of news about neural network-generated images. It makes sense that people started getting curious; were my photos used to train the robots? Are photos of me in the image-generating training sets? A brand new site tries to give you… Continue Reading
Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door
The New York Times: “Battling far-right extremism, Germany goes further than other Western democracies in policing online behavior, testing the limits of free speech on the internet…Hate speech, extremism, misogyny and misinformation are well-known byproducts of the internet. But the people behind the most toxic online behavior typically avoid any personal major real-world consequences. Most… Continue Reading
News Platform and Social Media and News Fact Sheet
Pew Research Center: “The transition of the news industry away from print, television and radio into digital spaces has caused huge disruptions in the traditional news industry, especially the print news industry. It is also reflected in the ways individual Americans say they are getting their news. Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans get news… Continue Reading
Tracked: How colleges use AI to monitor student protests
The Dallas Morning News, Arijit (Ari) D. Sen [subscription or online database access. Note – they are also making public nearly 3,000 documents, covering more than 56,000 pages from these schools]: “The pitch was attractive and simple. For a few thousand dollars a year, Social Sentinel offered schools across the country sophisticated technology to scan… Continue Reading
Does this button work? Investigating YouTube’s ineffective user controls
Mozilla: “Powered by 22,722 volunteers, Mozilla scrutinized YouTube to determine how much control people actually have over the platform’s recommendation algorithm. This is what we learned….Our work is the largest experimental audit of YouTube by independent researchers, powered by Mozilla’s RegretsReporter. Using RegretsReporter, an open source tool Mozilla built to study YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, we… Continue Reading
How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Your Friends (Or Family, Customers or Communities)
EFF: “Today, we launch “How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Your Friends” – a narrated slideshow and essay explaining how Facebook locks in its users, how interoperability can free them, and what it would feel like to use an “interoperable Facebook” of the future, such as the one contemplated by the US ACCESS Act…You can… Continue Reading
Manufactured Uncertainty in Constitutional Law
Waldman, Ari Ezra, Manufactured Uncertainty in Constitutional Law (September 6, 2022). Fordham Law Review, Vol. 91, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4211548 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4211548 “Civil rights litigation is awash in misinformation. Courts find that abortion causes cancer, that adolescent hormone therapy is irreversible, that in-person voter fraud is a growing problem. Except none of that is… Continue Reading
For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine
The New York Times: “…TikTok’s rise as a discovery tool is part of a broader transformation in digital search. While Google remains the world’s dominant search engine, people are turning to Amazon to search for products, Instagram to stay updated on trends and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses. As the digital world continues… Continue Reading
TikTok’s Search Engine Pumps Toxic Misinformation To Its Young Users
NewsGuard: “[A] NewsGuard investigation found that for a sampling of searches on prominent news topics, almost 20 percent of the videos presented as search results contained misinformation. This means that for searches on topics ranging from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to school shootings and COVID vaccines, TikTok’s users are consistently fed false and misleading… Continue Reading
How To Search Tweets By Location
Advos: “Ever wonder who the people are that are near your location and tweeting with a certain topic or hashtag? Maybe not, unless you are a Twitter nerd like me. But it can be interesting and if done correctly, improve your social marketing. Here is how to do it…” Continue Reading
