The Nation: “While the rest of the country was reeling from the Supreme Court’s decision in June to take away the right to abortion, Justice Sonia Maria Sotomayor was working. As her conservative colleagues planned victory tours and dinners at Morton’s, Sotomayor crafted dissents. She and her team of clerks worked to the last moment… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Social Media
Inside a ‘mega-study’ on election denial, polarization, and violence—and how to stop it
Fast Company: “Stanford’s Strengthening Democracy Study, the largest of its kind, tested 25 strategies among 32,000 Americans to learn which could reduce partisan animosity and curb antidemocratic attitudes…According to a FiveThirtyEight study, at least 120 Republican midterm candidates don’t accept the results of the 2020 election, representing 49% of Republicans on the ballot for Senate,… Continue Reading
YouTube․com/podcasts goes live as simple ‘Explore’ page
9to5Google: “youtube.com/podcasts is now live and is linked to on the existing Explore page alongside: Trending, Music, Movies & Shows, Live, Gaming, News, Sports, Learning, and Fashion & Beauty. It appears to have first gone live in late July, and is slowly becoming more widely available as it’s not showing up for all users we… Continue Reading
The Propagandists’ Playbook How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy
“The Propagandists’ Playbook by Francesca Bolla Tripodi, assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a research affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. “The Propagandists’ Playbook peels back the layers of the right-wing media manipulation machine to reveal why its strategies are so… Continue Reading
Prague Municipal Library art installation where hundreds of books are stacked in a cylindrical tower
Via Twitter – “Artist Matej Kren’s “Idiom” at the Prague Municipal Library is an art installation where hundreds of books are stacked in a cylindrical tower. Mirrors placed at the bottom and the top give the exhibit the illusion of being infinite.” See also the accompanying vide0 Continue Reading
What Happened When Twitter and Other Social Media Platforms Cracked Down on Extremists
ProPublica: “In a Q&A with ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson, former intelligence officer and data scientist Welton Chang explains how conspiracy theorists and violent racists fled to smaller platforms. Once there, their remarks festered and spread. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, an entire ecosystem of right-wing social media platforms has come into existence — from… Continue Reading
The Last Place Left Online for Real Conversation
The New York Times: “…By my count, I’m in eight group chats of varying intensity and longevity, between SMS and messaging apps. My longest-running group chat rose from the ashes of a failed workplace diversity committee. Over time, the conversation roamed far beyond work problems. (If you find me silently shaking with laughter over my… Continue Reading
America’s polarization – the impact of cable news
Via LLRX – Don’t be too quick to blame social media for America’s polarization – cable news has a bigger effect, study finds: Homa Hosseinmardi and a group of researchers from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and Microsoft Research tracked the TV news consumption habits of tens of thousands of American adults each month… Continue Reading
Meta injecting code into websites to track its users, research says
UK Guardian – “Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been rewriting websites its users visit, letting the company follow them across the web after they click links in its apps, according to new research from an ex-Google engineer. The two apps have been taking advantage of the fact that users who click on… Continue Reading
Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022
“The landscape of social media is ever-changing, especially among teens who often are on the leading edge of this space. A new Pew Research Center survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17 finds TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform… Continue Reading
As Partisan Hostility Grows, Signs of Frustration With the Two-Party System
Pew Research Center Report – “Nearly half of younger adults say they ‘wish there were more parties to choose from’. Partisan polarization has long been a fact of political life in the United States. But increasingly, Republicans and Democrats view not just the opposing party but also the people in that party in a negative… Continue Reading
How Russian Propaganda Is Reaching Beyond English Speakers
The New York Times: “In Spanish in Latin America or in Arabic across the Middle East, a steady stream of Russian propaganda and disinformation continues to try to justify President Vladimir V. Putin’s unprovoked invasion, demonizing Ukraine and obfuscating responsibility for Russian atrocities that have killed thousands of civilians. The result has been a geographical… Continue Reading
