Check yourself, Facebook
Even though a Washington Post investigation showed that Facebook allowed several false news stories to go viral, it hasn't followed Google's lead in adding fact-checking icons into posts.
More about this
Our reality is changing, thanks to media
- Facebook is bad for politics and for readers. Should it take up the publisher's burden? Updated Nov 8, 2016 ago
- Algorithms are always opinions embedded in mathematics.
- Check yourself, social networks.
Nov 8, 2016Facebook needs to embrace its status as a major media company and find ways to improve the average quality of the news stories it recommends to its users.
↩︎ Vox
Oct 24, 2016The best way to attract and grow an audience for political content on the world’s biggest social network is to eschew factual reporting and instead play to partisan biases using false or misleading information that simply tells people what they want to hear.
↩︎ BuzzFeed
If online identities allow us to migrate towards media that don’t challenge our views, perhaps the physical world offers a better shot at fostering civil discourse. We need "third places," neither work nor home, where people of different backgrounds share space—as in pubs, promenades, town squares, and coffeeshops.
As MIT Media Lab professor and famous computer scientist Alex Pentland argues, going outside is our only shot to save democracy.
More and more people are deluded into believing themselves experts
538's podcast lays out the problem inherent when, if you ask someone if they feel well-informed, they say “yes.”
Oct 20, 2016The old influence hierarchy has been shattered, replaced by a new mosaic of influence in which social media play a growing role.
↩︎ MIT Media Lab
America’s partisan divide comes down to city v. country
Cracked can usually be counted on for liberal viewpoints and hearty laughs, but their executive editor soberly recasts America’s partisan divide as one between the city and the country. “The cities are less than 4 percent of the land mass, but 62 percent of the population and easily 99 percent of the popular culture. Our movies, shows, songs, and news all radiate out from those blue islands. And if you live in the red, that fucking sucks.”
A central part of his argument is that the media have failed, and not just in their characterization of Trump supporters. There’s a fundamental mismatch between the lifestyles depicted onscreen and what is possible for many Americans, a disjuncture that has borne heavily on rural minds while city folk have gone blithely on. That vacuum was, inevitably, filled.
Online social networks privilege information from "friends," and elevate that information to the position of trusted source. According to Edelman, a PR firm that has conducted an exhaustive review of how influence works in the social age, that crowds out previously conventional sources of wisdom like experts and academics. "Two of the top three most-frequently used sources of news and information are now peer-driven media, where content is shaped by the search preferences of other users, or directly curated by friends or family."
Studies have shown that this structural tendency inflames nascent confirmation biases we all carry into ballooning echo chambers where conspiracy theories can run rampant. That contributes to a decades-long trend towards political polarization in America, confirmed by Pew.
As Cass Sunstein puts it in review of a research paper: "Confirmation bias turns out to play a pivotal role in the creation of online echo chambers. This finding bears on a wide range of issues, including the current presidential campaign, the acceptance of conspiracy theories and competing positions in international disputes."
Edelman calls this divide between “mass populations” and “informed publics,” with the main difference being that the latter lot have got college diplomas. After the financial crisis of 2008, the two groups have diverged in terms of how much they trust institutions like the government and the media.
Kaleidoscopic, nutso BBC doc challenges the algorithmization of media and the fantasies it has convinced us are real. "We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal."
Watch the whole entrancing film, composed almost entirely of repurposed footage, at ThoughtMaybe.
Oct 20, 2016Twitter has colonized my mind. Almost every day for just under a decade, I have checked the site, have tweeted, retweeted, been subtweeted. My mental map is the frontier surrendered, and Twitter is the empire. To become occupied by a social network is to internalize its gaze. It is to forever carry a doubled view of both your own mind and the platform’s.
↩︎ Real Life
More Headlines
The Editors' Longreads Picks
- An excellent essay on poverty and writing by Starr Davis. Updated May 31, 2022
- Novelist Héctor Tobar tries to understand the 1992 Los Angeles riots through the experiences of a single high school.
- Steven Johnson with a long assessment of the current state of A.I. and language. (The illusion has gotten very good.)
115
More to see
Welcome to The Morning News Tournament of Books, 2017 edition.
- Our championship match is decided in the Tournament of Books, with news of a Rooster surprise debuting this summer. Updated Mar 31, 2017
- In Thursday's action, Reyhan Harmanci sets up a colossal final.
- The Zombie round opens with Buzzfeed's Isaac Fitzgerald reading The Nix and The Underground Railroad.
21
More to see
Все ваши Белый дом принадлежит нам.
- "Will Putin expose the failings of American democracy or will he inadvertently expose the strength of American democracy?" Updated Mar 3, 2017
- Wilbur Ross just wanted to make some money in ethically gray areas (that should've prevented him from taking office).
- Jeff Sessions's spokeswoman can't help but continue to lie.
2
More to see
The oceans are under assault, and not just from the White House and friends.
- Trump's assault on the environment begins with American headwaters. Updated Mar 1, 2017
- Don't just blame the oil companies for destroying the oceans—blame sushi restaurants.
- Nothing escapes the deepest trenches of the ocean floor. Not light, not nutrients, not pollutants.
2
More to see