Teaching media literacy is an important skill!

Artificially limiting reach of large accounts to then turn around and demand extortion money? It's the social media mafia!

If this assertion is based on the Pew "News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017" (http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/) please note the question asked in the survey reads:

"Do you ever get news or news headlines on any of the following sites? By news we mean information about events and issues that involve more than just your friends or family."

Do you ever... I'm surprised the figure wasn't higher.

Social Media Company in Singapore - Incepte

Many useful and interesting ideas swirl around this and the nearby paragraphs and passages relating to the role of the media in American government. First - The A.P. Gov't exam, textbooks etc. The College board is fond of, and expects students to know and understand the following:

1. The role of media as a "linkage institution" between citizens and the gov't.
   1. The role of media in "agenda setting" i.e. deciding which issues / events will be put in front of the public.
   2. The tendency toward "horse race journalism" which focuses upon who leads in the polls rather than what their principles and positions on significant issues might be.

Secondly: I would be inclined to introduce students to this passage after a look at the history and influence of the media in politics & gov't especially as it has made political parties less crucial for candidates hoping to achieve nominations and elections (this is also a notion that the college board will deliver in its test questions)

Finally - in some of my other research, I came across this quotation by English editor Roger L'Estrange in THE INTELLIGENCER (Aug 3rd 1663) as quoted by Les Adams in his book THE SECOND AMENDMENT PRIMER on p. 115 "A public newspaper makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and councils of its superiors . . . and gives them, not only an itch, but a kind of colourable right and license to be meddling with the government" Perhaps a nice aristocratic counter position to lay alongside the remarks of Brutus concerning the media!

Gobo, a proof of concept.

I'm reminded of a JavaScript tool written by Aaron Parecki that automatically adds a start fragment to the URL of his page when the audio on the page is paused. He's documented it here: https://indieweb.org/media_fragment

Advocacy, leadership, social media

social media use

Media shapes culture, culture shapes society, and society can shape politics. It is cultural examples such as these that really show how influential media can be. Especially in movies that glorify tools to be weapons. Haltman states that there are metaphysical aspect that embody culture.

What is perceptive media

NBC News is sharing a database of 200,000 tweets from accounts that pushed Russian propaganda during the 2016 US election.

Mike Hearn, formerly with Google, calls a recent report on Twitter bots promoting Brexit "deliberate lying, or if you like, fake news."

Without having looked into it further than reading his response, I'm doubtful about his doubtfulness. I suspect the kind of bots he was trying to identify were a different variety. He says he never saw "cyborg" accounts. He doesn't mention that Russia is known to employ people for social media propaganda.

Is it, really? I think this confuses the issue.

Digital Hydra: Security Implications of False Information Online (NATO StratCom COE, Nov 2017)

Wer den Social Media fernbleibt, ist vielleicht online, vielleicht auch nicht. In beiden Fällen können die, die online sind und bei Social Media mitmachen, denjenigen, der fernbleibt, nicht «sehen», auch nicht als Leerstelle. Wer nicht bei den Social Media mitmacht, existiert – aus der Innensicht – in gewisser Weise nicht. Es sei denn, das Fernbleiben wird innerhalb der Social Media thematisiert. Und das kann nur, wer mitmacht oder prominent mitgemacht hat. Aus den Social Media heraus könnte zwar nach außen auf jemanden verwiesen werden, der nicht mitmacht – aber wäre das Kommunikation? Doch nur dann, wenn diese Person innerhalb der Social Media bekannt ist. «Ich mache bei Euch nicht (mehr) mit!» mach bei Social Media keinen Sinn. Ich würde also behaupten: im Zusammenhang mit Social Media ist Nicht-Kommunizieren durchaus möglich.

Jonathan Albright says that Instagram is another major channel of Russian propaganda.

IRA (Internet Research Agency) - a Russian troll factory.

David Karpf argues that actual user engagement among US citizens can be hard to estimate, since a lot of apparent activity comes from fake accounts.

This (“[hearts] increased likes by a billion!”) is said by an actual employee of Twitter as if it means something, but it means nothing. Clicking on a heart is not some inherent good like increasing exercise, or upping the amount of fiber in your diet, or decreasing poverty. It’s a decision to provide Twitter with more data. That’s it.

The truth is many people working these jobs are so far into the machine they don’t see the difference between platform engagement (clicking on hearts) and civic and personal engagement (enjoying life more fully, thinking about things more deeply, empathizing more broadly, imagining and building a better world). They upped the click rate on a heart which is good for marketing. They are food scientists trying to tweak a flavor profile to get people to consume thirteen more Doritos a day.

This is something that's been nagging at me for the last couple of weeks.

Does it all matter? Does that tweet, share, thumbs up, like really matter at all? If you/we/I share out of tweet of support, outrage, or indifference, does it really matter on the grand scale.

Yes, I might have some likeminded individuals value it, read it, use it, share it. But, ultimately aren't we really just shouting into the echo chambers that have been built up for us thanks to these algorithms and networks? We're preaching to the choir.

I'd like to think that open can/will combat this...but unsure.

I think this is a post for Hybrid Ped or elsewhere. Lemme know if this resonates with anyone and you want to write it out.

Kris Schaffer distinguishes bots, sockpuppets, and trolls, and talks about how to identify botnets. Twitter and other social media sites should be able to eliminate many of the bogus accounts. But they don't.

Interesting section

Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state's real GOP notified the social media company that the account was a fake.

The account, @TEN_GOP, was enormously popular, amassing at least 136,000 followers between its creation in November 2015 and when Twitter shut it down in August

The Bystander Effect - Crowds sometimes fail to help someone in trouble: everyone assumes someone else will do it.

Similarly, people in groups often fail to check facts as carefully as they would if they were alone. They assume someone else has already checked.

Careless people, and bots, tend to share news quickly, without bothering to fact check. Once something has been shared thousands of times, even fairly careful people are likely to assume it must be true.

Again, if social media was to think a bit bigger, there are ways to apply this insight to deprivilege the influence of the quickest, and privilege the influence of those making informed decisions.

Mike Monteiro's short history of Twitter from the point of view of a long-time user. They went bad when they started tolerating racists for the sake of continued growth. And now Trump's tweets are a genuine threat to the entire world.

Back in 2012, Zeynep Tufecki pointed out that election campaigns driven by big-data and social media could be bad for democracy.

Dewey and Lippmann had a well-documented public feud over the role of citizens in democracy.

Here are two articles a about their frequent debates:

http://schugurensky.faculty.asu.edu/moments/1922lippdew.html

https://www.infoamerica.org/teoria_articulos/lippmann_dewey.htm

Dewey, unlike Lippmann, believed in the underlying principle that humans were capable of discernment and if they were taught the skills to correctly identify inaccurate media sources, then we would have better journalism because citizens demanded it. This theme of human agency in media is a dominant one throughout this section.

Rheingold includes a large swath of Nicholas Carr's quotes on this page and next, which I'm not sure is helping his larger point. I happen to agree with some of Carr's arguments including this one. While I do believe its overstated, I think that his point that with there being so much content just 'out there' on the Internet, its hard to wade through the sludge for correct information, particularly if you don't have well-developed digital literacy skills.

This is another area where media stratification comes into play. The Internet has exacerbated the issue of confirmation bias in current events, because of its democratized nature. Everyone can publish content on the web, and because of that then anyone can find a source that aligns perfectly with their beliefs and biases, whether they're grounded in fact or not.

This is a huge contributor to the rise of the alt-right over the past year and a half. The publication of conspiracy theories, of abhorrent racist content, of confederate rage that make up alt-right circles on the Internet was a major news story during America's most recent election. Carr's point about the Internet forcing us to become 'hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest' means that people naturally flock to sources that confirm biases they already hold.

Again, the theme of people fearing the potential consequences of disruptive media that has become absolutely essential to the flow of modern day life. This quote from Plato demonstrates that even the wisest among us sometimes can't see past their own nose. Yes, Plato correctly predicted that writing and literacy would lead to a decrease in memorization and a de-emphasis on the intellectual oral tradition. But if not for disruptive media, we would all be lounging in the Athenian agora like Plato, believing the sun revolved around the Earth.

Often times, the zenith of disruptive media brings with it exaggerated hysteria over the potential ill-effects of what it will do to our current forms of media. But these doomsday predictions never seem to come to pass. The television didn't kill the radio. Email didn't kill face-to-face human interaction, and neither did the telephone. Writing didn't kill knowledge. Many of these Luddites forget human agency, the ability of humans to balance media consumption and manage the emerging new forms of media with classic forms.

Rheingold begins this section called '(Using) the Internet Makes Us Stupid (or Not)' in order to promote restraint and emphasize the forgotten element in all of these negative predictions for disruptive media: choice.

One of Rheingold’s central rhetorical devices for building ethos in this introductory chapter is to highlight the now-laughable negative reactions to technology that has become irreplaceable to our daily lives. This article from Vaughn Bell in Slate is useful in amplifying Rheingold’s point, that the new digital forms of media are just the latest in a long tradition of disruptive media sources. Bell writes, “Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain.”.In it, he mentions a long litany of naysayers against technologies like the printing press, the radio, and the television. Obviously all of these technologies have fostered human progress more than it has hindered it. I think this is the position Rheingold would take as well, that cries that the Internet is making us dumb or that social media is ruining our politics are huge overreactions to small kinks in a technology that’s benefits vastly outweigh its costs.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - the Atlantic (this is an article that Rheingold references several times) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Did Social Media Ruin Election 2016? - NPR http://www.npr.org/2016/11/08/500686320/did-social-media-ruin-election-2016

This list of potential consequences of media-related distraction that Rheingold gives us also happen to create conditions for how ISIS recruits online, according to this Brookings article

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/11/09/how-terrorists-recruit-online-and-how-to-stop-it/

Digital isolation is a key component in the ‘Discovery’ phase of terrorist recruitment that J.M. Berger lays out and also identified as a consequence in Rheingold’s assessment. Now of course, it’s not as if every time you get distracted from your homework and take a BuzzFeed quiz you’re a target for terrorist recruitment. It requires a concerted effort to learn more about ISIS in order for the organization to pick up on a recruit’s interest. The idea is that the more distracted you become by delving into ISIS-friendly spaces on the Internet, the more you become a potential target of ISIS recruiters. This is also an example of media stratification. The way that terrorists radicalize targets is by surrounding them with a digital community in the ‘Create micro-community’ stage of recruitment, further segregating the potential recruit into pro-ISIS circles. This experience of ISIS recruitment shows the extremes of media-triggered distraction.

This is a critical distinction.

This quote is how Rheingold introduces one of his central themes: distraction, its evolving role in our constantly connected world, and how to deal with it productively.

But this quote also provides an avenue to a topic that Rheingold briefly touches on later that I think is at the core of the intersection of our current political and digital discussions. That is, what is the impact of media stratification on our society? In all manner of our current dialogues, from the 2016 election, to opinions on climate change, even to the strategies of 21st century terrorist recruitment, how do we as digital citizens fight through the noise of partisan, unaccredited content to find truth? In many instances, especially in cases where someone may not possess the digital skills necessary to adequately judge the veracity of sources, we end up falling into traps of only trusting media outlets that confirm the opinions we already believe to be true. Huxley, and by extension Rheingold, points to humanity's bent towards distraction as the main source of this media stratification and increasing digital isolation into circles that continually reinforce whatever beliefs are held up as true.

I want to explore this whole tech companies acting like media companies thing...

Networks are like 'air'; they are all around us constantly. This class will not only help you see networks but also to see the complexity of them. They are growing more complex and more important to how our society functions. I often wonder if networks are not replacing institutions.

I think this is why we are so fascinated by social media; it has revealed what has always been under the surface. To me, networks are like 'air'; all around us but hard to see. SNA reveals the air.

I think this is a central question of our age--does social media make us happier? Increase democracy? Smarter? And the question always changes because the technology always changes. I now wonder about SnapChat. It functions a bit differently but with the same goal of connection. Does it produce better feelings than FB? Worse? More vicitimization? Less?

I think this is why they are hard to analyze...it is like trying to see and understand air. It is everywhere so it feels so normal and invisible. Networks, particularly human networks are the same. Humans have always been embedded in networks; we live, thrive and die in networks. They are another form of 'air'. The difference is that today, social media has made them more visible. We can now see them and analyze them in new ways. Hence, why this class is online :-)

Some ways to identify bots on Twitter.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07592

Bot tweets are retweeted by humans at the same rate as human tweets. Stories propped up by 1,000 bots spread just like stories propped up by a thousand humans.

The Business News Network main portal . No archived material related to the Alberta oil sands, unfortunately.

Trade magazine on Alberta oil industry. Articles have named authors.

The backfire effect is getting turbocharged online. I think we’re getting more angry and convinced about everything, not because we’re surrounded by like-minded people, but by people who disagree with us. Social media allows you to find the worst examples of your opponents. It’s not a place to have your own views corroborated, but rather where your worst suspicions about the other lot can be quickly and easily confirmed.

I concur. Diigo could have been a leader in the social annotation space, way ahead of Hypothesis. But now I think H is gaining more momentum than Diigo, because it adheres to open standards.

Em.. this is an interesting statement. So Diigo is moving away from being social?

In January 2018, the World Press Photo Foundation, in association with Newcastle University’s Open Lab, University of California Irvine and ArtEZ in the Netherlands will launch Talking Pictures, an open course in critical visual storytelling.

And isn't it common political practice for interviewees to not accept the premise of the question and then to pivot?

The Shouting Class -- people who criticize things as a way of life.

we’re at a pivotal point not just in the life of our democracy, but in how we think, read, and make choices. Selective information is being presented to us in a way that encourages selective reading and offers psychological and social rewards for, to put it bluntly, being stupid and submissive and spreading stupid to submit others.

...

What’s different now is that this propaganda is being gamed by professionals in a massive, orchestrated data campaign at a volume, pace, and consistency that not only muddies the truth, but completely eclipses the truth. Destroys the very notion of truth.

...

The truth about the truth is that we believe because we want to, because our ability to think independently is a point of pride for Americans. The people behind the curtain are telling us the same story we tell ourselves about ourselves. But this is also a vulnerability: Independence is in its purist form a kind of division. If you exploit it the right way, you can turn a democracy against itself.

Analysis of a subreddit for Trump supporters, based on comparisons of the users of various subreddits.

We are not post-truth, we're post-trust.

Kind of. A lot of people "trusted" the Denver Guardian because it fit within their pre-existing narrative framework. Maybe we are "post-trust" with the institutions and organizations that got us this far: traditional mainstream media, higher ed, researchers and scientists.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

The history of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.<br> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/20/the-seth-rich-conspiracy-shows-how-fake-news-still-works/

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

Participatory Propaganda - an analysis of current techniques for exploiting our online behavior. https://twitter.com/lageneralista

Really tho, the influence of cookbooks and Ladies' Home Journal among other popular media catered to households and women is amazing in promoting food trends.

research on how ideas spread through social media

Detection of fake news in social media based on who liked it.

we show that Facebook posts can be classified with high accuracy as hoaxes or non-hoaxes on the basis of the users who "liked" them. We present two classification techniques, one based on logistic regression, the other on a novel adaptation of boolean crowdsourcing algorithms. On a dataset consisting of 15,500 Facebook posts and 909,236 users, we obtain classification accuracies exceeding 99% even when the training set contains less than 1% of the posts.

New Hampshire state legislator discovered to be the founder of the misogynistic online group The Red Pill.(Which has nearly 200,000 subscribers. Yikes.)

digital identity, as a practice, operates counter to the collaboration and cooperation that need to be part of digital citizenship.

This is our contemporary contradiction: identity as a construct in contemporary social media spaces makes for pretty rotten social spaces.

...

We’re algorithmically manipulated. We’re surveilled. We’re encouraged to speak rather than listen. We’re stuck engaging in visibility strategies, whether we admit it or not, in order simply to be acknowledged and seen within a social or professional space.

Our digital identities do not – and at the level of technological affordances and inherent structure, cannot – create a commons that is actually a healthy pro-social space.

The key changes we can make in the short term (without requiring sites to relinquish their business models) are to teach social software to forget, to give it predictable security properties, and to sever the financial connection between online advertising and extremism.

Orwell imagined a world in which the state could shamelessly rewrite the past. The Internet has taught us that people are happy to do this work themselves, provided they have their peer group with them, and a common enemy to unite against. They will happily construct alternative realities for themselves, and adjust them as necessary to fit the changing facts.

Finally, surveillance capitalism makes it harder to organize effective long-term dissent. In an setting where attention is convertible into money, social media will always reward drama, dissent, conflict, iconoclasm and strife. There will be no comparable rewards for cooperation, de-escalation, consensus-building, or compromise, qualities that are essential for the slow work of building a movement. People who should be looking past their differences will instead spend their time on purity tests and trying to outflank one another in a race to the fringes.

Obviously, in this situation whoever controls the algorithms has great power. Decisions like what is promoted to the top of a news feed can swing elections. Small changes in UI can drive big changes in user behavior. There are no democratic checks or controls on this power, and the people who exercise it are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist

On Facebook, social dynamics and the algorithms’ taste for drama reinforce each other. Facebook selects from stories that your friends have shared to find the links you’re most likely to click on. This is a potent mix, because what you read and post on Facebook is not just an expression of your interests, but part of a performative group identity.

So without explicitly coding for this behavior, we already have a dynamic where people are pulled to the extremes. Things get worse when third parties are allowed to use these algorithms to target a specific audience.

any system trying to maximize engagement will try to push users towards the fringes. You can prove this to yourself by opening YouTube in an incognito browser (so that you start with a blank slate), and clicking recommended links on any video with political content.

...

This pull to the fringes doesn’t happen if you click on a cute animal story. In that case, you just get more cute animals (an experiment I also recommend trying). But the algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke. Nobody programmed the behavior into the algorithm; it made a correct observation about human nature and acted on it.

Digital Social Networks, particularly Facebook and Twitter.

Makes an interesting point about homogenisation in Facebook and Twitter (i.e. people are a binary of friend or not friend, categories that collapse all different categories.

Interestingly, both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to address this recently.

Trump-Russia sock puppets posing as "Bernie bros" targeted women and black men with harassment on Twitter when they expressed support for Hillary Clinton.

2 April, 2017 - International Fact-Checking Day Lesson plan and several how-to guides.

Nice talk and nice use of social media

Is this a problem with media literacy? Or does it stem from a mindless bias against Wikipedia? The problem described sounds like literacy taught poorly.

Useful: Zuckerberg's article is here available outside the Facebook silo.

This "continuing dialogue" also seems to be further embraced on a bigger scale and globally due to influences like social media and bloggers.

Even back in the day, media played a crucial role to rhetoric

Maybe that distance is a good thing?

The data Facebook collects, and what they do with it.

free media tools for nonprofits

The following text shows that people from the seven countries picked both by the U.S. Congress,Obama, and Trump do pose a significant risk of terrorism, despite the mainstream media's statements to the contrary.

Trump's temporary immigration ban from these seven countries was far from optimal, and may have actually caused considerably more harm than good, but it was not nearly as absurd at the mainstream media is propagandizing people to believe.

This sounds a lot like current complaints of the interwebs, particularly social media. Everyone's a critic!

This reminds me of Hume: "A good palate is not tried by strong flavors; but by a mixture of small ingredients, where we are still sensible of each part, notwithstanding its minuteness and its confusion with the rest" (835).

Anyone can praise or blame based on the most obvious and strongest characteristics of something. Taste is only at play when one is able to praise or blame based on the subtle and intricate details of the thing under review.

Andrew Postman says his father Neil got it right in "Amusing Ourselves to Death": our situation is more like Brave New World than 1984. But it's like both. Constant entertainment is a big part of what got us here, but we also have politicians practicing newspeak, and excessive surveillance.

Black women using technology to advocate for their erasure.

black women are being erased from the discussion. Race in general plays a role on how much a topic is spoken about. This case was not even mentioned or discussed until black women started the talk.

To me, this idea of writing that speaks and reveals information to a "director" is the very basic idea for what first person narratives are.

Furthermore, this idea of confessing to an audience through an interactive narrative translates to various media, as well. However, even though these confessions are seemingly necessary in textual renditions of narratives, they can often be misconstrued as more intrusive fourth wall breaks due to this change in media. This creates a very thin line between these confessions being additive to the narrative or if they take away from the overall intent of the author.

To keep this idea going still, upon researching the definition of "cogitationes," the definitions were either of self-reflection, thoughts, or the act of thinking; something clearly represented through Foucault's writing, but a connection I found interesting, nonetheless.

Researchers at University College London have discovered a Twitter botnet of more than 350,000 accounts created in 2013, and dormant since then. They've also found another one with more than 500,000 accounts.

never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

"Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

Thomas Edison. Love his quotes

The meaning of the term "fake news" and the dilution of that meaning.

It doesn't have to be just student feedback about the operations and mechanics of the course, or as a replacement for a course survey tool. You can also use the platform as a way to engage students on the content relevant to the learning outcomes of the course. And use the platform to connect learners with people in the field of study.