One of those factors is globalization which has helped lift hundreds and millions out of poverty, most notably in China and India, but which, along with automation has also ended entire economies, accelerated global inequality, and left millions of others feeling betrayed and angry at existing political institutions.

increased mobility and urbanization of modern life, which further shakes up societies, including existing family structures and gender roles

chronic political dysfunction, here in the U.S. and in Europe

What social media platforms have done, though, thanks to their increasing market dominance and their emphasis on speed, is accelerate the decline of newspapers and other traditional news sources.

the veil of anonymity that platforms provide their users

very specific choices made by the companies that have come to dominate the internet generally and social media platforms in particular

You don’t even have to look up. And it’s made all of us more prone to what psychologists call confirmation bias

it did fortify a sense of shared culture and it came to the news, at least, citizens across the political spectrum tended to operate using a shared set of facts

the sheer proliferation of content and the splintering of information and audiences

We’ll have to come up with new models for a more inclusive, equitable capitalism. We’ll have to reform our political institutions in ways that allow people to be heard and give them real agency. We’ll have to tell better stories about ourselves and how we can live together, despite our differences.

as once marginalized groups demand a seat at the table, politicians have found a new audience for old-fashioned appeals to racial and ethnic, religious or national solidarity

the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008

the rise of China

At the end of the day, tools don’t control us.

K-Monitor

News Literacy Project

MIT Center for Constructive Communication

National School of Journalism and Public Discourse

the U.S. Constitution as software

ways to give young people and the rest of us the chance to build up civic muscles

reinvigorate quality journalism, including local journalism

online media literacy

An interesting study came out recently

these companies need to have some other North Star other than just making money and increasing market share

Platform Accountability and Transparency Act

European Union’s Digital Services Act

tech companies need to be more transparent about how they operate

regulation has to be part of the answer

we need to consider reforms to Section 230 to account for those changes, including whether platforms should be required to have a higher standard of care, when it comes to advertising on their site

Section 230 of the United States code

More importantly, these companies are still way too guarded about how exactly their standards operate, or how their engagement ranking systems influence what goes viral and what doesn’t.

the need for some democratic oversight

The problem is, we often don’t know what principles govern those decisions. And on an issue of enormous public interest, there has been little public debate and practically no democratic oversight.

the First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter

I believe that in most instances the answer to bad speech is good speech.

There are some bugs in the software.

the transformative power and promise of the open internet

New technologies are already challenging the way we regulate currency

Russians could study and manipulate patterns in the engagement ranking system on a Facebook or YouTube.

the very design of these platforms seems to be tilting us in the wrong direction

sophisticated actors from political consultants to commercial interests, to intelligence arms of foreign powers can game platform algorithms

Obama's Stanford University speech this Thursday

Political and technological dislocation have fed off each other since the nation’s founding. Now they are dangerously out of whack.

Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1

“If we just reward content based on raw clicks and engagement, we might actually see content that is increasingly sensationalist, clickbaity, polarizing, and divisive,” she says. A social network that rewards only clicks, not subscriptions, is like a dating service that encourages one-night stands but not marriages.

“Social networks enable malicious actors to operate at platform scale, because they were designed for fast information flows and virality,”

Zuckerberg’s conference room (called the Aquarium) and Sandberg’s (called Only Good News)

Simultaneously, authority over the algorithm shifted to a team of engineers based in Seattle. Very quickly the module started to surface lies and fiction.

“We traced the creation of the Facebook accounts to IP addresses at the Apple store a block away from the MySpace offices in Santa Monica,”

If Facebook didn’t start offering a better deal to the publishing industry, Thomson and Murdoch conveyed in stark terms, Zuckerberg could expect News Corp executives to become much more public in their denunciations and much more open in their lobbying.

whether News Feed should be modified to better deal with some of the most complex issues facing the product. Does it favor posts that make people angry? Does it favor simple or even false ideas over complex and true ones?

As often happens when outsiders meet with Facebook, people used the time to try to figure out how they could get more followers for their own pages.

Facebook decided, too, that it had to extend an olive branch to the entire American right wing, much of which was raging about the company’s supposed perfidy.

But it’s hard to argue that this wasn’t an editorial decision. It may be one of the biggest ever made.

Facebook has long seemed to think it has immunity from those debates because it is just a technology company—one that has built a “platform for all ideas.”

When new recruits come in, they are treated to an orientation lecture by Chris Cox, the company’s chief product officer, who tells them Facebook is an entirely new communications platform for the 21st century, as the telephone was for the 20th. But if anyone inside Facebook is unconvinced by religion, there is also Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act to recommend the idea.

But Alphabet did flag “misleading” information and “objectionable content” as risks to the company’s financial performance in its annual report this week, for the first time ever.

Stuart Hall explained in his seminal work on reception theory

Debunks themselves can be considered a form of engagement.

mis-, dis- and mal- information

What we see unfolding right before our eyes is nothing less than Moore’s Law applied to the distribution of mis-information: an exponential growth of available technology coupled with a rapid collapse of costs.

What could technology companies do?Create an international advisory council.Provide researchers with the data related to initiatives aimed at improving public discourse.Provide transparent criteria for any algorithmic changes that down-rank content.Work collaboratively.Highlight contextual details and build visual indicators.Eliminate financial incentives.Crack down on computational amplification.Adequately moderate non-English content.Pay attention to audio/visual forms of mis- and dis-information.Provide metadata to trusted partners.Build fact-checking and verification tools.Build ‘authenticity engines’.Work on solutions specifically aimed at minimising the impact of filter bubbles:a. Let users customize feed and search algorithms. b. Diversify exposure to different people and views. c. Allow users to consume information privately d. Change the terminology used by the social networks.

Rather than simply thinking about communication as the transmission of information from one person to another, we must recognize that communication plays a fundamental role in representing shared beliefs. It is not just information, but drama — “a portrayal of the contending forces in the world.

visual content is just as widespread and much harder to identify and debunk

interpreters

Mis-information is when false information is shared, but no harm is meant.Dis-information is when false information is knowingly shared to cause harm.Mal-information is when genuine information is shared to cause harm, often by moving information designed to stay private into the public sphere.

we refrain from using the term ‘fake news’, for two reasons

mis-, dis- and mal- information

we are witnessing something new: information pollution at a global scale; a complex web of motivations for creating, disseminating and consuming these ‘polluted’ messages; a myriad of content types and techniques for amplifying content; innumerable platforms hosting and reproducing this content; and breakneck speeds of communication between trusted peers