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Category: Social media

Why Facebook will never change its business model

Why Facebook will never change its business model

Following Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony in March, Len Sherman wrote: Other companies can only dream of running a company with essentially: No cost of goods sold (individual users and companies provide content for free) No marketing costs (user word-of-mouth and viral network effects spur continuous growth) No selling costs (most advertisements are purchased through a self-service, automated ad placement platform) If you were in charge of such a money-making machine, would you be eager to change this business model? But…

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As the bizarre QAnon group emerges, Trump rallies go from nasty to dangerous

As the bizarre QAnon group emerges, Trump rallies go from nasty to dangerous

Margaret Sullivan writes: Hostility toward the media at Donald Trump’s rallies is nothing new. It infected the presidential campaign and has marred every raucous gathering of supporters since the election. But on Tuesday night in Tampa, the extreme aggression dropped the basement floor another level. This was a new low. And a scary one at that. “I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in someone getting hurt,” CNN’s much-maligned reporter…

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The liar’s dividend, and other challenges of deep-fake news

The liar’s dividend, and other challenges of deep-fake news

Paul Chadwick writes: Do the notes taken by the interpreters at the recent Helsinki summit include the words “Snowden” and “swap”? We could ask the Russians to check their (assumed) audio recording and let us all know whether Presidents Trump and Putin discussed such a prospect during their long private chat. Trump wrong-footing his own country’s intelligence community by delivering their most-wanted, Edward Snowden, seems precisely the trolling that Putin would enjoy. What else might leak soon, in the form…

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Facebook and YouTube give Alex Jones a wrist slap

Facebook and YouTube give Alex Jones a wrist slap

The New York Times reports: The digital walls are closing in on Alex Jones, the social media shock jock whose penchant for right-wing conspiracy theories and viral misinformation set off a heated debate about the limits of free speech on internet platforms. Facebook said on Friday that it had suspended Mr. Jones from posting on the site for 30 days because he had repeatedly violated its policies. The social network also took down four videos posted by Mr. Jones and…

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How social media became a tool of political oppression

How social media became a tool of political oppression

Bloomberg reports: Journalist Nedim Turfent was reporting on a brutal counterterrorism operation in Turkey’s Kurdish region when he published video of soldiers standing over villagers, who were face down with their hands bound. Soon, odd messages seeking Turfent’s whereabouts began appearing on his Facebook page. Then, Twitter accounts linked to Turkish counterterrorism units joined in, taunting locals with a single question—“Where is Nedim Turfent?”—as soldiers torched and raided more villages. The threat was clear: Give him up, or you’re the…

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For Facebook, Trump is, above all, a valued customer

For Facebook, Trump is, above all, a valued customer

BuzzFeed reports: In the days following Donald Trump’s election victory over Hillary Clinton, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg placed a secret, previously unreported call to the president-elect during which, sources told BuzzFeed News, he congratulated the Trump team on its victory and successful campaign, which spent millions of dollars on advertising with Facebook. The private call between Zuckerberg and Trump, which was confirmed by three people familiar with the conversation, is just one in a series of private endorsements from Facebook…

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How emoji are changing the way we communicate

How emoji are changing the way we communicate

Wired reports: Two years ago, Sanjaya Wijeratne—a computer science PhD student at Wright State University—noticed something odd in his research. He was studying the communication of gang members on Twitter. Among the grandstanding about drugs and money, he found gang members repeatedly dropping the ⛽ emoji in their tweets. Wijeratne had been working on separate research relating to word-sense disambiguation, a field of computational linguistics that looks at how words take on multiple meanings. The use of ⛽ jumped out…

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The escalating hatred faced by journalists

The escalating hatred faced by journalists

Julie Beck writes: The majority of Americans do not trust the news media. There are many complex reasons why, and there’s enough blame to go around to many different parties, journalists included. So it’s hardly surprising that they get some rude messages. “But I’m not talking about the rudeness. I’m talking about intimidation,” says Elana Newman, a psychologist who works with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. “I’ve been working for the Dart Center for 20 years in some…

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News and the forgotten value of waiting

News and the forgotten value of waiting

If someone wanted to create a parody of cable news, it would be hard to satirize the form more effectively than to cast Wolf Blitzer as the lead character in a goofy show called The Situation Room, where all news all the time is breaking news. The irony of the fact that CNN’s news show of that name is, on the contrary, meant to be taken seriously, is that it does indeed capture the zeitgeist of the news media environment…

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Jaron Lanier is convinced that social media is toxic, making us sadder, angrier and more isolated

Jaron Lanier is convinced that social media is toxic, making us sadder, angrier and more isolated

The Guardian reports: Many of the ideas in Jaron Lanier’s new book start off pretty familiar – at least, if you are active on social media. Yet in every chapter there is a principle so elegant, so neat, sometimes even so beautiful, that what is billed as straight polemic becomes something much more profound. The concept of random reinforcement, for example: addiction fed not by reward but by never knowing whether or when the reward will come, is well known….

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ABC only did the right thing when it could no longer get away with ignoring Roseanne’s racism

ABC only did the right thing when it could no longer get away with ignoring Roseanne’s racism

Roxane Gay writes: On Twitter on Tuesday, Roseanne Barr wrote that if “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby =vj.” The message referred to President Barack Obama’s former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and in it Ms. Barr traded on age-old racist ideas about black people and primates. Then she shared some incorrect nonsense about Chelsea Clinton marrying into the Soros family. It was the kind of thing Roseanne Barr has been doing online for years. This time,…

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Trump violates First Amendment by blocking Twitter users, judge says

Trump violates First Amendment by blocking Twitter users, judge says

The New York Times reports: Apart from the man himself, perhaps nothing has defined President Trump’s political persona more than Twitter. But on Wednesday, one of Mr. Trump’s Twitter habits — his practice of blocking critics on the service, preventing them from engaging with his account — was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in Manhattan. Despite the disgusting, illegal and unwarranted Witch Hunt, we have had the most successful first 17 month Administration in U.S. history – by far!…

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How social media exploits our moral emotions

How social media exploits our moral emotions

Scott Koenig writes: A few years ago, Justine Sacco, then the senior director of corporate communications at the holding company InterActiveCorp, tweeted about the nuisances of air-travel during a long, multi-leg journey from New York to South Africa. She started with sardonic observations—one about a smelly passenger at JFK Airport, another about London’s peculiar food and predictably inclement weather. Then came this one, shortly before her final flight: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”…

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USA Today read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians. Here’s what they found

USA Today read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians. Here’s what they found

USA Today reports: The Russian company charged with orchestrating a wide-ranging effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election overwhelmingly focused its barrage of social media advertising on what is arguably America’s rawest political division: race. The roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were created by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, which is at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s February indictment of 13 Russians and three companies seeking to influence the election. While some ads focused on topics as banal…

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Where countries are tinderboxes and Facebook is a match

Where countries are tinderboxes and Facebook is a match

The New York Times reports: Past the end of a remote mountain road, down a rutted dirt track, in a concrete house that lacked running water but bristled with smartphones, 13 members of an extended family were glued to Facebook. And they were furious. A family member, a truck driver, had died after a beating the month before. It was a traffic dispute that had turned violent, the authorities said. But on Facebook, rumors swirled that his assailants were part…

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