Archive of ‘social media’ category
Facebook’s Content Moderators
Propaganda, Hate Speech, Violence: The Working Lives Of Facebook’s Content Moderators
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/02/699663284/the-working-lives-of-facebooks-content-moderators
In a recent article for The Verge titled “The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America,” a dozen current and former employees of one of the company’s contractors, Cognizant, talked to Newton about the mental health costs of spending hour after hour monitoring graphic content.
Perhaps the most surprising find from his investigation, the reporter said, was how the majority of the employees he talked to started to believe some of the conspiracy theories they reviewed.
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more on Facebook in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Facebook+privacy
Facebook vs Patreon
categories: Facebook
Facebook wants up to 30% of fan subscriptions vs Patreon’s 5%
Josh Constine joshconstine”>@joshconstine Feb 26. 2019
Facebook wants up to 30% of fan subscriptions vs Patreon’s 5%
Facebook has consistently shown that it puts what it thinks users want and its own interests above those of partners. It cut off game developers from viral channels, inadequately warned Page owners their reach would drop over time, decimated referral traffic to news publishers and, most recently, banished video makers from the feed. If Facebook wants to win creators’ trust and the engagement of their biggest fans, it may need a more competitive offering with larger limits on its power.
Podcasts as an Instructional Tool
Teachers Are Turning to Podcasts as an Instructional Tool
Students practice reading, writing, interviewing
By Sasha Jones February 11, 2019
Anchor allows users to record and edit podcast episodes, all through an app on their cellphones. The service distributes and uploads episodes to streaming services, such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and provides analytics following publication.
“Traditionally, it’s write, write, write, write, write, and if you’re not a strong writer, you may start to think you’re not good at an English class in general.”
Podcasts that require scripts similarly encourage students to explore writing formats that stray from the traditional essay.
“When it’s just my eyes seeing it, it’s one-on-one and I’m the safety net,” Stevens said. “Even when you open it up to their classmates, they realize ‘OK, I’m going to be judged by them,’ and then you open it up to the internet. It’s a big deal.”
Last spring, cinematic arts and broadcast journalism teacher Michael Hernandez introduced his 11th and 12th graders to podcasting to teach them speaking skills that could be necessary for upcoming college or job interview.
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more on podcasts in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=podcast
grammar and word choice
categories: YouTube
Be a better write in 15 min
Emilie Soffe May 29, 2014
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more on proofreading in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=proofreading
Digital Destruction of Democracy
The Digital Destruction of Democracy
ANYA SCHIFFRIN JANUARY 21, 2019
https://prospect.org/article/digital-destruction-democracy
Anya Schiffrin is an adjunct faculty member at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She worked in Hanoi from 1997 to 1999 as the bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires.
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics
By Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, & Hal Roberts
Oxford University Press
By Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, & Hal Roberts
Oxford University Press
A Harvard law professor who is a well-known theorist of the digital age, Benkler and colleagues have produced an authoritative tome that includes multiple taxonomies and literature reviews as well as visualizations of the flow of disinformation.
clickbait fabricators
white supremacist and alt-right trolls
a history of the scholarship on propaganda, reminding the reader that much of the discussion began in the 1930s.
Benkler’s optimistic 2007 book, The Wealth of Networks, predicted that the Internet would bring people together and transform the way information is created and spread. Today, Benkler is far less sanguine and has become one of the foremost researchers of disinformation networks.
Fox News, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, InfoWars, and Zero Hedge
As a result, mainstream journalists repeat and amplify the falsehoods even as they debunk them.
There is no clear line, they argue, between Russian propaganda, Breitbart lies, and the Trump victory. They add that Fox News is probably more influential than Facebook.
after George Soros gave a speech in January 2018 calling for regulation of the social media platforms, Facebook hired a Republican opposition research firm to shovel dirt at George Soros.
The European Union has not yet tried to regulate disinformation (although they do have codes of practice for the platforms), instead focusing on taxation, competition regulation, and protection of privacy. But Germany has strengthened its regulations regarding online hate speech, including the liability of the social media platforms.
disclosure of the sources of online political advertising.It’s a bit toothless because, just as with offshore bank accounts, it may be possible to register which U.S. entity is paying for online political advertising, but it’s impossible to know whether that entity is getting its funds from overseas. Even the Honest Ads bill was too much for Facebook to take.
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more on the issues of digital world and democracy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/02/19/facebook-digital-gangsters/
Facebook Digital Gangsters
Facebook labelled ‘digital gangsters’ by report on fake news
Company broke privacy and competition law and should be regulated urgently, say MPs
See also: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/02/20/digital-destruction-of-democracy/
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
identity political correctness
‘Identity is a pain in the arse’: Zadie Smith on political correctness
At Hay Cartagena festival author questions role of social media in policing personal development
Claire Armitstead Sat 2 Feb 2019 10.55 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/zadie-smith-political-correctness-hay-cartagena
The writer Zadie Smith laid into identity politics in a headline session at the 14th Hay Cartagena festival, insisting novelists had not only a right, but a duty to be free.
She conceded that the assertion of a collective identity was sometimes necessary “to demand rights”, but cited the dismay of her husband – the poet and novelist Nick Laird – at finding himself increasingly categorised. “He turned to me and said: ‘I used to be myself and I’m now white guy, white guy.’ I said: ‘Finally, you understand.’
She went on to question the role of social media in policing personal development.
to the issue of political correctness, she reflected on her debut novel White Teeth, which had depicted characters from many backgrounds but, she said, had been given an easy ride by the white critics because “[its characters] were mostly brown.
citing Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as an example of the power of the reprobate imagination. “Women have felt very close to these fake, pretend women invented by men. It makes us feel uncomfortable in real life. This is not real life. It’s perverse, but it’s what’s possible in fiction. There’s no excuse for its irresponsibility, but fiction is fundamentally irresponsible.”
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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media
Your Brain Off Facebook
categories: Digital literacy, educational technology, Facebook, information technology, social media
This Is Your Brain Off Facebook
Planning on quitting the social platform? A major new study offers a glimpse of what unplugging might do for your life. (Spoiler: It’s not so bad.)
Benedict Carey, Jan 30, 2019
https://global9janews.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/this-is-your-brain-off-facebook-by-benedict-carey/
So what happens if you actually do quit? A new study, the most comprehensive to date, offers a preview.
Well before news broke that Facebook had shared users’ data without consent, scientists and habitual users debated how the platform had changed the experience of daily life.
the use of Facebook and other social media is linked to mental distress, especially in adolescents.
Others have likened habitual Facebook use to a mental disorder, comparing it to drug addiction and even publishing magnetic-resonance images of what Facebook addiction “looks like in the brain.”
When Facebook has published its own analyses to test such claims, the company has been roundly criticized.
For abstainers, breaking up with Facebook freed up about an hour a day, on average, and more than twice that for the heaviest users.
research led by Ethan Kross, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has found that high levels of passive browsing on social media predict lowered moods, compared to more active engagement.
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more on Facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook
Facial Recognition issues
Chinese Facial Recognition Will Take over the World in 2019
Michael K. Spencer Jan 14, 2018
https://medium.com/futuresin/chinese-facial-recognition-will-take-over-the-world-in-2019-520754a7f966
The best facial recognition startups are in China, by a long-shot. As their software is less biased, global adoption is occurring via their software. This is evidenced in 2019 by the New York Police department in NYC for example, according to the South China Morning Post.
The mass surveillance state of data harvesting in real-time is coming. Facebook already rates and profiles us.
The Tech Wars come down to an AI-War
Whether the NYC police angle is true or not (it’s being hotly disputed), Facebook and Google are thinking along lines that follow the whims of the Chinese Government.
SenseTime and Megvii won’t just be worth $5 Billion, they will be worth many times that in the future. This is because a facial recognition data-harvesting of everything is the future of consumerism and capitalism, and in some places, the central tenet of social order (think Asia).
China has already ‘won’ the trade-war, because its winning the race to innovation. America doesn’t regulate Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Facebook properly, that stunts innovation and ethics in technology where the West is now forced to copy China just to keep up.
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more about facial recognition in schools
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/02/02/facial-recognition-technology-in-schools/