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The Friday Long Read: Facebook’s Fight Against False News was Undercut by Fear

Facebook “absolutely has the tools to shut down fake news,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution from the company. The source added, “there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics,” and that “a lot of product decisions got caught up in that.”

#Facebook #Fake News #Mark Zuckerberg

The Wednesday Snapshot: The Tommy Westphall Universe Theory

The whole crazy yet troublingly plausible theory expands here.

The Tommy Westphall universe hypothesis is an idea discussed among some television fans, it makes the claim that not only does St. Elsewhere take place within Tommy’s mind, but so do numerous other television series which are directly and indirectly connected to St. Elsewhere through fictional crossovers and spin-offs, resulting in a large fictional universe taking place entirely within Tommy’s mind. This hypothesis comes from St. Elsewhere’s last episode “The Last One”. In which it’s implied that the whole St. Elsewhere’s series had been a product of his imagination

#Tommy Westphall #St Elsewhere #H:LOTS

The Weekend Long Read: The Forces that Drove this Election’s Media Failure are Likely to get Worse

I don’t know what the right solution would be — but I know that getting Mark Zuckerberg to care about the problem is absolutely key to the health of our information ecosystem.

#Bubble filters #Facebook #Mark Zuckerberg

Truth in Numbers: Ranking the Most Beloved TV Shows That Got Canceled

#Priceonomics #Firefly

Truth in Numbers: Ranking the Most Beloved TV Shows That Got Canceled

#Priceonomics #Firefly

Wednesday Snapshot: MLS TV Rights: A Brief History

#MLS

The Tuesday Listen: Disruption of the Week

The disruption this week, of course, was the presidential election of Donald Trump. I wanted to talk about my exclusive Monday night one-on-one interview with Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, but that was overshadowed by the outrage and debate around the election, which saw Trump win the electoral college, if not the popular vote.

We talked about the division in our country and how everyone got it wrong. The main discussion was how this result happened, the failure of the media, the failure of data scientists the failure of Silicon Valley and much more.

Listen.

#Election 2016 #AWS #Andy Jassy

Monday Professional Note: Lucasfilm Owns All of Your Droids

To keep a trademark active, one must vigorously defend it, sometimes excessively; this is exactly what Lucasfilm has done. Since 2009, they’ve taken legal action against a number of companies that have employed any variation of “Droid.” Among them: a small Los Angeles-based video ad banner start-up called Addroid.

#George Lucas #Droids #Copyright

The Weekend Long Read: The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Riding a tsunami of information, the public has trampled on the temples of authority in every domain of human activity, everywhere. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how ordinary people, gifted amateurs networked in communities of interest, have swarmed over the hierarchies of accredited professionals, questioned their methods, and shouted their failures from the digital rooftops. In science, business, media – and, pre-eminently, in politics and government – established elites have lost the power to command attention and set the agenda.

#Martin Gurri #Media overload #Information excess

Truth in Numbers: Web Traffic

#Web Traffic

Wednesday Snapshot: The Data Behind Trump’s Twitter Takeover

Consider that in January 2015, the average number of retweets one of Trump’s tweets received was 79. But by January 2016, the retweet average had shot up to 2,201. So while @realDonaldTrump’s capacity to reach people directly—i.e., his number of followers—has “only” doubled, the dissemination of his average tweet increased by a factor of 28 over that time period.

#Donald Trump #Twitter #Poliutico

#Election day

The Monday Professional Note: A Miss Bigger than a Missed Story--The Election and the Press

[http://xkcd.com/1756/]

On the eve of an election filled with danger I take up my pen to describe one more time what I think political journalists missed about the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned on Saturday that political debates devoid of facts present a “deadly danger” to democracy. Referring to the upcoming presidential election in the United States, the U.K.’s campaign to leave the EU, as well as an ever more assertive Russia, Steinmeier said the “audacity with which facts are hidden and denied in public, expert knowledge is discredited, and, simply, lies are being told in the West as in the East and beyond the English Channel, leaves one almost speechless.”

#Epic Fails

The Weekend Long Read: The Morality of Manipulation

Users take our technologies with them to bed. When they wake up, they check for notifications, tweets, and updates before saying “good morning” to their loved ones. Ian Bogost, the famed game creator and professor, calls the wave of habit-forming technologies the “cigarette of this century” and warns of equally addictive and potentially destructive side-effects.

#Nir Eyal #Hooked

Thursday snapshot

#Clinton #Trump

Wednesday Snapshot: Candidate Retweets

About a quarter (23%) of Trump’s tweets were retweets, as were one-in-five of Sanders’ and 15% of Clinton’s. The candidates’ retweets, however, reflected different strategies. Trump was most likely to retweet the public, Clinton her own campaign accounts and Sanders the news media. Of Trump’s 55 retweets, about eight-in-ten (78%) were of people who were not famous and had no discernable ties to news media, government or other organizations – in other words, the general public.

#Donald Trump #Hillary Clinton #Bernie Sanders #Twitter

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