Consider this my one year report. 😉 The core idea of Wikity was simple: what if we bent the world of social media a bit away from the frothy outrage factory of Twitter and Facebook towards something more iterative, exploratory, and constructive? I took as my model Ward Cunningham’s excellent work on wiki and combined it Continue reading

Here’s a fake story that was shown a number of places on the web during the campaign, claiming that protesters of Donald Trump were being paid. This has been covered so many times by so many fake and satirical sites that it is now an article of faith among Republicans, due to exposure effects. Here’s Continue reading

I’m playing with this idea of Facebook posting as “rebuttal shopping”. The idea is that a lot of stuff that goes viral on Facebook is posted as an implicit rebuttal to arguments that the poster feels are being levied against their position. This stuff tends to go viral on Facebook because the minute the Facebook Continue reading

The Stream is a weird place. Your Facebook feed, for example, is a series of posts by various people that in some ways resembles a forum, but in other ways it’s not at all like a forum.  When you post something to Facebook, there’s not an explicit prompt you are responding to, which seems non-problematic Continue reading

Let’s continue to look at how Facebook has harmed public discourse, because I’m getting increasingly worried that once Facebook blocks fake news people will say problem solved. And really, the problem is not even close to solved. One of Facebook’s oldest features is the “wall” although we seldom call it that anymore. The wall in Facebook Continue reading

TechCrunch has a story seemingly sympathetic to Facebook’s plight, which has this graf in it: Because Facebook and some other platforms reward engagement, news outlets are incentivized to frame stories as sensationally as possible. While long-running partisan outlets may be held accountable for exaggeration, newer outlets built specifically to take advantage of virality on networks Continue reading

So Facebook will ban fake news sites from their ads network, as will Google, which shows you exactly how hard it would have been to do this six months ago. But in any case, problem solved, right? Unfortunately, no. Fake sites that get traffic can get on other ad networks, or go the malware route, or Continue reading

BGR graciously linked my post from the weekend, a post showing that the scale at which fake news stories trend on Facebook can dwarf traditional news in terms of shares. (Thanks, BGR!) However, they end with this paragraph, which I’d like to reply to: On a related note, it stands to reason that most individuals prone Continue reading

Kevin Drum points out that if you search on Google to find out whether Hillary won the popular vote (she did) that one of the top results lies, right in the headline. How does 70news, a right wing site fond of claiming Trump protests are being funded by prominent Jewish banker George Soros, get to Continue reading

(An investigation in which we decide to use Facebook’s social graph API to see whether fake news or real news is more viral). UPDATE: Since posting, there has been some discussion about this post’s use of the phrase “top stories from local newspapers”.  A clarification on how that phrase is used has been appended at Continue reading