In June 2009, large protests broke out in Iran in the wake of a disputed election result. The unrest did not differ all that much from comparable episodes that had occurred elsewhere in the world over the preceding decades, but many Western observers became convinced that new digital platforms like Twitter and Facebook were propelling […]
Category Archives: Politics
People are learning the wrong lessons from the Facebook Papers
Recent Facebook leaks have prompted an avalanche of suggestions for fixing social media’s negative effects on society. These include demands for increased oversight by executives and boards of companies, regulators, or both. However, these proposals do not address the main problem of the attention-economy, which cannot be fixed by top-down control. The problem lies at […]
How to Fix Social Media
Around two o’clock in the afternoon on October 30, 1973, a disc jockey at the New York City radio station WBAI played a track called “Filthy Words” from comedian George Carlin’s latest album. “I was thinking one night about the words you couldn’t say on the public airwaves,” Carlin began. He then rattled off seven […]
Google Is Letting People Find Invites to Some Private WhatsApp Groups – VICE
Whatsapp users have been able to invite other users to a group chat using a link. If you open a link invitation, you will automatically be added to the group. As Vice reports, until recently those links were anything but private – if you search Google for the right URL, thousands of invitation links can […]
Personal Data Is Valuable. Give Pricing Power to the People | WIRED
Wired article by Olaf Groth, Tobias Straube and Dan Zehr discussing a market that establishes a price for privacy-assured data and returns a fair share of that value to the people: Today, people fuel the digital economy with vast streams of data but have virtually no power to demand fair compensation for it. The companies […]
On the potential Impact of banning Political Ads on Social Media
Worth reading: this Wired article that discusses the potential impact of banning political ads on social media. Political Ads serve as entry point to phony astroturf communities. For example, the now infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA for short) purchased only 3400 Facebook and Instagram ads. Compare this to the over 61500 Facebook posts, 116000 Instagram […]
The End of Political Advertising on Social Media?
Twitter has announced to block all political advertising with November. Although it is still unclear how this is implemented in practice and what qualifies as a political advertising, one thing is clear: the times when political parties have simply bought advertising on social media sites are probably over. This also because of Cambridge Analytica, that […]
The Great Hack review – searing exposé of the Cambridge Analytica scandal – The Guardian
The Guardian review of the new Nextflix documentary “The Great Hack“. Our recommendation? Watch it. It’s a must see. Source: The Great Hack review – searing exposé of the Cambridge Analytica scandal | Film | The Guardian Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels
How the biggest decentralized social network is dealing with its Nazi problem – The Verge
After the neo nazi network Gab migrated to Mastodon, the alternative social media network tries to deal with internet’s Nazi problem head-on. The distributed nature of the network (federation) makes it almost impossible to respond with a single strategy. Instead, individual instances as the nodes of the network are called, have taken different measures. For example. […]