The standards by which the internet is controlled need to be open and subject to impartial judiciaries – not left to advertisersThe revelations we publish about how Facebook’s data was used by Cambridge Analytica to subvert the openness of democracy are only the latest examples of a global phenomenon. All over the world, governments are coming to grips with the destructive power of social media. In recent weeks, Sri Lanka, Britain, Indonesia and Myanmar have all seen measures taken against hate-speech campaigns. In some cases the companies that publish and profit from them have acted themselves; in others the government has taken direct action. In Sri Lanka, the government reacted to a burst of anti-Muslim rioting by completely shutting down Facebook, WhatsApp, and the messaging app Viber for a week on 7 March. In Britain, Facebook banned the neo-Nazi Britain First movement, which had acquired 2m “likes”, after two of its leaders were jailed. The leaders’ personal pages were also removed. Why it took the company that long to act, when the hateful nature of the pages had been obvious to the whole world ever since Donald Trump retweeted one of their made-up news stories in 2017, is difficult to explain.YouTube can not only profit from disturbing content but in unintended ways rewards its creation. The algorithms that guide viewers to new choices aim always to intensify the experience, and to keep the viewer excited. This can damage society, and individuals, without being... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2018-03-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
As with the printing press and the dotcom boom, initial frenzy and speculation obscures the lasting legacy of new technologies“Innovation,” wrote the economist William Janeway in his seminal book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, “begins with discovery and culminates in speculation.”... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-12-30 16:00:37 UTC ]
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HarperCollins will no longer publish books by the historian and is reviewing his backlist after he said ‘slavery was not genocide’HarperCollins has dropped David Starkey as an author, saying that the racist views the bestselling historian expressed in a recent interview were “abhorrent”.On... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-07-03 11:40:12 UTC ]
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The giddy excess of the Peak TV era has culminated in a sort of option paralysis among consumers, many of whom, when presented with a near-infinite number of entertainment choices, make none whatsoever. According to Nielsen’s newly released Total Audience Report for the first quarter of 2019,... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-07-02 20:18:24 UTC ]
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The reaction to the exposure of the bestselling American author as a serial liar reveals more about our own insecurities than his duplicityWhat’s the difference between something going viral and a storm in a teacup? Not an awful lot, it often seems to me. Last week, everyone in publishing and... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-02-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The standards by which the internet is controlled need to be open and subject to impartial judiciaries – not left to advertisersThe revelations we publish about how Facebook’s data was used by Cambridge Analytica to subvert the openness of democracy are only the latest examples of a global... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2018-03-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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"Publishers want to scare Facebook because there have been so many different gripes." The post ‘There’s an awful lot of showmanship’: Confessions of a publishing consultant on Facebook’s news feed changes appeared first on Digiday. Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2018-02-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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If these are the end times for literature, then we must be traveling in circles, for the death of storytelling looks an awful lot like its birth. The novel itself isn’t all that old. Sure, we can find a handful of examples going back thousands of years, but you have to stretch your definition of... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2014-01-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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