Commentary: It’s Facebook’s algorithm vs. democracy, and so far the algorithm is winning — NOVA Next Over the last several years, Facebook has been participating—unintentionally—in the erosion of democracy. The social network may feel like a modern town square, but thanks to its tangle of algorithms, it’s nothing like the public forums of the past. The company determines, according to its interests and those of its shareholders, what we see and learn on its social network. The result has been a loss of focus on critical national issues, an erosion of civil disagreement, and a threat to democracy itself. Facebook is just one part—though a large part—of the Big Data economy, one built on math-powered applications that are based on choices made by fallible human beings. Facebook's algorithm—driven in part by likes and shares—has upended civil discourse. In 2008, when the economy crashed, I witnessed the power of these “Weapons of Math Destruction” firsthand from my desk at a hedge fund in New York City. In many cases, WMDs define their own reality to justify their results.
Michelle Everhart from Columbus Dispatch expresses... Students Reject 'Fake News' To Write Footnoted, Neutral Wikipedia Entries : NPR Ed Fake news has been, well, in the news a lot lately. But for the world's largest crowdsourced encyclopedia, it's nothing new. "Wikipedia has been dealing with fake news since it started 16 years ago," notes LiAnna Davis, deputy director of the Wiki Education Foundation. To combat misinformation, Wikipedia has developed a robust corps of volunteer editors. Anyone can write new entries and scrutinize existing ones for adherence to Wikipedia's rules on sourcing and neutrality. While it's not free of errors or pranks, what results is a resource that 50 million people turn to daily on hundreds of thousands of topics in a few dozen languages. Today, educators are among those more concerned than ever with standards of truth and evidence and with the lightning-fast spread of misinformation online. This spring, 7,500 students are expected to participate. Since the program began six years ago, Davis says, students have collectively added more than 25 million words of content to Wikipedia.
WKSU news director Andrew Meyer was 5 years old at... for Schools | AllSides Preparing students to participate thoughtfully in democracy - and in life. Students need to learn how to sort through mass media and social networks, think critically about the issues, and engage with each other in a healthy and positive way, even when there are differences in opinions and backgrounds. AllSides for Schools helps educators teach these valuable lessons and skills. Let's teach the next generation how to see diverse perspectives, value differences and benefit from everyone’s best ideas. Contact Us to Sign-Up See Overview of School Program Elections and Relationships The climate for elections and political issues is so divisive, how can classrooms discuss hot-button issues effectively and with mutual understanding? Relationships First Introduces students to civil dialog and appreciating others even when we disagree Dictionary Term Lesson Plan 1 or multiple day program that uses the Dictionary term of your choosing to teach about differences in opinion and perspective Election Issues
As a station that became liscensed to the university,... Blue Feed, Red Feed What is this? Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned “very liberal” (blue, on the left) and “very conservative” (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study. In 2015, the journal Science published a research paper by Facebook scientists (Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, “Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”, Harvard Dataverse, V2) which looked at how a subset of the social network’s users reacted to the news appearing in their feeds. For six months, Facebook tracked and analyzed the content shared by 10.1 million of its users (who were anonymized). For a site appearing in the Journal’s red feed, a majority of the articles shared from it were classified in the study as “very conservatively aligned.” To appear in the Journal’s blue and red feeds, posts must have at least 100 shares, and come from sources with at least 100,000 followers. No. No. No.
Difference: 1970 vs. 2019 Fake Facebook News Sites to Avoid As Facebook and now Google face scrutiny for promoting fake news stories, Melissa Zimdars, a communication and media professor from Merrimack College in Massachusetts, has compiled a handy list of websites you should think twice about trusting. “Below is a list of fake, false, regularly misleading, and otherwise questionable ‘news’ organizations that are commonly shared on Facebook and other social media sites,” Zimdars explains. “Many of these websites rely on ‘outrage’ by using distorted headlines and decontextualized or dubious information in order to generate likes, shares, and profits.” (Click here to see the list.) Be warned: Zimdars’s list is expansive in scope, and stretches beyond the bootleg sites (many of them headquartered in Macedonia) that write fake news for the sole reason of selling advertisements. She also includes some helpful tips for spotting fake news: • Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story.
Tim D. Smith was an on ground reporter for the Akron...