From self-harm to terrorism, online recommendations cast a deadly shadow
By: The Guardian March 3, 2019 My eye was caught by a headline in Wired magazine: “When algorithms think you want to die”. Below it was an article by two academic researchers, Ysabel Gerrard and Tarleton Gillespie, about the “recommendation engines” that are a central feature of social media and e-commerce sites. Everyone who uses the web is […]
Facebook is ‘destroying how society works,’ says a former executive
By: Sacramento Bee December 11, 2017 For years, he was a top executive at Facebook. Now, though, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth is sounding the alarm about how the social media company and others are “destroying how society works.” Chamath Palihapitiya, who held the user growth role until 2011, said he feels “tremendous […]
Facebook cracks down on personality quizzes to protect your personal info
By: USA Today April 28, 2019 You know those Facebook personality quizzes that tell you which fruit you are or which cast member of “Friends” is your spirit animal? The social networking giant is cracking down on them. On Thursday, Facebook updated its platform policies for developers and said apps with like personality quizzes “may not be permitted on the […]
China’s cosmological Communism: a challenge to liberal democracies
By: Merics July 18, 2018 China’s presence and influence is not confined to its own borders or East Asia anymore, but has reached a global scale. In the new MERICS China Monitor Perspectives, “China’s cosmological Communism: A challenge to liberal democracies,” journalist and former MERICS Research Fellow Didi Kirsten Tatlow shows how imperial philosophy meets Marxist orthodoxy in Beijing’s […]
YouTube’s recommendations drive 70% of what we watch
By: Quartz January 13, 2018 YouTube is a master of getting you to watch videos you didn’t know existed minutes earlier. On an average day, people around the world watch one billion hours of video on YouTube. Most of those—70%—are recommended by YouTube’s algorithms, chief product officer Neal Mohan revealed at CES, as reported by CNET. The recommendations […]
Casey Gerald – The Gospel of Doubt TED Talk
By: TED February, 2016 What do you do when your firmly held beliefs turn out not to be true? When Casey Gerald’s religion failed him, he searched for something new to believe in — in business, in government, in philanthropy — but found only false saviors. In this moving talk, Gerald urges us all to […]
Brutal Startup Is Using Eye Tracking to Force You to Watch Ads
By: Futurism March 22, 2019 The founder of MoviePass is back, and this time he’s not messing around. MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes has a new startup called PreShow, and it’s using a business model straight out of “A Clockwork Orange”: The company’s new app helps you score free movie tickets — as long as you sit through 15 […]
Outsourcing Adulthood Can you ever really grow up if you don’t do anything for yourself?
By: The Cut April 7, 2019 I live two blocks from the nearest grocery, but sometimes months pass between my visits. During those times, I rely on Amazon Fresh for my weekly supply of eggs, paper towels, and Diet Coke. When I scroll through Amazon’s virtual grocery store on my phone, I tell my boyfriend […]
Amazon Is Working on a Device That Can Read Human Emotions
By: MSN May 23, 2019 (Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. is developing a voice-activated wearable device that can recognize human emotions. The wrist-worn gadget is described as a health and wellness product in internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg. It’s a collaboration between Lab126, the hardware development group behind Amazon’s Fire phone and Echo smart speaker, and […]