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Consumer information exposing scams and lies in corporate america, media, politics government

When two sisters hit the web with their new idea, it was unlike anything anyone had seen. That one site, ChickClick, inspired so many more and crafted a foundational network of the early web.

WE HAVE TO WRAP OUR brains around 3.05 for a second." John Battelle, the managing editor of Wired, is using softwarespeak to start a meeting about the fifth issue of the magazine's third year. But Louis Rossetto seems to be somewhere else. Wearing sneakers and jeans, his wavy gray hair yanked back into a ponytail, curly wisps escaping around the sides, he stares blankly into space, like some cocky kid on an internship. Actually, he's Wired's 45-year-old editor and publisher, looking lost in a daydream . . . about how he trounced the mass media, maybe, those Second Wave dinosaurs who wouldn't know an Ethernet if somebody hacked one directly into their brainstem. . . . Rossetto props himself up on a bony elbow. The daydream would go like this: He lopes through the streets of Manhattan -- a tall, skinny figure -- with his partner in romance and business, Jane Metcalfe. It's 1991 and they have no jobs. They're looking for money to start a new magazine about the Digital Generation, whom they call "the most powerful people on the planet today."

Relationships we have with our friends, family, or colleagues influence our personal decisions, as well as decisions we make together with others. As in human beings, despotism and egalitarian societies seem to also exist in animals. While studies have shown that social networks constrain many phenomena from amoebae to primates, we still do not know how consensus emerges from the properties of social networks in many biological systems. We created artificial social networks that represent the continuum from centralized to decentralized organization and used an agent-based model to make predictions about the patterns of consensus and collective movements we observed according to the social network. These theoretical results showed that different social networks and especially contrasted ones – star network vs. equal network - led to totally different patterns. Our model showed that, by moving from a centralized network to a decentralized one, the central individual seemed to lose its leadership in the collective movement's decisions. We, therefore, showed a link between the type of social network and the resulting consensus. By comparing our theoretical data with data on five groups of primates, we confirmed that this relationship between social network and consensus also appears to exist in animal societies.

The aim of this study is to provide an overview the state-of-the-art elements of text classification. For this purpose, we first select and investigat…

There is growing evidence that social media addiction is an evolving problem, particularly among adolescents. However, the absence of an instrument me…

Source Hacking details the techniques used by media manipulators to target journalists and other influential public figures to pick up falsehoods and unknowingly amplify them to the public.

Memes come off as a joke, but some people are starting to see them as the serious threat they are.

Weaponizing the Digital Influence Machine: The Political Perils of Online Ad Tech identifies the technologies, conditions, and tactics that enable today’s digital advertising infrastructure to be weaponized by political and anti-democratic actors.

Semantic Publishing at Unidad Editorial: a Client Case Study in the Media Industry

Event Registry’s media monitoring and analysis service uses advanced natural language processing technology to analyze every news article…

Journalism has enjoyed a rich and relatively stable history of professionalization. Scholars coming from a variety of disciplines have theorized this history, f...

Executive Summary This will be the year when the regulation of platform companies starts to bite following growing concern about misinformation, privacy, and market...

Juan Benet joined the show to talk about IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open — addressed by content and identities. We talked about what it is, how it works, how it can be used, and how it just might save the future of the web.

The authors' bandit algorithms are tailored precisely to recommendation scenarios where user interests evolve under social influence and it is shown that their adaptations of the classic LinREL and Thompson Sampling algorithms maintain the same asymptotic regret bounds as in the non-social case. Recommender systems should adapt to user interests as the latter evolve. A prevalent cause for the evolution of user interests is the influence of their social circle. In general, when the interests are not known, online algorithms that explore the recommendation space while also exploiting observed preferences are preferable. We present online recommendation algorithms rooted in the linear multi-armed bandit literature. Our bandit algorithms are tailored precisely to recommendation scenarios where user interests evolve under social influence. In particular, we show that our adaptations of the classic LinREL and Thompson Sampling algorithms maintain the same asymptotic regret bounds as in the non-social case. We validate our approach experimentally using both synthetic and real datasets.

Nowadays, all major web browsers have a private browsing mode. However, the mode's benefits and limitations are not particularly understood. Through the use of survey studies, prior work has found...

How Friendster missed a billion-dollar break.

We're providing metrics on how we enforced our content policies from July 2020 through September 2020.

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand…

Newly public documents provide a rare window into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's thoughts on how to expand his social media juggernaut.

A lot has changed since Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook in 2004. Here are some of the milestones that mattered most.

The company is paying publishers directly for their work, but will an audience show up for it?