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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?

Facebook News gives people more control over the stories they see and the ability to explore a wider range of news within the Facebook app.

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Users are rejoicing because they can once again see the most recent tweets first.

Chief executives of Facebook and Twitter quizzed by judiciary committee on allegations of anti-conservative bias and handling of election

The two tech CEOs found areas of agreement on topics where they had previously been at odds such as content moderation and President Trump.

Kyle Drake, founder of Neocities, gives a New Relic FutureTalk in Portland discussing the distributed web. Join our New Relic FutureTalks PDX Meetup group here to take part in the next monthly event: http://www.meetup.com/New-Relic-FutureTalks-PDX/ Be sure to subscribe and follow New Relic at: https://twitter.com/NewRelic https://www.facebook.com/NewRelic https://www.youtube.com/NewRelicInc

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in almost 62 years. The goal of this new law is to let anyone enter any communications business -- to let any communications business compete in any market against any other. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has the potential to change the way we work, live and learn. It will affect telephone service -- local and long distance, cable programming and other video services, broadcast services and services provided to schools. The Federal Communications Commission has a tremendous role to play in creating fair rules for this new era of competition. At this Internet site, we will provide information about the FCC's role in implementing this new law, how you can get involved and how these changes might impact you. This page will include information listing the proceedings the FCC will complete to open up local phone markets, increase competition in long distance and other steps. You will find copies of news releases summarizing action, announcements of meetings where these items will be discussed, and charts describing the work ahead of us and where (within the FCC) and when it will be completed. Please note: some of the links on this page lead to resources outside the FCC. The presence of these links should not be taken as an endorsement by the FCC of these sites or their content. For more information about the referenced documents, contact the person listed on the document. Please let us know what topics most interest you or where you have questions about this new law. We will soon begin to post a series of Questions & Answers with Commission officials designed to answer your questions.

In December 2016, shortly after the US presidential election, Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes—entered a partnership to combat misinformation. Motivated by a variety of concerns and values, relying on different understandings of misinformation, and with a diverse set of stakeholders in mind, they created a collaboration designed to leverage the partners’ different forms of cultural power, technological skill, and notions of public service. Concretely, the partnership centers around managing a flow of stories that may be considered false. Here’s how it works: through a proprietary process that mixes algorithmic and human intervention, Facebook identifies candidate stories; these stories are then served to the five news and fact-checking partners through a partners-only dashboard that ranks stories according to popularity. Partners independently choose stories from the dashboard, do their usual fact-checking work, and append their fact-checks to the stories’ entries in the dashboards. Facebook uses these fact-checks to adjust whether and how it shows potentially false stories to its users. Variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or an unavoidable coupling of organizations through circumstances beyond either’s exclusive control, the partnership emerged as a key example of platform-publisher collaboration. This report contextualizes the partnership, traces its dynamics through a series of interviews, and uses it to motivate a general set of questions that future platform press partnerships might ask themselves before collaborating.

She Says: Women in News, which originally aired on PBS in 2001, is about ten women in positions of power within journalism and the effect they are having on the profession, and the world. The ten women examined include: Judy Woodruff, CNN prime anchor; Carole Simpson, ABC News anchor; Anna Quindlen, Newsweek columnist; Narda Zacchino, San Francisco Chronicle senior editor; Geneva Overholser, syndicated columnist; Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio's legal affairs correspondent since 1975; Rena Pederson, The Dallas Morning News editorial page editor; Helen Thomas, Heart Newspapers political reporter; Judy Crichton, first woman producer, director, and writer for CBS Reports; and Paula Madison, president and general manager at NBC4 in Los Angeles.

The digital journalist uses a host of new electronic sources, tools, and practices that are now part of the global reporting landscape. Digital journalists would argue that in the right circumstances, these tools enable them to offer as clear and informed a report as what the journalist on the ground can produce–sometimes even clearer, because they may have access to a broader spectrum of material than a field reporter. In mainstream newsrooms, though, there is still significant skepticism about digital’s impact on foreign reporting. Many see it as the end of the era when a reporter could spend a full day–or days or weeks–reporting in the field before sitting down to write. That traditional foreign correspondent model served audiences well, bringing them vivid accounts of breaking news and nuanced analysis of longer-term developments.At the Tow Center, we believe that both forms of reporting are vital, that both are necessary to help all of us understand the world. A goal of this report is to narrow or eliminate the divide between the two, and in this spirit we lay out several objectives. First, our authors work to provide a clear picture of this new reporting landscape: Who are the primary actors, and what does the ecosystem of journalists, citizens, sources, tools, practices, and challenges look like? Second, we urge managers at both mainstream and digital native media outlets to embrace both kinds of reporting, melding them into a new international journalism that produces stories with greater insight. Third, we hope to show the strengths in traditional and digital foreign reporting techniques, with a goal of defining a hybrid foreign correspondent model–not a correspondent who can do everything, but one open to using all reporting tools and a wide range of sources. Finally, we outline governance issues in this new space–legal and operational–with an aim to help journalists report securely and independently in this digital age. We approach these issues through five chapters, whose authors include journalists from both digital-native and mainstream media, as well as a communications scholar and a media producer for a human rights organization. While each writes from a different vantage, the overlapping insights and conclusions begin to redefine both the edges and heart of international reportage now.

This essay is part survey and part manifesto, one that concerns itself with the practice of journalism and the practices of journalists in the United States. It is not, however, about “the future of the news industry,” both because much of that future is already here and because there is no such thing as the news industry anymore. If you wanted to sum up the past decade of the news ecosystem in a single phrase, it might be this: Everybody suddenly got a lot more freedom. The newsmakers, the advertisers, the startups, and, especially, the people formerly known as the audience have all been given new freedom to communicate, narrowly and broadly, outside the old strictures of the broadcast and publishing models. The past 15 years have seen an explosion of new tools and techniques, and, more importantly, new assumptions and expectations, and these changes have wrecked the old clarity. Many of the changes talked about in the last decade as part of the future landscape of journalism have already taken place; much of journalism’s imagined future is now its lived-in present. (As William Gibson noted long ago, “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.”) Our goal is to write about what has already happened and what is happening today, and what we can learn from it, rather than engaging in much speculation.

More than ever before we’re consuming news in strange contexts; mixed into a stream of holiday photos on Facebook, alongside comedians’ quips on twitter; between Candy Crush and transit directions on our smartphones. In this environment designers can take liberties with the form of the news package and the ways that audiences can interact. But it’s not just users who are invited to experiment with their news: in newsrooms and product development departments, developers and journalists are adopting play as design and authoring process. Maxwell Foxman‘s new Tow Center report, Play The News: Fun and Games in Digital Journalism is a comprehensive documentation of this world.

Aim of Research The aim of this research is to provide the first comprehensive report about the use of user-generated content (UGC) among broadcast news channels. Its objectives are to understand how much UGC is used on air and online by these channels, why editors and journalists choose to use it, and under what conditions it is employed. The study intends to provide a holistic understanding of the use of UGC by international broadcast news channels. Methodology This research was carried out in two phases. The first involved an in-depth, quantitative content analysis examining when and how eight international news broadcasters use UGC. For this part of the research we analyzed a total of 1,164 hours of TV output and 2,254 Web pages, coding them according to parameters intended to answer the research questions. The second phase of the research was entirely qualitative. It was designed to build upon the first phase by providing a detailed overview of the professional practices that underpin the collection, verification, and distribution of UGC. To achieve this we conducted 64 interviews with news managers, editors, and journalists from 38 news organizations based in 24 countries around the world. This report brings together both phases of the research to provide a detailed overview of the key findings.