Articles fromjason.xyz

If the Federal Trade Commission ever planned to compel Facebook to spin out WhatsApp and Instagram — a big if, I know — you can imagine the company explaining that there was no longer such a thing as “WhatsApp” or “Instagram.” Going forward, those names will refer only to their respective graphical user interfaces. Behind the curtain, there is only Facebook. It’s a characteristically savvy — and ruthless — move from Zuckerberg and his lieutenants.

The third era is that of Web 2.0 and online collaboration. After the dotcom bubble burst, renewed excitement about digital media clustered around the social web.

Kramer and coauthors collaborated with Facebook on an experimental tweak to the newsfeed algorithm. Some users received a higher dosage of negatively valenced Facebook posts from their friend networks; other users received a higher dosage of positively valenced Facebook posts. They discovered a miniscule but statistically significant effect on users’ posting behavior. If you see sad posts in your newsfeed, you become slightly more likely to perform sadness in your own postings; if you see happy posts in your newsfeed, you become slightly more likely to perform happiness.

We produce mountains of Twitter and website research. We produce molehills of Facebook research. We produce practically no research on email, Reddit, or the algorithmic choices of the major platforms themselves. And this is entirely because Twitter has, for several years, made its data more easily accessible to researchers than Facebook. Websites can be crawled and scraped, while email lists are closely guarded by civic and political organizations. In the era of big data, most of the research community has flocked to the types of big data that are most accessible.