Reads

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts

👓 Microsoft threatens to take down Gab.ai over hate speech | Quartz

Read Microsoft threatened to stop hosting the alt-right’s favorite social network by Simone Stolzoff (Quartz)
Another company takes a stand for the limits of free speech online.

👓 Gab, the Alt-Right Social Media Site, Gets Banned | NY Mag | Intelligencer

Read Gab, the Social Media Site for the Alt-Right, Gets Deplatformed (Intelligencer)
After the Pittsburgh shooter was found to have used the site, it was abandoned by its business partners. What does that mean for Twitter?

👓 gab | Gab.ai

Read gab (gab.ai)

Gab has spent the past 48 hours proudly working with the DOJ and FBI to bring justice to an alleged terrorist. Because of the data we provided, they now have plenty of evidence for their case. In the midst of this Gab has been no-platformed by essential internet infrastructure providers at every level. We are the most censored, smeared, and no-platformed startup in history, which means we are a threat to the media and to the Silicon Valley Oligarchy.

Gab isn’t going anywhere.

It doesn’t matter what you write. It doesn’t matter what the sophist talking heads say on TV. It doesn’t matter what verified nobodies say on Twitter. We have plenty of options, resources, and support. We will exercise every possible avenue to keep Gab online and defend free speech and individual liberty for all people.

You have all just made Gab a nationally recognized brand as the home of free speech online at a time when Silicon Valley is stifling political speech they disagree with to interfere in a US election.

The internet is not reality. TV is not reality. 80% of normal everyday people agree with Gab and support free expression and liberty. The online outrage mob and mainstream media spin machine are the minority opinion. People are waking up, so please keep pointing the finger at a social network instead of pointing the finger at the alleged shooter who holds sole responsibility for his actions.

No-platform us all you want. Ban us all you want. Smear us all you want.

You can’t stop an idea.

As we transition to a new hosting provider Gab will be inaccessible for a period of time. We are working around the clock to get Gab.com back online. Thank you and remember to speak freely.

Andrew Torba, CEO Gab.com

The link to this site is definitely not an endorsement of any sort. I’m researching the idea of deplatforming and in particular Gab’s instance of it after their site was used by fringe groups to incite hatred which helped to fuel the shooting at the synagogue this past week.

My intent is also to archive a copy of the enhanced statement on what is left of their current website.

👓 Hopkins faculty promote better climate in machine learning | Hopkins CSW

Read Hopkins faculty promote better climate in machine learning (Women Faculty Forum at Homewood)
Today, 122 Hopkins faculty, post-docs, and grad students make a call to promote welcoming environments for women at machine learning conferences. In recognition of egregious behavior at recent conf…
Post moved from old URL
https://hopkinscsw.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/hopkins-faculty-promote-better-climate-in-machine-learning/

👓 Name Change | N.I.P.S.

Read NIPS Name Change by Terrence Sejnowski, Marian Stewart Bartlett, Michael Mozer, Corinna Cortes, Isabelle Guyon, Neil D. Lawrence, Daniel D. Lee, Ulrike von Luxburg, Masashi Sugiyama, Max Welling (nips.cc)

As many of you know, there has been an ongoing discussion concerning the name of the Neural Information Processing Systems conference. The current acronym NIPS has unintended connotations that some members of the community find offensive.

Following several well-publicized incidents of insensitivity at past conferences, and our acknowledgement of other less-publicized incidents, we conducted community polls requesting alternative names, rating the existing and alternative names, and soliciting additional comments.

After extensive discussions, the NIPS Board has decided not to change the name of the conference for now. The poll itself did not yield a clear consensus on a name change or a well-regarded alternative name.

This just makes me sick…

👓 Steven Brill’s NewsGuard wants to evaluate where you get your news | CNN

Read This start-up wants to evaluate your news sources (CNNMoney)
News Guard wants to grade websites using green, yellow, or red ratings and "nutrition labels" with more detailed information.

👓 A Roll-Up of Digipo Resources (4 September 2018) | Hapgood

Read A Roll-Up of Digipo Resources (4 September 2018) by Mike CaulfieldMike Caulfield (Hapgood)
One of the nice things about running a blog-fueled grassroots semi-funded initiative is the agility. The Digipo project has moved far and fast in the past year. But one of the bad things is all the…

👓 The Persistent Myth of Insurmountable Tribalism Will Kill Us All | Hapgood

Read The Persistent Myth of Insurmountable Tribalism Will Kill Us All by Mike CaulfieldMike Caulfield (Hapgood)
You know what I don’t see in my classes — in a Republican district, where a nontrivial number of students don’t believe in climate change? Any reaction of the sort that you “can’t trust the site because declining sea ice and climate change is a myth.” Not one. It’s not just a Republican thing. We find the same thing with prompts for liberal hot-button issues on GMOs. Students — many of whom are very committed to “natural” products and lifestyles — make accurate assessments of the lack of credibility of sites supporting their opinions. They believe this stuff, maybe, but admit the given site is not a good source.
After some of the depression of reading the entire Knight Foundation paper last night, this short vignette about Mike’s work in the trenches gives me a lot of hope. I wish I had read it last night before retiring.

I’ll be bookmarking some additional sources today/tomorrow from the paper as well as from Mike’s work and various links.

👓 I’m excited to release Episode 2 of My Url Is | Eddie Hinkle

Read a post by Eddie HinkleEddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)
It's a day late, but I'm excited to release Episode 2 of My Url Is. This week, featuring Rosemary Orchard. We had a super fun conversation about how she learned about the IndieWeb, about attending IndieWebCamps remotely and more!
#autofollow

👓 How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians | Project Information Literacy Research Institute

Read How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians [.pdf] by Alison J. Head, John Wihbey, P. Takis Metaxas, Margy MacMillan, and Dan Cohen (Project Information Literacy Research Institute)
Abstract: The News Study research report presents findings about how a sample of U.S. college students gather information and engage with news in the digital age. Results are included from an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 U.S. colleges and universities selected for their regional, demographic, and red/blue state diversity. A computational analysis was conducted using Twitter data associated with the survey respondents and a Twitter panel of 135,891 college-age people. Six recommendations are included for educators, journalists, and librarians working to make students effective news consumers. To explore the implications of this study’s findings, concise commentaries from leading thinkers in education, libraries, media research, and journalism are included.
A great little paper about how teens and college students are finding, reading, sharing, and generally interacting with news. There’s some nice overlap here on both the topics of journalism and education which I find completely fascinating. In general, however, I think in a few places students are mis-reporting their general uses, so I’m glad a portion of the paper actually looks at data from Twitter in the wild to see what real world use cases actually are.

Perhaps there are some interesting segments and even references relevant to the topics of education and IndieWeb for Greg McVerry‘s recent project?

As I read this, I can’t help but think of some things I’ve seen Michael Caulfield writing about news and social media over the past several months. As I look, I notice that he’s already read and written a bit about a press release for this particular paper. I’ll have to take a look at his take on it tomorrow. I’m particularly interested in any insights he’s got on lateral reading and fake news above and beyond his prior thoughts.

Perhaps I missed it hiding in there reading so late at night, but another potentially good source for this paper’s recommended section would be Caulfield’s book Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

The purpose of this study was to better understand the preferences, practices, and motivations of young news consumers, while focusing on what students actually do, rather than what they do not do.  ❧

October 22, 2018 at 08:28PM

YouTube (54%), Instagram (51%) or Snapchat (55%)  ❧

I’m curious to know which sources in particular they’re using on these platforms. Snapchat was growing news sources a year ago, but I’ve heard those sources are declining. What is the general quality of these sources?

For example, getting news from television can range from PBS News Hour and cable news networks (more traditional sources) to comedy shows like Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah which have some underlying news in the comedy, but are far from traditional sources.
October 22, 2018 at 08:35PM

Some students (28%) received news from podcasts in the preceding week.  ❧

October 22, 2018 at 08:38PM

news is stressful and has little impact on the day-to-day routines —use it for class assignments, avoid it otherwise.” While a few students like this one practiced news abstinence, such students were rare.  ❧

This sounds a bit like my college experience, though I didn’t avoid it because of stressful news (and there wasn’t social media yet). I generally missed it because I didn’t subscribe directly to publications or watch much television. Most of my news consumption was the local college newspaper.
October 22, 2018 at 08:46PM

But on the Web, stories of all kinds can show up anywhere and information and news are all mixed together. Light features rotate through prominent spots on the “page” with the same weight as breaking news, sports coverage, and investigative pieces, even on mainstream news sites. Advertorial “features” and opinion pieces are not always clearly identified in digitalspaces.  ❧

This difference is one of the things I miss about reading a particular newspaper and experiencing the outlet’s particular curation of their own stories. Perhaps I should spend more time looking at the “front page” of various news sites?
October 22, 2018 at 08:57PM

Some (36%) said they agreed that the threat of “‘fake news’ had made them distrust the credibility of any news.” Almost half (45%) lacked confidence with discerning “real news” from “fake news,” and only 14% said they were “very confident” that they could detect “fake news.”  ❧

These numbers are insane!
October 22, 2018 at 09:04PM

As a matter of recourse, some students in the study “read the news laterally,” meaning they used sources elsewhere on the Internet to compare versions of a story in an attempt to verify its facts, bias, and ultimately, its credibility.25  ❧

This reminds me how much I miss the old daily analysis that Slate use to do for the day’s top news stories in various outlets in their Today’s Papers segment.
October 22, 2018 at 09:15PM

Some respondents, though not all, did evaluate the veracity of news they shared on social media. More (62%) said they checked to see how current an item was, while 59% read the complete story before sharing and 57% checked the URL to see where a story originated (Figure 7). Fewer read comments about a post (55%) or looked to see how many times an item was tweeted or shared (39%).  ❧

I’m not sure I believe these self-reported numbers at all. 59% read the complete story before sharing?! 57% checked the URL? I’ll bet that not that many could probably define what a URL is.
October 22, 2018 at 10:00PM

information diet  ❧

October 22, 2018 at 11:02PM

At the tactical level, there are likely many small things that could be tested with younger audiences to help them better orient themselves to the crowded news landscape. For example, some news organizations are more clearly identifying different types of content such as editorials, features, and backgrounders/news analysis.57More consistent and more obvious use of these typological tags would help all news consumers, not just youth, and could also travel with content as itis posted and shared in social media. News organizations should engage more actively with younger audiences to see what might be helpful.  ❧

October 22, 2018 at 11:37PM

When news began moving into the first digital spaces in the early 1990s, pro-Web journalists touted the possibilities of hypertext links that would give news consumers the context they needed. Within a couple of years, hypertext links slowly began to disappear from many news stories. Today, hypertext links are all but gone from most mainstream news stories.  ❧

October 22, 2018 at 11:38PM

“Solutions journalism’ is another promising trend that answers some of the respondents’ sense of helplessness in the face of the barrage of crisis coverage.62  ❧

October 22, 2018 at 11:40PM

👓 Slate’s Today’s Papers invented aggregation journalism. | Slate

Read Today’s Papers: Slate’s First Hit Feature Invented the Modern Web, Kind Of (Slate Magazine)
Its name suggests a slower-moving past, when much still depended on the morning thump of fresh-printed broadsheets landing on doorsteps. Its concept presaged a lightning-quick future, when much of what we read is attitude-laced summary of someone else’s work. It was Slate’s first smash-hit feature and, for better or worse, its most influential. “Today’s Papers,” says Michael Kinsley, Slate’s founding editor, “deserves some tiny bit of credit for the ruination of journalism.”

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

That enterprising writer could read the papers the moment they went online in the wee hours, summarize their lead stories and other juicy pieces, and post this briefing on Slate before the paperboys could toss physical copies onto driveways in Middle America’s cul-de-sacs.  ❧

For me, it wasn’t so much the summary, but who was it that had the best coverage. It was the comparison of the coverage. I read most of the particular stories anyway.
October 22, 2018 at 09:28PM

The Today’s Papers job was first offered to Matt Drudge,  ❧

October 22, 2018 at 09:29PM

Anyone can open up Twitter and instantly know what the world is gabbing about from minute to minute, all day long, across thousands of electronic sources that are instantly available all over the globe.  ❧

But we don’t get the journalistic criticism of the coverage, who’s doing it better, who’s more thorough, etc. We’re still missing that.
October 22, 2018 at 09:32PM

👓 What We Learned from Studying the News Consumption Habits of College Students | Dan Cohen

Read What We Learned from Studying the News Consumption Habits of College Students by Dan CohenDan Cohen (Dan Cohen)
Over the last year, I was fortunate to help guide a study of the news consumption habits of college students, and coordinate Northeastern University Library’s services for the study, including great work by our data visualization specialist Steven Braun and necessary infrastructure from our digital team, including Sarah Sweeney and Hillary Corbett. “How Students Engage with News,” out today as both a long article and accompanying datasets and media, provides a full snapshot of how college students navigate our complex and high-velocity media environment.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Side note: After recently seeing Yale Art Gallery’s show “Seriously Funny: Caricature Through the Centuries,” I think there’s a good article to be written about the historical parallels between today’s visual memes and political cartoons from the past.  ❧

This also makes me think back to other entertainments of the historical poor including the use/purpose of stained glass windows in church supposedly as a means of entertaining the illiterate Latin vulgate masses.
October 22, 2018 at 08:07PM

nearly 6,000 students from a wide variety of institutions  ❧

Institutions = colleges/universities? Or are we also considering less educated youth as well?
October 22, 2018 at 08:08PM

A more active stance by librarians, journalists, educators, and others who convey truth-seeking habits is essential.  ❧

In some sense these people can also be viewed as aggregators and curators of sorts. How can their work be aggregated and be used to compete with the poor algorithms of social media?
October 22, 2018 at 08:11PM

👓 poniewozik tweetstorm: Response to Axios op ed

Read tweetstorm by James PoniewozikJames Poniewozik (Twitter)
A human take on the Twitter portion of the Axios’ 4 ways we all can work to fix “fake news”