Do hate speech detectors discriminate against African Americans?
Shocking article on arXiv.org from the at the Annual Meeting for the Association for Computational Linguistics 2019. It reports that the algorithms used by “sophisticated” hate bias checkers are not neutral – they are based on standard American English. Therefore tweets by black Americans are proportionally more likely to be flagged up as abusive than […]
Facebook Ads Library
Who pays for adverts on Facebook? This free resource will have data for 7 years of all political and other advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Regular reports on trends will also be provided. It displays page creation dates, mergers with other pages, page name changes and where a page is managed from, and the option […]
Does social media make you happy or unhappy?
This week the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Media and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Inquiry: “Managing the Impact of Social Media on Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing” called for safeguards; but their surveys also found that two thirds of those answering found social media useful for sourcing health information.
The Zuckerberg Files
Not new but recently upgraded, time to revisit The Zuckerberg Files maintained by UW-Milwaukee Center for Information Policy Research. It provides free access to over 900 statements, transcripts of speeches and videos from Facebook’s founder covering the period 2004-2018. Free registration required. Includes materials on Russian elections and privacy.
1.1 million abusive tweets sent to women in 2017
…according to large-scale research undertaken by Amnesty International and Element AI, a global artificial intelligence software product company. They surveyed millions of tweets mentioning 778 journalists and politicians from the UK and US during 2017. Women of colour were more than 34% likely to receive abuse than white women. The research also looks at the […]
What should we do about Fake News?
This week the LSE Truth, Trust and Technology Commission launched its report. They argued that big tech companies should fund an independent platform agency to police fake news. Find out more by downloading the report and getting the facts on the composition of the commission from the official website.
US Mid-Term Elections
Lots of links on this subject. New York Times collected examples of misinformation over 4,000 were sent from social media. Other sources of fact checking and overviews of political accuracy include: Politfact has been checking claims made about the election by the President and other commentators Washington Post fact-checker Media Matters for America News coverage […]
Advertising on Social Media
As a move to greater transparency Facebook has launched this searchable database about political adverts appearing on Facebook and who is funding them. It covers US election spending. There are also statistical snapshots taken every week. Google transparency report also has a political ads section and Twitter has a list of political campaign advertisers.
Twitter release data on state-backed propaganda from Iran and Russia
https://about.twitter.com/en_us/values/elections-integrity.html#data As part of it openness and transparency policy, Twitter have released information and datasets indicating that thousands of sources from Russia were used during the USA election campaign to manipulate news sources. TechCrunch discusses and gives links to the datasets.
How many times a day do you check your phone?
According to the latest Ofcom communications report people in the UK now check their smartphones, on average, every 12 minutes of the waking day. Their press release also has a fascinating infographic comparing usage and consumption of media from 2008 and 2018 which shows startling changes over the last ten years. The full report covers […]
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