Digital Incivility
The Microsoft Digital Civility Index (DCI) Microsoft has been measuring online behaviour and has found a worrying increase of bad behaviour and digital incivility over the last 4 years. Their Digital Civility webpage gives information about safer internet campaigns and you can scroll down to get global and country report cards. The data is based […]
Fighting Disinformation Online: Building the Database of Web Tools
A new report from think tank Rand describes the building of the database which has links to useful sources for researchers on detecting spam, codes, credibility scoring, disinformation tracking, verification and education. Also released this week a report from Fullfact.org and Africa Check which includes information resources and an excellent report entitled: Media and information […]
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.
Recent Comments