How Facebook swallowed the internet | This guy broke the internet | Annotating the abusers

By Matt Carroll <@MattatMIT>

April 5, 2016: A trio of news media stories, videos, and data viz compiled weekly. Get notified via email? Email 3toread (at) gmail.com.

1. The end of the Internet as we know it: How Facebook swallowed journalism: Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, takes a hard look at the rapidly evolving relationship between social media and journalism, and doesn’t like what she sees. Social is making editorial decisions that have traditionally been made by news publishers, such as what stories you see when or in censoring “hate speech.” That means these companies are making critical news decisions. And with great power comes great responsibility, she argues, which raises a big question: Can they be trusted with that responsibility? Or should government step in?
2. The fragility of the internet: The internet has become a dominating feature of life in a few short decades. Yet it is a startlingly fragile creation in some ways. It’s multitude of features are composed of millions of lines of code, written by many contributors. So what happens when one person, in a snit, takes away a few lines of his code? For a few brief hours in one corner of the internet, chaos. An amazing story of what happens when 11 lines code disappear and a warning that worse could be on the horizon. By Keith Collins of Quartz.
3. Genius web annotator vs one young woman with a blog: Commenting and annotation are going through growing pains, to say the least. Everyone loves them in concept, but in practice — man, those trolls drive you crazy. So what happens when one woman blogger, who writes about being sexually active while having Herpes, gets fed up with getting attacked through Genius? She gets Genius to make changes. (Note the note at top of story.)

One last note: Spell it “Internet”? Nope, it’s “internet.” The Associated Press, which sets the style for most news organizations in the US, recently decided that the Internet would now be spelled — drum roll, please — internet. As in, lower-case “i”, if you missed that.

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Matt Carroll runs the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab.