During Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony, we asked our readers to answer a series of questions on BuzzFeed using only emoji. Over the period of a few hours, we received hundreds of thousands of responses, tens of thousands of distinct emoji sequences, and a whopping 10 million emojis.
The Official TRUMP Emoji
Bias, propaganda, and deliberately misleading information are much more prevalent and do more damage.
Points: Buckle up for a longer than usual Points post, friends (and don’t worry, there are lots of illustrations). Gilad Lotan, Chief Data Scientist at betaworks, chaperones us through some trends in how conversation and attention are being shaped online and argues they present a larger problem than “fake news.”…
a deep dive into the underlying data
Why is everyone so obsessed with this hashtag and the fact that it was in Twitter’s trending topics list the morning after the first presidential debate? Perhaps the competitive nature of a presidential debate — the fact that there’s supposed to be a “winner” — means that we’re reading into…
analyzing the Anchor launch using social data.
My response to the Uber “Dead Miles” Argument
Jay Cassano reached out to me as he was writing his piece on Uber’s “dead miles” (linked below), questioning Uber’s current practice saving driver location data for potential product development. He was specifically interested in a Data Scientist’s opinion on the value of one’s location data — can we put…
…or how much harder it is to get into the top charts
If you’ve launched an iOS app, you know just how difficult it is to gain traction. Even when spending on marketing, the odds are stacked against your success. The iTunes ecosystem is a walled garden, where on the one hand, Apple has full control over what’s accepted, while on the…
Find, Follow and Reach Communities on Twitter
In a media ecosystem dominated by networks, gaining an understanding of your audience may be confusing. Who are all those followers, and how can you actually reach specific groups of users? …
Last night, someone forwarded the following tweet to me:
A few years ago, at the peak of the #OccupyWallStreet movement, I published a piece that explained how Twitter’s Trending Topics (TTs) algorithm works, and why, that very popular hashtag actually never trended in New York City. Even though we…
A data analysis of iTunes’ top chart algorithm
On October 29th and December 18th, 2014, something very strange happened to the iTunes top apps chart. Like an earthquake shaking up the region, all app positions in the chart were massively rearranged, some booted off completely. …
Israel, Gaza, War & Data
social networks and the art of personalizing propaganda
It’s hard to shake away the utterly depressing feeling that comes with news coverage these days. IDF and Hamas are at it again, a vicious cycle of violence, but this time it feels much more intense. …
