“We can train AI to identify good and evil, and then use it to teach us morality” was the title of the opinion piece in Quartz that brought me up short during this morning’s usual Twitter peruse. The text wasn’t much more encouraging: the author, a tech entrepreneur advocates for…
How two sociologists foresaw social media’s current troubles seventy years ago — and what they can teach us about how to fix them
Two weeks ago, Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey issued a mea culpa. In thirteen tweets, Dorsey acknowledged the site’s role in enabling the misinformation, trolling, and…
Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) dismissed a complaint by James Damore, the former Google employee whose infamous 10-page manifesto espousing racist and misogynous views got him fired from the company. In case you’ve forgotten, Damore’s August 2017 manifesto suggested the lack of women in Silicon Valley tech firms…
Last week Facebook announced it would change the composition of its News Feed to combat misinformation and so-called “fake news.” Alongside prioritizing posts from friends and family, the social networking platform also announced it would ask users to identify their level of trust in news sites, in order to incorporate…
Two weeks ago, the social network Facebook rolled out a new feature called Reactions icons, five small faces intended to compliment the site’s Like button and, in the company’s words, “ easily and quickly express how something you see…makes you feel.” One of my acquaintances on Facebook, a comedian, reacted…
[co-authored with Kate Crawford; cross-posted to The New Inquiry and the MSR Social Media Collective]
The world will soon have its first emoji-only social network: Emoj.li. This news, announced in late June, was met with a combination of scorn and amusement from the tech press. It was seen as another…
