Kris-Stella Trump (SSRC): Social Media and Democracy: Assessing the State of the Field and Identifying Unexplored Questions. Jason Hannan (Winnipeg): Trolling Ourselves to Death? Social Media and Post-Truth Politics. Ari Ezra Waldman (NYLS): Safe Social Spaces. Barbara Fister reviews Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Karsten Muller and Carlo Schwarz (Warwick): Making America Hate Again? Twitter and Hate Crime Under Trump. What happens to our hatred when it goes online? From TNR, does Twitter really want to solve its harassment problem? Let’s make tech CEOs moderate their own hellish websites.
Google autocomplete suggestions are still racist, sexist, and science-denying. “Fiction is outperforming reality”: How YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth. YouTube’s fake news problem isn’t going away. Nicole Nguyen goes inside the ecosystem that fuels Amazon’s fake review problem. Online security is a disaster and the people who investigate it are being sued into silence. Jonathon Sturgeon on the post-text hustle: Internet’s got a fever. Spam is back: It seemed like we had defeated electronic junk mail — then the spammers rose from the dead. The digital ruins of a forgotten future: Second Life still has 600,000 regular users. The story of the internet, as told by Know Your Meme: After 10 years of documenting memes, nobody has seen this much shit.
