A very similar version of this blog post originally appeared in Culture Digitally on June 5, 2015. Words Matter. As I write this in June 2015, a United Nations committee in Bonn is occupied in the massive task of editing a document overviewing global climate change. The effort to reduce 90 pages into a short(er), …
Continue reading Discourse Matters: Designing better digital futures
Today in Science, members of the Facebook data science team released a provocative study about adult Facebook users in the US "who volunteer their ideological affiliation in their profile." The study "quantified the extent to which individuals encounter comparatively more or less diverse" hard news "while interacting via Facebook’s algorithmically ranked News Feed."* The research found that …
Our own Mary Gray was featured on C-SPAN's "The Communicators," discussing the ethical implications of personal data collection online and its use in commercial and academic contexts. You can watch this special here. via The Communicators | Communicators with Mary Gray [12/3]
I'm intrigued by the reaction that has unfolded around the Facebook "emotion contagion" study. (If you aren't familiar with this, read this primer.) As others have pointed out, the practice of A/B testing content is quite common. And Facebook has a long history of experimenting on how it can influence people's attitudes and practices, even …
Continue reading What does the Facebook experiment teach us?
This summer, with NSA scandal after NSA scandal, the public has (thankfully) started to wake up to issues of privacy, surveillance, and monitoring. We are living in a data world and there are serious questions to ask and contend with. But part of what makes this data world messy is that it's not so easy …
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