Fake News, Echo Chambers & Polarization: How Bad Is Social Media?

Sabrine Hossenfelder does a good job in covering a number of research papers on this important topic, and analyzes them.    A fairly balanced look as I see it.   Including references to a number of studies that have been made in the US and elsewhere.   Link to her YouTube is right below.   I am reading her new book: 'Existential Physics', available most anywhere and in libraries.

Link to the Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDqESkPiV4E

Does fake news spread better than true news? Do bots spread fake news? What can we do against fake news? Does social media increase political polarization? Is it true that we all live in political echo chambers? In this video, we look at what scientific studies have found and what we can learn from that.

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The two browser games I mentioned are "Go Viral" https://www.goviralgame.com

And "Get Bad News" https://www.getbadnews.com/

00:00 Intro

01:30 Fake News 

09:38 Information Literature

10:16 Echo Chambers

13:15 Polarization

16:38 Summary

17:19 MEL Science: Experiments By Subscription

#science

Scrubbing Social Media

 Can see this happening. It also means that that hiring companies can enforce their belief in that is right.   Especially among those whose beliefs differ strongly.  Dangerous.

How Students Are Scrubbing Their Social Media Profiles   By Inside Higher Ed, June 23, 2022

Many current college students have had social media accounts since they were young teens, regularly posting on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook without fear of repercussions.

But posts riddled with profanity or raucous party photos can come back to haunt them once they start looking for a job. According to a 2020 survey from the Harris Poll, a global market research and consulting firm, 71 percent of those who make hiring decisions in the U.S. agreed that looking at social media profiles is an effective way to screen job applicants. Among employers that use social media to vet candidates, 55 percent said they have found content that caused them to turn down an applicant.

Now a new company called Filtari is partnering with institutions to help students clean up their social media profiles before they start the job-search process. Filtari works by using artificial intelligence to scan and identify written posts and photos on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook that an employer might deem inappropriate or harmful.

From Inside Higher Ed

View Full Article   

Musk Takes Twitter

Worth a look to think of implications, who guarantees freedom of speech? 

A complete timeline of the Elon Musk-Twitter saga   from TechCrunch

It’s been a wild month of news for the social network that we collectively love to hate. In early April, Elon Musk took a bite out of Twitter, coming away with 9.2% of the company and plans to exercise his influence over the company through its board. After that he backed out of his planned board seat, Musk teed up an even more outrageous plan: He’d buy the company outright and take it private.  ....  '

Elon Musk says he wants to improve Twitter by "making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans" (The Verge)

Atrocity Detection in the Ukraine

How accurately? Always suspicious of social media accounts. 

Researchers Create System to Quickly Identify Ukraine Atrocities Using Social Media

University of Manchester (U.K.), Joe Stafford, April 11, 2022

A system developed by British and American scientists rapidly identifies atrocities occurring in Ukraine based on social media accounts. The U.K.'s Ukrainian-focused MOBILISE project partnered with the University of Maryland, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina to document and trace displacements, human rights abuses, humanitarian needs, and civil resistance in real time through the Data for Ukraine project, which analyzes Twitter data via machine learning algorithms. The system can flag developments several hours ahead of media outlets by demonstrating spikes of credible tweets about certain monitored topics, then mapping where these events transpired. Olga Onuch at the U.K.'s University of Manchester identified which accounts to track and generated over 600 keywords to check.