Tag Archives: curation

How to Deal with Fake News: Let the Bots Do It

Is Facebook a purveyor of journalism or fake news?

If you have read any of my posts over time, you will have realized a number of things about me, here are three which are key for the understanding of this particular post. I am:

  1. A Big Star Trek Fan
  2. A Libertarian
  3. A Geek

Lately, Facebook has been in the news for the supposed censoring (or let’s call it suppressing) of conservative speech during this election cycle. Does it happen? Of course, it does. Why does it happen? Well, simply put, the content filtering people at Facebook consider themselves “journalists” and not “reporters”  Everyone is a journalist now. Plus, they use too many humans when they should be leaving it all to the algorithms, and they seem to forget the Prime Directive. read more

j j j

Curation: Necessary Yet Broken

Curation is necessary. But it’s also broken, very broken.

Please let me know if you don’t see this post on Facebook -oh wait – you couldn’t possibly tell me if you saw this because you didn’t see it. Facebook does its own curating of content from your friends and family – I could tell that this was going on over the course of time but now its gotten ridiculous – I now ordinarily miss things people who are important to me send, and my stream is full of junk – mostly ads. It takes time to scroll through the crap to get to the good stuff – and even when I see the good stuff I only seems to get a small taste of it. Makes me think of World Of Warcraft in some sense – the gamemakers purposely force you to wait periods of time before things happen in order to force you to use the product longer – I’d be very surprised if the same isn’t going on with Facebook, Twitter and most other firehoses of data. read more

j j j