Michigan Daily: A case for keeping your relationship off of social media. “I certainly don’t love the idea of any of my followers gossiping about what I’m posting, and I’m sure you don’t either. Yet, isn’t that inevitable? By putting even just small pieces of our lives on social media, don’t we invite people to speculate about it all, including our relationships?”
The Conversation: Algorithms are moulding and shaping our politics. Here’s how to avoid being gamed . “In a recent paper, I coined the term ‘algopopulism’: algorithmically aided politics. The political content in our personal feeds not only represents the world and politics to us. It creates new, sometimes “alternative”, realities. It changes how we encounter and understand politics and even how we understand reality itself.”
Financial Times: Why children can be better than adults at spotting misinformation. “It’s never been easier to find fun, clear and deep perspectives on the complex world around us. The chief obstacle is deliberate ignorance: we don’t ask questions because we don’t care to know the answers. That’s why I’ve long argued that curiosity is so important — and why young readers are often better equipped to be truth detectives than their parents.”
Hindustan Times: The custodial death of Indian history. “The custodial death of Indian history is all but certain. The funds or expertise required to preserve and manage archives will not be available on the required scale. A few high-profile archives will survive, but the bulk will perish. The only hope is to digitise all surviving records and make them freely available on a well-designed, user-friendly platform.”
SOAS University of London: Is disinformation during natural disasters an emerging vulnerability?. “Thanks to climate change, more natural disasters are coming, and they’re becoming more powerful and more impactful. The disaster-disinformation nexus offers unique conditions for powerful and frequent influence campaigns against communities at their most vulnerable. And while this hasn’t been a large problem yet, indicators of its coming abound.”
Stars and Stripes: Suffering through a state of social media mediocrity. “Thirteen years ago, when I posted my first photo-less status update on Facebook, typing a few words sufficed for posting. But today, social media posts must tell a compelling, cool, hilarious, heart-warming, informative or tear-jerking tale, complete with a collage of photographs — or better yet, a well-edited video set to music — and include captioning that drives engagement without rendering you unfollowed, unfriended or, worse yet, muted. And that’s just on Facebook.”
WIRED: Billionaires Are A Security Threat. “In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. Call it the ‘evil billionaire attack’ if you’d like.”
The Atlantic: Conspiracy Theories Have a New Best Friend. “Although many of the early versions of chatbot-based search give Wikipedia-style responses with footnotes, the whole point of a synthetic history is to provide an alternative and convincing set of sources. And the entire premise of chatbots is convenience—for people to trust them without checking.”
Richmond Times-Dispatch: Opinion: Casting shade on Virginia’s ‘Sunshine Law’. “What was once the domain of overreaching politicians and campaign-season hyperbole, the idea that U.S. democracy is under attack means something different in 2023. Meanwhile, perhaps our best tool for combating propaganda and misinformation — the Freedom of Information Act — continues to get treated in the Virginia General Assembly like a bureaucratic nuisance.”
Michigan Daily: My love for physical media will never die. “I have a DVD collection that I’ve been building since my preteen years. Whenever a book I want to read comes out, I have to buy my own copy (and I wouldn’t be caught dead with a Kindle — no offense to my Mom, or anyone else who owns one). I still get CDs at Christmas, and I’m slowly getting into vinyl. Do I technically still have a bunch of Disney movies on VHS? That, I will neither confirm nor deny.”
Mother Jones: Bing Is a Liar—and It’s Ready to Call the Cops. “When I started playing with Bing, I was drawn by its promise of relevant, accurate, and natural-sounding web results. I was confronted instead by the possibility of industrial-scale fabrication.”
The Conversation: How Records of Life’s Milestones Help Solve Cold Cases, Pinpoint Health Risks and Allocate Public Resources. “As a family demographer, I use information from these vital records to understand how childbirth, marriage and divorce are changing in the United States over time. The scope and quality of these records reflect remarkable administrative coordination from the local to the national level, but examples from other countries illustrate how much more the records could yet tell us.”
Michigan Daily: A love letter to Pinterest. “I still remember the day that you and I first met. I couldn’t have been more than 12 years old. My aunt had told me all about you — ‘It’s like an online bulletin board,’ she described — and showed me around her own profile. I had never seen so many pictures, appropriately dubbed ‘pins,’ in one place before. I could save these pins to a board, or multiple boards, and organize them in whatever way I liked. I knew that I had just discovered something magical.”
New York Times: A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled. “I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.”
Los Angeles Times: Column: Minimum wage ‘ghosts’ keep Google and Microsoft’s AI arms race from becoming a nightmare. “The raters join a wave of discontented contractors in speaking out: workers who ensure YouTube videos contain the correct metadata went on strike the same week, alleging unfair labor practices. That’s not even the bottom of the barrel. A Time magazine investigation revealed that contractors in Kenya were being paid less than $2 an hour to review content for ChatGPT — much of it so toxic that it left them traumatized.”
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