I’ve been trying to write a comment about the leaked Facebook documents published by The Guardian this week. The documents, part of the training materials that Facebook provides to independently contracted moderators, instruct them on what they should remove and what should stay, across a wide variety of categories. But it’s hard not to feel disheartened […]
“Sitting Here in California”: Introduction On February 16, 2017, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg published an unprecedented 5,732-word post, “Building Global Community.” Observers—many of whom appropriately termed Zuckerberg’s missive a “manifesto”—soon noted troubling aspects of his vision for Facebook’s role in the world. In this essay, I add to that response by discussing, in […]
Major events of national importance reverberate throughout many levels of social life. They are discussed in the corridors of formal power, and in conversations by the water cooler. They also inspire an intensification of activity on social media. One of these activities is unfriending. Unfriending is a relatively under-researched social media practice, but it would […]
The controversy about the human curators behind Facebook Trends has grown, since the allegations made last week by Gizmodo. Besides being a major headache for Facebook, it has helped prod a growing discussion about the power of Facebook to shape the information we see and what we take to be most important. But we continue […]
Gizmodo has released two important articles (1, 2) about the people who were hired to manage Facebook’s “Trending” list. The first reveals not only how Trending topics are selected and packaged on Facebook, but also the peculiar working conditions this team experienced, the lack of guidance or oversight they were provided, and the directives they […]