Algorithms and automation increasingly are connected to many aspects of news production, distribution, and consumption. We invite original, unpublished papers to address such issues at an international conference to be held at the Center for Advanced Studies, LMU Munich, May 22-23, 2018 — shortly before the ICA annual convention in Prague, not far from Munich. Thanks […]
This is the big year for computational propaganda—using immense data sets to manipulate public opinion over social media. Both the Brexit referendum and US election have revealed the limits of modern democracy, and social media platforms are currently setting those limits. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook now provide a structure for our political lives. We’ve […]
The algorithm, Tarleton Gillespie argues in this terrific essay, stands as a complex administrator of modern life. In it Gillespie demystifies the many uses of the recent keyword algorithm, on loan from Arabic. It is at once a trick of the trade for software programmers, a synecdoche standing in for entire informational systems and their […]
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 […]