Last week, Facebook released a report summarizing the most widely-viewed content as shared on the site between April and June of 2021. It’s odd.
Alice Marwick and Shannon McGregor each sat down with with Mathew Ingram for CJR to dig into the report’s contradictions and surprises.
All the research products that Facebook has made available to researchers—CrowdTangle and Condor, the Social Science One dataset—are lists of URLs, along with their engagement metrics. So if URLs are a tiny percentage of what people see on the platform, and they're not really important, and reach matters more than engagement, then the stuff Facebook is giving to researchers is useless. (Note that I don't actually believe this; I think FB is being disengenous).
Viewing is what we might call a passive behavior -- especially when it comes to the things that appear in our news feed. We don't have to DO anything to see them. They just appear. Any type of engagement - such as sharing, commenting, liking, or otherwise reacting - is a more active behavior.
Recent publications and appearances
“In this Review, we discuss current evidence regarding the transmission of respiratory viruses by aerosols—how they are generated, transported, and deposited, as well as the factors affecting the relative contributions of droplet-spray deposition versus aerosol inhalation as modes of transmission.” Zeynep Tufekci co-authored a piece in Science on the evidence for aerosol transmission of COVID-19.
“It’s a little bit like nuclear weapons and nuclear physics and nuclear reactors. They can be really powerful and useful. They might be very crucial for fighting climate change with the new kinds of energy you can use. But if you don’t have it as a safe thing, if you have questions about its safety, people are not going to want to use it. Countries are going to say, ‘No, not in my backyard’” Zeynep Tufekci also joined Tyler Cowen for a discussion of problems with the media and the scientific establishment.
“If you’re saying, ‘We only want to target people who are interested in conservatism in America,’ that creates this bifurcated or dual internet, and that allows for information to circulate unchecked.” Francesca Tripodi’s conversation with The Markup appeared in a New Yorker piece on why Facebook is suddenly afraid of the FTC.
“America’s Frontline Doctors has capitalized on ‘the perfect storm of everything that you needed to have a large population of people susceptible to vaccine misinformation.’” Graduate affiliate Kolina Koltai spoke to TIME about how the group sold patients bogus COVID-19 treatments.
Coming Soon
September 10: UNC’s School of Information and Library Sciences will host a virtual symposium on AI and Knowledge Work as part of the school’s 90th anniversary celebrations.
September 14: Shannon McGregor will join a panel discussion on Democracy and Public Discourse, organized by Carolina Public Humanities and the General Alumni Association. The panel will take place in-person at the Center for Global Education, but will also be live-streamed.
October 12: Tressie McMillan Cottom will appear live with Kate Bowler and Kelly Corrigan at Durham’s Carolina Theatre.
Rest of Web
🎧 Lilliana Mason appeared on the Ezra Klein Show to talk polarization and identity politics.
📝 Our colleagues at CSMaP have a new paper out in the HKS Misinformation Review analyzing the outcomes of different intervention strategies on Twitter and other platforms:
📝 Friends of CITAP Jay Jennings and Talia Stroud have a new paper in New Media & Society on partisanship and correcting misinformation on Facebook: