Cuttings: March 2018

How Trump Conquered Facebook, Without Russian Ads - article by Antonio  García Martínez  in Wired magazine, referenced in John Naughton's column in The Observer. "Russia’s Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign’s mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: the ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences). Both of which sound incredibly dull, until you realize that the fate of our 242-year-old experiment in democracy once depended on them, and surely will again.... [In the ads auction,] rather than simply reward [an] ad position to the highest bidder,... Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is.... A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook’s estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor.... [For a Custom Audience,] a campaign manager takes a list of emails or other personal data for people they think will be susceptible to a certain type of messaging (e.g. people in Florida who donated money to Trump For America). They upload that spreadsheet to Facebook via the Ads Manager tool, and Facebook scours its user data, looks for users who match the uploaded spreadsheet, and turns the matches into an 'Audience,' which is really just a set of Facebook users."

The bad news about false news - post in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog.“The most comprehensive study to date of misinformation on Twitter is out. The Abstract reads: ‘We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.’”

Dear Damian Hinds, here’s what your schools minister can learn from Eton - column by Michael Rosen in The Guardian. "Your schools minister, Nick Gibb ... [says] the 'core purpose of schooling' ... is 'endowing pupils with knowledge of the best that has been thought and said, and preparing pupils to compete in an ever more competitive jobs market'. ... Looking at the aims of say, Eton college, is instructive. Among its core purpose it lists things such as: promoting the best habits of independent thought and learning, enabling all to discover their strengths, and to make the most of their talents; engendering respect for individuality, difference, the importance of teamwork; supporting pastoral care that nurtures physical health, emotional maturity and spiritual richness; fostering self-confidence, enthusiasm, perseverance, tolerance and integrity. I wonder why Eton doesn’t mention anything about that 'jobs market' the government is so concerned about."

Alternative Facts, Alternative Truths - article by Francesca Tripoldi on 'Data and Society: Points' website, referenced in John Naughton's column in The Observer. "If only, the story goes, there was some way to reach Trump supporters... The assumption: If only they could learn to think critically, accessing, analyzing, and evaluating a variety of sources, then they would be informed voters... The thing is — they do, and they are. During 2017, I began regularly attending Republican events associated with two upper-middle class communities in the Southeastern United States: a women’s group and a college group. ... Those I observed consumed a wide variety of news sources and applied their critical interrogation of the Bible to what they were reading, watching, and listening to.... it was not until observing a 'direct reading' of the Bible that I saw how literal translations of the Bible are used as a mechanism for other critical assessment.... At one point during the meeting, the Pastor turned from the Bible to the new tax reform bill, where he encouraged the group to apply the same 'deep reading.' The group poured over the text together, helping each other decide what it really meant rather than relying on mainstream media coverage of the bill.... Conservatives like these do not turn to media to be told what to think about Trump. They know what he stands for because they listen to or read his speeches directly, relying on their own interpretation and application of his ideas." See also talk by Danah Boyd. 'You think you want media literacy'.

Grammar gripes: why do we love to complain about language? - article by Penny Modra in The Guardian. "Now that every English speaker in the world can talk to every other English speaker in the world, the virus [of language] is mutating vociferously. The modern grievance airer must keep pace. So I have compiled a list of changes for which to watch out in 2018. 1. Semantic change thanks to the internet... 2. Syntactical change thanks to the internet... 3. Semantic and syntactical change thanks to television... 4. Inflection change led by Kanye West... 5. Conversion thanks to advertising... 6. Word and phrase coinages from the internet meme factory... 7. Punctuation change led by smartphones... 8. ‘Meaning leakage’ thanks to politicians, bureaucrats and business writers... " See also her writing school The Good Copy.

What do students want most? To be treated with respect - article by Anonymous Academic in The Guardian. "I recently led a survey of students across my university at all levels of study. ... there was an unsettling, underlying narrative in the responses which felt shocking. Students were essentially asking: why don’t academics have more humanity?... Students identified kindness, integrity and understanding as the most important things that would improve or change their student experience. These things are fundamental. Was I wrong to have assumed that all academic staff would simply be kind and treat students with respect?... students talked about wanting academic staff to have empathy and compassion, to smile and encourage. Most revealingly, they asked academics 'to treat and talk to me as though I’m a person'. This is pretty devastating: it’s hard to see how anyone can learn and develop when they feel like that."