Posted on by Gabriel

5 interesting stories

Instead of relying on social algorithms for my news, I have been doing things the old-fashioned (i.e. circa 2007) way: visiting homepages, using an RSS reader, reading other people’s newsletters. Here are five interesting stories that didn’t reach me by a trending news algorithm.

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  1. “Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook—and the World” (Wired) – The underlying theme in Nick Thompson and Fred Vogelstein’s deeply reported feature of Facebook’s existential crisis: there’s nothing inevitable or permanent about Facebook’s dominance over the news media.
  2. “Crowdsourcing Judgments of News Source Quality” (SSRN) – A paper by Yale researchers Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand, (via Politico’s Jason Schwartz) suggests a serious methodological problem in Facebook’s plans to crowdsource its trustworthiness ratings of media outlets, but overall they point to a somewhat optimistic conclusion: partisanship doesn’t necessarily make people more likely to trust fake news sites they’ve never heard of. However, the paper also suggests that when we are talking about “fake news” problems, we’re really just saying “conservative fringes” problems.
  3. “Videos of Syrian Militia Abusing Kurdish Fighter’s Corpse Stir Outrage” (New York Times) – If the Arab Spring showed us the best that social media had to offer as a force for good, the Syrian civil war, and the frequency of abhorrent viral memes, shows us its worst. Here, a disturbing story, of a widely circulated video of Syrian militia’s mutilating the corpse of a female Kurdish fighter: “This is the spoils of war from the female pigs of the P.K.K.”
  4. “Chinese Police Add Facial-Recognition Glasses to Surveillance Arsenal” (Wall Street Journal) – Seven people have already been arrested in China after they were spotted at train stations by cops wearing glasses that can scan crowds for the faces of wanted criminals.
  5. “A Famed Fishing Port Staggers as Its ‘Codfather’ Goes to Jail” (New York Times) – What happens when an entire community’s livelihood is built on corruption.