Gabriel Snyder — Notes

Remember when the Internet felt like it was expanding your world? I have been on Twitter a little more than usual these last few days and in addition to the annoying way it reduces conversation into competing bumper sticker slogans, it makes the world seem so much smaller than it is. That’s why I am relying less on social algorithms for my news. Here are five interesting stories I found.

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1. “Sol Flores for Congress – ‘That Door'” (YouTube) – “I’ll fight as hard for you in Congress as I did to protect myself.” That’s the closing line of a striking campaign ad by Sol Flores, a Chicago community advocate who is running for Congress, in which she tells how she fought off a man who was sexually abusing her when she was 11 years old. The Chicago Tribune has a good profile of Flores, too.

2. “U.S. Strikes Killed Scores of Russia Fighters in Syria, Sources Say” (Bloomberg) – Russian and American soldiers are fighting — and killing each other in large numbers — in Syria. To make matters more bizarre, the Russians appear to be private mercenaries working for Assad, and the “Russian assault may have been a rogue operation.”
3. “The Bittersweet Beauty of Adam Rippon” (Vanity Fair) – Richard Lawson’s essay on ice skating is heartbreaking, beautiful.
4. “The fight for the right to be a Muslim in America” (The Guardian) – Andrew Rice looks at how Islamophobia crept out from the fringes of the right-wing internet to the lives of Muslims living in tony suburban New Jersey after Trump’s victory. “It’s like his election has given permission to people.”
5. “Americans overestimate social mobility in their country” (The Economist) – Americans believe the U.S. is far more upwardly mobile than it actually is, while Europe is slightly the opposite. Interestingly, American beliefs of how probable it is for someone born into the lowest quintile to rise to the top is about even with the actual probability in the European countries.
   

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.

One of my realizations of not paying as close attention to trending news is that I don’t really know what’s gone viral or not as I feel more like I’m just keeping track of the news again. But whatever situational awareness I’ve lost feels a lot healthier than fruitlessly trying to keep up with every meme ever. Here are five interesting stories that I discovered without an algorithm.

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1. “Russia pushes more ‘deep state’ hashtags” (Politico) – This fascinating report by Jason Schwartz shows how Russian botnets are used to market test anti-“deep state” hashtags like #ReleaseTheMemo that later hit it big with Trump supporters. Up next: #qanon which refers to a conspiracy theory that first cropped up on 4chan.
2. “2018 election is no problem for Putin – but what about 2024?” (The Guardian) – Vladimir Putin is certain to be re-elected Russian president on March 18. But the real question for Russian politics is what happens at the end of the six-year term when he is barred by the Russian constitution from serving another term as president.
3. “#MeToo Hits Movie Deals: Studios Race to Add ‘Morality Clauses’ to Contracts” (The Hollywood Reporter) – Entertainment lawyers, some of the most fascinatingly amoral legal creatures, are trying to figure out how to handle the risk of a movie star or studio executive suddenly turning radioactive in the wake of reports of sexual misconduct.
4. “This man made over half a million dollars threatening elderly magazine subscribers” (Washington Post) – Here’s one way to make money in the magazine business.
5. “Suicides spiked 10 percent in months after death of Robin Williams” (Boston Globe) – Nothing makes trending news algorithms go wild like a celebrity suicide. A study by Columbia researchers suggests the saturation coverage could be causing others to take their own lives, too.