This week…
Meta’s COO Sheryl Sandberg will be replaced by Chief Growth Officer, Javier Olivan. Anyway, and more importantly, Reuter’s Institute’s Digital News Report 2022 will come out June 15th!
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
How science fuels a culture of misinformation
“We tend to blame the glut of disinformation in science on social media and the news, but the problem often starts with the scientific enterprise itself,” writes Joelle Renstrom for OpenMind.
How self-publishing, social media, and algorithms are aiding far-right novelists
Helen Young and Geoff Boucher for Nieman Lab:
As literary studies scholars, our research grew out of exploring these reading lists and investigating why extremists write fiction. In 2020, we began looking at how someone who casually encountered a reading list online might access the books and pursue the ideas they contain.
We found a group of about 15 novels by self-identified neo-Nazis and other white supremacists that were known to counter-terrorism experts. Others were not. These books were disturbingly easy to get, because they were sold on sites including Amazon, Google Play, and Book Depository.
Publishing houses once refused to print such books, but changes in technology have made traditional publishers less important. With self-publishing and ebooks, it is easy for extremists to produce and distribute their fiction.
In this article, we have only given the titles and authors of those books that are already notorious, to avoid publicizing other dangerous hate-filled fictions.
I won’t spoil it for you. Read the rest.
Tim Hortons app tracked too much personal information without adequate consent
Nojoud Al Mallees for CBC:
The federal privacy commissioner’s investigation into the Tim Hortons mobile app found that the app unnecessarily collected extensive amounts of data without obtaining adequate consent from users.
The commissioner’s report, which was published Wednesday morning, states that Tim Hortons collected granular location data for the purpose of targeted advertising and the promotion of its products but that the company never used the data for those purposes.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading a paper by Aliaksandr Herasimenka et al. on misinformation and professional news on largely unmoderated platforms, which uses Telegram as a case study. The good news and the bad news are that “the audience is not a general one, but a small and active community of users.”
I’m watching Borgen: Power & Glory.
I’m listening to how the “data-driven” label sanitises cruel austerity politics, an episode of Citations Needed by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson with epidemiologist Abigail Cartus as guest.
More stray links:
What happens after TikTok songs go viral, a collaboration between The Pudding and Vox.
Legal experts fact-check Quebec ad campaign that aims to correct 'falsehoods' on controversial language law by Steve Rukavina for CBC.
In Australia’s election, Rupert Murdoch was a surprise loser by Antony Loewenstein for The Intercept.
Chart of the week
Chimdi Nwosu visualises the 50 biggest data breaches from 2004 to 2021 for the Visual Capitalist, with an accompanying article by Paul Sykes: