The 72nd Block: Do emoji and memes improve your online communication?
Using emoji only, describe what you're feeling
This week…
Jennifer Daniel, the chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee introduces new emoji. Did you know that the plural of emoji is emoji? Anyway, in this article, she explains how to use emoji as—can you guess it—building blocks. By the way, have you followed @EmojiMashupBot on Twitter?
And now for the rest of The Starting Block, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Nicki Minaj isn’t anti-vax, exactly. That’s why her vaccine resistance is so concerning.
Aja Romano for Vox:
For many people, Nicki Minaj’s scene-stealing tweets about why she chose not to attend the Met Gala Monday night were peak comedy. Minaj told several people on social media she’d chosen not to attend the haute couture event because of its requirement that attendees be vaccinated against Covid-19. After she explained her hesitancy in a baffling, instantly viral tweet involving swollen testicles and a canceled wedding, some ignored the more concerning parts of Minaj’s argument in favor of laughing.
While it’s tempting to just focus on the absurdist meme potential of Minaj’s tweets, Minaj’s approach to the vaccine is deeply concerning, both because it reflects a strain of distrust in public policy, health, and science experts and because it presents a cautionary mindset regarding vaccines as a sort of reasonable “middle ground” in the fight between science and anti-vax ideology.
Facebook keeps researching its own harms — and burying the findings
Will Oremus for WaPo:
Facebook knew that teen girls on Instagram reported in large numbers that the app was hurting their body image and mental health. It knew that its content moderation systems suffered from an indefensible double standard in which celebrities were treated far differently than the average user. It knew that a 2018 change to its news feed software, intended to promote “meaningful interactions,” ended up promoting outrageous and divisive political content.
Facebook knew all of those things because they were findings from its own internal research teams. But it didn’t tell anyone. In some cases, its executives even made public statements at odds with the findings.
This week, each of those revelations was the subject of a story in the Wall Street Journal, part of an ongoing investigative series that it’s calling the Facebook Files.
One WSJ headline from this series is Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show ($). But we are not surprised, are we?
This study shows how people reason their way through echo chambers — and what might guide them out
Shraddha Chakradhar for Nieman Lab:
…When people lose the scope to have to assign their own accuracy, people also lose the tendency to want to respond to information through motivated reasoning.
Ultimately, motivated beliefs are what gain a foothold when there is wiggle room in people’s ability to try and make sense of information without context. So, losing that wiggle room would be key.
What does that mean for those of us in the news business? Finding that Holy Grail of an unbiased news source, one that can provide that signal to readers that the information presented can be trustworthy, is a worthy, albeit unlikely, goal.
Perhaps more realistically, what the media landscape likely needs is a reintroduction of signals, like when study subjects were told which group they’re in and the likelihood that that information was 70% correct. The erosion of public trust in media over the past few decades has meant that people don’t have those public signals anymore, signals that they can instinctively trust to be true and unbiased.
The full paper is available in PDF here.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading Is our food Malaysian enough? by Maynard Keyne Langet for Periuk.
I’m watching CBC’s David Common’s piece on how political parties use data to target voters. It’s always good to be periodically reminded.
Chart of the week
Quite recently analyst Nate Elliott started The Good Data Project. His latest blogpost is about the best COVID charts online. Spoiler: It’s the CBC’s—even if one showed negative three deaths on May 5.