Author: Kalev Leetaru
Will Social Media's Active Algorithmic Moderation Lead To 1984?
Algorithmic moderation might at first glance seem like the ultimate solution to all of the online world’s evils, but in…
Would Facebook's Move To The Edge Really Solve The Privacy Problem?
Facebook’s move to the edge will create a useful public relations story for it but do little to constrain the…
FiveThirtyEight: Cable News Is Covering Biden As Much As Every Other Democratic Candidate Combined
FiveThiryEight's Dhrumil Mehta graphs the state of the 2020 Democratic field. Read The Full Article.
Would Facebook's Phone-Based Content Moderation Solve Its Globalization Problem?
Could Facebook’s move towards shifting its content moderation algorithms from its centralized datacenters out to users’ phones help it transition…
How Edge AI Could Solve The Problem Of Personalized Ads In An Encrypted World
One of the greatest challenges confronting social media companies as they push towards their “privacy first” visions of our digital…
Facebook Just Gave Repressive Regimes The Ultimate Surveillance Blueprint
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Facebook’s new initiative to move content moderation to the edge, running their algorithms directly…
Could Facebook Turn The World's Smartphone Microphones Into Batman's Massive Surveillance Network?
Could Facebook realize the vision of Batman's The Dark Knight in turning the world's smartphone microphones into a global surveillance…
Could Facebook's Edge AI Message Scanning Save Encryption?
Could Facebook’s efforts to scan users’ decrypted messages directly on their phones offer a potential solution that would enable governments…
Facebook's Edge AI Content Scanning Brings NSA-Style Surveillance And Censorship To The Planet
Will the future be Facebook-produced AI algorithms running directly on our phones, monitoring every second of our lives, eliminating encryption,…
Are Facebook's Disaster Maps The Ultimate Government Surveillance Tool In Disguise?
As governments become accustomed to turning to Facebook to map their citizens and understand their spatial patterns of life, troubling…
Mueller Got More Attention Than Sri Lanka, Notre Dame Combined
As the Mueller report and its aftermath dominated the headlines once again this week, it can seem at times like…
We Must Bring Libraries, Journalists And Technologists Together To Preserve Online News
How might technologists help the library and journalism worlds reimagine how they preserve online news? Read The Full Article
FiveThirtyEight: How Cable News And The Polls Reacted To 2020 Campaign Announcements
FiveThiryEight's Laura Bronner examines how polls and media coverage responded to the Democratic 2020 campaign announcements. Read The Full Article.
Crowdsourcing Vs Using AI-Codified Experts
Could the era of crowdsourcing finally be coming to a close through the confluence of an increasingly sensor-drenched world with…
Are Smartphones Making "Fake News" And Disinformation Worse?
Smartphones’ tiny screens and on-the-go usage promotes the very behaviors that help “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation and foreign influence spread,…
Public Crowdsourcing Vs Researchers In Libraries: Image Searching Lessons From World War II
Will the nascent world of deep learning image recognition help codify the vast knowledge of our professional image researchers and…
FiveThirtyEight: Biden Was All Over Cable News Last Week – And So Was Anita Hill
Dhrumil Mehta examines the week in review of the major Democratic presidential candidates. Read The Full Article.
Towards a Geographically Enriched Wikipedia: High Resolution Figures
In 2012 we explored the geography of the world through the eyes of Wikipedia and the broader field of fulltext…
Global Twitter Heartbeat: High Resolution Figures
When it debuted in 2013, the Global Twitter Heartbeat was the first in-depth look at the geography of social media,…
Culturomics 2.0: High Resolution Figures
When it debuted in 2011, Culturomics 2.0 profoundly reshaped how we think of conflict analysis and forecasting, garnering international fame,…
The GDELT Global Frontpage Graph (GFG) At 1 Year: 100 Billion URLs
GDELT's Global Frontpage Graph (GFG) launched in March of last year, accumulating more than 35 billion URLs in just its first five…
Twitter Sees Democracy Through The Lens Of 'Fake News' And That's Troubling
Twitter’s view of content moderation is both fascinating in how it reveals the company’s view of free speech in 2019…
As The Government And Emergency Agencies Shift To Twitter What Happens To Those Left Behind?
It shouldn’t be up to a private for-profit company to decide who has the right to call for help as…
From Savior To Suppressor: Can Democracy Survive Social Media?
Social media has gone from being the great savoir of democracy to its ultimate suppressor, deciding who has a voice…