Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “fake news” has dominated popular dialogue and is increasingly perceived as a unique threat to an informed democracy. Despite the common use of the term, it eludes common definition. When we agonize over the fake news phenomenon, though, we are not talking about these kinds of fabricated stories. Instead, what we are really focusing on is why we have been suddenly inundated by false information—purposefully deployed—that spreads so quickly and persuades so effectively. This is a different conception of fake news, and it presents a question about how information operates at scale in the internet era. And yet, too often we analyze the problem of fake news by focusing on individual instances, not systemic features of the information economy. This Essay therefore recommends that we must build a realistic theory—based on observations as well as interdisciplinary insights—to explain the governance of private companies who maintain our public sphere in the internet era.

A definitive guide to verifying digital content for emergency coverage

Developers of platforms such as Facebook have admitted that they were designed to be addictive. Should we be following the executives’ example and going cold turkey – and is it even possible for mere mortals?

Erving Goffman helped outline the impact of social expectation on our behavior by introducing the concepts of front stage and back stage behavior.

The following are remarks by Data & Society Founder and President danah boyd for her keynote at the 2017 Strata Data Conference in New York…

Under a German law in effect since Jan. 1, Facebook and other social platforms now are responsible for keeping illegal content off their sites—and finding the job is harder than it looks.

"When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules."

Logan Paul’s controversial dead body video is a watershed moment in YouTube’s effort to grapple with a vast content moderation problem.

On search engines and social media, their distortions of society, and what we can do about them.

Among the companies we found doing it: Amazon, Verizon, UPS and Facebook itself. “It’s blatantly unlawful,” said one employment law expert.

We asked a group of writers to consider the forces that have shaped our lives in 2017. Here, science fiction writer Ted Chiang looks at capitalism, Silicon Valley, and its fear of superintelligent AI.

Silicon Valley is slow to come to terms with the fact that it's become the new Wall Street.

‘No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.’

And then served customers frozen dinners on its opening night.

Facebook and Twitter won't fix this problem alone, says danah boyd. Today's information wars are also a reflection of us.

The Paradox of Tolerance for tech companies How to support free speech but not white supremacy http://frameshiftconsulting.com/ CC BY-SA Frame Shift Consulting LLC

Users shouldn’t give up their basic Fourth Amendment privacy rights when they use a smartphone to make calls, write texts and emails or access their private personal information

I need to read this Verbeek book.