Engaged Reading Digest: over-sharers, engagement editors and #interhacktives
Facebook and Bloomberg struggle with fake news, JPI gets engaged and the Interhacktives get productive…
The Post-Social Share comedown
Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies here, of course. But it is an interesting look at how people are starting to navigate and learn coping strategies for life with social media. What's striking is the degree to which people are having to work around the way the platforms operate, rather than with them.
As long as they bias towards public sharing at a design level, which they have commercial reasons for doing, this will be an issue.
Another head of engagement emerges
JPI Media has a new group engagement editor. Interesting to note that he's risen through the more traditional head of digital route, rather than being an engagement/social media specialist to start with.
Simon Austin
You can follow him on Twitter.
Facebook's Fake News labels may be backfiring
The law of unintended consequences strikes again. Facebook's Fact Checking partnership scheme is having an impact on how people perceive stories that aren't labelled by it:
But according to new research out of MIT published in Management Science, that something was the wrong thing. When only some news is labeled as fact-checked and disputed, people believe stories that haven’t been marked as fact-checked more—even when they are completely false, the researchers found. They dubbed this consequence the “implied truth effect.”
Ooops.
Mark Wilson
Facebook WHO
However, this seems like good news:
Michael Grothaus
Bloomberg: Trump's Sith Apprentice?
The late entrant to the Democratic primaries in the US is using social media more aggressively than any of his peers. He's even paying influencers to boost his prospects. In fact, he approach is more reminiscent of Trump than anything else.
And therein lies the problem:
“This is absolutely dangerous for the fair functioning of our political process,” Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of digital platforms and the Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, said of the video and tweets posted by Bloomberg. “And it could very well send the Democrats down the slippery slope of disinformation.”
Bloomberg may well be aiding Trump in shifting the Overton Window of what is acceptable in political campaigning.
LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ
Fly in the local democracy reporter ointment
This reads suspiciously like one of the big publishers might be, well, taking the piss. Time for the system to be reviewed and streamlined? At least one successful hyperlocal publisher thinks so.
And finally:
The MA Interactive Journalism students I teach at City, University of London have dedicated production weeks for Interhacktives, their website, for the first time in the eight years the course has been running. Expect lots of good content from them this week, and the fortnight afterwards.
Here's a few relevant pieces from the week so far:
Nimra Shahid
Joe Goodman
Fergus O’Loan
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