Gradute student Jonny Sun speaks with Seth Myers on Late Nate with Seth Meyers about his new book, “Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too.” The book, which follows an alien who comes to earth and learns to celebrate people’s differences, features intentional typos to emphasize “a common theme throughout the story…that it’s ok to be imperfect,” says Sun.
NPR’s Laurel Wamsley speaks with Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, about how to create a better social network. Zuckerman, reports Wamsley, thinks a decentralized structure is part of the answer and says the algorithm that sits behind the news feed is ripe for reinvention.
The Boston Globe highlights some of the notable speakers who will deliver remarks at commencements across New England in the coming weeks, including Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, who will speak at MIT’s ceremony.
A study led by research scientist Nick Obradovich found that people’s behavior on social media may be influenced by weather conditions. “Positive posts increased as the temperature rose,” reports Robert Preidt in US News & World Report, but “precipitation, humidity levels of 80 percent or higher, and high amounts of cloud cover were associated with a greater number of negative posts.”
Squadbox, developed by graduate student Amy Zhang, allows a user’s “squad” to sift through online messages and scan for contextual harassment language that software might miss. “Squadbox currently only works with email,” Shannon Liao writes for The Verge. “[B]ut the team behind it hopes to eventually expand to other social media platforms.”
Graduate student Amy Zhang, has developed an application, known as Squadbox, that seeks to disarm internet harassers by enlisting the help of a user’s friends, who act as inbox “moderators.” “According to what the harassed person has specified beforehand, the moderator can delete any abusive messages, forward on clean messages, or send along messages with tags,” writes Katharine Schwab for Co.Design.
Researchers from the Media Lab and Sloan found that humans are more likely than bots to be “responsible for the spread of fake news,” writes Paul Chadwick for The Guardian. “More openness by the social media giants and greater collaboration by them with suitably qualified partners in tackling the problem of fake news is essential.”
In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle shares her thoughts on research from the Media Lab and Sloan that identifies “fake news” as traveling six times faster than factual news. “The difference between social media and ‘the media’ is that the gatekeeper model…does care more about the truth than ‘the narrative,’” McArdle writes.
Jordan Webber of The Guardian addresses the rise of “fake news”, citing research from the Media Lab and Sloan. “I believe that social media is a turning point in human communication,” said Sloan Prof. Sinan Aral. “I believe it is having dramatic effect on our democracies, our politics, even our health.”
Larry Greenemeier of Scientific American writes about a study from researchers at Sloan and the Media Lab that finds “false news” is “70% more likely to be retweeted than information that faithfully reports actual events.” “Although it is tempting to blame automated “bot” programs for this,” says Greenemeier, “human users are more at fault.”
Robin Young and Femi Oke of WBUR’s Here and Now highlight research from Sloan and the Media Lab that shows how quickly false news travels the internet. “We [also] found that false political news traveled farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than any other type of false news,” says Prof. Sinan Aral.
Researchers from Sloan and the Media Lab examined why false news spreads on Twitter more quickly than factual information. “Twitter bots amplified true stories as much as they amplified false ones,” writes Robinson Meyer for The Atlantic. “Fake news prospers, the authors write, ‘because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.’”
Prof. Sinan Aral writes for The New York Times about research he co-authored with Postdoc Soroush Vousaghi and Associate Prof. Deb Roy, which found that false news spreads “disturbingly” faster than factual news. “It could be, for example, that labeling news stories, in much the same way we label food, could change the way people consume and share it,” writes Aral.
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with Judi Ketteler at the New York Times about how to introduce your children to social media. “Spend some time introducing your child to social media, the same way you introduce them to your neighborhood,” said Turkle. “It is simply now part of parenting.”
The MIT Museum and MIT List Visual Arts Center were two of 18 Boston-area museums that participated in this year’s #BostonInstaSwap. Each museum sent an employee to another local institution where they were “tasked with snapping and sharing pictures from the scene, highlighting exhibits and giving their followers a different experience,” writes Steve Annear for The Boston Globe.