“Content is king” was the catch-phrase of the 1990s and the heady (headless really) days of the Dot Com bubble. And although that stopped being a slogan with the resurgence of Web 2.0, it was still true. Content was still king except the would-be tech giants figured out that they didn’t need to create content but instead just make someone ...
In 2015, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) introduced a bill that would make it a federal crime to engage in what is generically called “revenge porn.” I say generically because “revenge” alludes to a specific motive, usually that of a disgruntled ex-boyfriend who decides to get back at a former girlfriend by distributing intimate or sexually explicit images of her online. ...
Immediately after the 2016 election, many Americans discovered just how much fake news they were sharing via social media. And for about ten minutes, the term fake news had a specific and literal meaning; it referred to fabricated stories made to look like news, and which serve either as clickbait to generate ad revenue or as mischief to fan the ...
Not long after I wrote a post suggesting there is little difference between naive human engagement and bot engagement on policy issues, a couple of things happened. One was the publication of a story by Max Read in New York Magazine reporting that a substantial (though hardly surprising) amount of material and people on the internet are fake. The other ...
In a recent post on Techdirt, Mike Masnick calls columnist Nicholas Kristof a hypocrite based on a narrative Masnick just plain made up. On December 12, Kristof published a brief column in The New York Times with a picture of a 12-year-old girl who is starving to death as a victim of the US-backed, Saudi-Arabian war in Yemen. The girl ...
