Last week I published the first in a series of posts dealing with issues that arose in the recent Digital Diplomacy Conference held in Tel Aviv. While last week I blogged about digital diplomacy that is targeted at domestic populations, this week’s post will deal with another issue that arouse at the conference- diplomacy in the age of algorithms.
LONDON — Islamic State (ISIS) supporters in several European cities have been reportedly located thanks to an online crowdsourcing effort.
Investigative journalist Mark Hertsgaard’s new book Bravehearts: Whistle-Blowing in the Age of Snowden tells the story of modern intelligence community whistleblowing; in a fantastic longread excerpted from the book, he recounts how the US military’s program of punishing whistleblowers, and the officials charged with protecting them, convinced Snowden that he should take a thumbdrive full of documents directly to the media.
We asked seven leaders at some of the biggest companies how design impacts their business—here’s what they had to say.
Anonymous sources recently claimed that Facebook’s Trending Topicsmay not be as algorithm-driven as believed. Facebook strongly denied the allegations, but are the algorithms receiving help from curators to surface topics in the Trending box? With so many people getting their news from Facebook, is it ethical to emphasize or devalue certain news in the trending topics?
The Age of Algorithms
LinkedIn prides itself on being “the largest professional network,” a social media platform where companies post job offers and users create their digital CVs. Since few world leaders are actively looking for a job and their institutions are already swamped with applications, it comes as no surprise that world leaders and governments have been slow to embrace LinkedIn.
Google+ is a social network which is in steady decline. Despite its 418 million active users, the platform can be considered a niche network for heads of state and governments, very few of which are active on the platform.
UPDATE This is a couple months old — I read “Mar 5” as “May 5.” My apologies.
Ray Tomlinson created the first networked email system in 1971 while working on his MIT doctorate and collaborating on the early ARPAnet at BBN; he used @ — the at symbol — to separate the username from the machinename because “it did not appear in user names and did not have any meaning in the TENEX paging program.”
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