Where do you get your news? According to the recent Digital News Report, the internet is quickly gaining on television as the primary source of news for most people and social media is even more important for younger audiences.
But, as almost anyone who has spent time online will attest, the internet is full of rumours, fakes and hoaxes. A little digital literacy and healthy skepticism can help spot a fake story from the growing number of viral “news” sites but online trolls continue to find new ways to trick the casual social media user.
When “social media” meant “blogs,” there were many tools, services and protocols that comprised an infrastructure for federated, open, loosely joined interaction: the rise of the social giants has killed off much of this infrastructure, all but erasing it from our memories.
GIFs are the Esperanto of our Internet culture, a semi-nonsensical, visual language that acts as a stand-in for everything from random thoughts and reactions to intricate art and instructions.
Facebook is at war with users who block ads, and battle proceeds apace. Just two days after boasting that it could serve ads that were undetectable by adblockers, Facebook got a rude awakening in the form of updates to AdBlock that detected them just fine. But it isn’t giving up, and has already adjusted its code to once again circumvent the blocks.
Huffman and Jobs have more in common than the first name Steve. When Reddit‘s CEO Ellen Pao resigned in 2015, the company’s largest shareholder, Condé Nast, asked its founder Steve Huffman to come back and fill the top spot (like Apple did with Jobs in 1997). Why? Because he’s the only guy in the world who knows Reddit well enough to actually fix it. Huffman had sold the website in 2006 and went on to pursue other things, like the travel website Hipmunk, which he founded in 2010 with Adam Goldstein and funding from Y Combinator. He often stated that selling Reddit…
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