Elon Musk
A lot of folks are saying they’re not going to leave Twitter, in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform, because Musk and its once and long-time CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey aren’t very different: both are billionaires, tech-bros, libertarian and pro-cryptocurrencies. And
democracy
One of the more eye-opening discussions on Elon Musk’s attempt to take control of Twitter, and the Twitter board’s attempts to defend the company from the bid, have been playing out on Hacker News (here and, after Twitter’s response, here) – the popular discussion board for topics related
Bharatiya Janata Party
Reuters published a very interesting report on February 2, entitled ‘Exclusive-In heated meeting, India seeks tougher action from U.S. tech giants on fake news’. Excerpt: Indian officials have held heated discussions with Google, Twitter and Facebook for not proactively removing what they described as fake news on their platforms,
engineers
Two of the most annoying kinds of ‘science people’ I’ve come across on social media of late: * Those who perform rationalism – These people seem to know a small subset of things well and the rest on faith, and claim to know that “science can explain everything” without being able
arXiv
I’m not very fond of some highly popular pieces of writing (I won’t name them because I’m nervous about backlash from authors and/or their supporters) because a part of their popularity is undeniably rooted in technological ‘solutions’ that asymmetrically promote work published in the solution’s
conspiracy theories
Wish I may, wish I might Have this wish, I wish tonight I want that star, I want it now I want it all and I don’t care how Metallica, King Nothing I’m a news editor who frequently uses Twitter to find new stories to work on or
echo chamber
The following article was originally intended for an Indian publication but I withdrew from the commission because I couldn’t rework the piece according to changes they required, mostly for lack of focus. I thank Karnika Kohli and Shruti Muralidhar for their inputs. Since the mid-20th century, the news-publishing industry
curiosity gap
(Re)Stumbled upon this article, by Ed Yong in The Atlantic, July 2016, this morning. As usual, it is rivetingly packaged. The strapline in particular caught my eye: Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong. Makes you go
This post is a breakdown of the Pew study titled The Science People See on Social Media, published March 21, 2018. Without further ado… In an effort to better understand the science information that social media users encounter on these platforms, Pew Research Center systematically analyzed six months’ worth of
The Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 kicked off a flurry of social media activity that was equal parts well-meaning and counterproductive. Users on Facebook and Twitter shared reports, updates and photos of victims, spending little time on verifying them before sharing them with thousands of people. Others on forums
2014 Lok Sabha polls
In a matter of months, India will overtake the US as Facebook’s largest user-base. According to various sources, the social media site is currently adding about 40 million users from the country per year while the US adds some 5 million at the same rate. Such growth is not
aggregators
Access to multiple sources of news over the internet increases aspirations corresponding to news consumption: readers don’t have to restrict themselves anymore to news that we or they think will be useful to them. Consequently, news aggregators become more than that: they are now personalized news repositories from which
