Rogers — The week that was in the land of new media

COLUMN: The week at newsonaut.com, a Kamloops-based blog about new media written by Mark Rogers.

• • •

Facebook has confessed to manipulating the emotions of its 700,000 users in an experiment. Some were shown fewer posts with positive words, others were shown fewer posts with negatives words.

And it worked. People followed along with fewer positive or negative posts of their own.

Facebook, like any other company, wants to keep its customers happy and make money by doing so. But let’s not forget who their customers are — advertisers and marketers who want to sell us things.

So should we be surprised that Facebook treats us like lab rats with no say in whether we take part in their research? No. Disappointed, yes, but not surprised.

• • •

As more and more jobs in the news industry are taken over by computers and automation, journalists have consoled themselves with the knowledge that no software could ever take over the job of a reporter.

But watch out — here come the robot reporters.

The Associated Press is using automation to write business earning reports, but it’s not all bad news. This is boring boilerplate stuff that’s better left to computers. With the robots doing drudge work, humans are free to write substantive pieces about what the numbers mean.

The robots have also arrived at Yahoo to write fantasy football recaps, and they’ve been tuned up for “humour and tone.” So, for example, if none of your players are playing one weekend, the robot could pipe up with, “You might as well go to the beach during Week 10.”

Bad joke in. Bad joke out.

• • •

One way to judge a tweet is by counting the number of retweets it gets. The more, the better.

Some companies hoping for a boost on social media, have whole teams dedicated to crafting just the right posts for Twitter and Facebook. Even so, computer scientists at Cornell University figure they have an algorithm that gets more retweets than a human.

If you think you’re pretty good at Twitter, the New York Times has an online test where you can choose between two tweets to see which did the best, and compare your answer with that of the algorithm.

Go ahead and <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/01/upshot/twitter-quiz.html?_r=0″>try this test</a> at the The Upshot. Do us humans proud.

• • •

In Europe, Google is complying with a new “right to be forgotten” law where, if asked, the company must consider removing links to “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” material.

So if all they’re doing is getting rid of unflattering pictures or references to youthful hijinks . . . what could go wrong? Plenty, it turns out.

When Google pulls links to stories at news sites like The Guardian, BBC and Mail Online, it’s like those stories no longer exist. Google, after all, has 90 per cent of the search engine market in Europe.

A news story expunged from memory has, in effect, been censored.

In one case, Google replaced the link. But who knows why? The lack of transparency is disturbing.

It’s bad enough that the news industry has become so dependent on Google, but now we have an even worse muddle with ill-conceived legislation in the mix.

• • •

When you think about Internet spies, it’s usually shadowy government organizations that come to mind. But tracking software exists on virtually every website you visit.

These trackers are typically designed to take note of your interests so they can display advertising for products you’re more likely to buy. Some sites have 20 or 30 trackers chugging away in the background.

There are a couple of browser extensions you can get that track down the trackers so you can see a list of them as you go from site to site. They also allow you to block certain trackers so you can preserve your privacy and, in some cases, improve load times.

The extensions are called Ghostery (ghostery.com) and Disconnect (disconnect.me). Instructions for installation and use are available at their respective websites.

Mark Rogers is a Kamloops journalist who publishes a blog at http://www.newsonaut.com. He can be reached at mark@newsonaut.com.