Facebook et al. must be excited right now with this jackpot of acute behavioral data they're acquiring, in the context of a global catastrophe. I wonder if anyone has any insight here into what kind of research they are doing? I know it's all usually a tight secret.

One idea that came to mind is that this would be excellent data to weaponize. Now we (as in social media corps.) can generate a pretty good model of what a global conflict looks like on the level of individual behavior and how that can be used for an advantage. The other edge of the sword would be this will help future public health initiatives but somehow I don't see this info being made publically available...

It's been a while since we've had a thread like this and our active users have cycled around a bit (plus there's a lot of dead links in the old threads), so who here is on the fediverse?

Connecting with some more people from here sounds nice :)

News article: Fires misinformation being spread through social media

This includes a prominent local billionaire, Andrew Forrest, who has pledged $70 million for bushfire relief: "I think there's a multitude of reasons why the fire extent has bene so devastating. I think a warming planet would be part of that — [but] the biggest part of that is arsonists," he said.

What do you think about it? I personally think it's just another rewind showcasing how YouTube is prioritizing more generic audiences and content because YouTube has pratically turned into online video and is more focused on growing into audiences who use the Internet for entertainment and to pander to advertisers and since YouTube is more the, rather than a platform, pretending the entirety of YouTube is or at this point even could be a united community without massive, world-wide changes to society is just incorrect. The list format like watchmojo is probably to pretend they have backpedaled and that they're now unbiased. (Also they have done it in this format before.)