A look inside Guy Fieri’s $700 Super Bowl tailgate party
Tailgate parties are generally open affairs. Football fans gather around a grill – or several grills – and grub down on as much meat and consume as many beverages as they can before kickoff. Most times, joining these tailgates is completely free, the only admission being a handshake, a smile and a mutual rooting interest in a football team.
http://www.chron.com/entertainment/article/Inside-Guy-Fieri-s-700-Super-Bowl-tailgate-party-10909982.php
Who Controls Your Facebook Feed
A small team of engineers in Menlo Park. A panel of anonymous power users around the world. And, increasingly, you.
Every time you open Facebook, one of the world’s most influential, controversial, and misunderstood algorithms springs into action. It scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked. For the average Facebook user, that’s more than 1,500 posts. If you have several hundred friends, it could be as many as 10,000. Then, according to a closely guarded and constantly shifting formula, Facebook’s news feed algorithm ranks them all, in what it believes to be the precise order of how likely you are to find each post worthwhile. Most users will only ever see the top few hundred.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01/how_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.html
Does Facebook’s News Feed control your world view?
After Royally Screwing Up the Election, the Media Want Control Over Your Facebook News
The modern American media may have just had their worst year yet, and for their efforts, they have announced they’d like to reward themselves more power than they have held in decades.
The past year has seen a declining trust in the media that is fully deserved.
Debate moderators have been exposed as shills; network employees have been busted tipping the scales for their candidates (something this “senior media reporter” is sympathetic toward); political reporters have been caught running stories by their sources; “fact-checkers” have bent over backwards for Hillary Clinton; and major newspapers have openly cast objectivity aside—all in the name of a political candidate the media were so eager to elect, one legacy magazine shipped covers celebrating her victory before the votes were even counted.
After Donald Trump won the election, “renegade Facebook employees” reportedly formed a “task force” to crack down on the “fake news” they blame for Clinton’s sizable electoral defeat, aiming to purge social media of what someone, somewhere deems inaccurate.
http://dailysignal.com/2016/11/17/after-royally-screwing-up-the-election-the-media-want-control-over-your-facebook-news/
The New Censorship
How did Google become the internet’s censor and master manipulator, blocking access to millions of websites?
Google, Inc., isn’t just the world’s biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world’s biggest censor.
The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency. Google is not the only company suppressing content on the internet. Reddit has frequently been accused of banning postings on specific topics, and a recent report suggests that Facebook has been deleting conservative news stories from its newsfeed, a practice that might have a significant effect on public opinion – even on voting. Google, though, is currently the biggest bully on the block.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated
Facebook accused of censoring conservatives, report says
Curators of the social media company’s ‘trending news’ sidebar purposely leave out stories from rightwing sites, a former employee has alleged
Facebook’s trending bar deliberately suppresses conservative news, according to a new report.
Facebook, now arguably the most important distributor of news online, has cultivated the idea that its bar is an impartial algorithm that responds to “likes” and gives users only what they’ve indicated they want.
But in a bombshell confession on the tech blog Gizmodo, a former editor says popular conservative news would be kept off the “trending news” sidebar.
“I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” the former news curator told Gizmodo.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/09/facebook-newsfeed-censor-conservative-news