Pew Research Center dove into social media as a source for news. Over half of U.S. adults say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes”. Facebook (36%) stands out as a regular source of news for about a third of Americans. YouTube comes next (23%) and Twitter(15%). Of these news consumers 39% percent thinks what they read is “largely accurate”. Even it is 39% of half of all Americans, this sounds like a large piece of the population, not just a small group of conspiracy believers. I guess people think this stuff on social is more real, uncensored stuff, whilst traditional media are biased.
Then how did traditional TV News cover the Capitol Building incident? In this analysis of words used in video news coverage Yahoo News, Business Insider, and BBC used “siege, attack, and insurrection” more often as compared to Breitbart, Epoch Times, and Fox News. The Epoch Times also described the event as a “breach” more times than any other outlet.
In this increasingly partisan world, people have moved their verbal attacks from the bar stool to comments on platforms. In this long read on the evolution of moderation of political comments on platforms, it seems the moderation argument is coming to all the other publishing platforms. After Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and other large platforms have shifted from free speech to a (highly) moderated version of themselves, smaller services are coming under scrutiny. Now the likes of Spotify have to consider what action to take as people move to new uncensored platforms.
NY Times builds up its own internal user tracking and targeting with first party data in advance of the death of cookies. Traditionally, digital publishers have relied on external data management platforms (DMPs) to help them target audiences, using third-party cookies that are on the verge of extinction thanks to new privacy laws and - mainly - crackdowns by Apple and Google.
After lots of A/B testing with direct clients, they see campaigns perform well and “sometimes it’s better than what we used to have.” Washington Post meanwhile created Zeus, its own ad tech and buyer platform. Nice stuff for directly sold ads, but still huge question marks over the future of programmatic (not direct-sold) advertising for all publishers.
Taking a step out of media now. Amazon’s ‘Just Walk Out’ tech (cameras and an app instead of staff) will be trialed by Hudson, a US airport store chain. A good controlled-environment use case and, of course, no crowds right now. Fascinating.
I had no idea what Google Research was about. Take a look in the link for an insightful overview of more than 800 research publications of Google in 2020. Their goal is to work on long-term, ambitious problems across a wide range of topics — from predicting the spread of COVID-19, to designing algorithms, to learning to translate more and more languages automatically, to mitigating bias in machine learning models.
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