There has always been a form of censorship: "The day Facebook went algorithmic, with an advertising-based business model, they started censoring the boring and mundane." This is a brilliant take: "From the day they went algorithmic, Facebook started throttling the un-engaging. The boring among became voiceless. Tempered viewpoints are shut down. The mundane moments of life are no longer worth sharing. That off-center photo, not-quite-in-focus photo of your kids had every right to show up in your friends' feeds as the latest post from Dan Bongino, but it won't." We are all products of the platforms. The medium is the message. "Social platforms have very carefully trained us on how to "not be boring" in the very specific mold that they define."

when they believe that many other people have shared them.users are more likely to share low-credibility articles

Speaks to the power of social signalling around information. What if it didn't just showed many other people shared, but the information track record around them? How many *credible* users shared?

One of the best ideas may be to make it more difficult to create and share low-quality information. This could involve adding friction by forcing people to pay to share or receive information. Payment could be in the form of time, mental work such as puzzles, or microscopic fees for subscriptions or usage. Automated posting should be treated like advertising.

Friction! Friction by design will lead to a better internet. Of course, this is a problem when the main monetization scheme relies on minimal friction and maximum impulse.

Free communication is not free. By decreasing the cost of information, we have decreased its value and invited its adulteration. To restore the health of our information ecosystem, we must understand the vulnerabilities of our overwhelmed minds and how the economics of information can be leveraged to protect us from being misled.

As the saying goes, "free as in freedom", or "free, as in free beer?"

In a fascinating 2006 study involving 14,000 Web-based volunteers, Matthew Salganik, then at Columbia University, and his colleagues found that when people can see what music others are downloading, they end up downloading similar songs.

On the surface, seems obvious. But look closer and it provokes profound questions about the homogenization of opinion and society in a social media-driven world.

"the company "blocked or removed" 56 million policy-violating reviews and nearly three million fake business profiles in 2020 alone" - and they're still barely scratching the surface! The scale is mind blowing. "it's implausible that of 71 reviewers for a downtown Toronto pizzeria, 50 would also have used that same lawn care company and 20 bought a wig from a single store in Vaughan, Ont." " as soon as they were posted to Riverbend's page, an obscure online marketing firm would get in touch with an offer to remove them — for a fee. "We'd get 14 [reviews] at midnight on a Saturday, we would get 10 in a row, you know, within an hour on a Wednesday night," he said. Sometimes Pereira felt like the review removal company, which sent him screenshots of newly posted negative reviews, was taunting him, he said. "It's definitely coordinated," he said." "None of this is illegal. Many companies selling fake reviews do so openly on social media platforms like Facebook. One such group found by CBC News is called, simply, Buy Google Reviews, and advertises packages starting from $5." "Dean believes that the fake review industry is able to exist because technology companies like Google aren't interested in solving the problem."

There, for anyone to see on her public Facebook account, were all of the embarrassing moments from my childhood: The letter I wrote to the tooth fairy when I was five years old, pictures of me crying when I was a toddler, and even vacation pictures of me when I was 12 and 13 that I had no knowledge of. It seemed that my entire life was documented on her Facebook account, and for 13 years, I had no idea.

I could understand why my mother would post these things; to our extended family and her friends they were cute, funny moments. But to me they were mortifying. Scrolling through my sister’s tweets, I saw what my sister had been laughing about. She would frequently quote me and the random things I would say, it seemed anything I had ever said to her that she thought was funny was fair game. Things I had no idea she was posting online.

I had just turned 13, and I thought I was just beginning my public online life, when in fact there were hundreds of pictures and stories of me that, would live on the internet forever, whether I wanted it to be or not, and I didn’t have control over it. I was furious;

I confessed that I felt like my privacy was violated, because I felt like they had no right to take pictures of me or quote me on their Facebook and Twitter accounts without my permission.

They didn’t know I would get so upset over it, because their intentions weren’t to embarrass me, but to keep a log and document what their little sister/youngest daughter was doing in her early childhood and young teenage years.

Teens get a lot of warnings that we aren’t mature enough to understand that everything we post online is permanent, but parents should also reflect about their use of social media and how it could potentially impact their children’s lives as we become young adults.

Every October my school gave a series of presentations about our digital footprints and online safety. The presenters from an organization called OK2SAY, which educates and helps teenagers about being safe online, emphasized that we shouldn’t ever post anything negative about anyone or post unapproved inappropriate pictures, because it could very deeply affect our school lives and our future job opportunities.

I also have a lot more opportunities to be social outside of the digital world, especially in middle school and entering high school now that there are more extracurriculars and clubs available for students to meet and socialize through.

My friends are active social media users, but I think they are more cautious than they were before. They don’t share their locations or post their full names online, and they keep their accounts private. I think in general my generation has to be more mature and more responsible than our parents, or even teens and young adults in high school and college.

We are more cautious than people have been before.

For my generation, being anonymous is no longer an option. For many of us, the decisions about our online presence are made before we can even speak.

This should be mandatory reading for every internet user. Haven't read something this eye-opening in a while. Great fodder for a true paradigm shift.