N ews Feed Controls, Aliases for Contributors and Transforming Design
Facebook tests News Feed controls that let people see less from groups and pages
By Taylor Hatmaker from Tech Crunch
- “Facebook announced Thursday that it’s running a test to give users a sliver more control over what they see on the platform.”
- “It adds three sub-menus into Facebook’s menu for managing what shows up in the News Feed: friends and family, groups and pages and public figures.”
- “Facebook will also be expanding a tool that allows advertisers to exclude their content from certain topic domains, letting brands opt out of appearing next to ‘news and politics,’ ‘social issues’ and ‘crime and tragedy.’”
Twitter introduces aliases for contributors to its Birdwatch moderation program
By Kim Lyons from The Verge
- “Twitter said its research shows that aliases have the potential to reduce bias by putting the focus not on the author of a Birdwatch note but on the note’s content.”
- “Twitter introduced a pilot of the Birdwatch program in January, which allows participating users to fact-check tweets and add notes with additional context. Birdwatch participants can also rate each others’ notes.”
- “Twitter also said Monday it was rolling out Birdwatch profile pages “to ensure this change doesn’t come at the expense of accountability.” This will make users’ past Birdwatch contributions visible and allow contributors to be “accountable” to the ratings their notes receive.”
Machine Learning Has Already Transformed the Design Profession. How Do We Use It Ethically?
By Helen Armstrong From Eye On Design
- “Simply asking software to perform an action—rather than clicking and dragging through a menu to find the right tool—will, for example, allow designers to bypass hours of busywork, not to mention perusing dense tutorials.”
- “In essence, we must recognize that integrating ML into design practice will not feel like adding a supersmart fake human to our creative team but, instead, will be something else entirely.”
- “Humans bring that understanding to the equation. We human designers must be there to frame the right problems—the problems that will move us toward future points that truly benefit humanity.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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