谁分享假新闻？直到今天，传统观点认为，在Facebook和其他平台上发布错误信息主要是意识形态的副产品。这种观点认为，2016年你越保守，就越有可能分享恶作剧。

但今天发表在《科学进步》杂志上的一篇引人入胜的新论文表明，还有其他一些事情正在进行中。我今天在边缘写下了这件事：

11 percent of users older than 65 shared a hoax, while just 3 percent of users 18 to 29 did. Facebook users ages 65 and older shared more than twice as many fake news articles than the next-oldest age group of 45 to 65, and nearly seven times as many fake news articles as the youngest age group (18 to 29).

“When we bring up the age finding, a lot of people say, ‘oh yeah, that’s obvious,’” co-author Andrew Guess, a political scientist at Princeton University, told The Verge. “For me, what is pretty striking is that the relati***hip holds even when you control for party affiliation or ideology. The fact that it’s independent of these other traits is pretty surprising to me. It’s not just being driven by older people being more c***ervative.”

为什么老用户分享虚假新闻的频率更高？有两种相互竞争的理论，我们仍然缺乏很好的证据：

The first is that older people, who came to the internet later, lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts. The second is that people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes.

Regardless of age, the digital literacy gap has previously been blamed on users’ willingness to share hoaxes. Last year, WhatsApp began developing a program to promote digital literacy in India — where many of its 200 million users are relatively new to the internet — after a series of murders that may have been prompted by viral forwarding in the app. That program is aimed at users of all ages.

At the same time, elderly Americans are prone to falling for so many scams that the Federal Bureau of Investigati*** has a page devoted to them. It seems likely that a multi-pronged approach to reducing the spread of fake news will be more effective than trying to solve for only one variable.

我不想引用我的整篇文章，而是请你再次阅读全文。

关于这项研究的另外两个注释来自我与一位没有参与研究的研究员的对话：Matthew Gentzkow，他研究了Facebook为减缓虚假新闻传播所做的努力。

首先：斯坦福大学经济政策研究所的高级研究员Gentzkow指出，这篇论文记录Facebook用户的实际行为而不是自我报告的调查数据是不寻常的。研究人员之所以能够做到这一点，是因为在征得用户同意的情况下，他们将用户时间轴上的帖子刮下来，看看他们实际上共享了哪些链接。这也是为什么该论文的发现比以前在这方面所做的工作更有说服力的原因之一。

第二：这些痴迷于Facebook的老年人到底是谁？Gentzkow指出，尽管Facebook几乎完全渗透北美市场，但在2016年，七旬老人中过度活跃的社交媒体使用仍然有些不寻常。

Gentzkow告诉我：“使用社交媒体的可能性随着年龄的增长而下降，这也是非常非常正确的。”老年人使用社交媒体的比率很低。谁是2016年10月在Facebook上花费大量时间的70岁老人？Gentzkow推测，年龄较大的Facebook用户可能对党派政治有着不成比例的浓厚兴趣。

无论如何，这项研究对Facebook和民主有一些好消息。正如研究人员安德鲁·盖斯（Andrew Guess）向我解释的那样，对问题的解释越窄，设计有效的解决方案就越容易。假设未来的研究证明分享虚假新闻主要是老年人的后果，或者老年人实际上是数字文盲的代名词，那么我们就有了一个很好的修复起点。

民主

参议员呼吁FCC调查T-Mobile、AT&amp；T、 Sprint向赏金猎人**位置数据

主板对电信公司**我们的实时位置数据进行了出色的调查，一天后，几位参议员呼吁进行调查：

“The American people have an absolute right to the privacy of their data, which is why I’m extraordinarily troubled by reports of this system of repackaging and reselling location data to unregulated third party services for potentially nefarious purposes. If true, this practice represents a legitimate threat to our personal and national security,” Senator Kamala Harris told Motherboard in a statement.

谷歌搜索结果列表可以**纵用于宣传

还记得谷歌轰炸吗？Catalin Cimpanu报道了它的最新发展，它利用谷歌内部的共享功能，在搜索结果旁边显示不正确的“知识面板”：

While sharing search result page URLs for queries like “Who invented sliced bread” with an incorrect knowledge panel passes as an innocent prank, sharing malformed URLs for search queries like “Who’s resp***ible for 9/11” and highlighting results like Judai** can have serious c***equences in today’s complicated political climate. Just imagine the damage you can do with manipulated Google URLs like these [1, 2, 3].

Link sharing is an important part of today’s web and the way in which Google appears to have structured its URL parameters allows threat actors a way to essentially edit search results, which is a dangerous issue.

越南威胁要惩罚Facebook违反其严苛的网络安全法

去年5月，我写了一篇关于越南立法机构通过一项新法律的文章，该法律要求Facebook等大型科技公司在当地存储数据，并在越南开设办事处。Jon Russell报道，该法律于1月1日生效，该国已经开始对Facebook施加压力。

这个故事之所以重要，是因为它表明，监管社交网络的一个结果可能是压制政治异见——越南对此相当透明。

The U.S. social network stands accused of allowing users in Vietnam to post “slanderous content, anti-government sentiment and libel and defamation of individuals, organisati*** and state agencies,” according to a report from state-controlled media Vietnam News. The content is said to have been flagged to Facebook which, reports say, has “delayed removing” it.

That violates the law which — passed last June — broadly forbids internet users from organizing with, or training, others for anti-state purposes, spreading false information, and undermining the nation state’s achievements or solidarity, according to reports at the time. It also requires foreign internet companies to operate a local office and store user information on Vietnamese soil. That’s something neither Google nor Facebook has complied with, despite the Vietnamese government’s recent claim that the former is investigating a local office launch.

在别处

美国军方的制图员是如何在南非无意中创造了一个恐怖之家的

互联网协议映射的一个奇怪的事实是，这项技术可以让网站和其他人跟踪设备大致到他们登录互联网的位置，这项科学是如此不精确，以至于公司有时会将数百万个地址映射到各个位置。这些地点通常都是居住地址，对他们的生活造成了严重破坏。克什米尔·希尔是最著名的纪录片作家，他对南非的一对夫妇进行了一项全新的研究：

The downside of this delay is that John and Ann continued to get visits over the last couple of years, as recently as last month when police showed up looking for a kidnapping victim. The upside is that John sought other help. He saw on Facebook that a clas**ate of his from Pretoria Boys High, the same English-speaking high school Elon Musk attended, was a computer science lecturer at the University of Pretoria. John sent him a message.

“I’m not the guru, this guy is,” the clas**ate responded, sending John contact information for Martin Olivier, a professor at the University. Within three days of John contacting him, Olivier discovered that MaxMind didn’t choose to put the target on John and Ann’s home on its own. It got help from the U.S. military.

杰夫和麦肯齐·贝佐斯结婚25年后即将离婚

这里有两个注释。首先，贝佐斯在推特上宣布了这一分离——2019年，这是对该平台文化相关性的一次相当惊人的认可。（想想他可以用其他方式做到这一点！）第二，麦肯齐·贝佐斯将有很大的空间进行科技和媒体投资。世界将密切关注。

推特希望你能通过一个只关注一名球员的摄像机观看NBA比赛

库尔特·瓦格纳（Kurt Wagner）报道了推特和篮球高管之间的一桩听起来很奇怪的交易：

Twitter doesn’t stream NBA games, but soon it will stream parts of NBA games — just not the parts you usually watch on TV from the NBA’s traditional broadcast partners like Turner and ESPN.

Instead of streaming a full game with all the players, graphics, and announcers, starting in February Twitter will stream the second half of some NBA games — yes, only the second half — but the camera will focus on a single player.

《太阳报》的记者们担心德拉吉的报道会让他们变得更加右翼

每个大型平台都鼓励创建特定的内容，无论是谷歌（“超级碗什么时候举行”）、Facebook（“教皇支持唐纳德·特朗普”）还是YouTube（“观看佩帕猪摧毁女权主义者”）。马克·迪斯蒂法诺（Mark Di Stefano）写到了另一个大型平台——德拉吉报告（Drudge Report）——的持续影响力，以及它如何影响了鲁珀特·默多克旗下的一家小报：

The Sun has been targeting important parts of its news agenda to court the attention of right-wing aggregator the Drudge Report, with some staff concerned that it is beginning to change the way the British outlet presents stories on Drudge’s favourite UK targets, such as London mayor Sadiq Khan.

According to emails seen by BuzzFeed News and interviews with Sun staff, the Sun’s website editors have become increasingly insistent on creating what they have internally referred to as “Drudge-bait” in an effort to secure huge amounts of traffic from the aggregator.

印度农村地区的**通过在Facebook上进行秘密活动来挑战她们的社区

Pranav Dixit考察了印度妇女以化名加入以逃避其社区警惕和评判的目光的现象：

For women living in these parts of the country, using social networks like Facebook comes with real risks of being socially outcast. While Facebook may have an image problem in most parts of the world for handling data carelessly, spreading fake news, and inciting violence and genocide, male leaders in these parts of India dislike it for an entirely different reason: It gives young women a platform to post pictures, put themselves out there, and meet young men.

Across rural India, young women are accessing Facebook under false identities, using the names of Bollywood actors or other made-up monikers, and sometimes even posing as men — violating Facebook’s policy against “pretending to be anything or anyone” — as they seek a place in modern digital life. (Facebook declined to comment on such apparent violati***.) Their discretion doesn’t stem from an everyday eye for privacy but from a fear of the harsh social c***equences of being outed as a woman who uses Facebook.

发射

Twitter正在发布状态更新、破冰推文，以在未来几周内选择用户

朱莉娅·亚历山大（Julia Alexander）报道说，作为测试的一部分，Twitter在未来几周将出现一些相当重要的变化。公司告诉我，我会成为其中的一员，所以请继续关注印象！

A green bubble will appear beside beta users’ names when they’re actively online and using the app, similar to Instagram’s status indicator, according to new screenshots released by Twitter and first reported by Engadget. Twitter hopes that by seeing someone is online, you’ll be more likely to respond to their tweets and start a conversation.

The other feature Instagram is introducing is “ice breaker” tweets, which are supposed to help start a conversation about a specific topic. Users will be able to post their own ice breakers for others to respond to; screenshots provided by Twitter show weekly television series like Scandal and events like CES as an example of how “ice breaker” tweets will appear.

Instagram现在可以让你将你的帖子重新注册到多个帐户

正如Josh Contine在这里建议的那样，我不太确定能够同时将一张照片发布到多个帐户是否算是一种“再拍照”，但也许这是朝着这个方向迈出的一步。我在这里同意他的观点，即这些努力的风险，因为它们有可能促进分享和放映时间，所以总是被忽视：

Simplifying publishing sounds obviously better, but it could also dilute the quality of Instagram. Luckily, the feed’s algorithm can simply demote generic content that doesn’t resonate with people. But if the feed becomes full of stale cross-posted promotional spam, it could send younger users fleeing toward the next generation of social apps trying to spice it up.

拿

真正的病毒式电影就在这里

有时候，一个大型的科技平台会不断地把一些东西放在你面前，希望它会成为一个纯粹的统计概率命中。我想到了Facebook市场，Snapchat也发现了这一点。它的工作频率比你想象的要低——但正如MG Siegler在这里指出的那样，Netflix似乎已经在Bird Box上完美实现了这一点：

In my case, I watched Bird Box because so many people were talking about it on Twitter. It was word-of-mouth, but not necessarily in the normal sense — again, the movie is decent, but not great and the chatter I saw was largely meme-based! — and yet there it was, staring me in the face when I opened Netflix. It was basically begging me to click-to-watch. And so I did. And so this shows yet again why Netflix is lightyears ahead of traditional Hollywood.

This isn’t the first attempt Netflix has had in this arena. During last year’s Super Bowl, they attempted to do the same basic thing with a commercial for The Cloverfield Paradox. It was clever because unlike so many other movie trailers shown during the event, the kicker was that you could watch the movie right now. Again, all of the friction had been compressed to time.

But ultimately, Netflix likely figured out two things from that experiment. First, you don’t even need to spend tens of milli*** of dollars to promote this type of movie. In fact, a simple in-app promotion likely reaches as many people as a Super Bowl ad — and it undoubtedly leads to much higher conversion! Second, for the virality to truly work, the movie has to be at least halfway decent. Cloverfield Paradox was not. Bird Box is.

最后。。。

骗子欺骗人们购买不存在的小狗

互联网上到处都是假冒的小狗，你不必年事已高，就可以上当受骗。下面是固执的记者简·利特维恩科：

There are a few ways to determine whether a website is legitimate, like doing a reverse image search on the pets or googling a phrase that doesn’t mention the breed of the animal to see if other sites are using the exact same language. But the most surefire way to prevent being scammed is to meet the future pet in person, Baker said. That’s what Dowden did when she tried to adopt again after losing her money. She said being scammed took an emotional toll on her, and she was embarrassed to tell her hu**and what happened.

为了确保一只网狗是真的，你必须离开网际网路。

跟我说

向我发送可能会让老年人困惑的提示、评论、问题和链接：[email protected]