Four short links: 29 March 2018
Facebook Container, Publishing Future, Social Media Ethics, and Online Virality
- Facebook Container — Firefox add-on that isolates your Facebook identity from the rest of your web activity. When you install it, you will continue to be able to use Facebook normally. Facebook can continue to deliver their service to you and send you advertising. The difference is that it will be much harder for Facebook to use your activity collected off Facebook to send you ads and other targeted messages.
- What’s Coming for Online Publishing (Doc Searls) — What will happen when the Times, the New Yorker, and other pubs own up to the simple fact that they are just as guilty as Facebook of leaking its readers’ data to other parties, for—in many if not most cases—God knows what purposes besides “interest-based” advertising? (via Piers Harding)
- Affiliate Marketing Not Disclosed on Social Media (Freedom to Tinker) — Of all the YouTube videos and Pinterest pins that contained affiliate links, only ~10% and ~7% respectively contained accompanying disclosures. (paper)
- The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion — Indeed, the very label “viral hit” implies precisely the exponential spreading of the sort observed in contagion models in their supercritical regime. It is therefore notable that essentially everything we observe, including the very largest and rarest events, can be accounted for by a simple model operating entirely in the low infectiousness parameter regime.