• extract from Jamie Bartlett’s new book on internet trools, The Dark Net. (pdf format)

  This chapter opens with a description of how users of 4chan set out to exploit, humiliate and expose a girl who – from her willingness to pose with her meds – seems to have some problems with her mental health. It’s a Very Tough thing to read, by the way. It then expands into a discussion with a self-annointed troll, and looks at the history of the phenomenon. It is, in short, a very good read for anyone who deals with online communities.

  tags: trolls OnlineCommunities abuse

• What Facebook doesn’t show you – The Washington Post

  Crunching the data on what you really see on Facebook.
  “My News Feed showed me only a fraction of my network’s total activity, most of what it showed me was old, and what I was shown was often jarringly unexpected.”

  tags: facebook social+media

• View of #Ferguson Thrust Michael Brown Shooting to National Attention – NYTimes.com

  “News organizations learned about the arrest and harassment of their reporters on Twitter and were able to take steps to get them out of jail. In the meantime, important information continues to flow out of Ferguson. As much as any traditional wire service, Twitter spread the remarkable work of David Carson, a photographer at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch who managed to take pictures despite being pushed around by both the police and the protesters.

  Continue reading the main story
  There is a visceral quality to Twitter that can bring stories to a boiling point. Ron Mott, an NBC correspondent and a social media skeptic, watched Twitter turn up the heat on Wednesday and tweeted, “As powerful as our press have been through years of our democracy, social media raises temp on public officials like never before.””

  tags: ferguson shooting nytimes social+media twitter

• GIF YouTube | Make Animated GIFs from Youtube

  Handy little gif maker from YouTube videos – let people watch Fenton running after those deer over and over and over and….

  tags: gif youtube how-to

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.