This morning, as I was waking up I have a very scary idea. What if psychographic profiles and algorithms start to write online news stories customized to what you want to believe? Or exploiting your beliefs to manipulate your reaction? Amazon offering different prices based on what it thinks you will pay and Facebook manipulating news feeds point to this.<\/p>\n
Some “news”, primarily financial news stories, are already written by computers since they are matter of fact statistics. Newspapers were constrained because the news has to be put into a permanent fixed printed form that was the same for every reader. Online news is not constrained by that.<\/p>\n
Sources already exist that allow you to direct the selection of stories you see – Google News and Flipboard are ones I use. But what if the actual content of the news story<\/strong> was generated on the fly, emphasizing details of the story or concealing details from you? You might walk away thinking the shooter in UCLA from India was just another “white guy” Christian Republican NRA member. Anyone remember the ethnic background of the shooter at Virginia Tech? (Seung-Hui Cho)<\/p>\n To be honest, if I was a hard working bright Asian student going to a high end university and saw the nonsense of how American universities are being run, I would probably be angry too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This morning, as I was waking up I have a very scary idea. What if psychographic profiles and algorithms start to write online news stories customized to what you want to believe? Or exploiting your beliefs to manipulate your reaction? … Continue reading