Facebook and Falsehood

After the election, many people blamed Facebook for spreading partisan — and largely pro-Trump — “fake news,” like Pope Francis’s endorsement of Trump, or Hillary Clinton’s secret life-threatening illness. The company was assailed for prioritizing user “engagement,” meaning that its algorithms probably favored juicy fake news over other kinds of stories. Those algorithms had taken on greater prominence since August, when Facebook fired its small team of human beings who curated its “trending” news section, following conservative complaints that it was biased against the right.

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Other Writing:

Essay

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and ...
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Academic Article

Consensus, Dissensus and Economic Ideas: Economic Crisis and the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism – with John Quiggin

Henry Farrell and John Quiggin (2017), “Consensus, Dissensus and Economic Ideas: Economic Crisis and the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism,” International Studies Quarterly,61,1:269-283. Subsequent subject of an ISQ Symposium, featuring Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Berman, Stephen Nelson and Andrew Baker, with a response from the authors. During the recent economic crisis, Keynesian ideas about fiscal stimulus briefly seemed ...
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