Digital war and moral imagination

The war in Ukraine is providing us with a myriad of case studies about the application of digital tools in ways they weren’t necessarily designed for: from Google Maps providing real-time information about Russian troop movement, to passionate pleas on Twitter by the Ukrainian president, to Facebook blocking Russian state media. It’s been surreal watching a 20th-century style war play out on 21st-century media.

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The difficulty of managing expectations

At our current moment there are dueling theories about why everyone feels so badly about the economy. Nate Cohn draws a straight line between perceptions of the economy and confidence in the Biden administration. Paul Krugman claims that the media, especially right-wing media, is over-indexing on stories about inflation.

Either way, we’re in a moment that illustrates the difficulty of expectation setting and the power of narrative—and especially the narrative reinforcement mechanisms inherent to our current media ecosystem.

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Decentering the LinkedIn user

Yesterday I wrote a long LinkedIn post with my thoughts about why a new feature it’s testing—the ability to turn on and off political content—is ethically dicey idea at best, and why it has has the potential for harm.

When you create tools for the public, especially when you have the size and influence of a company like LinkedIn, you have a moral responsibility to think beyond the experience of the individual user.

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