Business, Spoken

The internet was supposed to mean a whole new world for the business of advertising. Gobs of data let advertisers become wildly efficient in who they target and how they measure results. Consumers also ostensibly win: If you’re in the market want a quality winter coat, the thinking goes, you’re not going to be annoyed if you see an ad for one. In this new world, Facebook is on top. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Since the election, Facebook has faced growing pressure to police hoaxes and misleading content. And with good reason: around 44 percent of US adults get at least some of their news through Facebook, and fake news often spreads more quickly through social media than real news. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last month, the entire internet went down for a few hours. At least that’s what one of the biggest denial-of-service attacks in recent memory felt like to a lot of people. Sites from Netflix, Spotify, and Reddit to The New York Times and, yes, even WIRED went dark. The massive outage was the result of an attack on an Internet infrastructure company called Dyn. You’d think that finding yourself at the center of such a destructive online maelstrom wouldn’t be much of a sales pitch. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On November 7, 2016, the day before the US election, I compared the number of social media followers, website performance, and Google search statistics of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. I was shocked when the data revealed the extent of Trump’s popularity. He had more followers across all social platforms and his posts had much higher engagement rates. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Fei-Fei Li is a big deal in the world of AI. As the director of the Artificial Intelligence and Vision labs at Stanford University, she oversaw the creation of ImageNet, a vast database of images designed to accelerate the development of AI that can “see. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this month Google filed its response to the European Commission’s Android antitrust complaint, which alleges that Google thwarts its competitors in search, mobile apps, and mobile devices by limiting their access to Android users through self-serving licensing terms. But the EC’s objections, rooted in an outdated understanding of marketplace dynamics, are a contrivance. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

To build OpenAI—a new artificial intelligence lab that seeks to openly share its research with the world at large—Elon Musk and Sam Altman recruited several top researchers from inside Google and Facebook. But if this unusual project is going to push AI research to new heights, it will need more than talent. It will needs enormous amounts of computing power. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Julie Lalonde knows all too well what it’s like to be harassed on social media. Lalonde is an Ottawa-based women’s rights activist intimately familiar with the deluge of abuse a single tweet can trigger. She’s endured everything from whack-a-mole trolls impersonating her onlineto enduring a coordinated campaign of abuse against women who dared to comment on Canada’s first Twitter harassment criminal case. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Howard County, Indiana—home to the city of Kokomo—has long been a center for the automotive industry. Or at least it was until that industry and others began to shift overseas in recent decades. By 2008, when Chrysler, the town’s largest employer, teetered on extinction, Forbes named Kokomo the third-fastest dying city in America; during the financial collapse of 2009, fully 40 percent of its home sales were foreclosures. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Google changed the world with its PageRank algorithm, creating a new kind of internet search engine that could instantly sift through the world’s online information and, in many cases, show us just what we wanted to see. But that was a long time ago. As the volume of online documents continues to increase, we need still newer ways of finding what we want. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices