Lisa Khan’s 93 page article about Amazon’s business practices suggests an antitrust legal intervention may be required. This has sustained an ongoing public debate about trust in “big tech”. However, Amazon customers are not giving up their Prime accounts, including Khan’s husband who is a regular user according to her. Over at Facebook, the fallout […]

This is evidence was written and submitted to help inform the UK Government’s research into upcoming mental health policy. 1. Advising employers about the mental health continuum. A study by Schomeris et al. (2017) found that employers might stigmatise mental health sufferers partly due to a lack of knowledge about how mental illness impacts an […]

Part of my PhD research has exposed a need for effective moderation in social environments online. This article explores how one company called Improbable could benefit from pro-social AI’s to help moderate the huge multiplayer world’s they are creating. Improbable’s second round of funding gives them the opportunity to break down the technical barrier to […]

Originally published on University of Cambridge Sociology website: https://www.smhr.sociology.cam.ac.uk/blog/RwSMHandsDent Who regulates the algorithms that influence our experience online? That is the question Joss Hands, a lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University conducting research into media and critical theory, asked the Researching (with) Social Media reading group in November 2014. Algorithms analyse much of what we do […]

Originally printed in The Guardian on 10th March, 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/10/campaign-jimmy-thoronka-internet-power-good Last Friday afternoon I was writing my PhD first year report. I was on a deadline and still had a chapter to write. I’m researching how social networks and crowdsourcing can help people in poverty and crisis. I took a break to read the news […]