Portside

• What Was Fake on the Internet This Week: Why this is the final column - Caitlin Dewey (Washington Post)
• For Internet Users 2015 Was a Year of Many Wins … and One Loss - Timothy Karr (Free Press)
• Open Access Movement Demands More: 2015 in Review - Elliot Harmon (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• The Washington Post Fired Lefty Columnist Harold Meyerson - Peter Dreier (Huffington Post)
• Social Media Questions Lame Response to Militant Group Occupying Oregon Wildlife Park - Nick Whigham (news.com.au)

What Was Fake on the Internet This Week: Why this is the final column
By Caitlin Dewey
December 18, 2015
Washington Post

We launched “What was Fake” in May 2014 in response to what seemed, at the time, like an epidemic of urban legends and Internet pranks: light-hearted, silly things, for the most part, like new flavors of Oreos and babies with absurd names.
Frankly, this column wasn’t designed to address the current environment. This format doesn’t make sense. I’ve spoken to several researchers and academics about this lately, because it’s started to feel a little pointless. Walter Quattrociocchi, the head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Science at IMT Lucca in Italy, has spent several years studying how conspiracy theories and misinformation spread online, and he confirmed some of my fears: Essentially, he explained, institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.

For Internet Users 2015 Was a Year of Many Wins … and One Loss
By Timothy Karr
December 29, 2015
Free Press

While not every fight ended in a win for Internet users, 2015 was a year when millions of advocates defied the conventional wisdom that tech policymaking was an arcane and secretive world limited to a small circle of insiders.
We organized online and off, sending millions of comments in support of an open Internet, beating back efforts to build even larger broadband monopolies, and creating new online tools to safeguard the privacy of our online communications.
Here are the many highlights ... and a few less-than-spectacular moments.

Open Access Movement Demands More: 2015 in Review
By Elliot Harmon
January 2, 2016
Electronic Frontier Foundation

In October 2015, all six editors of the linguistics journal Lingua quit at once, along with its 31-member editorial board. The walkout brought mainstream attention to a debate that has been brewing for years over the future of academic publishing.
Elsevier—Lingua’s publisher—classifies it as a hybrid journal. By default, Lingua is available only to subscribers (or to institutions that purchase access to journals in bulk). Individual writers can choose to have their articles shared openly if they pay an additional fee. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with those fees—most major open journals have article processing charges, as do many closed journals. But Lingua’s editors believed that their journal’s fee was prohibitively high and didn’t correspond to increased support from Elsevier. The same team is planning to launch a new journal next year with the growing open access publisher Ubiquity Press.
In a lot of ways, what happened at Lingua is emblematic of something that’s been happening all year. If 2014 was the year that the open access movement became mainstream, then this is the year we stopped compromising with closed publishers.
 

The Washington Post Fired Lefty Columnist Harold Meyerson
By Peter Dreier
December 31, 2015
Huffington Post

Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post's editorial page editor, has fired columnist Harold Meyerson, one of the nation's finest journalists and perhaps the only self-proclaimed socialist to write a weekly column for a major American newspaper during the past decade or two.
More than any other columnist for a major U.S. newspaper, Meyerson provided ongoing coverage and incisive analysis of the nation's labor movement and other progressive causes as well as the changing economy and the increasing aggressiveness of big business in American politics. He was one of the few columnists in the country who knew labor leaders and grassroots activists by name, and who could write sympathetically and knowledgeably about working people's experiences in their workplaces and communities.
 

Social Media Questions Lame Response to Militant Group Occupying Oregon Wildlife Park
By Nick Whigham
January 4, 2016
news.com.au

The top trending hashtag on Twitter this morning was #OregonUnderAttack but the bulk of the activity has been from those lamenting the double standards shown by the American media and authorities, with many highlighting the hypocrisy of the reaction in general.
Social media has been ablaze with those flabbergasted by the tepid reaction from authorities and the media. Much of the discontent has been around the language used to describe the group and the media’s reticence to label their actions as a form of terrorism.