EMPOWERVERSE

@jorgebscomm for @empowermedia   The Wizard of Oz (1939)                                                        [Image:  Flickr ] W hat makes a political leader look powerful? Is strength something a leader possesses, or something a society collectively agrees to see? In a recent interview with journalist Nicolle Wallace , historian and Professor Timothy Snyder offered a striking interpretation of Donald Trump's political persona: "He lives entirely by the strength that is conferred upon him by people who believe the story", Dr. Snyder told Wallace. "It's like the end of the Wizard of Oz . In a moment you realise — wait a minute, there actually isn't anything there". Taken psychologically, this argument is less about Trump's private personality than about a fundamental feature of social power: power is partly relational . A leader may ...

@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia [Image credit: raportuldegarda.ro ] I n 2021, an Instagram employee created a false account posing as a thirteen-year-old girl searching for diet tips. Within minutes, the algorithm was surfacing accounts titled "skinny binge" and "apple core anorexic". The employee documented what she found. It was not a surprise to her colleagues — internal research had been saying this for years. What made the moment extraordinary was that the documents eventually reached the public, courtesy of whistleblower Frances Haugen, and were published by the Wall Street Journal in September 2021 . They revealed something the company had worked hard to avoid saying publicly: Instagram knew it was making things worse. "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls."  — Internal Meta slide presentation, 2019 . What the internal documents showed The leaked presentations — reviewed across an 18-month window from 2019 — we...

@jorgebscomm for @empowervmedia [Image credit: frontiersin.org ] S omewhere between your third and fourth scroll this morning, an algorithm quietly decided what kind of person you are. It inferred your openness to new ideas from what you paused on, your emotional stability from what provoked a reaction, your social orientation from how you interact with others' content. Technology companies have been doing this for years, using personality models built by academic psychologists over decades. The real science behind those models — not the pop-psychology version — is far more nuanced and useful than any personality type has ever suggested. Understanding it matters for how we know ourselves, how we judge others, and how we resist being profiled by systems we didn't consent to. "Personality is not a fixed label. It is a set of tendencies: measurable, partially heritable, genuinely predictive, and far more context-dependent than any online quiz has ever acknowledged." ...