Notices by Mike McCue (mike@flipboard.social), page 12

@binarytango @debacle @mazhe @manlycoffee @Gargron Totally.

@otterX yeah totally. I try not to boost too much. though sometimes I just can't help it. :-)

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 13. There is a lot to this and I was only able to provide a high level overview. Hopefully this was helpful for you. Let me know if you have other questions and I’ll do my best to answer.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 12. Finally, we believe in the power of an educated society to make better decisions. We also see the clear and present danger of misinformation and conspiracy theories that divide and confuse people.

This is why we federated @NewsLitProject which helps people, especially students, develop the skills necessary to tell the difference between factual reporting and misinformation, seek out other points of view, and be cautious about sharing links.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 11. Of course, users have choice and can decide to follow or mute any publisher they’d like.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 10. We also believe it’s important for people to see content from a range of diverse sources. For example, we will soon be federating other publishers focused on education like Education Week, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Philanthropy, and several others.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 9. If you look at some of the other publishers that we federated on Monday you’ll see that many have some degree of bias. This is fairly typical. Some lean more left or more right. We believe it’s helpful for people to see stories with differing points of view, provided those stories are well sourced, fact checked and reported by real journalists.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 8. Here is a screenshot for what mediabiasfactcheck.com reports on The 74:

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 7. Now to your question. I was personally not familiar with The 74 when you asked. So I dug into our team’s decision making on this one and it seems clear based on our own observations as well as third party analysis that The 74 is indeed a well regarded, factual source albeit with a left-center bias.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 6. Second, we use a set of external resources like factcheck.org and mediabiasfactcheck.org to gather the most objective points of view we can to balance our judgement. You can learn more about both of these organizations on wikipedia but suffice to say they are both well regarded and heavily utilized in universities and non-profits.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 5. First, we apply common sense. Is the content and writing interesting, factual and useful? Was it written by trained journalists? Does the publication have a track record of making corrections? Do they properly label opinion pieces from fact based journalism? etc.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 4. To determine this subset, our editors apply a set of tests for quality and journalistic integrity. Each of the publishers we federated on Monday passed these tests. To be succinct I’ll highlight just two of the ways we make these judgement calls.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 3. This is one of the ways that we put quality ahead of engagement when recommending content. Twitter, as just one example, does the exact opposite of this.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 2. Of our 11K publishers, there is a verified subset of these which we have achieved a quality threshold meaning they can be promoted by our editorial team and/or integrated into our content recommendation feeds on Flipboard.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration 1. Flipboard has approx 11K publishers from around the world on our platform, each curating into thematic magazines. We specifically do not allow organizations or people that traffic in hate speech, spam, etc. so if/when we detect that we have no qualms about swiftly de-platforming those accounts.

@Pepijn @mastodonmigration Yes. Thanks for checking back. I have a number of things to relay here which I’ll do in a thread.

@stinerman hah. yes, that's what's cool about this place. People who are using or building the product can readily talk to each other and share ideas and feedback.

@yourautisticlife Love it. It's all about user choice. We'll soon bring all the Mastodon blocking, muting, reporting functionality to flipboard users too.

@tobiaalberti will be interviewing Mitchel Baker, ceo of Mozilla. Have reached out to others and awaiting record dates. Let me know if you have suggestions. Would love to hear who you’d like to hear from.

@Damon thanks for the recommendation. I will.