First Draft launches a free online course on identifying misinformation →

“The app suggested several videos from prominent conspiracy theorist David Icke in which he claimed that the world is ruled by reptile-human hybrids.”

“My friend taught me the ropes. She told me that I had to write posts that were natural — like, for example, ‘I am cooking or I am walking down the street and I had this thought about how bad the [pro-Western] Ukrainian president is.’ ”

“The move illustrates how Meredith sees some of Time Inc.’s titles that attract primarily male readership as not playing to its core strength in women’s magazines, which include Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle and Martha Stewart Living.”

“‘The public narrative has its bad guy, and it’s the perfect bad guy: Joe Ricketts,’ a former DNAinfo staffer told me Wednesday. ‘He’s rich, he owns the Cubs, he likes Trump. But in real life there are a lot of villains. And there are a lot of losers, too.'”

“The subscription will cost $4.99 a month, and Facebook won’t take a cut. But Apple and Google, which will process the transactions on their respective platforms, will take the standard 30 percent cut they take for all in-app purchases they facilitate. That means creators will get about $3.50 for each subscription.” —LO

“eMarketer estimates the two companies will capture a combined 56.8% of US digital ad investment in 2018, down from 58.5% last year. These figures have been adjusted downward, as smaller players such as Amazon and Snapchat are experiencing faster-than-expected growth.

Importantly, Google and Facebook’s share of new digital ad dollars is declining as well. This year, they will garner nearly 48% of new expenditures. By comparison, that figure was nearly 73% in 2016.”

“I’ve had editors at glossy women’s magazines say to me, ‘Forget the nuance. We’re trying to make a really clear argument here.’ No editor at The Cut has asked me to forget the nuance,” [Ann] Friedman says. “Internet conventional wisdom is you need a very clear take that can be put into a clicky headline. Some of the worst #MeToo writing and response has been that — ‘Here’s why so-and-so is bad.’ That is just not The Cut’s M.O.”

“A cross between a piece of infrastructure, a public commons and an online community, Wikipedia has been a boon to some of the largest companies in the world. Whatever benefit Google, the owner of YouTube, hopes to wring from the crowdsourced encyclopedia is likely to pale in comparison with the value it receives from including Wikipedia entries in its search results.”

“Mark Zuckerberg wants to get a billion people in ‘meaningful’ Facebook groups. But to get there he’ll have to battle the spammers, hackers, and trolls who exploit and hijack groups to make money or sow chaos.” —CS