Zemanta is a “plug in” for WordPress-based web sites. When writing content, Zemata scans the text and offers suggestions of photos that can be inserted into your content, generally for free. It’s a neat feature that is easy to use to add valuable images to web pages.
I have an old post that reviews a particular 3D camera and has a title similar to “Camera X 3D Image Quality”.
Zemanta suggests a large set of images of people vomiting or being sick:
This calls into question the algorithm used by Zemanta – if they are this biased against 3D, what are they doing for other topics? Could Zemanta be skewing viewers through targeted image selection?
On my old tech blog, I wrote frequently about the impact of propaganda and its intersection with social media – concluding that Facebook is a friction-less conduit for modern propaganda, where people share without thinking, and “friends” hesitate to point out factual and logic errors made by their “friends”. Thus, errant messages become commonly held “knowledge”, even when wrong. This aspect of social media is widely known today and exploited by individuals, activist organizations, businesses and politicians.
