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Global Potemkin Village

A new NATO Stratcom report on social media-based disinformation is out. I haven’t finished it, but it starts out with an great (and needed) summary of various disinfo efforts around the world, with particular attention to how disinfo manifests differently in different countries and platforms. I think tracking this is important to media literacy efforts, not necessarily because our students will be fighting disinfo on Russia’s VKontakte or China’s Jinri Toutiao, but because by tracking these many different articulations of the same phenomenon we are more likely to see what is coming down the road next.

A piece on Mocha Uson, who is the social media face of Duerte’s regime in the Phillipines. Uson calls the press “press-titutes” (get it?) and has more recently pushed for the news source that published this to be reclassified and denied access to some Palace events. The piece lists the web sources she promotes which also forms a helpful index of junk news Filipino websites. Remember that in the Phillipines sharing fake news knowingly is a sin against charity, per the Catholic Church there, which maintains a list of websites to avoid.

China’s WeChat is rumored to be moving toward a more feed-like experience. Chinese citizens get the majority of their news from online sources, and given the ubiquity of WeChat these changes will increase those numbers. Of course, the Chinese government exerts heavy control on these platforms. I need a burner phone so I can play around with WeChat while not aiding the Chinese surveillance state.

Claire Wardle talks about the need for a coordinated global effort to fight information disorder. She also says we should treat “fake news” as a swear. Which will ding our SEO, but she’s probably right.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I made a short video showing how Pinterest can quickly pull a person into a web of medical misinformation. It’s quite shocking to watch. In two minutes you can watch a person go from antivax-curious to full-on medical conspiracist. A lot of this is driven by natural health sites, who push these pins into the system to up their reach, and to discredit traditional medicine as a marketing strategy. While it’s tempting to chalk that up to California liberalism, it’s worth noting that Pinterest as late as 2014 was the only major platform that had a much larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats. But watch the video and be shocked. Pinterest is also a major source of political misinfo, but more on that later.

1984, Inc.

From Molly Hackett: “We should be having a conversation, as a society, whether we want our moral emotions to be manipulated as a way of generating advertising for big tech companies.”

Fringe communities on Reddit and 4chan have an outsize impact on Twitter. Yeah, tell me something I don’t know, but there are some interesting details here besides that. Again, you have to look at this as a system — the surest sign of a noob in this space is someone that sees influence as only occurring in the platform things originated in. The truth is much more complex.

The Lawfare Podcast has Andrei Soldatov on Russian Intel Ops and Surveillance. Related: a 2015 Guardian article on the Hall of Mirrors approach to disinfo.

New report on Google and the 2016 elections finds that “up to 30% of … national candidates had their search results affected by potentially fake or biased content.”

Jonathan Albright on Instagram meme-seeding. Takeaway: “Instagram — a service larger than Twitter and Snapchat combined — should be seen as a major influence, targeting and engagement hub for the spread of political propaganda.”

You Are Being Gamed

Sharing pictures of missing children on your Facebook or Twitter feed must be good, right? Not so fast, say Canada’s Mounties. These pitures go around for a lot of reasons and you can do real harm in sharing them. Always make sure the child is truly missing by checking news reports before you share.

“Disinformation campaigns target tech-enabled citizen journalists” from Brookings.

Amanda Hess has an utterly engaging short video on conspiracy theories and the Internet. There’s not much new here, it’s just really well done. I look at it more as an example of the sort of idiom we might want to talk in to correct misconceptions.

Alternative Facts and Alternative Medicine

A good interview with Emily Thorson who is much more concerned with medical misinformation than with political misinformation in high-profle races. Again, the main takeaway is that this is a complex problem that does not benefit from band-aid or single-pronged solutions.

A bonus old article on Pinterest and health disinfo.

You’ve seen those web ads where Jennifer Aniston endorses some unheard of product by describing one weird trick, right? Fake, of course. But incredibly profitable, according to Stephanie Lee at Buzzfeed. Profitable to the tune of $179 million. Seriously. If we want to reduce medical misinfo where going to have to a lot better job at making it unprofitable.

Free Speech is like Free Markets. Broken.

Here’s a good case that “No Platform for Fascists” makes sense, but that expanding it much further may not. Also a good presentation of the case that the real threats to free speech on campus are not coming from the students. Something I didn’t know — “No Platform for Fascists” as a stance in student movements dates back to 1973 Britain.

Department of Being a Better Person

Drake calls out a groper in the crowd. Honestly, they should have kicked the guy out of the club, but Drake is still the hero we need right now. Rock and rap shows are often gropefests. It’s disgusting, and artists need to speak up