Originally sent on Nov 21, 2017 via Tinyletter. Your Autocracy Will Be Laundered Pizzagate: Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal. I’ve talked before about how most discussion of free speech and disinformation is stuck in a centralized model that ignores the current multi-agent process by which the fake is laundered into the real. This article… Continue reading

For some reason Tiny Letter’s archive is not showing the latest newsletter, so I am putting it here for safe-keeping. You can read other previous newsletters here, and also sign up to receive them by email. Global Potemkin Village A new NATO Stratcom report on social media-based disinformation is out. I haven’t finished it, but… Continue reading

The speed with which Pinterest radicalizes your feed with conspiracy-based disinfo is shocking. I speed up this video by 400% but the entire process takes less than 13 minutes I think. Here’s the final frame. I got here without taking a single explicit antivax action (e.g. I didn’t follow any antivax boards): Please watch the… Continue reading

First published Nov. 10, 2017 at TinyLetter Free Speech Is Like Free Markets. Broken. A New York courtroom gave every detained immigrant a lawyer. The results were staggering. This piece from Vox is about the sixth amendment of the U.S. constitution (the right to a lawyer) but is a good lens for the first amendment as… Continue reading

The Pew Research Center is a good source of information on many issues; much of our current public debate is informed by data they collect. So here’s a question: is the site at people-press.org really Pew? Or is it an imposter? How do you know?   Continue reading

Some materials here for a web literacy presentation to students dealing with climate. The Stream Evaluating Search Results Here’s some searches. As usual, we use questions, while noting questions are not a great way to search the web. These searches have been chosen because they are at least partially problematic. Will the Thames freeze over… Continue reading

Last night’s newsletter today. If you like the newsletter you should sign up here, as sometimes I post these here and sometimes I don’t. No main story this time. Please note a new edition to our format — some stories are marked “evolving”. These are stories which have caught my interest, but where the story… Continue reading

Every time I say I can’t make it easier to participate in Digipo, I find a way to make it easier. The current process involves no skills greater than knowing how to work a word processor, and (more importantly) allows students to participate anonymously if they wish, without having to sign up for Google accounts… Continue reading

Saw this today. Watson is going to solve OER! Wait what? Only a thousand lessons? Divide that by six grade levels and that’s about 166 lessons per grade. Figure you probably teach 80 lessons a year… So Watson, with its supposed brain the size of a planet, is going to do what for you exactly?… Continue reading

Misinformation is an asymmetrical phenomenon, occurring more in sources followed by Republicans than Democrats. There are historical reasons that explain this: the creation of a right-wing media system was heavily funded and subsidized by corporations and donors in a way that left-wing media never has been. This isn’t to say that the left couldn’t become… Continue reading