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The Information Intervention Chain
Some notes I just wanted to get down. There are four places where information interventions can be applied. Moderation/Promotion. A platform always makes decisions on what to put in front of a user. It can decide to privilege information that is more reliable on one or another dimension, or to reduce the dissemination of unreliable… Continue reading
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Tropes and Networked Digital Activism #3: How Fact-Checkers Use Knowledge of Tropes to Fact-Check Quickly (and how you could too)
So to review from parts one and two: People have a lot of stuff they can share or attend to online. In order to efficiently create and process content we look at things like “evidence” through tropes Tropes, not narratives or individual claims, are the lynchpin of activism and propaganda, whether true or false, participatory or… Continue reading
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Tropes and Networked Digital Activism #2: The Portability and Persistence of Tropes
Part 2 of a series. Follows Part 1. Followed by Part 3. So to review from yesterday: People have a lot of stuff they can share or attend to online. In order to efficiently create and process content we look at things like “evidence” through tropes Tropes, not narratives or individual claims, are the lynchpin… Continue reading
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Tropes and Networked Digital Activism #1: Trope-Field Fit
Note: In this post, I jump back and forth between the use of tropes to frame events ethically, non-ethically, and in-between. This is not meant to be “both-sidesim”. Rather it is meant to demonstrate something of the utmost importance to policy discussions about misinformation: there isn’t really a magical set of techniques associated with “misinformation”… Continue reading
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Teach Information Architecture If You Care About Trust
Today’s activity revolves around a tweet that National Geographic (through the Society) has recognized a fifth ocean. I use this tweet here as a jumping off point, but if you want to run it in in another platform you can find examples anywhere. Like over half the prompts we use with SIFT, this is a true prompt,… Continue reading
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Twitter Should Cancel the Appeals Process or Make It Work (also: I’m in Twitter jail!)
Welp, I was going to write a much more nuanced post about problems with the Twitter appeals process, but I’ll just put this here instead for now. I got banned wrongly for a tweet last week where I was talking about the history of conspiracy theory and its relationship to current COVID-19 misinformation. Someone had… Continue reading
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Normie Infiltration
Still banned from Twitter (over a dumb mistake their algorithm made), so I’ll just put this here — I am finding it really hard to figure out if some of these QAnon groups are really rifting at the moment over things not playing out as they were told or if the groups have been infiltrated… Continue reading
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Microclout
I have a couple people in my online social circle who were over the past month telling followers to “just watch” what would happen on the 6th, when everybody but them and their followers would be surprised that Joe Biden didn’t become president. At first, Mike Pence was going to heroically pull some imagined maneuver.… Continue reading
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When it comes to disinformation, the public is a vector, not a target.
Disinformation has always been about getting elites to do things. That’s the point that so many who have looked at what percentage of ppl saw what on Facebook have missed. The public isn’t a target — it’s a vector (and it’s not the only vector). Hopefully, as we watch what’s going on today, people can… Continue reading
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Control-F and Building Resilient Information Networks
In the misinformation field there’s often a weird dynamic between the short-term and long-term gains folks. Maybe I don’t go to the right meetings, but my guess is if you went to a conference on structural racism and talked about a redesigning the mortgage interest deduction in a way that was built to specifically build… Continue reading