McClure, H. (2021, May 12). How conspiracy theories led to Covid vaccine hesitancy in the Pacific. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/13/how-conspiracy-theories-led-to-covid-vaccine-hesitancy-in-the-pacific

Account started on 2021-05-12 at 11:37 PM

A strong list of toxic behaviors that are meant to keep people from having a voice in the online commons. We definitely need to design these features out of our social software.

Young, K. S., Purves, K. L., Huebel, C., Davies, M., Thompson, K. N., Bristow, S., Krebs, G., Danese, A., Hirsch, C., Parsons, C. E., Vassos, E., Adey, B., Bright, S., Hegemann, L., Lee, Y. T., Kalsi, G., Monssen, D., Mundy, J., Peel, A., … Breen, G. (2021). Depression, anxiety and PTSD symptoms before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sf7b6

Where is the Silent Spring in the data, privacy, and social media space?

What lessons might we draw from public health and epidemiology to improve our privacy lives in an online world? How might we wear social media "masks" to protect our friends and loved ones from our own posts?

Sanders, J. G., Tosi, A., Obradovic, S., Miligi, I., & Delaney, L. (2021). Lessons from lockdown: Media discourse on the role of behavioural science in the UK COVID-19 response. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.647348

Massive how? He's such a public figure that most of these connections are already widely reported in the media or easily guessable by an private invistigator. The bigger issue is the related data of transactions which might open them up for other abuses or potential leverage as in the other examples.

How will covid-19 vaccine safety concerns impact vaccine confidence? (2021, April 16). The BMJ. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/04/16/how-will-the-uks-decision-to-offer-an-alternative-to-the-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-for-under-30s-following-safety-signals-impact-vaccine-confidence/

The analogy of social media being a flywheel of engagement is an apt one and it also plays into the idea of "flow" because if you're bored with one post, the next might be better.

But what are these people really making? Besides one or two of the highest paid, what is a fair-to-middling influencer really making?

Tucker Carlson May Be America’s Biggest Public-Health Problem. (n.d.). Retrieved May 13, 2021, from https://www.thedailybeast.com/tucker-carlson-may-be-americas-biggest-public-health-problem?ref=author

Schmitt, H.-J., Booy, R., Aston, R., Van Damme, P., Schumacher, R. F., Campins, M., Rodrigo, C., Heikkinen, T., Weil-Olivier, C., Finn, A., Olcén, P., Fedson, D., & Peltola, H. (2007). How to optimise the coverage rate of infant and adult immunisations in Europe. BMC Medicine, 5, 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7015-5-11

It’s too soon to declare vaccine victory—Four strategies for continued progress | TheHill. (n.d.). Retrieved May 12, 2021, from https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/552219-its-too-soon-to-declare-covid-vaccine-victory-four-strategies-for

A strong and cogent argument for why we should not be listening to the overly loud cries from Tristan Harris and the Center for Human Technology. The boundary of criticism they're setting is not extreme enough to make the situation significantly better.

It's also a strong argument for who to allow at the table or not when making decisions and evaluating criticism.

A reasonable summary list of alternatives. Note how dreadful and unmemorable most of these names are. Most noticeable in this list is that I don't think that anyone actually built any actual tools that accomplish any of these theoretical things.

It also makes more noticeable that the Center for Humane Technology seems to be theoretically arguing against something instead of "for" something.

Perhaps the better move is to frame these companies as behemoths on the scale of foreign countries, but ones which have far more power and should be scrutinized more heavily than even China itself. What if the enemy is already within and it's name is Facebook or Google?

Zarocostas, J. (2020). How to fight an infodemic. The Lancet, 395(10225), 676. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30461-X

Ahmed, S. T. (2020). Managing News Overload (MNO): The COVID-19 Infodemic. Information, 11(8), 375. https://doi.org/10.3390/info11080375

Misinformation “superspreaders”: Covid vaccine falsehoods still thriving on Facebook and Instagram. (2021, January 6). The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/06/facebook-instagram-urged-fight-deluge-anti-covid-vaccine-falsehoods

Jarvis, T., Weiman, S., & Johnson, D. (2020). Reimagining scientific conferences during the pandemic and beyond. Science Advances, 6(38), eabe5815. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe5815

Lies, Bots, and Coronavirus: Misinformation’s Deadly Impact on Health. (2020, July 17). Grantmakers In Health. https://www.gih.org/views-from-the-field/lies-bots-and-coronavirus-misinformations-deadly-impact-on-health/

Pennycook, G., McPhetres, J., Zhang, Y., Lu, J. G., & Rand, D. G. (2020). Fighting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge Intervention. Psychological Science, 0956797620939054. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620939054

Kim, E., Shepherd, M. E., & Clinton, J. D. (2020). The effect of big-city news on rural America during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(36), 22009–22014. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2009384117

Broniatowski, D. A., Kerchner, D., Farooq, F., Huang, X., Jamison, A. M., Dredze, M., & Quinn, S. C. (2020). The COVID-19 Social Media Infodemic Reflects Uncertainty and State-Sponsored Propaganda. ArXiv:2007.09682 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09682

Rogers, K. (2020, May 21). How Bad Is The COVID-19 Misinformation Epidemic? FiveThirtyEight. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-bad-is-the-covid-19-misinformation-epidemic/

Chang, H.-C. H., Chen, E., Zhang, M., Muric, G., & Ferrara, E. (2021). Social Bots and Social Media Manipulation in 2020: The Year in Review. ArXiv:2102.08436 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08436

Darren Dahly. (2021, February 24). @SciBeh One thought is that we generally don’t ‘press’ strangers or even colleagues in face to face conversations, and when we do, it’s usually perceived as pretty aggressive. Not sure why anyone would expect it to work better on twitter. Https://t.co/r94i22mP9Q [Tweet]. @statsepi. https://twitter.com/statsepi/status/1364482411803906048

Gallacher, J., & Bright, J. (2021). Hate Contagion: Measuring the spread and trajectory of hate on social media. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/b9qhd

Ira, still wearing a mask, Hyman. (2020, November 26). @SciBeh @Quayle @STWorg @jayvanbavel @UlliEcker @philipplenz6 @AnaSKozyreva @johnfocook Some might argue the moral dilemma is between choosing what is seen as good for society (limiting spread of disinformation that harms people) and allowing people freedom of choice to say and see what they want. I’m on the side of making good for society decisions. [Tweet]. @ira_hyman. https://twitter.com/ira_hyman/status/1331992594130235393

Oh, FFS!

Donald Trump invents blogging.<br><br> https://t.co/Wl06PnekU7

— Theo Priestley (@tprstly) May 4, 2021

I love all of these ideas. It's all-around edifying!

‘I’m ridiculously positive about the media’s coverage of COVID-19.’ (n.d.). RSB. Retrieved February 13, 2021, from https://www.rsb.org.uk//biologist-covid-19/189-biologist/biologist-covid-19/2568-fiona-fox-interview

The Data Visualizations Behind COVID-19 Skepticism. (n.d.). The Data Visualizations Behind COVID-19 Skepticism. Retrieved March 27, 2021, from http://vis.csail.mit.edu/covid-story/

Epidemiology 101 for Journalists. (n.d.). Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health. Retrieved 23 February 2021, from https://www.mcgill.ca/epi-biostat-occh/epidemiology-101-journalists

That neither content creators nor browser vendors are particularly concerned with the production and consumption of documents, as such, is precisely the issue. This is evident in the banner that the majority of the work has occurred under over the last 10+ years: they're the Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group.

No one, not even the most well-intentioned (such as the folks at Automattic who are responsible for the blogging software that made Christina's post here possible), see documents when they think of the Web. No, everything is an app—take this page, for example; even the "pages" that WordPress produces are facets of an application. Granted, it's an application meant for reading the written word (and meant for occasionally writing it), but make no mistake, it's an application first, and a "document" only by happenstance (i.e. the absence of any realistic alternative to HTML & co for application delivery).

In fact, HTML makes it very easy (true for the reasons that lead Mark to write that it can be copied and manipulated). It's contemporary authoring systems and the typical author-as-publisher and the choices they make that are what makes this difficult.

The future of rich media lies in striving to be more like dead media (or at least mining it for insights by better understanding it through thoughtful study), rather than the misguided attempts we've been living inside.

(This is something that I've done a 180 on in the last year or so.)

Lutkenhaus, R. O., Jansz, J., & Bouman, M. P. A. (2019). Mapping the Dutch vaccination debate on Twitter: Identifying communities, narratives, and interactions. Vaccine: X, 1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvacx.2019.100019

Shelby, A., & Ernst, K. (2013). Story and science. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 9(8), 1795–1801. https://doi.org/10.4161/hv.24828

Tollefson, J. (2021, April 16). The race to curb the spread of COVID vaccine disinformation. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00997-x?error=cookies_not_supported&code=0d3302c0-59b3-4065-8835-2a6d99ca35cc

Many of these articles read like direct translations from English, somewhat poor translations.

Yang, K.-C., Pierri, F., Hui, P.-M., Axelrod, D., Torres-Lugo, C., Bryden, J., & Menczer, F. (2020). The COVID-19 Infodemic: Twitter versus Facebook. ArXiv:2012.09353 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2012.09353

This still exists in the social media space, but has gotten even worse with the rise of algorithmic feeds.

Swenson, A. (2021, April 20). Study lacks evidence on masks, isn’t linked to Stanford. AP NEWS. https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-629043235973

Berman, J. M. (2020). Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12242.001.0001

Smith, N., & Graham, T. (2019). Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook. Information, Communication & Society, 22(9), 1310–1327. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1418406

Featherstone, J. D., Bell, R. A., & Ruiz, J. B. (2019). Relationship of people’s sources of health information and political ideology with acceptance of conspiratorial beliefs about vaccines. Vaccine, 37(23), 2993–2997. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.04.063

PrameelaApr. 15, S. E., 2021, & Pm, 2:00. (2021, April 15). As a Ph.D. student, sharing my perspective on social media felt scary—But it’s worth it. Science | AAAS. https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2021/04/phd-student-sharing-my-perspective-social-media-felt-scary-it-s-worth-it

This is a great example of how services like Facebook can be like the abusive significant other you can never leave.

What a gruesome name for an all-too-frequent internet problem: miscarriage problem

It would be far better to have apps focus on better reasons for on this day features. I'd love to have something focused on spaced repetition for building up my memory for other things. Reminders at a week, a month, three months, and six months would be a useful thing for some posts.

Example of unwanted spaced repetition via social media.

Idea: Implement a slow web week for the IndieWeb, perhaps to coincide with the summit at the end of the week.

People eschew reading material from social media and only consume from websites and personal blogs for a week. The tough part is how to implement actually doing this. Many people would have a tough time finding interesting reading material in a short time. What are good discovery endpoints for that? WordPress.com's reader? Perhaps support from feed reader community?

Sounds like I'm not missing anything.

The "Social Web" was a thing by this point

This is certainly a defining characteristic that differentiates the internet from previous mediums of mass communication. Consider the process by which a reader or viewer would share their opinion about a story or a show in the pre-internet era?

You cannot practice public health without engaging in politics. (2021, March 29). The BMJ. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/03/29/you-cannot-practice-public-health-without-engaging-in-politics/

There's a reasonably good overview of some ideas about fixing the harms social media is doing to democracy here and it's well framed by history.

Much of it appears to be a synopsis from the perspective of one who's only managed to attend Pariser and Stround's recent Civic Signals/New_Public Festival.

There could have been some touches of other research in the social space including those in the Activity Streams and IndieWeb spaces to provide some alternate viewpoints.

An example of social media for proactive government action.

[[J. Nathan Matias]] Citizens and Technology Lab

I recall having looked at some of this research and not thinking it was as strong as is indicated here. I also seem to recall he had a connection with Tristan Harris?

This is the second reference I've seen recently (Jack Dorsey mentioning a version was the first) of there being a marketplace for algorithms.

Does this help introduce enough noise into the system to confound the drive to the extremes for the average person? What should we suppose from the perspective of probability theory?

Do bots have or deserve the right to not only free speech, but free reach?

I've not run across data colonialism before.

I love the idea of social peripheral vision online.

And you could go a few feet farther if you added fragment support to the site, then the browser would also autoscroll to that part. Then you could add a confetti cannon to the system and have the page rain down confetti when more than three people have highlighted the same section!

This is pretty cool looking. I'll have to add it as an example to my list: Social Reading User Interface for Discovery.

We definitely need more things like this on the web.

It makes me wish the Reading.am indicator were there without needing to click on it.

I wonder how this sort of activity might be built into social readers as well?

Suddenly social annotation has taken an interesting twist. @Hypothes_is better watch out! ;)

Rosen, M. L., Rodman, A. M., Kasparek, S. W., Mayes, M., Freeman, M. M., Lengua, L., … McLaughlin, K. A., PhD. (2021, March 26). Promoting youth mental health during COVID-19: A Longitudinal Study spanning pre- and post-pandemic. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/n5h8t

Fabry, P., Gagneur, A., & Pasquier, J.-C. (2011). Determinants of A (H1N1) vaccination: Cross-sectional study in a population of pregnant women in Quebec. Vaccine, 29(9), 1824–1829. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2010.12.109

Meleo-Erwin, Z., Basch, C., MacLean, S. A., Scheibner, C., & Cadorett, V. (2017). “To each his own”: Discussions of vaccine decision-making in top parenting blogs. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 13(8), 1895–1901. https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2017.1321182

I like this idea of creating a space and causing a scene to pull people in.

Not too dissimilar to the aculturation Hollywood does to help normalize certain activities just by showing them increasingly.

Definitely want to circle back to this with additional examples and expand on it.

Poland, G. A., & Jacobson, R. M. (2011, January 12). The Age-Old Struggle against the Antivaccinationists (world) [N-perspective]. Http://Dx.Doi.Org/10.1056/NEJMp1010594; Massachusetts Medical Society. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1010594

Gesser-Edelsburg, A., Diamant, A., Hijazi, R., & Mesch, G. S. (2018). Correcting misinformation by health organizations during measles outbreaks: A controlled experiment. PLOS ONE, 13(12), e0209505. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209505

Schlosser, F., Maier, B. F., Hinrichs, D., Zachariae, A., & Brockmann, D. (2020). COVID-19 lockdown induces structural changes in mobility networks—Implication for mitigating disease dynamics. ArXiv:2007.01583 [Physics, q-Bio]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01583

ReconfigBehSci. (2020, December 5). As everyone’s focus turns to vaccine hesitancy, we will need to take a close look not just at social media but at Amazon- the “top” recommendations I get when typing in ‘vaccine’ are all anti-vaxx https://t.co/ug5QAcKT9Q [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1335181088818388992

Szumowska, E., Czarnek, G., Dragon, P., & Keersmaecker, J. D. (2021). Multitasking and correction of false information. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/w5v4z

This is also the case for many other toxic online social media platforms. A fantastic framing.

We have built strong communities on social platforms

They have? Really?! I think it's more likely the social platforms have built strong communities which happen to be talking about and sharing the papers content. The paper doesn't have any content moderation or control capabilities on any of these platforms.

Now it may be the case that there are a broader diversity of voices on those platforms over their own comments sections. This means that a small proportion of potential trolls won't drown out the signal over the noise as may happen in their comments sections online.

If the paper is really listening on the other platforms, how are they doing it? Isn't reading some or all of it a large portion of content moderation? How do they get notifications of people mentioning them (is it only direct @mentions)?

Couldn't/wouldn't an IndieWeb version of this help them or work better.

the Guardian. ‘Small Number of Facebook Users Responsible for Most Covid Vaccine Skepticism – Report’, 16 March 2021. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/15/facebook-study-covid-vaccine-skepticism.

There is more of the latter than the former to be certain, but I don't think it's by design.

Many of the people there are already experts in some of these sub-areas, so there aren't as many questions on those fronts. Often there are other resources that are also better for these issues and links to them can be found within the wiki.

The social portions are far more difficult, so this is where folks are a bit more focused.

I think when the community grows, we'll see more of these questions about CSS, HTML, and accessibility. (In fact I wish more people were concerned about accessibility and why it was important.)

Morley, Jessica, Josh Cowls, Mariarosaria Taddeo, and Luciano Floridi. ‘Public Health in the Information Age: Recognizing the Infosphere as a Social Determinant of Health’. Journal of Medical Internet Research 22, no. 8 (2020): e19311. https://doi.org/10.2196/19311.

the Guardian. ‘Shield Some and Let Others Carry on? This Covid Theory Is Dangerous, and Foolish | Charlotte Summers’, 29 December 2020. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/29/covid-theory-dangerous-health.

Rozendaal, E., Woudenberg, T. V., Crone, E., Green, K., Groep, S. van de, Leeuw, R. de, Sweijen, S., & Buijzen, M. (2021). Communication and COVID-19 Physical Distancing Behavior Among Dutch Youth. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/c6s5v

Helmus, Todd C., James V. Marrone, Marek N. Posard, and Danielle Schlang. ‘Russian Propaganda Hits Its Mark: Experimentally Testing the Impact of Russian Propaganda and Counter-Interventions’, 15 October 2020. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA704-3.html.

Krupenkin, Masha, Kai Zhu, Dylan Walker, and David M. Rothschild. ‘If a Tree Falls in the Forest: COVID-19, Media Choices, and Presidential Agenda Setting’. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 22 September 2020. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3697069.