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  1. Last 7 days
    1. Wolf, Mark, ed. The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence. 1st ed. 63 vols. Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Companions. New York: Routledge, 2019.

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    1. RA supports the Black Lives Matter movement. We have made it part of our mission as a publication to re-centre artists of colour and work against racism within electronic music.
    1. Trakt DataRecoveryIMPORTANTOn December 11 at 7:30 pm PST our main database crashed and corrupted some of the data. We're deeply sorry for the extended downtime and we'll do better moving forward. Updates to our automated backups are already in place and they will be tested on an ongoing basis.Data prior to November 7 is fully restored.Watched history between November 7 and Decmber 11 has been recovered. There is a separate message on your dashboard allowing you to review and import any recovered data.All other data (besides watched history) after November 7 has already been restored and imported.Some data might be permanently lost due to data corruption.Trakt API is back online as of December 20.Active VIP members will get 2 free months added to their expiration date
  2. May 2023
    1. New to me form of censorship evasion: easter egg room in a mainstream online game that itself is not censored. Finnish news paper Helsingin Sanomat has been putting their reporting on the Russian war on Ukraine inside a level of online FPS game Counter Strike, translated into Russian. This as a way to circumvent Russian censorship that blocks Finnish media. It saw 2k downloads from unknown geographic origins, so the effect might be very limited.

  3. Apr 2023
    1. Benefits of sharing permanent notes .t3_12gadut._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/bestlunchtoday at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12gadut/benefits_of_sharing_permanent_notes/

      I love the diversity of ideas here! So many different ways to do it all and perspectives on the pros/cons. It's all incredibly idiosyncratic, just like our notes.

      I probably default to a far extreme of sharing the vast majority of my notes openly to the public (at least the ones taken digitally which account for probably 95%). You can find them here: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich.

      Not many people notice or care, but I do know that a small handful follow and occasionally reply to them or email me questions. One or two people actually subscribe to them via RSS, and at least one has said that they know more about me, what I'm reading, what I'm interested in, and who I am by reading these over time. (I also personally follow a handful of people and tags there myself.) Some have remarked at how they appreciate watching my notes over time and then seeing the longer writing pieces they were integrated into. Some novice note takers have mentioned how much they appreciate being able to watch such a process of note taking turned into composition as examples which they might follow. Some just like a particular niche topic and follow it as a tag (so if you were interested in zettelkasten perhaps?) Why should I hide my conversation with the authors I read, or with my own zettelkasten unless it really needed to be private? Couldn't/shouldn't it all be part of "The Great Conversation"? The tougher part may be having means of appropriately focusing on and sharing this conversation without some of the ills and attention economy practices which plague the social space presently.

      There are a few notes here on this post that talk about social media and how this plays a role in making them public or not. I suppose that if I were putting it all on a popular platform like Twitter or Instagram then the use of the notes would be or could be considered more performative. Since mine are on what I would call a very quiet pseudo-social network, but one specifically intended for note taking, they tend to be far less performative in nature and the majority of the focus is solely on what I want to make and use them for. I have the opportunity and ability to make some private and occasionally do so. Perhaps if the traffic and notice of them became more prominent I would change my habits, but generally it has been a net positive to have put my sensemaking out into the public, though I will admit that I have a lot of privilege to be able to do so.

      Of course for those who just want my longer form stuff, there's a website/blog for that, though personally I think all the fun ideas at the bleeding edge are in my notes.

      Since some (u/deafpolygon, u/Magnifico99, and u/thiefspy; cc: u/FastSascha, u/A_Dull_Significance) have mentioned social media, Instagram, and journalists, I'll share a relevant old note with an example, which is also simultaneously an example of the benefit of having public notes to be able to point at, which u/PantsMcFail2 also does here with one of Andy Matuschak's public notes:

      [Prominent] Journalist John Dickerson indicates that he uses Instagram as a commonplace: https://www.instagram.com/jfdlibrary/ here he keeps a collection of photo "cards" with quotes from famous people rather than photos. He also keeps collections there of photos of notes from scraps of paper as well as photos of annotations he makes in books.

      It's reasonably well known that Ronald Reagan shared some of his personal notes and collected quotations with his speechwriting staff while he was President. I would say that this and other similar examples of collaborative zettelkasten or collaborative note taking and their uses would blunt u/deafpolygon's argument that shared notes (online or otherwise) are either just (or only) a wiki. The forms are somewhat similar, but not all exactly the same. I suspect others could add to these examples.

      And of course if you've been following along with all of my links, you'll have found yourself reading not only these words here, but also reading some of a directed conversation with entry points into my own personal zettelkasten, which you can also query as you like. I hope it has helped to increase the depth and level of the conversation, should you choose to enter into it. It's an open enough one that folks can pick and choose their own path through it as their interests dictate.

    1. Now, I've made a number of documentaries about fake news. And what interests me is the first person to use the phrase mainstream media was Joseph Goebbels. And he, in one of his propaganda sheets, said “It's very important that you don't read the mainstream media because they'll tell you lies.” You must read the truth by the ramblings of his boss and his associated work. And you do have to watch this. This is a very, very well-established technique of fascists, is to tell you, don't read this stuff, read our stuff.<br /> —Ian Hislop, Editor, Private Eye Magazine 00:16:00, Satire in the Age of Murdoch and Trump, The Problem with Jon Stewart Podcast

    1. Introducing Substack Notes<br /> by Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi

    2. In Notes, writers will be able to post short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers. Like our Recommendations feature, Notes is designed to drive discovery across Substack. But while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links.

      Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

      Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

  4. Mar 2023
    1. Table of contents

      • Introduction: Through the Ludic Glass
      • Why Algorithmic Images Now?
      • Computed Representations / Represented Computations
      • Technical Images
      • Operational Images
      • Watching through the Ludic-Glass
      • Layers of Spectated Meaning
      • Towards Aesthetics of Spectated Play

      Notes

    1. Structures and Transformations of the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Text and Knowledge Culture in Ancient Egypt. “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften 1999,” 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/index.html.

    2. Die schiere Menge sprengt die Möglichkeiten der Buchpublikation, die komplexe, vieldimensionale Struktur einer vernetzten Informationsbasis ist im Druck nicht nachzubilden, und schließlich fügt sich die Dynamik eines stetig wachsenden und auch stetig zu korrigierenden Materials nicht in den starren Rhythmus der Buchproduktion, in der jede erweiterte und korrigierte Neuauflage mit unübersehbarem Aufwand verbunden ist. Eine Buchpublikation könnte stets nur die Momentaufnahme einer solchen Datenbank, reduziert auf eine bestimmte Perspektive, bieten. Auch das kann hin und wieder sehr nützlich sein, aber dadurch wird das Problem der Publikation des Gesamtmaterials nicht gelöst.

      Google translation:

      The sheer quantity exceeds the possibilities of book publication, the complex, multidimensional structure of a networked information base cannot be reproduced in print, and finally the dynamic of a constantly growing and constantly correcting material does not fit into the rigid rhythm of book production, in which each expanded and corrected new edition is associated with an incalculable amount of effort. A book publication could only offer a snapshot of such a database, reduced to a specific perspective. This too can be very useful from time to time, but it does not solve the problem of publishing the entire material.


      While the writing criticism of "dumping out one's zettelkasten" into a paper, journal article, chapter, book, etc. has been reasonably frequent in the 20th century, often as a means of attempting to create a linear book-bound context in a local neighborhood of ideas, are there other more complex networks of ideas which we're not communicating because they don't neatly fit into linear narrative forms? Is it possible that there is a non-linear form(s) based on network theory in which more complex ideas ought to better be embedded for understanding?

      Some of Niklas Luhmann's writing may show some of this complexity and local or even regional circularity, but perhaps it's a necessary means of communication to get these ideas across as they can't be placed into linear forms.

      One can analogize this to Lie groups and algebras in which our reading and thinking experiences are limited only to local regions which appear on smaller scales to be Euclidean, when, in fact, looking at larger portions of the region become dramatically non-Euclidean. How are we to appropriately relate these more complex ideas?

      What are the second and third order effects of this phenomenon?

      An example of this sort of non-linear examination can be seen in attempting to translate the complexity inherent in the Wb (Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache) into a simple, linear dictionary of the Egyptian language. While the simplicity can be handy on one level, the complexity of transforming the entirety of the complexity of the network of potential meanings is tremendously difficult.

    3. Die schiere Menge sprengt die Möglichkeiten der Buchpublikation, die komplexe, vieldimensionale Struktur einer vernetzten Informationsbasis ist im Druck nicht nachzubilden, und schließlich fügt sich die Dynamik eines stetig wachsenden und auch stetig zu korrigierenden Materials nicht in den starren Rhythmus der Buchproduktion, in der jede erweiterte und korrigierte Neuauflage mit unübersehbarem Aufwand verbunden ist. Eine Buchpublikation könnte stets nur die Momentaufnahme einer solchen Datenbank, reduziert auf eine bestimmte Perspektive, bieten. Auch das kann hin und wieder sehr nützlich sein, aber dadurch wird das Problem der Publikation des Gesamtmaterials nicht gelöst.

      link to https://hypothes.is/a/U95jEs0eEe20EUesAtKcuA

      Is this phenomenon of "complex narratives" related to misinformation spread within the larger and more complex social network/online network? At small, local scales, people know how to handle data and information which is locally contextualized for them. On larger internet-scale communication social platforms this sort of contextualization breaks down.

      For a lack of a better word for this, let's temporarily refer to it as "complex narratives" to get a handle on it.

    1. Paris on the Amazon?: Postcolonial Interrogations of Benjamin’s European Modernism (pp. 216-245) Willi Bolle From: A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin, Camden House (2009) Edition: NED - New edition https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt14brv7g

      ...and complete but constitutes an open repertoire, always in movement, expressing and stimulating the spirit of experimentation and invention. Let us remember that Benjamin, in his early work Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street, 1923/28), argued in favor of direct communication between the “ Zettelkasten ” (card box...

      communication between?! though it is 2009 and after Luhmann's reference to communication with slip boxes....

    1. Title: Fox News producer files explosive lawsuits against the network, alleging she was coerced into providing misleading Dominion testimony

      // - This is an example of how big media corporations can deceive the public and compromise the truth - It helps create a nation of misinformed people which destabilizes political governance - the workspace sounds toxic - the undertone of this story: the pathological transformation of media brought about by capitalism - it is the need for ratings, which is the indicator for profit in the marketing world, that has corrupted the responsibility to report truthfully - making money becomes the consumerist dream at the expense of all else of intrinsic value within a culture - knowledge is what enables culture to exist, modernity is based on cumulative cultural evolution - this is an example of NON-conscious cumulative cultural evolution or pathological cumulaitve cultural evolution

    1. Michel Thomas Method Review

      Michel Thomas method also includes: - atomic pieces built up as building blocks into larger pieces - lots of encouragement to prevent the feeling of failure

      Downsides: - there is no failure mode which can nudge people into a false sense of performance when using their language with actual native speakers

      This reviewer indicates that there is some base level of directed mnemonic work going on, but the repetition level isn't such that long term retention (at least in the space repetition sort of way) is a specific goal. We'll need to look into this piece more closely to firm this up, however.

    1. The Michel Thomas Method in a nutshell

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Xh-by50pI

      This video indicates that small mnemonic hooks are inserted for some words in the Michel Thomas method. This was not immediately apparent or seen in the 1997 BBC documentary about his method and wasn't immediately apparent in Harold Goodman's discussion.

      Is it apparent in Goodman's session with his nephews? Was it part of Thomas' method originally or was it added later? Is it truly necessary or does it work without it as in the SSiW method which doesn't use it.

  5. Feb 2023
    1. "Sieć przyjaciół. Serwis społecznościowy oczami etnografa" Piotra Cichockiego

      Piotr Cichocki, Sieć przyjaciół. Serwis społecznościowy oczami etnografa, Instytut Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2012.

      Książka w katalogu Nukat: http://katalog.nukat.edu.pl/lib/item?id=chamo:2727292&fromLocationLink=false&theme=nukat

      Książka w katalogu Worldcat: https://worldcat.org/title/920454035

    1. Vismann, Cornelia. Files: Law and Media Technology. Stanford University Press, 2008.

      This looks intriguing...

      autocomplete tells me I've seen her before....

      update: it's a Rowan Wilken reference! https://hypothes.is/a/xwRnzr-REeyvvDd7YBbLVA

    1. Related here is the horcrux problem of note taking or even social media. The mental friction of where did I put that thing? As a result, it's best to put it all in one place.

      How can you build on a single foundation if you're in multiple locations? The primary (only?) benefit of multiple locations is redundancy in case of loss.

      Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene are counter examples, though Greene's books are distinct projects generally while Holiday's work has a lot of overlap.

    1. If Seneca or Martial were around today, they would probably write sarcastic epigrams about the very public exhibition of reading text messages and in-your-face displays of texting. Digital reading, like the perusing of ancient scrolls, constitutes an important statement about who we are. Like the public readers of Martial’s Rome, the avid readers of text messages and other forms of social media appear to be everywhere. Though in both cases the performers of reading are tirelessly constructing their self-image, the identity they aspire to establish is very different. Young people sitting in a bar checking their phones for texts are not making a statement about their refined literary status. They are signalling that they are connected and – most importantly – that their attention is in constant demand.
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyBIT0Q7fOc

      Dealing with someone who is passive aggressive:

      • Hold eye contact
      • maintain the benefit of the doubt
      • give a warning shot: "I don't know why we're talking about this"
      • call it out: "What are we doing here? What are you trying to do?"
      • if it continues, remove yourself from the situation
    1. Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’ by [[Taylor Lorenz]]

      shifts in language and meaning of words and symbols as the result of algorithmic content moderation

      instead of slow semantic shifts, content moderation is actively pushing shifts of words and their meanings


      article suggested by this week's Dan Allosso Book club on Pirate Enlightenment

    2. Could it be the sift from person to person (known in both directions) to massive broadcast that is driving issues with content moderation. When it's person to person, one can simply choose not to interact and put the person beyond their individual pale. This sort of shunning is much harder to do with larger mass publics at scale in broadcast mode.

      How can bringing content moderation back down to the neighborhood scale help in the broadcast model?

    3. In January, Kendra Calhoun, a postdoctoral researcher in linguistic anthropology at UCLA, and Alexia Fawcett, a doctoral student in linguistics at UC Santa Barbara, gave a presentation about language on TikTok. They outlined how, by self-censoring words in the captions of TikToks, new algospeak code words emerged.

      follow up on this for the relevant forthcoming paper....

    4. “It makes me feel like I need a disclaimer because I feel like it makes you seem unprofessional to have these weirdly spelled words in your captions,” she said, “especially for content that's supposed to be serious and medically inclined.”

      Where's the balance for professionalism with respect to dodging the algorithmic filters for serious health-related conversations online?

      link to: https://hypothes.is/a/uBq9HKqWEe22Jp_rjJ5tjQ

    5. But algorithmic content moderation systems are more pervasive on the modern Internet, and often end up silencing marginalized communities and important discussions.

      What about non-marginalized toxic communities like Neo-Nazis?

    6. Unlike other mainstream social platforms, the primary way content is distributed on TikTok is through an algorithmically curated “For You” page; having followers doesn’t guarantee people will see your content. This shift has led average users to tailor their videos primarily toward the algorithm, rather than a following, which means abiding by content moderation rules is more crucial than ever.

      Social media has slowly moved away from communication between people who know each other to people who are farther apart in social spaces. Increasingly in 2021 onward, some platforms like TikTok have acted as a distribution platform and ignored explicit social connections like follower/followee in lieu of algorithmic-only feeds to distribute content to people based on a variety of criteria including popularity of content and the readers' interests.

    1. Orkut – dawny internetowy serwis społecznościowy o charakterze międzynarodowym. Jego nazwa pochodzi od imienia inżyniera pracującego w Google – Turka Orkuta Büyükköktena. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut?useskin=vector

    1. Man kann die ganze Situation nämlich auch einmal zum Anlass nehmen, darüber nachzudenken, ob man das Ganze wirklich braucht. Ist der Nutzen der sozialen Medien so hoch, dass er den Preis rechtfertigt? Das ist eine Frage, die ich mir stelle, seit ich meinen persönlichen Twitter-Account stillgelegt habe, aber so verkehrt fühlt es sich zumindest für mich nicht an, nicht mehr auf Twitter, Mastodon & Co. vertreten zu sein. Vielleicht hatte ein solcher Dienst auch einfach seine Zeit, und vielleicht überschätzen wir die Relevanz von sozialen Medien, und vielleicht wäre es gut, davon mehr Abstand zu nehmen.
    1. One can find utility in asking questions of their own note box, but why not also leverage the utility of a broader audience asking questions of it as well?!

      One of the values of social media is that it can allow you to practice or rehearse the potential value of ideas and potentially getting useful feedback on individual ideas which you may be aggregating into larger works.

  6. Jan 2023
    1. “She is likely our earliest Black female ethnographic filmmaker,” says Strain, who also teaches documentary history at Wesleyan University.

      Link to Robert J. Flaherty

      Where does she sit with respect to Robert J. Flaherty and Nanook of the North (1922)? Would she have been aware of his work through Boaz? How is her perspective potentially highly more authentic for such a project given her context?

    1. Ryan Randall @ryanrandall@hcommons.socialEarnest but still solidifying #pkm take:The ever-rising popularity of personal knowledge management tools indexes the need for liberal arts approaches. Particularly, but not exclusively, in STEM education.When people widely reinvent the concept/practice of commonplace books without building on centuries of prior knowledge (currently institutionalized in fields like library & information studies, English, rhetoric & composition, or media & communication studies), that's not "innovation."Instead, we're seeing some unfortunate combination of lost knowledge, missed opportunities, and capitalism selectively forgetting in order to manufacture a market.

      https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/109677171177320098

    1. social media platform

      This technical jargon, in the context of Cohost.org, means "a website".

    1. is zettelkasten gamification of note-taking? .t3_zkguan._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; }

      reply to u/theinvertedform at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zkguan/is_zettelkasten_gamification_of_notetaking/

      Social media and "influencers" have certainly grabbed onto the idea and squeezed with both hands. Broadly while talking about their own versions of rules, tips, tricks, and tools, they've missed a massive history of the broader techniques which pervade the humanities for over 500 years. When one looks more deeply at the broader cross section of writers, educators, philosophers, and academics who have used variations on the idea of maintaining notebooks or commonplace books, it becomes a relative no-brainer that it is a useful tool. I touch on some of the history as well as some of the recent commercialization here: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/.

    1. Books and Presentations Are Playlists, so let's create a NeoBook this way.

      https://wiki.rel8.dev/co-write_a_neobook

      A playlist of related index cards from a Luhmann-esque zettelkasten could be considered a playlist that comprises an article or a longer work like a book.

      Just as one can create a list of all the paths through a Choose Your Own Adventure book, one could do something similar with linked notes. Ward Cunningham has done something similar to this programmatically with the idea of a Markov monkey.

    1. Results for the YouTube field experiment (study 7), showing the average percent increase in manipulation techniques recognized in the experimental (as compared to control) condition. Results are shown separately for items (headlines) 1 to 3 for the emotional language and false dichotomies videos, as well as the average scores for each video and the overall average across all six items. See Materials and Methods for the exact wording of each item (headline). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals.

    1. John B. Kelly highlighted this disparity in a memorable passage published in 1973:

      Distance, the filtering of news through so many intermediate channels, and the habitual tendency to discuss and interpret Middle Eastern politics in the political terminology of the West, have all contrived to impart a certain blandness to the reporting and analysis of Middle Eastern affairs in Western countries. ... To read, for instance, the extracts from the Cairo and Baghdad press and radio ... is to open a window upon a strange and desolate landscape, strewn with weird, amorphous shapes cryptically inscribed "imperialist plot," "Zionist crime," "Western exploitation," ... and "the revolution betrayed." Around and among these enigmatic structures, curious figures, like so many mythical beats, caper and cavort - "enemies," "traitors," "stooges," "hyenas," "puppets," "lackeys," "feudalists," "gangsters," "tyrants," "criminals," "oppressors," "plotters" and deviationists". ... It is all rather like a monstrous playing board for some grotesque and sinister game, in which the snakes are all hydras, the ladders have no rungs, and the dice are blank.

  7. Dec 2022
    1. nalyze the content of 69,907 headlines pro-duced by four major global media corporations duringa minimum of eight consecutive months in 2014. In or-der to discover strategies that could be used to attractclicks, we extracted features from the text of the newsheadlines related to the sentiment polarity of the head-line. We discovered that the sentiment of the headline isstrongly related to the popularity of the news and alsowith the dynamics of the posted comments on that par-ticular news
    1. "Queer people built the Fediverse," she said, adding that four of the five authors of the ActivityPub standard identify as queer. As a result, protections against undesired interaction are built into ActivityPub and the various front ends. Systems for blocking entire instances with a culture of trolling can save users the exhausting process of blocking one troll at a time. If a post includes a “summary” field, Mastodon uses that summary as a content warning.
    1. Investigating social structures through the use of network or graphs Networked structures Usually called nodes ((individual actors, people, or things within the network) Connections between nodes: Edges or Links Focus on relationships between actors in addition to the attributes of actors Extensively used in mapping out social networks (Twitter, Facebook) Examples: Palantir, Analyst Notebook, MISP and Maltego
    1. Drawing from negativity bias theory, CFM, ICM, and arousal theory, this study characterizes the emotional responses of social media users and verifies how emotional factors affect the number of reposts of social media content after two natural disasters (predictable and unpredictable disasters). In addition, results from defining the influential users as those with many followers and high activity users and then characterizing how they affect the number of reposts after natural disasters
    1. Using actual fake-news headlines presented as they were seen on Facebook, we show that even a single exposure increases subsequent perceptions of accuracy, both within the same session and after a week. Moreover, this “illusory truth effect” for fake-news headlines occurs despite a low level of overall believability and even when the stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers or are inconsistent with the reader’s political ideology. These results suggest that social media platforms help to incubate belief in blatantly false news stories and that tagging such stories as disputed is not an effective solution to this problem.
    1. . Furthermore, our results add to the growing body of literature documenting—at least at this historical moment—the link between extreme right-wing ideology and misinformation8,14,24 (although, of course, factors other than ideology are also associated with misinformation sharing, such as polarization25 and inattention17,37).

      Misinformation exposure and extreme right-wing ideology appear associated in this report. Others find that it is partisanship that predicts susceptibility.

    2. . We also find evidence of “falsehood echo chambers”, where users that are more often exposed to misinformation are more likely to follow a similar set of accounts and share from a similar set of domains. These results are interesting in the context of evidence that political echo chambers are not prevalent, as typically imagined
    3. And finally, at the individual level, we found that estimated ideological extremity was more strongly associated with following elites who made more false or inaccurate statements among users estimated to be conservatives compared to users estimated to be liberals. These results on political asymmetries are aligned with prior work on news-based misinformation sharing

      This suggests the misinformation sharing elites may influence whether followers become more extreme. There is little incentive not to stoke outrage as it improves engagement.

    4. Estimated ideological extremity is associated with higher elite misinformation-exposure scores for estimated conservatives more so than estimated liberals.

      Political ideology is estimated using accounts followed10. b Political ideology is estimated using domains shared30 (Red: conservative, blue: liberal). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

      Estimated ideological extremity is associated with higher language toxicity and moral outrage scores for estimated conservatives more so than estimated liberals.

      The relationship between estimated political ideology and (a) language toxicity and (b) expressions of moral outrage. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for visualization purposes. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

    5. In the co-share network, a cluster of websites shared more by conservatives is also shared more by users with higher misinformation exposure scores.

      Nodes represent website domains shared by at least 20 users in our dataset and edges are weighted based on common users who shared them. a Separate colors represent different clusters of websites determined using community-detection algorithms29. b The intensity of the color of each node shows the average misinformation-exposure score of users who shared the website domain (darker = higher PolitiFact score). c Nodes’ color represents the average estimated ideology of the users who shared the website domain (red: conservative, blue: liberal). d The intensity of the color of each node shows the average use of language toxicity by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher use of toxic language). e The intensity of the color of each node shows the average expression of moral outrage by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher expression of moral outrage). Nodes are positioned using directed-force layout on the weighted network.

    6. Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with the use of toxic language and moral outrage.

      Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the toxicity of the language used in their tweets, measured using the Google Jigsaw Perspective API27, and (b) the extent to which their tweets involved expressions of moral outrage, measured using the algorithm from ref. 28. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for visualization purposes. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

    1. Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with sharing news from lower-quality outlets and with conservative estimated ideology.

      Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by professional fact-checkers21, (b) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by layperson crowds21, and (c) estimated political ideology, based on the ideology of the accounts they follow10. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin.

    1. Notice that Twitter’s account purge significantly impacted misinformation spread worldwide: the proportion of low-credible domains in URLs retweeted from U.S. dropped from 14% to 7%. Finally, despite not having a list of low-credible domains in Russian, Russia is central in exporting potential misinformation in the vax rollout period, especially to Latin American countries. In these countries, the proportion of low-credible URLs coming from Russia increased from 1% in vax development to 18% in vax rollout periods (see Figure 8 (b), Appendix).

    2. Interestingly, the fraction of low-credible URLs coming from U.S. dropped from 74% in the vax devel-opment period to 55% in the vax rollout. This large decrease can be directly ascribed to Twitter’s moderationpolicy: 46% of cross-border retweets of U.S. users linking to low-credible websites in the vax developmentperiod came from accounts that have been suspended following the U.S. Capitol attack (see Figure 8 (a), Ap-pendix).
    3. Considering the behavior of users in no-vax communities,we find that they are more likely to retweet (Figure 3(a)), share URLs (Figure 3(b)), and especially URLs toYouTube (Figure 3(c)) than other users. Furthermore, the URLs they post are much more likely to be fromlow-credible domains (Figure 3(d)), compared to those posted in the rest of the networks. The differenceis remarkable: 26.0% of domains shared in no-vax communities come from lists of known low-credibledomains, versus only 2.4% of those cited by other users (p < 0.001). The most common low-crediblewebsites among the no-vax communities are zerohedge.com, lifesitenews.com, dailymail.co.uk (consideredright-biased and questionably sourced) and childrenshealthdefense.com (conspiracy/pseudoscience)
    1. We applied two scenarios to compare how these regular agents behave in the Twitter network, with and without malicious agents, to study how much influence malicious agents have on the general susceptibility of the regular users. To achieve this, we implemented a belief value system to measure how impressionable an agent is when encountering misinformation and how its behavior gets affected. The results indicated similar outcomes in the two scenarios as the affected belief value changed for these regular agents, exhibiting belief in the misinformation. Although the change in belief value occurred slowly, it had a profound effect when the malicious agents were present, as many more regular agents started believing in misinformation.

    1. Therefore, although the social bot individual is “small”, it has become a “super spreader” with strategic significance. As an intelligent communication subject in the social platform, it conspired with the discourse framework in the mainstream media to form a hybrid strategy of public opinion manipulation.
    2. There were 120,118 epidemy-related tweets in this study, and 34,935 Twitter accounts were detected as bot accounts by Botometer, accounting for 29%. In all, 82,688 Twitter accounts were human, accounting for 69%; 2495 accounts had no bot score detected.In social network analysis, degree centrality is an index to judge the importance of nodes in the network. The nodes in the social network graph represent users, and the edges between nodes represent the connections between users. Based on the network structure graph, we may determine which members of a group are more influential than others. In 1979, American professor Linton C. Freeman published an article titled “Centrality in social networks conceptual clarification“, on Social Networks, formally proposing the concept of degree centrality [69]. Degree centrality denotes the number of times a central node is retweeted by other nodes (or other indicators, only retweeted are involved in this study). Specifically, the higher the degree centrality is, the more influence a node has in its network. The measure of degree centrality includes in-degree and out-degree. Betweenness centrality is an index that describes the importance of a node by the number of shortest paths through it. Nodes with high betweenness centrality are in the “structural hole” position in the network [69]. This kind of account connects the group network lacking communication and can expand the dialogue space of different people. American sociologist Ronald S. Bert put forward the theory of a “structural hole” and said that if there is no direct connection between the other actors connected by an actor in the network, then the actor occupies the “structural hole” position and can obtain social capital through “intermediary opportunities”, thus having more advantages.
    3. We analyzed and visualized Twitter data during the prevalence of the Wuhan lab leak theory and discovered that 29% of the accounts participating in the discussion were social bots. We found evidence that social bots play an essential mediating role in communication networks. Although human accounts have a more direct influence on the information diffusion network, social bots have a more indirect influence. Unverified social bot accounts retweet more, and through multiple levels of diffusion, humans are vulnerable to messages manipulated by bots, driving the spread of unverified messages across social media. These findings show that limiting the use of social bots might be an effective method to minimize the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech online.
    1. I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.

      Social media should be comprised of people from end to end. Corporate interests inserted into the process can only serve to dehumanize the system.


      Robin Sloan is in the same camp as Greg McVerry and I.

    1. Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new "online safety" rules that require firms to break E2E and block third-party de-enshittification tools: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-safety-made-dangerous/ The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses: Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even get a feed of things you asked to see; Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether solicited messages reach their readers; Focusing on algorithmic transparency, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms; Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties; Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair: https://doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censorship-2026c9edc0fd

      This list is particularly good.


      Proper regulation of end to end services would encourage the creation of filtering and other tools which would tend to benefit users rather than benefit the rent seeking of the corporations which own the pipes.

    1. Okay, so flashback to the 1920s and the emergence of something called the public interest mandate, basically when radio was new, a ton of people wanted to broadcast the demand for space on the dial outstripped supply. So to narrow the field, the federal government says that any station using the public airwaves needs to serve the public interest. So what do they mean by the public interest? Yeah, right? It's like super vague, right? But the FCC clarified what it meant by public interest in the years following World War Two, They had seen how radio could be used to promote fascism in Europe, and they didn't want us radio stations to become propaganda outlets. And so in 1949, the FCC basically says to stations in order to serve the public, you need to give airtime to coverage of current events and you have to include multiple perspectives in your coverage. This is the basis of what comes to be known as the fairness doctrine.

      Origin of the FCC Fairness Doctrine

    1. I'd love it to be normal and everyday to not assume that when you post a message on your social network, every person is reading it in a similar UI, either to the one you posted from, or to the one everyone else is reading it in.

      🤗

    1. [https://a.gup.pe/ Guppe Groups] a group of bot accounts that can be used to aggregate social groups within the [[fediverse]] around a variety of topics like [[crafts]], books, history, philosophy, etc.

    1. Musk appears to be betting that the spectacle is worth it. He’s probably correct in thinking that large swaths of the world will not deem his leadership a failure either because they are ideologically aligned with him or they simply don’t care and aren’t seeing any changes to their corner of the Twitterverse.

      How is this sort of bloodsport similar/different to the news media coverage of Donald J. Trump in 2015/2016?

      The similarities over creating engagement within a capitalistic framing along with the need to only garner at least a minimum amount of audience to support the enterprise seem to be at play.

      Compare/contrast this with the NBAs conundrum with the politics of entering the market in China.

    2. A lot has changed about our news media ecosystem since 2007. In the United States, it’s hard to overstate how the media is entangled with contemporary partisan politics and ideology. This means that information tends not to flow across partisan divides in coherent ways that enable debate.

      Our media and social media systems have been structured along with the people who use them such that debate is stifled because information doesn't flow coherently across the political partisan divide.

    3. I often think back to MySpace’s downfall. In 2007, I penned a controversial blog post noting a division that was forming as teenagers self-segregated based on race and class in the US, splitting themselves between Facebook and MySpace. A few years later, I noted the role of the news media in this division, highlighting how media coverage about MySpace as scary, dangerous, and full of pedophiles (regardless of empirical evidence) helped make this division possible. The news media played a role in delegitimizing MySpace (aided and abetted by a team at Facebook, which was directly benefiting from this delegitimization work).

      danah boyd argued in two separate pieces that teenagers self-segregated between MySpace and Facebook based on race and class and that the news media coverage of social media created fear, uncertainty, and doubt which fueled the split.

      http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

    1. “The damage commercial social media has done to politics, relationships and the fabric of society needs undoing.
    2. As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.
    1. I have about fourteen or sixteen weeks to do this, so I'm breaking the course into an "intro" section that covers some basic stuff like affordances, and other insights into how tech functions. There's a section on AI which is nothing but critical appraisals on AI from a variety of areas. And there's a section on Social Media, which is the most well formed section in terms of readings.

      https://zirk.us/@shengokai/109440759945863989

      If the individuals in an environment don't understand or perceive the affordances available to them, can the interactions between them and the environment make it seem as if the environment possesses agency?

      cross reference: James J. Gibson book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966)


      People often indicate that social media "causes" outcomes among groups of people who use it. Eg: Social media (via algorithmic suggestions of fringe content) causes people to become radicalized.

  8. Nov 2022
    1. The TTRG (time to reply guy) was getting so fast, that I can’t actually remember the last time I tweeted something helpful like a design or development tip. I just couldn’t be arsed, knowing some dickhead would be around to waste my time with whataboutisms and “will it scale”?
    1. 11/30 Youth Collaborative

      I went through some of the pieces in the collection. It is important to give a platform to the voices that are missing from the conversation usually.

      Just a few similar initiatives that you might want to check out:

      Storycorps - people can record their stories via an app

      Project Voice - spoken word poetry

      Living Library - sharing one's story

      Freedom Writers - book and curriculum based on real-life stories

    1. If more Americans were like TV Tropes’ users—that is, if they could spot the recurring motifs in purported political plots—might they also be better at separating fact from fiction?

      Perhaps EIP could partner with On the Media to produce a trope consumer handbook for elections, vaccines, and various conspiracy theory areas?

      Cross reference: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/breaking-news-consumers-handbook

    2. As part of the Election Integrity Partnership, my team at the Stanford Internet Observatory studies online rumors, and how they spread across the internet in real time.