Untangling Threads by Erin Kissane

Untangling Threads by Erin Kissane on 2023-12-21

This immediately brings up the questions of how the following - founder effects and being overwhelmed by the scale of an eternal September - communism of community interactions being subverted bent for the purposes of (surveillance) capitalism (see @Graeber2011, Debt)

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.

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

Navlakha, M. (2022, January 24). On Substack, COVID misinformation is allowed to flourish. Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/substack-covid-misinformation

Defeat The Mandates: Green Our Vaccines reconstituted for COVID-19. (2022, January 21). RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE. https://respectfulinsolence.com/2022/01/21/defeat-the-mandates-green-our-vaccines-reconstituted-for-covid-19/

The online information environment | Royal Society. (n.d.). Retrieved January 21, 2022, from https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/online-information-environment/

mdr.de. (n.d.). Wie sich die Zivilgesellschaft in Mitteldeutschland zunehmend gegen die Corona-Proteste stemmt | MDR.DE. Retrieved January 16, 2022, from https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/gesellschaft/corona-proteste-zivilgesellschaft-sachsen-anhalt-thueringen-100.html

Perhaps better would be stipulations in the contract that incentivize authors to leverage their platforms in the form of bonuses while removing the advance money in lieu. Make the author part of the promotion, which has been part of the movement in publishing for the last decade.

This seems like common sense to me, why hasn't the industry grokked it?

Recommended Reading: Amazon’s algorithms, conspiracy theories and extremist literature. (n.d.). ISD. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/recommended-reading-amazons-algorithms-conspiracy-theories-and-extremist-literature/

ReconfigBehSci. (2021, November 2). The current JCVI minutes debate clearly illustrates the problems with Twitter and scientific debate: Meaning glossed, hedges and distinctions left behind, claims about arguments conflated with claims about people, paving the way to ramped up, emotive soundbites and claims. 1/7 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1455458854637117440

Hosseinmardi, H., Ghasemian, A., Clauset, A., Mobius, M., Rothschild, D. M., & Watts, D. J. (2021). Examining the consumption of radical content on YouTube. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(32), e2101967118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101967118

Schmitt, C. E., November 7, & 2020. (n.d.). ‘Be the Twitter that you want to see in the world’. Harvard Law Today. Retrieved 1 March 2021, from https://today.law.harvard.edu/be-the-twitter-that-you-want-to-see-in-the-world/

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

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

Fukuyama, Barak Richman and Francis. “How to Quiet the Megaphones of Facebook, Google and Twitter.” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2021, sec. Life. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-quiet-the-megaphones-of-facebook-google-and-twitter-11613068856.

This is one of the key reasons people look to social media--for the connections and the network they don't have via non-digital means. Most of the people I've seen with large blogs or well-traveled websites have simply done a much better job of connecting and interacting with their audience and personal networks. To a great extent this is because they've built up a large email list to send people content directly. Those people then read their material and comment on their blogs.

This is something the IndieWeb can help people work toward in a better fashion, particularly with better independent functioning feed readers.

Cookson, J. A., Engelberg, J. E., & Mullins, W. (2020). Does Partisanship Shape Investor Beliefs? Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/rwhse

Newman, N. (n.d.). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020. 112.

Velásquez, N., Leahy, R., Restrepo, N. J., Lupu, Y., Sear, R., Gabriel, N., Jha, O., Goldberg, B., & Johnson, N. F. (2020). Hate multiverse spreads malicious COVID-19 content online beyond individual platform control. ArXiv:2004.00673 [Nlin, Physics:Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00673

In publishing circles, this has long been known as platform or author platform--ie that thing that made you famous in the first place that gives you the space to attempt to try to use that fame to sell books.