- Apr 2022
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barackobama.medium.com barackobama.medium.com
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One of those factors is globalization which has helped lift hundreds and millions out of poverty, most notably in China and India, but which, along with automation has also ended entire economies, accelerated global inequality, and left millions of others feeling betrayed and angry at existing political institutions.
An awareness of other structural, economic issues that are weakening democracy: Globalization, Automation, Inequality.
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increased mobility and urbanization of modern life, which further shakes up societies, including existing family structures and gender roles
Another possible structural cause of weakened democracy, though I'm not sure how urbanization leads to a decrease in communal glue.
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chronic political dysfunction, here in the U.S. and in Europe
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What social media platforms have done, though, thanks to their increasing market dominance and their emphasis on speed, is accelerate the decline of newspapers and other traditional news sources.
So this is a different way social media has intervened in the constellation of issues here then right? So to combat this issue, we might take different steps.
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the veil of anonymity that platforms provide their users
Uh oh. Is this a trial balloon for ending online anonymity?
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very specific choices made by the companies that have come to dominate the internet generally and social media platforms in particular
The move to blame specific corporate social media algorithms.
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You don’t even have to look up. And it’s made all of us more prone to what psychologists call confirmation bias
Placing blame with users, as if only users were selecting what they see online.
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it did fortify a sense of shared culture and it came to the news, at least, citizens across the political spectrum tended to operate using a shared set of facts
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the sheer proliferation of content and the splintering of information and audiences
Structural effects of global digital networks: more content, splintered audiences.
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We’ll have to come up with new models for a more inclusive, equitable capitalism. We’ll have to reform our political institutions in ways that allow people to be heard and give them real agency. We’ll have to tell better stories about ourselves and how we can live together, despite our differences.
Obama's three strategies: better capitalism, better politics, better stories/communications.
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as once marginalized groups demand a seat at the table, politicians have found a new audience for old-fashioned appeals to racial and ethnic, religious or national solidarity
This formulation almost makes it sound like marginalized folks are to blame.
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the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008
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the rise of China
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At the end of the day, tools don’t control us.
Against technodeterminism.
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K-Monitor
"We Use Technology, Research & Participatory Action to Unveil Corruption." Visit website >
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News Literacy Project
"The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan national education nonprofit, provides programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy." Visit website >
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MIT Center for Constructive Communication
"Designing tools, methods, and systems to understand and address societal fragmentation." Visit website >
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National School of Journalism and Public Discourse
"National School of Journalism (NSoJ) is a highly selective J-school that identifies and trains India's best journalistic talents. Our newsroom-focused curriculum, in-house digital news portal, expert faculty members and unparalleled industry connections prepare our students for successful careers in broadcast, print and convergence journalism." Visit website >
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the U.S. Constitution as software
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ways to give young people and the rest of us the chance to build up civic muscles
Call for civics.
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reinvigorate quality journalism, including local journalism
Call to improve journalism.
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online media literacy
Call to improve online media literacies.
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An interesting study came out recently
Preprint of study: Broockman, D., & Kalla, J. (2022, April 1). The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/jrw26
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these companies need to have some other North Star other than just making money and increasing market share
Will regulation be able to change the North Star?
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Platform Accountability and Transparency Act
PATA via Senator Coons website.
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European Union’s Digital Services Act
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tech companies need to be more transparent about how they operate
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regulation has to be part of the answer
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we need to consider reforms to Section 230 to account for those changes, including whether platforms should be required to have a higher standard of care, when it comes to advertising on their site
Possible s230 reform in advertising.
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Section 230 of the United States code
s230 first mention
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More importantly, these companies are still way too guarded about how exactly their standards operate, or how their engagement ranking systems influence what goes viral and what doesn’t.
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the need for some democratic oversight
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The problem is, we often don’t know what principles govern those decisions. And on an issue of enormous public interest, there has been little public debate and practically no democratic oversight.
Call for more transparency in social media algorithms, with a little threat of regulation.
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the First Amendment is a check on the power of the state. It doesn’t apply to private companies like Facebook or Twitter
Reminder to folks who misunderstand the reach of the First Amendment.
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I believe that in most instances the answer to bad speech is good speech.
Pretty close to a "marketplace of ideas" POV.
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There are some bugs in the software.
A solution that suggests some fixes to the existing structures will suffice.
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the transformative power and promise of the open internet
Putting the "open" in internet.
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New technologies are already challenging the way we regulate currency
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Russians could study and manipulate patterns in the engagement ranking system on a Facebook or YouTube.
This suggests there is enough transparency in social media algorithms to game them.
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the very design of these platforms seems to be tilting us in the wrong direction
Another call to focus on social media platform design.
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sophisticated actors from political consultants to commercial interests, to intelligence arms of foreign powers can game platform algorithms
Are there interventions that can be made with these actors rather than at the level of the algorithms?
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Annotators
URL
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pluralistic.net pluralistic.net
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Obama's Stanford University speech this Thursday
Read a full-text transcription of Obama's 21 April 2022 speech at Stanford University and engage in its annotated discussion.
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- Sep 2018
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Political and technological dislocation have fed off each other since the nation’s founding. Now they are dangerously out of whack.
The underlying premise is that there used to be a balance between tech innovation and political response in the USA, but since Reagan, there has not.
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- Aug 2018
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1
See also my tweet: What I coincidence! Like Facebook, I also measure people's credibility on a scale of zero to one, or what I like to think of as a scale of Pinocchio to Cassandra. It would be cool to hear what @marshallk @holden and @vgr think of this:
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- Feb 2018
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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“If we just reward content based on raw clicks and engagement, we might actually see content that is increasingly sensationalist, clickbaity, polarizing, and divisive,” she says. A social network that rewards only clicks, not subscriptions, is like a dating service that encourages one-night stands but not marriages.
sexual/matrimony metaphor
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“Social networks enable malicious actors to operate at platform scale, because they were designed for fast information flows and virality,”
why is virality the goal? venture capital, if you take away venture capital and virality, do you still get info disorder?
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Zuckerberg’s conference room (called the Aquarium) and Sandberg’s (called Only Good News)
conference rooms named after our greatest weaknesses?
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Simultaneously, authority over the algorithm shifted to a team of engineers based in Seattle. Very quickly the module started to surface lies and fiction.
LOL: responsibility transfers to engineer and lies ensue
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“We traced the creation of the Facebook accounts to IP addresses at the Apple store a block away from the MySpace offices in Santa Monica,”
MySpace people used internet access at Apple stores to try to malign Facebook.
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If Facebook didn’t start offering a better deal to the publishing industry, Thomson and Murdoch conveyed in stark terms, Zuckerberg could expect News Corp executives to become much more public in their denunciations and much more open in their lobbying.
worth thinking about before one refers to the "free press"
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whether News Feed should be modified to better deal with some of the most complex issues facing the product. Does it favor posts that make people angry? Does it favor simple or even false ideas over complex and true ones?
complex issues are...complex...and not easily made into algorithms
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As often happens when outsiders meet with Facebook, people used the time to try to figure out how they could get more followers for their own pages.
LOL: the idea that people drinking the koolaid of social could think clearly to regulate it
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Facebook decided, too, that it had to extend an olive branch to the entire American right wing, much of which was raging about the company’s supposed perfidy.
to remain neutral, one often has to take sides
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But it’s hard to argue that this wasn’t an editorial decision. It may be one of the biggest ever made.
a stylistic choice as a very profound editorial choice
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Facebook has long seemed to think it has immunity from those debates because it is just a technology company—one that has built a “platform for all ideas.”
a warning to anyone who thinks technology is neutral
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When new recruits come in, they are treated to an orientation lecture by Chris Cox, the company’s chief product officer, who tells them Facebook is an entirely new communications platform for the 21st century, as the telephone was for the 20th. But if anyone inside Facebook is unconvinced by religion, there is also Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act to recommend the idea.
when culture and legislation mix
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But Alphabet did flag “misleading” information and “objectionable content” as risks to the company’s financial performance in its annual report this week, for the first time ever.
Google's parent company now includes information disorder as a factor in its profitability and success.
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- Nov 2017
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shorensteincenter.org shorensteincenter.org
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Stuart Hall explained in his seminal work on reception theory
Stuart Hall reception theory
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Debunks themselves can be considered a form of engagement.
All news is good news.
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mis-, dis- and mal- information
3 types of infodisorder
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What we see unfolding right before our eyes is nothing less than Moore’s Law applied to the distribution of mis-information: an exponential growth of available technology coupled with a rapid collapse of costs.
Moore's law of #infodisorder.
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What could technology companies do?Create an international advisory council.Provide researchers with the data related to initiatives aimed at improving public discourse.Provide transparent criteria for any algorithmic changes that down-rank content.Work collaboratively.Highlight contextual details and build visual indicators.Eliminate financial incentives.Crack down on computational amplification.Adequately moderate non-English content.Pay attention to audio/visual forms of mis- and dis-information.Provide metadata to trusted partners.Build fact-checking and verification tools.Build ‘authenticity engines’.Work on solutions specifically aimed at minimising the impact of filter bubbles:a. Let users customize feed and search algorithms. b. Diversify exposure to different people and views. c. Allow users to consume information privately d. Change the terminology used by the social networks.
What tech companies should do about #infodisorder.
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Rather than simply thinking about communication as the transmission of information from one person to another, we must recognize that communication plays a fundamental role in representing shared beliefs. It is not just information, but drama — “a portrayal of the contending forces in the world.
Carey's thinking that communication is more than just the transmission of info.
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visual content is just as widespread and much harder to identify and debunk
is visual content harder to debunk? Google reverse image search is a powerful tool...
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interpreters
Maybe other forms of interpretation beyond ignoring and sharing? eg: critique, commentary?
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Mis-information is when false information is shared, but no harm is meant.Dis-information is when false information is knowingly shared to cause harm.Mal-information is when genuine information is shared to cause harm, often by moving information designed to stay private into the public sphere.
definitions of three types of #infodisorder: mis-, dis-, and mal-information
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we refrain from using the term ‘fake news’, for two reasons
why not to use "fake news"
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mis-, dis- and mal- information
3 types of infodisorder
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we are witnessing something new: information pollution at a global scale; a complex web of motivations for creating, disseminating and consuming these ‘polluted’ messages; a myriad of content types and techniques for amplifying content; innumerable platforms hosting and reproducing this content; and breakneck speeds of communication between trusted peers
Current info disorder is something new.
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