Better journalism, informing communities of color, and *sigh* Twitter
Yesterday, Dr. Samuel Woolley testified about how communities of color are targeted with electoral disinformation in front of the US House Committee on Administration. He offered four key findings about electoral disinformation targeting communities of color:
Encrypted and private messaging apps like WhatsApp are important communication tools and major vectors for political disinformation.
When seeking to influence minority communities, disinformers use transnational content and campaign in languages other than English.
Disinformation frequently links COVID-19 conspiracies and falsehoods to political disinformation when targeting people of color. Historical injustices in medical research and examples of racism in the medical system are used by propagandists.
Disinformation about elections aimed at communities of color is structural. For example, in keeping with our long history of suppressing the votes of people of color, disinformation frequently seeks to mislead people about how, when, and where to vote.
In his written testimony, Dr. Woolley cited critical disinformation work by Rachel Kuo and Alice Marwick, as well as recent research on transnational disinformation by Sarah Nguyễn, Rachel Kuo, Madhavi Reddi, Lan Li, and Rachel E. Moran.
Woolley concluded, “It is the human impact of computational propaganda and of digital disinformation that we should be most concerned about as a society.”
Do we have to talk about this?
On Monday, April 25th, Elon Musk reached an agreement to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. In a statement, Musk said he wants to make Twitter better and plans on “making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans.” Based on their research, CITAP faculty have expressed skepticism at this approach.
In one of her newsletters from 2020 titled “The Problem With (all) Tech Hearings”, Zeynep Tufekci discusses that when it comes to holding CEOs accountable it is “almost certain to turn into another round of the legislators playing the referees, the executives themselves, rather than policy-making by the people who had elected to be referees- the legislators. And the balance is all wrong: it’s the companies, not the legislators, that hold more power.”
Other great insights we’ve seen and shared include Ethan Zuckerman, who started a Twitter thread with “We already know little about how Twitter handles content moderation or how their algorithms work, and taking the company private makes it likely we will know less. What we do know is this: two billionaires will now control four of the major digital public sphere platforms.” Chris Bail also offered a round-up of research that contradicts many of Musk’s claims.
Publications and appearances
We’re excited that the Northern Colorado Deliberative Journalism Project used our report on the decline of local news in their work strengthening local journalism in the region.
“Ironically, even as the economic fortunes of the news media have declined precipitously, as a social group the status of journalists has increased.” Two recent pieces from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project cite Daniel Kreiss’s work to explore the Great Resignation and the need to support journalists from working-class backgrounds.
Coming soon
May 1: Deadline to submit nominations for the Nancy Baym Book Award from AoIR.
May 5: Catherine Knight Steele wraps up the CITAP spring speaker series! Full details & RSVP to join in person or save a livestream link to join us remotely.
Rest of Web
Congratulations to the 2022 Carnegie Fellows! (Special shout-out to Jonathan Ong, who recently spoke at CITAP.)
Do you want to learn about computational social science online for free? The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science has announced a new video archive!
