Democracy & (dis)information

Apr 22

Yesterday, Barack Obama spoke at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center about information challenges to democracy. (Video of his address unfortunately omits an introduction from Tiana Epps-Johnson on how disinformation affects election administrators). For summary coverage, Will Oremus live-tweeted the event and Platformer takes a look at Obama’s recommendations about how to address the problem.

Daniel Kreiss offered three takeaways of his own:

Public debate and policy-making on platforms and democracy is incoherent because few agree on what we should be solving for and why.
So much of what is at issue are 'tradeoffs'; between misinformation and expression, participation and deliberation, fairness and electoral safeguards, etc.
Finally, these problems are hard because they are rarely (just) about disinformation. They are political, social, economic, cultural, and always about power.

To build on Obama’s disinformation and democracy reading list with CITAP work that addresses these takeaways, we’d recommend:

Zeynep Tufekci noted that these recommendations represent a shift from the Obama administration-era approach of not regulating the role of platforms in our society.

Finally, through an accident of scheduling, Jonathan Ong spoke yesterday at CITAP about his research into disinformation networks and troll farms in the Philippines. The relationships among political elites, campaign communications staff, and the teams hosting fake social media profiles to promote divisive, false, and democratically-harmful content may sound quite familiar, and the talk is an excellent contribution to understanding the information threat to democracy from politicians themselves. The talk—and Ong’s own reading list—are worth a look:

Jonathan Corpus Ong @jonathan_c_ong

So this is not quite President Obama’s disinformation studies reading list 👇🏾

Shannon McGregor, PhD @shannimcg

So excited to host @jonathan_c_ong @unc_citap — starting with a rich foundation of disinfo perspectives https://t.co/w3kwSRUids

Immigration on YouTube

This week, Define American released “‘Immigration Will Destroy Us’ and Other Talking Points,” a report on how popular anti-immigration YouTube videos frame the issue and their influence on offline conversations and perceptions. Francesca Tripodi contributed to the report, analyzing the content of the 23 most-watched videos with anti-immigration messages and documenting how they promote the Great Replacement Theory narrative.

Common tactics used in these videos include:

Calls to logic and common sense (“trust me, I’ve done the research”)
Appeals to fear
Malinformation, or true statistics or data taken out of context to support false conclusions

The full report is available from Define American.

Welcoming the Center for Technology Policy

We’re excited to welcome new CITAP neighbors to UNC! Launched yesterday, the Center for Technology Policy seeks to craft public policy for a better internet.

Their initial report, “Understanding, Enforcement, and Investment: Options and Opportunities for State Regulation of Online Content” explores how states are already passing laws that shape content moderation and online content, as well as what possible future state-level interventions could accomplish. In a hurry? Axios offered a summary.

Publications and appearances

Deen Freelon joined Meredith Clark and Charleton McIlwain on the ICA podcast One World, One Network? to discuss their experiences as Black graduate students and scholars.

“Not having a regular relationship with a medical provider — too common in the United States — leaves these high-risk people open to confusion and misinformation, especially in the current political environment. People without insurance lagged in being vaccinated at all and will face more obstacles in getting antivirals.” Zeynep Tufekci wrote about the systemic barriers to distributing Covid drugs for the New York Times.

“It absolutely is not independent research because the Facebook researchers are holding our hands metaphorically in terms of what we can and can’t do.” Deen Freelon spoke with Undark about why researchers need access to social media data.

Coming soon

April 26, 4pm: Shannon McGregor joins a virtual conversation on Disinformation, Media, & Democracy hosted by Brown University, alongside Brendan Nyhan, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Kate Klonick, and Yukang Yang. Registration is open to the public.

April 28, 5:30pm: MIT Libraries are hosting an evening with Tressie McMillan Cottom. The event will be hybrid, with a livestream available.

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.

August 16: Francesca Tripodi’s The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy comes out. The book is available for pre-order now, and early reviews suggest you won’t want to miss it: