What would it mean to place analyses of race and ethnicity at the heart of communication theory and research?
In a book review for Communication Theory, Daniel Kreiss explores how three books—Distributed Blackness: African American cybercultures, #HashtagActivism: Networks of race and gender justice, and Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, smartphones, and the new protest #journalism—do exactly that. Collectively, their authors take up the challenge issued in 2018 by the authors of “#CommunicationSoWhite” to “[engage] with work that addresses racial antagonisms as central features shaping modern communicative practices.”
“As these books argue across many different domains, race and ethnicity are structuring aspects of human societies, and therefore at the heart of communication. They show us how social differentiation and social inequality affects communication, even as communication reifies or transforms social structures and social identities in turn.”
—Daniel Kreiss
Learning to distinguish truth from fiction online
Congratulations to Francesca Tripodi and her collaborators Justin Reich and Sam Wineburg on winning an NSF Convergence Accelerator grant to support their research into addressing mis- and disinformation.
“Our goal is to take current media literacy interventions and adapt them to be more effective for communities who evaluate and trust information differently.”
—Francesca Tripodi
Recent publications and appearances
“In some ways, the very system that allows activists to be able to engage in hashtag activism is also supported by algorithmic rabbit holes that lead people to white nationalism and disinformation that prevents people from, or that makes people think that vaccines are going to harm them.“ Deen Freelon appeared on the Reimagining the Internet podcast from the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure to discuss online activism and ideological asymmetries in how the right and left use digital tools.
“We’re seeing this technological utopianism hitting against our experience with COVID...and starting as a world to realize that these tools are not solving some of the problems we thought they might be.” CITAP co-hosted a panel on Technology, Inclusiveness, Structural Racism, and Silicon Valley featuring Rachel Kuo, Francesca Tripodi, and CITAP affiliates Amelia Gibson and David Ardia.
““Technopanics have the following characteristics: First, they focus on new media forms, which currently take the form of computer–mediated technologies. Second, technopanics generally pathologize young people’s use of this media, like hacking, file–sharing, or playing violent video games. Third, this cultural anxiety manifests itself in an attempt to modify or regulate young people’s behavior, either by controlling young people or the creators or producers of media products.” Ryan Broderick discussed Alice Marwick’s 2008 paper on MySpace to challenge current media claims that TikTok is corrupting children.
“When people make things themselves, the perceived value in them rises. It’s the Ikea Effect of misinformation.” Franesca Tripodi spoke to Rolling Stone about misconceptions of QAnon and conspiratorial thinking as a new phenomenon.
“The Covid concept home demonstrates both the exuberant quality of American consumption — that we can buy our way out of everything — and its limits as a solution. Designing for problems that may seem straightforward in a survey may sound really cool...but the problems posed by Covid can’t really be solved at the level of the household. These are structural, collective problems: politically and culturally, economically and spiritually.” Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses how the pandemic has changed perspectives on labor, and by extension, perceptions of the home.
Coming soon
October 25: Danielle Kilgo Brown will deliver a talk on Black women, police violence and intersectional oppression in the media as part of the Hussman Media Justice series, co-sponsored by CITAP.
October 27: Rachel Kuo will lead a virtual research workshop on transnational and intergenerational histories of information at Duke University.
October 27: Faculty affiliate Caitlin Petre will give a research seminar at the University of Leeds on how metrics are transforming the work of journalists.
October 29: Deen Freelon and Andrew Crist will discuss their use of the Twitter API for research on the Twitter Developer livestream at twitch.tv/twitterdev.
November 4: Nikki Usher will deliver a talk about her new book “News for the Rich, White, and Blue” as part of the Hussman Media Justice series, co-sponsored by CITAP.
November 11-12: It’s not too late to register for the QAnonference!
Rest of Web
In our study, we examined algorithmic amplification of political content in the Home timeline by asking the following questions:
How much algorithmic amplification does political content from elected officials receive in Twitter’s algorithmically ranked Home timeline versus in the reverse chronological timeline? Does this amplification vary across political parties or within a political party?
Are some types of political groups algorithmically amplified more than others? Are these trends consistent across countries?
Are some news outlets amplified more by algorithms than others? Does news media algorithmic amplification favor one side of the political spectrum more than the other?
Twitter released new research showing that its algorithms amplify right-leaning political content more than left-leaning, which Protocol summarizes.
📄 A great article in Science Advances on why people express outrage online and how that builds into cascades of outrage.