This week on Does Not Compute – Conspiracy and Racism
What do conspiracy theories and racism have in common? More than you might think. This week, Deen Freelon discusses how white supremacy itself is a kind of highly successful disinformation campaign and how a willingness to believe all sorts of terrible and false things about people of other races might open a door to believing falsehoods about science, medicine, politics and other topics.
Even when Black communities and right-wing political groups express similar distrust of official government sources and embrace conspiracies, they do so via very different paths. We talk about conspiracies, racism, and recognizing when the government actually is out to get you.
New publication: Ms. Categorized
Women are disproportionately subject to erroneous nominations for deletion from Wikipedia. Francesca Tripodi gathered data on articles that were flagged for removal under the site’s notability requirements but were ultimately found to be notable and not deleted. She found that “Even though women still make up less than 19% of all available biographies on English-language Wikipedia, women routinely make up a quarter of the biographies nominated for deletion each month.”
Most notably, over several months’ of data in the study, women’s biographies were twice as likely as men’s biographies to be miscategorized as non-notable.
The gender gap on Wikipedia is well known. The Wikimedia Foundation notes that “On English Wikipedia, fewer than 18 percent of biographies are about women.” In addition to the well-documented challenges to representation among the site’s biographical articles and editor community, “Ms. Categorized” identifies a new hurdle to representation on Wikipedia—the intentional, disproportionate, removal of existing articles about women, nonbinary, and trans subjects.
As she writes,
“Wikipedians trying to close the gender gap must work nearly twice as hard to prove women’s notability, devoting extra time to track the biographies they create to ensure notable biographies about women are not subsequently deleted… One month, multiple biographies about women were nominated with the same phrase copy and pasted over and over: ‘I don’t see how she manages to pass our notability guidelines.'”
CITAP Book Club 📚
This week a small group of CITAP affiliates gathered to discuss Sarah Brayne’s Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing. The book gives an unusually close look at the LAPD. (Like really close—the depth and access that Dr. Brayne was able to achieve in her field data is pretty amazing.) Here’s what was on our minds after reading:
The book gives a lot of insight into how organizational politics play into the adoption of emerging tech, but what other power dynamics are at play, and who else stands to benefit from the trends Dr. Brayne describes so well? (Journalists? Holders of public office?)
Dr. Brayne shows that police resistance to officer surveillance is strongly influenced by personal identity and “function creep” in technology. How might agencies redefine what successful policing looks like to shift occupational norms and normalize using data to address problems in policing?
Sociologists have been thinking critically about data sets and representation for decades, but many in the computer science community deprioritize the question of bias and ethics for fear of hampering innovation. If incentives and values differ across disciplines, what does that mean for how we approach interventions?
If you’ve been reading along with us, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And if you’re reading ahead, next month we’ll be diving into Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, by André Brock Jr.
Recent publications and appearances
“Our interpersonal communication, our movements and many of our everyday actions, are all potentially accessible for scientific research; sometimes through purposive instrumentation for scientific objectives (for example, satellite imagery), but far more often these objectives are, literally, an afterthought (for example, Twitter data streams).” Deen Freelon and colleagues evaluate meaningful measures of human society in the twenty-first century in Nature.
"Many of those drawn into communities that trafficked in conspiracy theories also found misinformation and disinformation. The former is shared without malicious intent. The latter comprises false information, distorted stereotypes, and mischaracterizations as part of a campaign of persuasion.” Alice Marwick was quoted in an essay about conspiracy theories as a mental health crisis.
“In the past six months in particular, conservative think tanks, commentators, and news media have waged an all-out disinformation war on their version of critical race theory, which is a catch-all for diversity efforts, anti-racist education, “cancel culture,” and unconscious bias training—or any talk of racial inequality at all.” Alice Marwick and Daniel Kreiss’s recent piece on Nikole Hannah-Jones was referenced in an article about how right wing media fueled the CRT panic.
“Ultimately, what I think activists and faculty are working toward is that it really shouldn’t take all this pressure to have these kinds of routine and common-sense decisions to be made.” Deen Freelon spoke to WRAL about Nikole Hannah-Jones following the UNC Board of Trustees’ decision to award her tenure.
“In holding a vision and commitment to a future without carceral systems, we challenge the notion that law enforcement, including more data collection and training, will end anti-Asian violence. We need responses to violence without enacting further violence.” Rachel Kuo and colleague Matthew Bui argue against carceral data collection as a response to anti-Asian violence.
CITAP affiliates Scott Brennen and Matt Perault announced a project to request the FEC to improve spending transparency of campaigns and PACs.
Going places
Congratulations to CITAP Affiliate Dr. Kirsten Adams Eddy on successfully defending her dissertation, “The Righteous and the Woke”!
Congratulations also to CITAP Graduate Michele Meyer on her new position as Senior Director of Research & Methodologies for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media!
Know someone who should consider this role? The Knight Foundation’s Learning & Impact team is hiring: