Daniel Kreiss posted his contributions to last week’s The Capitol Coup One Year Later event to Medium as “What Researchers Must Do Differently After January 6th, 2021”
First, we need to move from talking about polarization to talking about status threats.
Second, center power and interest in studies of disinformation and propaganda.
Third, what we do well as a field is media, but we should have more explicit efforts to incorporate what comparativists and institutionalists tell us about democratic decay and backsliding, and give back to their literature in turn.
Recent publications and appearances
“It is no wonder that so many of us think that we can parse vaccine trial data, compare personal protective equipment, write school policy and call career scientists idiots on Facebook. We are know-it-alls because we are responsible for knowing everything. And God forbid we should not know something and get scammed. If that happens, it is definitely our fault. It does not have to be this way.” Tressie McMillan Cottom begins her promised exploration of scam culture in The New York Times.
The Anti-Defamation League released “Very Fine People: What Social Media Platforms Miss About White Supremacist Speech,” citing work by Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis.
“Science is inherently uncertain and changes, which makes tackling misinformation exceedingly difficult.” Affiliate Kolina Koltai spoke with The New York Times about a new spike in Covid disinformation.
Affiliate Bridget Barrett reviewed Subprime Attention Crisis for the International Journal of Communication, concluding that it “serves as a good starter to dive deeper into big, thorny problems, and will surely lead readers deeper down the rabbit hole of programmatic media buying.”
Coming soon
January 21: CITAP, the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, and the First Amendment Law Review will cohost a virtual symposium on election speech and the First Amendment, featuring
FEC commissioner Shana Broussard.
February 18: The call for papers is up for CITAP’s cosponsored ICA preconference What Comes After Disinformation Studies? The preconference will take place May 25, 2022 in Paris, France. Submissions due February 18.
Rest of Web
Candy hearts to Nikki Usher, who’ll be teaching “How we love (online)” on Valentine’s Day, using Chapter 6 of Nancy Baym’s Personal Connections in the Digital Age and pieces on Tinder and dating in the digital age.
"I would suggest that the tech policy world’s view of the CFAA as exceptional is primarily driven by its lack of contact with the criminal legal system. And that, I would suspect, is due to its Whiteness." Kendra Albert explores the respectability politics of “Hacking is not a crime.”
“Your company platform has so far framed discussions about disinformation as a false dichotomy of deleting or not deleting content. By doing this, YouTube is avoiding the possibility of doing what has been proven to work.” Global fact-checking organizations call on YouTube to address the spread of mis- and disinformation on the platform.