Morally motivated
Understanding how online harassers justify their attacks & documenting disinformation against Nikole-Hannah Jones
This week, Alice Marwick published a new piece in Social Media & Society. “Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement” explores how communities band together to reinforce their shared moral norms by harassing perceived violations of those norms.
She sums it up in a Twitter thread:
She finds that networked, coordinated harassment is done by all kinds of communities, from partisan political groups to fandoms. Though the origins of harassment are not necessarily identity-based, the resulting attacks use race, gender, sexuality, religion, and other attributes as vectors, making it more likely that people with marginalized identities will be harassed in ways that are intersectional/more harmful for individuals with multiple marginalized identities.
The key point is that while harrassers draw from identity-based stereotypes in their attacks, they understand their actions as morally justified and based in the target’s actions, rather than their identity. Alice offers two examples, “I'm not against Anita Sarkeesian because I'm a misogynist/anti-feminist, but because she's a scammer/liar,” and “I'm not against the 1619 project/Nikole Hannah Jones b/c I'm racist/my white ID is threatened but because she's a liar who hates white people and white children.”
Read the full paper (it’s open access!)
The disinformation campaign against Nikole Hannah-Jones
This week in Slate, Alice Marwick and Daniel Kreiss break down the disinformation campaign against the 1619 Project. They write:
Debate and disagreement are at the heart of academia—but conservative disinformation campaigns are deliberately spread to advance particular political and ideological goals. In the Hannah-Jones case, the board was under tremendous pressure from local conservative groups and wealthy donors to intervene in the appointment. Hannah-Jones founded the New York Times’ 1619 Project, an effort to center the history and legacy of slavery and the experiences of Black Americans in U.S. history.
CITAP affiliate and Hussman graduate student Daniel Jones added his perspective in The Hill, noting:
In contrast to a recent controversial issue on our campus, it is disturbing to consider the possibility that the Board of Trustees moved faster to target a Pulitzer, McArthur, and Peabody-award winning journalist over ideas they opposed than they did to tear down a monument erected in honor of those who took up arms against the United States. It took over 54 years of protests to remove “Silent Sam,” the monument to Confederate soldiers on UNC’s campus, before it was finally toppled in 2018.
Recent publications and appearances
"The strategy in calling it an audit to begin with creates the illusion of legality — the illusion of a government-backed agency... And when I think of an audit, I think of wrongdoing immediately."” Francesca Tripodi spoke to NPR about the election ‘audit’ taking place in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Dr. Tripodi also gave the keynote address for the Responsible Machine Learning Conference and was profiled by campus media for her work on media literacy skills.
“Disinformation and radicalization 'actually emerge as a result of cultural, technical, and economic forces working together’...’ Even something that fuels the less-crazy end of partisanship can contribute to spreading disinformation that has real consequences.’” Alice Marwick and CITAP affiliate Becca Lewis spoke to Whitney Phillips and the Columbia Journalism Review about how disinformation is polluting our media environment.
Dr. Marwick also spoke to iNews about how anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists use anti-Semitic memes to spread Covid misinformation online.
“The rapid convergence of speech and technology on social media platforms means it is likely the case that, either now or soon, more expressive activity will be regulated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) than by any legislature, regulator, or other government entity... However, automated front-end filtering of user speech via AI is in serious tension with several core tenets of First Amendment doctrine. ” CITAP affiliate Enrique Armijo has a new paper in SSRN advocating for robust notice and procedural rights for platform users whose speech is regulated via AI.
Coming soon
June 19: Tressie McMillan Cottom will be speaking alongside Jasmine Griffin during the Schomburg Center Literary Festival and literary competition. Registration is free and open to the general public.
Rest of Web
Daniel Kreiss comments on a major policy change at Facebook:
Data & Society is hiring!