Hello, friends, and goodbye—after three years and over 100 of these weekly updates, this is my last CITAP newsletter.
I came to CITAP in 2020 hoping to learn a thing or two about disinformation and why my previous decade’s work in voter engagement and election information felt existentially threatened by sudden public distrust in the outcome. It feels strange now to describe it that way, knowing our work on critical disinformation studies, political identity ownership, data voids and search manipulation, and why people share fake news, but it’s how I understood the issue at the time. But the roots of our democratic crisis aren’t new, and neither are the solutions. Building a robust, multiracial democracy requires upholding voting rights and equal voice. Yes, platforms should enforce consistent policies for political speech. Absolutely, journalists should use democracy-centered frames in their coverage. Most of the rest of us should not let fact-checking whack-a-mole distract from the real work of restoring public accountability and small-d democratic power. At least, that’s what I’m most hopeful about working on in my next chapter.
And that’s valuable research that will continue at CITAP. Our call for the next Executive Director is open and I hope you’ll share it with your friends, on LinkedIn and zombie Twitter, here on Substack, and wherever we might find the right person to join this truly amazing team.
So, what does an executive director do around here, anyway? You hear from me each Friday with updates on our research and work, but what happens Monday through Thursday?
Facilitation. With five PIs and a deep bench of other researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students, CITAP enjoys an abundance of big ideas. I’ve loved getting to ask strategic questions, seek consensus, navigate difference and conflict, and ensure that the center is supporting and upholding the researchers’ vision.
Building relationships and matchmaking. Our work is deeply collaborative. Whether it’s co-hosting a workshop on January 6 with the Institute for Data, Democracy, & Politics, advising the German Marshall Fund’s Civic Information Handbook, pitching our work to funders, or convening our affiliate community, I’ve been lucky to work with some of our smartest, most engaged peers doing complementary work and build closer ties among those many partners.
Operations and program. Every big idea needs an execution plan, whether it’s a speaker series or a new Bulletin for Tech & Public Life, a podcast, or a new graduate researcher role. Figuring out “how do we start this?” and then “how do we do this better?” is a constant creative challenge.
Telling stories. information, technology, and public life is a HUGE topic area, but there are so many common threads that unite our work within that space. Listening for those shared roots and then writing them down—including in these messages to you every Friday—has been a whole education.
I’ve especially enjoyed supporting our podcast series on disinformation, the launch of the Bulletin of Tech and Public Life, CITAP’s founding role in the Public Technology Leadership Collaborative, and our graduate students’ leadership in both research and public scholarship work as we’ve established new GRA roles focused on research translation, policy engagement, and community building.
Over the last year, I’ve facilitated a series of strategic planning conversations, and we’ve identified five key areas where CITAP’s research can impact digital society: addressing authoritarian technologies and inequality, designing for information integrity, understanding democratic backsliding, identifying alternatives to individualized accountability in the face of systemic issues, and tracking journalism’s evolution. Those issue areas suggest a whole host of new opportunities for research, engagement, and agenda setting for a new leader to take up.
If that sounds like the right creative challenge for you or anyone you know, please send them our way!
And if you’d like to keep in touch, I’m still on X (for now) as @katyetc, on Substack and Notes with that same handle.
Online privacy and generative AI
“In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg told the audience at a TechCrunch awards ceremony that young people-especially social media users-no longer cared about privacy. "People have gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he said. "That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." While this statement obviously hasn't aged well, it reflects a common belief that privacy violations happen when individuals reveal their own information. In other words, when something posted to Reddit or TikTok goes viral, or a nude photo sent to an admirer leaks, it's first and foremost the fault of the person who posted it. This model of individualized accountability is very persistent. It's also completely wrong. And it's irrelevant in the age of generative AI.”
Alice Marwick writes in WIRED about how generative AI makes the lie of individualized responsibility for privacy even more clear and explains how understanding networked privacy is the only way forward.
Deep stories and dog whistles
“Deep stories are these narratives that are told and retold, whether it's in church or around a campfire, or in school or around the dinner table, that you don't actually have to hear the whole story to understand the moral of the story. These are stories that feel true even if they are not particularly accurate. And how this aligns with my research is that propagandists and conspiracy theorists are particularly good at tapping into that deep story, so you can signal to this concept with just one or two words, this idea without actually having to get into the whole idea. So it's actually kind of aligning a lot of Lopez's work on dog whistles. And thinking about how dog whistles intersect with deep stories, because dog whistles are wrapped up in resentment. With just a few words, you can understand what they are. And so I argue that part of how you make dog whistle effective is by connecting it to that deep story.”
Francesca Tripodi talks about her research with the Media @ Risk podcast.
Coming soon
August 30 at APSA: CITAP is co-hosting the APSA Pre-Conference in Political Communication: The Age of Misinformation.
September 7 at 3pm at CITAP & online: CITAP is hosting Lee McGuigan for a book talk on his book “Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech.” In the Freedom Forum and via livestream: details and RSVP.
October 16 at CITAP & online: We’re hosting the Misinformation and Marginalization Symposium. How does misinformation circulate in marginalized communities, and what misinformation narratives are shared about marginalized groups?
Featuring a keynote from Dr. Sarah Banet-Weiser and panels on misinformation and gender & sexuality; diasporic communities; and algorithmic amplification, race, and religion. Register to join in person or virtually!
October 18 at AoIR: Alice Marwick, Yvonne Eadon, and Rachel Kuo are among the co-organizers of an AoIR preconference on future of conspiracy.
October 22 at the Annenberg Public Policy Center: The Post-API Conference.
November 10 at CITAP & online: A symposium on Religion, Media, and Public Life.
Confirmed panelists include Whitney Phillips, Samuel Perry, Eden Consenstein, Xavier Pickett, Erika Gault, and Heidi Campbell, with additional participants to be named in the weeks to come. Register to join in person or virtually!
Rest of Web
Alice Marwick recommends: “I FINALLY found the killer app for ChatGPT: Cutting down my 13,000+ word papers to 10,000 words so I can actually submit them. Yes it involves onerously cutting and pasting paragraphs and laboriously rewriting everything but it WORKS. Thank you to Francesca Tripodi for this hot tip.”