The Civic Information Handbook
Breaking down and countering deceptive information campaigns
Last week, the Bulletin of Technology and Public Life published a new piece by Karen Kornbluh and Adrienne Goldstein of the German Marshall Fund. The Civic Information Handbook breaks down how coordinated deceptive information campaigns work, from building audiences to identifying compelling narratives, amplifying messages, and activating followers. They also delve into how civic information providers can use some of these same approaches to promote trustworthy information.
As they note in the introduction:
To be sure, the playing field is not even. Social media platform tools are better suited for campaigns seeking to manipulate and agitate users than to empower and inform. Platforms and regulators must get involved to fix the design flaws that allow false and misleading information to flourish in the first place.[2] Policymakers should update and enforce civil and human rights laws for the online environment, compel radical transparency, update consumer protection rules, insist that industry make a high-level commitment to democratic design, and create civic information infrastructure through a new PBS of the Internet. In the absence of such policy reform, amplifiers of civic information may never be able to beat out the well-resourced, well-networked groups that intentionally spread falsehoods. Nonetheless, there are strategies for helping civic information compete.
If you’ve ever wanted to get behind the scenes and watch how a deceptive campaign takes shape, the Handbook provides examples and case studies.
Join CITAP!
Want to be part of the CITAP affiliate community for the 2023-24 academic year? We’d love to have you! We welcome researchers whose subject matter and normative commitments align with our own. The affiliate community is open to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and professional researchers across a broad range of institutions, especially within North Carolina.
For this coming year, we have three goals for our affiliate program:
Promoting public scholarship and research translation efforts that help policymakers, civil society groups, and others better understand the impact of technology on our public lives.
Supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career researchers navigating the challenges of doing interdisciplinary and publicly-engaged work.
Providing a community for researchers who could benefit from a broader network.
These goals inform our affiliate programming and are not intended to limit who should apply! (We also welcome well-connected senior researchers interested in sharing their time and talents, for example).
Publications and appearances
“I connected with this amazing data scientist, Leon Yin, who's now at the Markup. And he had a script that was able to pull from YouTube, how content creators tagged their content. It's basically a way for your content to be readable by the algorithm, so that when you search for something in YouTube, YouTube's algorithm will be like, this super matches what you want to see… I found that conservative YouTubers are just much more savvy when it comes to tagging their content, anticipating their audience's needs, as well as anticipating needs that would be outside of their audience.” Francesca Tripodi went on the Stats and Stories podcast to talk about her research.
“Competition policy seems like an obvious conversation to have, but it's not something that everybody has been thinking about. And in particular, I find that when I'm chatting with other people who are political communication scholars, we aren't necessarily used to talking about the idea of antitrust and competition because those are pretty legal and/or economic concepts. So I wanted to kind of have a chat today about what those concepts really mean.” Affiliates Elizabeth Dubois and Matt Perault talked antitrust and big tech on Dubois’s Wonks and War Rooms podcast.
👏
Our community has been racking up recognitions this spring:
The Laney Graduate School at Emory University recognized Tressie McMillan Cottom with their 2023 distinguished alumni award.
Tori Ekstrand received a UNC faculty award for global excellence. We’re grateful for her work building connections between CITAP and our peers at the University of Tübingen!
Felix Simon won the Hans Bausch Media Prize for research on journalism and AI.
Carolyn Schmitt was recognized as the outstanding master’s graduate in Media and Communication at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Coming soon
May 25-29: We’ll be out in force at the ICA conference in Toronto. If you’ll be there, reach out for an invitation to a joint CITAP/Hussman/UNC Communication Department reception on May 26.
May 30: Release date for Alice Marwick’s The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media.
June 5: Deadline to apply to join the CITAP 2023-24 affiliate community.