This week on Does Not Compute, Daniel Kreiss answered this question in conversation with former Facebook employee Katie Harbath and CITAP’s own Tressie McMillan Cottom. They talked about the role of “efficiency machines” in social spaces and what guardrails might allow social media platforms to serve as effective stewards of democracy.
“We conflate like what's good for the platform with what's good for activism and political life because the platforms, again, encouraged us to think of them that way. They're not doubling down on their structure because it's good for democracy. They're doubling down on it because it's very profitable.”
— Tressie McMillan Cottom
Dr. Kreiss revisited these same topics in an interview with Nancy Scola in her Slow Build newsletter:
“The problem is that if polarization is your foremost concern, you're not analyzing structural inequality. And any group that's pushing to achieve equality is automatically dismissed as being polarizing because it’s threatening the status quo.”
The interview also delves into identity propaganda, the potential for race-conscious moderation policies, and the benefits of analog productivity tools.
Sean Combs as a proto-influencer
Tressie McMillan Cottom interviewed Sean Combs for the cover story of Vanity Fair’s September issue, exploring his status as an influencer before the term, an entrepreneur who anticipated both the visuals and the lifestyle consumption of the influencer era.
Combs’s story is a hood Horatio Alger tale. He started from the bottom and now he is here, as it were. It was a hero’s tale that made sense for where the culture was in 1999, even where it was in 2005. The 15 years before the 2008 Great Recession were a period of unbridled economic optimism. It was the era of the hustle, and Black youth culture translated it into an ethos, an identity, and an ideology.
State regulations of political speech
In partnership with the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, CITAP released a new report by David Ardia and Evan Ringel summarizing state regulations on political speech.
Political speech has long been viewed as residing at the core of the First Amendment’s protections for speech. Yet it has become increasingly clear that lies and other forms of misinformation associated with elections are corrosive to democracy. The surprising number of state statutes already on the books clearly demonstrate that state legislatures see a problem that needs to be addressed.
What they found is that these election-speech statutes deviate significantly from longstanding theories of liability for false speech. First, the statutes cover a broader range of speech than has traditionally been subject to government restriction: the statutes cover everything from merely derogatory statements about candidates (defamation requires false statements that create a degree of moral opprobrium) to false information about ballot measures, voting procedures, and incumbency. Second, a substantial number of the statutes impose liability regardless of whether the speaker knew the information was false or acted negligently.
New affiliates!
CITAP welcomed our 2021-22 affiliate cohort this week. We’re incredibly excited by the talent and diversity of this year’s community, and we're eager to begin featuring their work in this newsletter.
This year’s affiliates represent institutions spanning the Research Triangle and the globe, including North Carolina Central University, Stanford, Princeton, ITESO University (Mexico), and Oxford. They bring expertise in mis- and disinformation, health communication, surveillance, public policy, far-right media ecosystems, and more.
Countering donor influence at UNC
NC Policy Watch continues to cover Walter Hussman’s influence at UNC, including a new investigation into how a donor agreement was published by the News & Observer:
On Wednesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) sent a letter to Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz warning that the investigation appears to be violating the First Amendment rights of faculty.
Rest of Web
Many CITAP researchers and affiliates have signed an open letter supporting Laura Edelson and the NYU Ad Observatory in response to Facebook’s recent revocation of API access for the research team.