Overview: Politics

The “Brussels effect:... When the European Union comes up with some new tech regulation, it can quickly spread around the world"...To draft its proposed AI regulatory approach, the EC "created a 52-member “high-level expert group” ... collected further input via an “AI alliance” ... published a white paper" to which 1,250 groups a…

Good history of the digital ad industry, from 3rd-party tracking cookies through to today's data-brokered behavioural advertising profiles:"Digital advertisers have steadily transformed the internet into a surveillance machine from which there is no escape... argue that ... universe of on demand digital content has created a crisis of at…

"social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation ... are on the rise" - not so much created by bad actors, but exploited by them. Why?“cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and pol…

"Europe deserves a forum where passionate Europeans share, debate and package ideas into policy proposals their fellow Europeans can vote on in 2024." But the CoFoE simply shows the hallmarks of previous efforts, like "the “New Narrative for Europe”, a kind of weird uncle to the Conference on the Future of Europe" created by Ba…

"the fourth wave of online education...: “Cohort-Based Courses,” ... the first to tap into the essential nature of the Internet: that it is open-ended and interactive."Takes you through the first 3 waves:MOOCs, from 2008: overcame the “How to get content online,” problem "by converting traditional course materials into digital form …

"Almost unbelievably, scepticism is highest among healthcare workers."Examines both the specific mistakes and the general antivaxxer European setting undermining the vaccination campaign.Specific mistakes: "by publicly trashing [AstraZeneca], the commission undermined trust in the vaccines... compounded by confusion over the vaccine…

Pretty cool spatial video conferencing platform:create a 2D world with rooms, events, etc.users move around it, and can video-conference with whomever's nearbytest server: https://topia.io/welcome

Content moderation "will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the "proper" level of moderation of anyone".any moderation will upset the moderated no moderation will upset those who don't like spam, harassment, etcpushing moderation to the users puts th…

After pointing out that mainstream - ie centralised - social platforms cannot moderate effectively due to scale, then introduces fediverse/activitypub-based platforms. Will they face same moderation problems as the mainstream if/when they grow?Takes Gab's unsuccessful move into fediverse as an example: "Almost immediately, Gab was met by…

Not the only interesting piece on Trump viewed from ancient Greece."this election was something like a census of American Idiots... " defined using the classical Greek meaning of “people who are consumed only with self-interest". Any society with too many such idiots would be "consumed solely with self-interest... [and] cease …

Overview of efforts to put data back into the hands of people. "platforms’ business models depend on network effects and scale to keep users engaged and to sell more advertising... a culture of virality that... poisons public discourse." Moreover, their data dominance is stifling competition & innovation. " So trustbusters are o…

Trump's delegitimisation disinformation campaign bears fruit: while 60% of those polled by Economist/YouGov thought Biden legitimately won:86% of Trump voters said he hadn’t, with 80% saying he shouldn’t concede, and most thinking the courts will overturn the resultsover 75% think there was sufficient fraud to influence the outcome - although…

When changing their Newsfeed algorithm, Facebook's tests found "a dramatic impact on the reach of right-wing “junk sites,”... [by] January 2018 a second iteration dialed up the harm to progressive-leaning news organizations instead... Mother Jones was singled out as one that would suffer... Daily Wire was identified as one that would be…

Today's social platforms' business models are not inevitable, but because we see them as such we constrain "the solution space we consider for combatting mis-/disinformation, polarization, and promotion of extremism... we need to consider what technologies [and] digital media to have a productive role in democratic societies".H…

"Our digital public sphere has been failing ... [but] History offers a proven template for how to build healthier public spaces."Filter Bubble author Pariser hearkens back to Walt Whitman's creation of NY's Green Park, when "New York City had no public parks ...only walled commercial pleasure gardens for those who could af…

"Falun Gong-backed newspaper used aggressive Facebook tactics and misinformation to create an anti-China, pro-Trump media empire" - from a "low-budget newspaper ... handed out free on New York street corners" to "one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers... a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation"…

Q really seems to act like a virus, finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in each new host is discovers: Germany's far-right groups were the first, and now France's Yellow Jackets, Italy's anti-vaxxers and UK's Brexiteers. Why? Trump's role is at the heart of the Q narrative. Answer (according to Politico): COVID19. "…

Another analysis - with a lot of useful links - of the way social platforms managed the NYPost story, and what it tells us "about the status of social media companies’ reform efforts, and [how]... they are still failing to safeguard the democratic process?"First some facts:The NYPost article's "sourcing was so dubious that at l…

The platforms started doing what people concerned about disinformation have been asking for, and immediately came under fire from people concerned about censorship.When The New York Post published a story supposedly incriminating Hunter Biden "YouTube largely did nothing, Facebook deprioritized the Post story (slowing spread until 3rd party f…

Facebook's 2017 newsfeed algorithm tweak intentionally reduced traffic to left-leaning outlets " to avoid adding fuel to critics’ argument that the platform has an anti-conservative bias"... and overcorrected."Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue"

Berkman Klein Center analyzed 55,000 news stories, five million tweets, and 75,000 public Facebook posts to discover that it's "Trump, the Republican National Committee, and Fox News — not Facebook spammers and Russian trolls — who are the primary drivers of misinformation around mail-in voting fraud", taking advantage of three stan…

With more than a dozen congressional candidates appearing on ballots in November, Qanon is mainstream. While it looks like a lot of other conspiracy theories, this research provides a fascinating look at how the conspiracy's "Bakers" co-create their knowledgescape."QAnon doesn’t simply offer readers insider insight into current…

Facebook deleted post where Trump claimed Covid-19 was "less lethal" than the flu, while Twitter hid it behind a warning about "spreading misleading and potentially harmful information". Covid-19 thought to be up to 10 times more lethal than most flu strains. Trump's reaction: "REPEAL SECTION 230!!!" His propo…

The current Trump campaign, on the record, said they didn't do #psychographic profiling. "Well, why do I have one in my file? It works as a suppression system.., to subvert the will of the people"

Cornell analyzed 38 million English-language articles about the pandemic found that President Trump was the largest driver of the “infodemic.”...Of 11 different narratives ID'd, "miracle cures" - including Trump's anti-malarial drugs, UV and disinfectants - accounted for more than the other 10 combined.Keep it in perspective: a…

Criticisms of social media platforms for allowing disinfo and hate speech to flourish are accurate, but sometimes also wishful thinking: "if only Mark Zuckerberg got his act together, American politics would get back to normal"A disinfo video gone viral may get half a million views - the first Trump-Biden "debate was probably seen b…

The new label makes clear that Facebook understands Trump is posting misinformation about whether votes are counted. But it is not fulfilling its stated policy to remove the post. 

"the right is better at connecting with people on a visceral level", according to Facebook, portraying themselves as a neutral mirror. Rightwing content resonates by "speaking to "an incredibly strong, primitive emotion" by touching on "nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.""This may be true, but it&#x…

It's 2020 in the US: "a pandemic, economic collapse and a society-wide reckoning over racism [and] an election in which voter suppression, foreign interference, online disinformation and a bitterly contested supreme court vacancy ... an incumbent president who has spent months spreading disinformation and discrediting what he calls “the …

During the Cold War, the Soviets conducted over 10,000 disinformation operations, with up to 15000 KGB officers. Europe a target since 2015. Goal: weaken western democracy from within. This article sets out their most pertinent tactics:1) Narratives: post-Western world (the West no longer dominates); anti-(elite, EU, NATO) narratives; danger narra…