Overview: Politics

Tours election technology from 2008 to 2018 "and beyond".2008: Obama integrated e-mail, cell phones and websites to both convey the candidate’s message and enable his supporters to connect and self-organize - supporting grassroots community. MyBarackObama allowed users to form groups, raise money, organise events, get info on local vote…

A case study of top down domestic disinformation: "Questions about the legitimacy of Justice Ginsburg’s “dying wish” were not circulating online [until] his Fox News appearance, [then] social media has filled with false claims echoing it... and taking it even further

"the greatest threat to a credible vote is homegrown... Trump has falsely claimed that mail-in ballots “lead to massive corruption and fraud,” that foreign powers will “forge ballots” and that the “only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” ...Bullshit, of course: he said this in 2016, but now with the weight of…

ActivityPub separates content from platform. Posts from one platform propagate to other platforms, and users don’t need an account on every platform ... for ex., YouTube clone PeerTube and Mastodon both implement it, so is Mastodon user A follows PeerTube user B, B's new videos will appear in A's Mastodon feed. A can even comment on it f…

Donald Trump literally laughs factchecking off - it's good to have, but insufficient. To establish non-partisan status, factcheckers need to be equally tough on all sides, but all sides don't lie the same. They use euphemisms for 'lie', and check narrow, easy-to-debunk statements while ignoring the larger pattern of "the a…

fake Twitter accounts removed: impersonated black men who left the Dems because of BLM to support Trump ... some had tweets with over 10,000 RTs...bots risk drowning out an authentic black political dialogue... shutting them down risks collateral damage (ie shutting down actual people, not fake accounts)...Great metaphor: "we would have a lot…

if his supporters truly come to believe that the game is rigged, that persuasion is impossible, then his argument acquires a dark and inevitable logic. When politics ceases to function, when the rules governing its practice have been dismissed as a hoax, all that remains is the barrel of the gun.

Unless Biden stumbles, he'll win, but the amazing thing is that ~40% of Americans will support Trump no matter what. Trump is talking and acting crazy while over 1000 Americans die of covid19 on many days - compared to around half that in the worst week of the Vietnam war. Yet there seems to be no electoral consequence: the Trump-Biden gap ha…

Literature note: “How to Lose the Information War,” ... on disinformation as a geopolitical strategy...Mueller report: I.R.A.-created groups and accounts reached tens of millions... the troll factory found “authentic, local voices,” to foment large-scale distrust in government and democracy... and managed to get into the heads of powerful politici…

Amazing animation setting out the 5 filters - ownership, advertising, the media elite, flak and the common enemy - used by media and power to Manufacture Consent, as set out in Chomsky's eponymous book on mainstream journalism and its role in the mechanics of power

I'm (re)launching my newsletter to focus on disinformation during the 2020 US election. It's also part of a wider experiment in integrating Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management into my personal content strategy, hosted on MyHub.ai.

once a fringe phenomenon ... gone mainstream... trying to attach themselves to other activist causes ... poses a potential domestic terror threat... Last week ... avowed QAnon supporter ... won a Republican primary ... Mr. Trump called her a “future Republican star.”... here are some basic things you should know...umbrella term ... conspiracy…

counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 exhibited 14% less physical distancing... higher Covid-19 infection and fatality growth rates ...the hormone oxytocin... promotes bonding... plays a role in trust... When participants trusted and felt trusted, oxytocin levels ... jumped... Trust just feels good... But risky if we give it to the w…

Books on note-taking... always too vague and boring, full of platitudes ... never an overarching system for turning notes into concrete results ... [but]How To Take Smart Notes ... is by far the most impactful and profound book I’ve ever read on the subject... most books are a few morsels of real insight wrapped in... fluff... I systematically unr…

foreign pro-Trump troll farm was based in Romania... Facebook... didn’t see “clear evidence of financial motivation” or “clear links to known commercial actors...separate troll operation, tied to pro-Trump media organization Epoch Media Group, featured 303 Facebook accounts, 181 pages, 44 Facebook groups and 31 Instagram accounts... followed by mo…

This is a piece for people who have been part of the Q Anon movement... beginning to get tired ... starting to get skeptical... Q mostly stopped making specific predictions after a series of embarrassing failures... demanding that we all Trust the Plan and stop asking why Q is always wrong... There’s a reason you got scammed... why did you keep be…

Q claims to be a government insider exposing an entrenched, international bureaucracy that is secretly plotting all sorts of nefarious schemes against the Trump ... military or intelligence background ... various, but connecting, conspiracy theories... Trump ... battling a cabal of anti-American saboteurs ... overarching goals ... not clear... “…

The president’s reelection campaign ... multimillion-dollar ad blitz ... shaping Americans’ understanding of ... impeachment ... micro-targeted ads ... portraying Trump as a heroic reformer ... while Democrats plotted a coup... An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape ... I wanted to see it from the inside...I was surprised by the effec…

“This hearing has made one fact clear to me. These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up. All need to be properly regulated ... their control of the marketplace allows them to do whatever it takes to crush independent business and expand their own power. This must end.”

Covid-19 case numbers are now spiking in many counties across West Texas ... [but] resolve of ... skeptics appears to be stiffening... the denial of facts is often rooted in identity and belonging, not in ignorance ...people who deny science ... trying to uphold membership in ... a political or religious affiliation or some other group ... a commu…

Amazon is accused of abusing its role as both a retailer and a platform hosting third-party sellers ... Apple ... unfairly using ... App Store to block rivals and to force apps to pay high commissions.... Facebook has a monopoly in social networking... Google... multiple antitrust allegations ... dominance in online advertising, search and smartph…

It’s official: 1,913,369 ballots were cast but never counted in the 2016 presidential race. That’s from the US Elections Assistance Commission... your chance of having your vote simply go uncounted, “spoiled,” is 900% higher if you're Black than if you're white...Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes... 75,355 ballots were never cou…

my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost... The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem... A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me ... orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in …

advice on how to bring science to the attention of policymakers... dedicated to researchers and research organisations aiming to achieve policy impact... advice on new skills and practices for individual researchers, but also ... institutional change ... puts co-creation at the centre of Science for Policy 2.0, a more integrated model of knowledg…

marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

For the 6th episode of his Futurized podcast, Trond Undheim asked me why surveillance capitalism inevitably leads to polarised, undemocratic and dysfunctional societies, and what we must do about it...If we don’t change course, in the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democ…

echo chambers and epistemic bubbles... systematically exclude sources of information... exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs... work in entirely different ways... epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side...‘epistemic bubble’ …

unique, visual tool to help researchers and applied scientists find and explore papers relevant to their ... work... analyze ... ~50,000 papers and select the few dozen with the strongest connections to the origin paper.... arranged according to their similarity... papers that do not directly cite each other can be strongly connected and very clo…

Online communities are uniquely suited to promote wide-scale inclusion because of their collaborative rather than directive structure—they reward members for their unique contributions instead of forcing compliance to a standard... don’t just assume ... [they] will immediately foster widespread inclusion... prioritize investment ... [to] institut…

Newspaper newsrooms lost 45 percent of their employees between 2008 and 2017... growing number of “news deserts”: communities where there are no longer media outlets sending reporters to city-council meetings... Can a healthier news ecosystem be built? ... a role for government in ensuring citizen access to reliable information... “There was alw…