Listened to Fake news is # Solvable from The Rockefeller Foundation

Anne Applebaum talks to Renée DiResta about building a more trustworthy Internet.

Renée DiResta is the Director of Research at New Knowledge and a Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust. She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem. She has advised the United States Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.

Many talk about the right to freedom of speech online, but rarely do discussions delve a layer deeper into the idea of the “right to reach”. I’ve lately taken to analogizing the artificial reach of bots and partisan disinformation and labeled the idea social media machine guns to emphasize this reach problem. It’s also related to Cathy O’Neill’s concept of Weapons of Math Destruction. We definitely need some new verbiage to begin describing these sorts of social ills so that we have a better grasp of what they are and how they can effect us.

I appreciate Renee’s ideas and suspect they’re related to those in Ezra Klein’s new books, which I hope to start reading shortly.

 

👓 New plugin allows the far-right to ‘graffiti’ any website | Columbia Journalism Review

Read New plugin allows the far-right to ‘graffiti’ any website (Columbia Journalism Review)

Dissenter acts as a workaround for people wishing to comment on websites, even those without a comment section. One user, Cody Jassman, describe the plugin as “like the graffiti painted in the alley on every web page. You can take a look around and see what passersby are saying.”

The plugin was launched in beta at the end of February by Andrew Torba, who co-founded Gab, a far-right social network. Gab is well known for being the platform where Robert Bowers, the suspected Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, published anti-Semitic comments before he allegedly killed 11 people and wounded many others at the Tree of Life synagogue.

👓 Baltimore ‘Fiddler’ Disrupted by ‘Heil Hitler, Heil Trump’ | New York Times

Read Baltimore ‘Fiddler’ Disrupted by ‘Heil Hitler, Heil Trump’ (nytimes.com)
A man was removed from the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore after he loudly yelled pro-Hitler slogans during intermission.
Given the political climate, ubiquity of mass murders via guns, and the reactions reported, this seems tantamount to yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. It’s certainly psychological terrorism and bordering on even worse.

📑 Reply to Ben Werdmüller | Interdependent Thoughts

Annotated Reply to Ben Werdmüller by Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)
They can spew hate amongst themselves for eternity, but without amplification it won’t thrive.  
This is a key point. Social media and the way it (and its black box algorithms) amplifies almost anything for the benefit of clicks towards advertising is one of its most toxic features. Too often the extreme voice draws the most attention instead of being moderated down by more civil and moderate society.

📑 Social Media Bans Actually Work | Motherboard

Annotated Social Media Bans Actually Work (Motherboard)
“We need to puncture this myth that it’s only affecting far-right people. Trans rights activists, Black Lives Matter organizers, LGBTQI people have been demonetized or deranked. The reason we’re talking about far-right people is that they have coverage on Fox News and representatives in Congress holding hearings. They already have political power.”  

👓 A Response To My University President’s Essay On Free Speech | Dr. Eric Anthony Grollman

Read A Response To My University President’s Essay On Free Speech by Dr. Eric Anthony GrollmanDr. Eric Anthony Grollman (Eric Anthony Grollman, Ph.D.)
Dear University of Richmond President Ronald A. Crutcher, The following serves as an open letter to you in response to your July 10 opinion piece on The Hetchinger Report entitled, “Defending the ‘right to be here’ on campus.” My hands shake from the building anxiety as I write this public s...

👓 Why We Terminated Daily Stormer | Cloudflare

Read Why We Terminated Daily Stormer by Matthew Prince (Cloudflare)
Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We've stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We've taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare's services ever again. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology. Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare. Now, having made that decision, let me explain why it's so dangerous.
Some interesting implications for how the internet works as a result of this piece.