New Data & Society report recommends editorial “better practices” for reporting on online bigots and manipulators; interviews journalists on accidental amplification of extreme agendas
This report draws on in-depth interviews by scholar Whitney Phillips to showcase how news media was hijacked from 2016 to 2018 to amplify the messages of hate groups.
Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of an industry caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology.
After reviewing common methods of “information laundering” of radical and racist messages through the press, Phillips uses journalists’ own words to propose a set of editorial “better practices” intended to reduce manipulation and harm.
As social and digital media are leveraged to reconfigure the information landscape, Phillips argues that this new domain requires journalists to take what they know about abuses of power and media manipulation in traditional information ecosystems; and apply and adapt that knowledge to networked actors, such as white nationalist networks online.
This work is the first practitioner-focused report from Data & Society’s Media Manipulation Initiative, which examines how groups use the participatory culture of the internet to turn the strengths of a free society into vulnerabilities.
Category: Bookmark
🔖 This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips | The MIT Press
Why the troll problem is actually a culture problem: how online trolling fits comfortably within today's media landscape.
Internet trolls live to upset as many people as possible, using all the technical and psychological tools at their disposal. They gleefully whip the media into a frenzy over a fake teen drug crisis; they post offensive messages on Facebook memorial pages, traumatizing grief-stricken friends and family; they use unabashedly racist language and images. They take pleasure in ruining a complete stranger's day and find amusement in their victim's anguish. In short, trolling is the obstacle to a kinder, gentler Internet. To quote a famous Internet meme, trolling is why we can't have nice things online. Or at least that's what we have been led to believe. In this provocative book, Whitney Phillips argues that trolling, widely condemned as obscene and deviant, actually fits comfortably within the contemporary media landscape. Trolling may be obscene, but, Phillips argues, it isn't all that deviant. Trolls' actions are born of and fueled by culturally sanctioned impulses—which are just as damaging as the trolls' most disruptive behaviors.
Phillips describes, for example, the relationship between trolling and sensationalist corporate media—pointing out that for trolls, exploitation is a leisure activity; for media, it's a business strategy. She shows how trolls, “the grimacing poster children for a socially networked world,” align with social media. And she documents how trolls, in addition to parroting media tropes, also offer a grotesque pantomime of dominant cultural tropes, including gendered notions of dominance and success and an ideology of entitlement. We don't just have a trolling problem, Phillips argues; we have a culture problem. This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things isn't only about trolls; it's about a culture in which trolls thrive.
🔖 The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online by Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner
This book explores the weird and mean and in-between that characterize everyday expression online, from absurdist photoshops to antagonistic Twitter hashtags to deceptive identity play.
Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner focus especially on the ambivalence of this expression: the fact that it is too unwieldy, too variable across cases, to be essentialized as old or new, vernacular or institutional, generative or destructive. Online expression is, instead, all of the above. This ambivalence, the authors argue, hinges on available digital tools. That said, there is nothing unexpected or surprising about even the strangest online behavior. Ours is a brave new world, and there is nothing new under the sun – a point necessary to understanding not just that online spaces are rife with oddity, mischief, and antagonism, but why these behaviors matter.
The Ambivalent Internet is essential reading for students and scholars of digital media and related fields across the humanities, as well as anyone interested in mediated culture and expression.
🔖 Storyful – The world’s social media intelligence agency
Storyful is a social media intelligence agency that sources and verifies insights for media, communications and brand partners by analyzing digital content.
🔖 How Students Engage With News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians | Project Information Literacy Research Institute
Abstract: The News Study research report presents findings about how a sample of U.S. college students gather information and engage with news in the digital age. Results are included from an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 U.S. colleges and universities selected for their regional, demographic, and red/blue state diversity. A computational analysis was conducted using Twitter data associated with the survey respondents and a Twitter panel of 135,891 college-age people. Six recommendations are included for educators, journalists, and librarians working to make students effective news consumers. To explore the implications of this study’s findings, concise commentaries from leading thinkers in education, libraries, media research, and journalism are included.
hat tip: Dan Cohen
telephone interviews with 37 participants ❧
I have to wonder at telephone samples of this age group given the propensity of youth to not communicate via voice phone.
October 22, 2018 at 08:15PM
Major Findings (2:35 minutes) ❧
I’m quite taken with the variety of means this study is using to communicate its findings. There are blogposts, tweets/social posts, a website, executive summaries, the full paper, and even a short video! I wish more studies went to these lengths.
October 22, 2018 at 08:19PM
🔖 E21 Consortium | Symposium
Join us for a day of disruptive dialogue about Artificial Intelligence and 21st Century Education in Ottawa, an annual international symposium hosted by the University of Ottawa in collaboration with Carleton University, St. Paul University, Algonquin College, La Cité, and the Centre franco-ontarien de ressources pedagogique (CFORP).
hat tip: Stephen Downes
🔖 Approaching E-Learning 3.0 | Stephen Downes
Stephen Downes (downes.ca)The course is titled 'E-Learning 3.0' and could be subtitled 'Distributed Learning Technology'. This is a course about the next generation of learning technology. It's a broad and challenging domain that I've broken down into the following topics: data, cloud, graph, community, identity, resources, recognition, experience, agency.
I'm designing the course so that each week is one of these self-contained topics. This topic can then be approached from different directions, at different levels. The content is a starting point. I will provide a series of reflections. But I will be learning about each of these topics along with everyone else.
An online course I should take part in…
❤️ Downes tweet: I’m at “Education in the 21st Century: A Symposium on Artificial Intelligence” today at the University of Ottawa.
Stephen Downes (Twitter)I'm at "Education in the 21st Century: A Symposium on Artificial Intelligence" today at the University of Ottawa. #E21SYM #el30 Live Stream: https://t.co/09K0QKvnM7
— Downes (@Downes) October 22, 2018
🔖 davidgchristian tweet: We humans have reduced the biomass of life on earth by 50%
We humans have reduced the biomass of life on earth by 50% #bighistory pic.twitter.com/dlDypTlU1l
— David Christian (@davidgchristian) October 21, 2018
🔖 academicpages is a ready-to-fork GitHub Pages template for academic personal websites
This is the front page of a website that is powered by the academicpages template and hosted on GitHub pages. GitHub pages is a free service in which websites are built and hosted from code and data stored in a GitHub repository, automatically updating when a new commit is made to the respository. This template was forked from the Minimal Mistakes Jekyll Themecreated by Michael Rose, and then extended to support the kinds of content that academics have: publications, talks, teaching, a portfolio, blog posts, and a dynamically-generated CV. You can fork this repository right now, modify the configuration and markdown files, add your own PDFs and other content, and have your own site for free, with no ads! An older version of this template powers my own personal website at stuartgeiger.com, which uses this Github repository.
❤️ staeiou tweet: GitHub pages template supporting CV-style content for academics
Stuart Geiger (Twitter)Academics who need a personal website, check out my https://t.co/onrqJPt3Nq project, a ready-to-fork GitHub pages template supporting CV-style content. Difficulty is more than using Wordpress but lower than building your own site from scratch. Over 2,500 people have tried it out!
— Stuart Geiger (@staeiou) October 17, 2018
🔖 Accelerated Reader Bookfinder
Searching for books with a corresponding Renaissance Accelerated Reader 360® quiz is easy with Accelerated Reader Bookfinder®. Students, teachers, parents, and librarians can search in English or Spanish using criteria such as ATOS book level or a Lexile™ measure, interest level, title, author, fiction/nonfiction, subject, award-winners, state lists, CCSS Exemplars, and more
An interesting site with a wealth of information and details for children’s books.
🔖 Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York by Cindy R. Lobel (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
Glossy magazines write about them, celebrities give their names to them, and you’d better believe there’s an app (or ten) committed to finding you the right one. They are New York City restaurants and food shops. And their journey to international notoriety is a captivating one. The now-booming food capital was once a small seaport city, home to a mere six municipal food markets that were stocked by farmers, fishermen, and hunters who lived in the area. By 1890, however, the city’s population had grown to more than one million, and residents could dine in thousands of restaurants with a greater abundance and variety of options than any other place in the United States. Historians, sociologists, and foodies alike will devour the story of the origins of New York City’s food industry in Urban Appetites. Cindy R. Lobel focuses on the rise of New York as both a metropolis and a food capital, opening a new window onto the intersection of the cultural, social, political, and economic transformations of the nineteenth century. She offers wonderfully detailed accounts of public markets and private food shops; basement restaurants and immigrant diners serving favorites from the old country; cake and coffee shops; and high-end, French-inspired eating houses made for being seen in society as much as for dining. But as the food and the population became increasingly cosmopolitan, corruption, contamination, and undeniably inequitable conditions escalated. Urban Appetites serves up a complete picture of the evolution of the city, its politics, and its foodways.
Came across this excellent sounding history of food in New York via the author’s obituary in the New York Times.
🔖 [1810.05095] The Statistical Physics of Real-World Networks | arXiv
Statistical physics is the natural framework to model complex networks. In the last twenty years, it has brought novel physical insights on a variety of emergent phenomena, such as self-organisation, scale invariance, mixed distributions and ensemble non-equivalence, which cannot be deduced from the behaviour of the individual constituents. At the same time, thanks to its deep connection with information theory, statistical physics and the principle of maximum entropy have led to the definition of null models reproducing some features of empirical networks, but otherwise as random as possible. We review here the statistical physics approach for complex networks and the null models for the various physical problems, focusing in particular on the analytic frameworks reproducing the local features of the network. We show how these models have been used to detect statistically significant and predictive structural patterns in real-world networks, as well as to reconstruct the network structure in case of incomplete information. We further survey the statistical physics frameworks that reproduce more complex, semi-local network features using Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, and the models of generalised network structures such as multiplex networks, interacting networks and simplicial complexes.
Comments: To appear on Nature Reviews Physics. The revised accepted version will be posted 6 months after publication
🔖 Hypothesis User: kael
Joined: September 9, 2018
Location: Paris
Link: del.icio.us/kael
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone using it this way before, but I’ve coincidentally noticed that Kael seems to be using Hypothes.is in an off-label manner as a bookmarking service with tagging rather than an annotation or highlighting service. Most of their “annotations” are really just basic page notes with one or two “tags” and rarely (if ever) any highlights or annotations.
I’m curious if the Hypothes.is team has considered making such additional functionalities more explicit within their user interface?
Social bookmarking does seem like a useful and worthwhile functionality that would dovetail well with many of their other functionalities as well as their basic audience of users. Perhaps some small visual UI clues and the ability to search for them as a subset would complete the cycle?