Zignal Labs charted a 73 percent decline on Twitter and beyond following historic action against the president.
Tag: disinformation
Cory Doctorow (well.com)Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria.
Doctorow apparently drew out the roadmap for Twitter, democracy, and the future of society in 2001.
If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. ❧
Apparently this also now applies to politics and democracy too.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:12AM
When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order. ❧
If we look at Twitter as a worldwide annotation tool which is generating metadata on a much tinier subset of primary documents (some of which are not truthful themselves), this seems to bear out in that setting as well.
ref: Kalir & Garcia in Annotation
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:17AM
Schemas aren’t neutral ❧
This section highlights why relying on algorithmic feeds in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be toxic. Your feed is full of what they think you’ll like and click on instead of giving you the choice.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:23AM
It’s wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. ❧
The fate of true democracies.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:33AM
It's stunning, to be honest. Made by me. Insta: @jstntbrwn Twitter: @JuuustinBrown
via
Ok. Who made this? It’s genius. pic.twitter.com/EkwG2RlDel
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 5, 2020
The long read: As social media has become more inhospitable, the appeal of private online groups has grown. But they hold their own dangers – to those both inside and out.
👓 How to Cover Hate — The Disinformation War | Columbia Journalism Review
At UNC Charlotte in North Carolina on Tuesday, April 30, a 22-year-old man allegedly shot six people in his anthropology class with a handgun, wounding four and killing two. Three days earlier, on the last day of Passover, in Poway, California, a 19-year-old man walked into a synagogue with what police described as an “AR-type assault weapon” and now stands accused of killing a 60-year-old woman and injuring another congregant, the rabbi, and an 8-year-old girl.
👓 Maria Ressa, Zeynep Tufekci, and others on the growing disinformation war | Columbia Journalism Review
📑 Maria Ressa, Zeynep Tufekci, and others on the growing disinformation war | Columbia Journalism Review
Tufekci argued that, in the 21st century, a surfeit of information, rather than its absence, poses the biggest problem. “When I was growing up in Turkey, the way censorship occurred was there was one TV channel and they wouldn’t show you stuff. That was it,” she said. “Currently, in my conceptualization, the way censorship occurs is by information glut. It’s not that the relevant information isn’t out there. But it is buried in so much information of suspect credibility that it doesn’t mean anything.” ❧
Featured image “Vintage Television” by Sven Scheuermeier via CC on Unsplash
👓 How Barr and Trump Use a Russian Disinformation Tactic | New York Times
They were able to define “collusion” to benefit themselves. Don’t let them twist meanings again with their “spying” investigation.
In an interview, President Trump said Ms. Rice, a former national security adviser, may have sought the identities of Trump associates who were mentioned on intercepted communications.