Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmCovid-19 and the new merchants of doubt2021-09-14T08:39:05+00:00
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13/covid-19-and-the-new-merchants-of-doubt/
jmHow best can scientists push back against [science denialists]? There is a range of evidence-based strategies. These include:
“Public inoculation”–warning people about the risk of being misled and drawing attention to who is pushing the contentious information and their financial competing interests;
Highlighting scientific consensus; and
Mapping the institutional networks who are pushing controversial information and then using political and legal strategies to counter them.
For physicians, scientists, and public health officials to be effective countering efforts like the [Great Barrington declaration], it will be absolutely critical for them to realize that they are not dealing with an orthodox scientific debate based on sound data and evidence, but a well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests.
]]>denialism climate-change covid-19 science communication astroturf fakes evidence fake-newshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7f0213363f87/How To Talk To Older People In Your Life About Fake News2019-07-30T09:46:42+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/young-people-worry-about-older-people-sharing-fake-news?ref=mobile_share&fbclid=IwAR1fI3B4VuDZcE3hw43Fp7Cf-_RAryCbGa7tbk_1Bmo65xvG02gkZ5WRR08
jmCaulfield said it’s common for older people to unwittingly share things that have extremist messages or iconography. “It's very hard to see people posting stuff that may come from a kind of a dark place that they don't realize is dark,” Caulfield said. “What do you do when your parents go from posting Minions to posting hard-right memes about cement milkshakes?”
this is where we're at. (Thankfully not with _my_ parents, though)]]>family fake-news propaganda facebook memes alt-right fascismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1bee191f11ee/Russians used fake Foster email for disinformation – researchers2019-06-24T11:13:45+00:00
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/russians-used-fake-foster-email-for-disinformation-researchers-1.3935125
jm
Facebook believes this is the first time fake information about Northern Ireland and topics concerning Anglo-Irish relations has been disseminated by Russian operators acting in concert.
The Atlantic Council’s research centre found the campaign was “persistent, sophisticated and well-resourced” and said that “the likelihood is that this operation was run by a Russian intelligence agency”.
The operation “appeared designed to stoke racial, religious or political hatred, especially in Northern Ireland”, the researchers said, disclosing their findings in an online article published on the Medium self-publishing online platform over the weekend.
]]>ireland russia disinformation fake-news facebook dfrlab ira politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7b231e3bcb71/Jigsaw Bought a Russian Twitter Troll Campaign as an Experiment2019-06-13T16:33:50+00:00
https://www.wired.com/story/jigsaw-russia-disinformation-social-media-stalin-alphabet/
jm"Let's say I want to wage a disinformation campaign to attack a political opponent or a company, but I don’t have the infrastructure to create my own Internet Research Agency," Gully told WIRED in an interview, speaking publicly about Jigsaw's year-old disinformation experiment for the first time. "We wanted to see if we could engage with someone who was willing to provide this kind of assistance to a political actor ... to buy services that directly discredit their political opponent for very low cost and with no tooling or resources required. For us, it’s a pretty clear demonstration these capabilities exist, and there are actors comfortable doing this on the internet."
it cost just $250.]]>disinformation fakes disinfo fake-news russia trolls jigsaw social-mediahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:47436354b2d3/"Bring home the bacon" debate is a case study in how stupid we've all become2018-12-06T11:04:50+00:00
https://www.joe.ie/life-style/bring-home-bacon-debate-makes-us-look-like-idiots-650545
jmHow are we supposed to focus on the things that matter when media organisations refuse to? Ivan Yates and Matt Cooper ran a segment on whether or not we've reached political correctness. Niall Boylan had a discussion about whether or not it's okay to ban phrases that nobody really wants to ban [as PETA has suggested].
As a matter of pure coincidence, other reports from outlets like the Daily Mail and Today FM reported that the HSE was going to ban its employees from using phrases like "love," "pet" or "dear." That wasn't true either. Again, it was one line in a huge report that asked the question as to whether or not it was the best course of action to use such terms. It wasn't mentioned again.
Unlike phrases about meat, this actually matters. This is the kind of thing that could actually change how people are treated in hospital. But again, it wasn't true. The public – which has lost its capacity to verify what is true and what is not — was being lied to by the media. That's how it works now.
]]>media clickbait fake-news news today-fm daily-mail hse niall-boylan peta controversy political-correctness ivan-yates matt-cooperhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:10d22fa90c98/Brits getting into the online-disinfo game2018-11-14T12:24:59+00:00
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-77th-brigade-britains-information-warfare-military
jm
Disinformation and deception have been a part of warfare for thousands of years, but across the world, something new was starting to happen. Information has long been used to support combat operations, but now combat was seen to taking place primarily, sometimes exclusively, through it. From being a tool of warfare, each military began to realise that the struggle with, over and through information was what war itself actually was about. And it wasn’t confined to Russia, China or anyone else. A global informational struggle has broken out. Dozens of countries are already doing it. And these are just the campaigns that we know about.]]>disinfo fake-news uk british-army military memes infowarhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:00b6471238f3/Welcome To The Dystopia: People Are Arguing Whether This Trump Press Conference Video Is Doctored Or Not2018-11-08T16:20:15+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/acosta-video-trump-cnn-aide-sarah-sanders
jmTo sum it up: A historically unreliable narrator who works for a conspiracy website tweets out a video in order to show alleged bad behavior on the part of a journalist. The clip goes viral. The White House picks up and disseminates that video and uses it as proof to ban the journalist from reporting at the White House. Outraged journalists decry the White House's use of a video taken from a historically unreliable narrator. Then, users attempt to debunk the video as "actual fake news." Others, unclear if the video is fake, urge caution, suggesting the media may be jumping the gun. An argument breaks out over the intricate technical details of doctoring a clip.
The entire ordeal is a near perfect example of a scenario disinformation experts have predicted and warned of, where the very threat of video manipulation can lead to a blurring of reality. "These technological underpinnings [of AI and photoshop, and editing programs lead] to the increasing erosion of trust,” computational propaganda researcher Renee DiResta told BuzzFeed News in early 2018. “It makes it possible to cast aspersions on whether videos — or advocacy for that matter — are real.”
]]>twitter disinfo disinformation buzzfeed video reality fake-news photoshophttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:388d17be0d69/Notes on some artefacts2018-09-13T21:28:32+00:00
https://www.themonthly.com.au/tiredofwinning/notes-some-artefacts
jmFive or six years ago, around the time most people seemed to be spending almost all of their time on the internet, I began to notice a particular kind of online phenomenon, one that I did not have a terminology for. I started to call these moments “artefacts”, borrowing a term from photography that describes the machine-created distortions and ghosts that corrupt digital imagery. “An unintended alteration in data” is one definition, but this new kind of “artefact” was expanding beyond sporadic instances and becoming a persistent sub-theme in discourse at large.
The result was a type of semiotic collapse, one that first found its fullest expression in the absurdity of the 2016 presidential campaign, when news stories fabricated in Macedonia found a wider reach than The Washington Post. Countermeasures to interference in the coming 2018 congressional election look ineffectual, perhaps deliberately so.
]]>artefacts fake-news bots weird 2018 trump politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b8444bf11ed8/'The Internet of Garbage' by Sarah Jeong2018-09-05T09:19:01+00:00
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/17777330/internet-of-garbage-book-sarah-jeong-online-harassment
jmdystopia fake-news internet spam harrassment abuse twitter gamergate politics books free to-readhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1fa9b11841c6/How my research on DNA ancestry tests became "fake news"2018-07-13T13:27:08+00:00
http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2018/07/12/written-in-blood/
jmI was not surprised to see our research twisted by fake news and satire websites. Conspiracy theories are meant to be just as entertaining as they are convincing. They also provide a way out of confronting reality and reckoning with facts that don’t confirm preexisting worldviews. For white nationalists and racists, if test results showed traces of African American or Jewish ancestry, either the tests did not work, or the results were planted by some ideologically motivated scientists, or the tests were part of a global war against whites. With conspiracy theories, debunking is rarely useful because the individual is often searching for an interpretation that confirms their prior beliefs.
As such, DNA conspiracy theories allow white supremacists to plan new escape routes for the traps they laid for themselves long ago. With DNA testing, the one-drop rule—a belief made law in the 1900s that one drop of African blood makes one Black—becomes transmuted genealogically into the one-percent rule, according to which to remain racially white, an individual’s results must show no sign of African or Jewish origin. Through the genealogical lens, American white nationalists consider “one hundred percent European” as good results, which in turn substantiates their “birth right” to the United States as a marker of heredity and conquest.
]]>racism science fake-news conspiracy genealogy dna dna-testinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1ea9a3a486ad/How Ireland’s Abortion Referendum Became a Test Case for Democracy in the Social Media Age2018-06-05T22:13:45+00:00
https://storyful.com/blog/2018/06/01/how-irelands-abortion-referendum-became-a-test-case-for-democracy-in-the-social-media-age/
jmOn 4chan, a number of users who identified as Irish attempted to infiltrate the online conversation and tarnish the pro-repeal campaign. Operation Zyklon encouraged users to spread awareness of a connection between Amnesty International Ireland and the philanthropist George Soros, who donated €137,000 to Amnesty’s My Body My Rights campaign in 2016. Operation Trojan Horse saw users sharing templates of fake pro-repeal posters with extreme captions such as, “There should be no limit on abortion up to birth”. Users were encouraged to print and spread these posters around college campuses and share them across social media. A particularly curious operation called Operation Drunken Monkey aimed to stifle student voter turnout by organizing club nights on May 24 in the hope that students would be too hungover to vote the following day.
]]>4chan repealthe8th abortion referenda politics fake-news amnestyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:73da75e4857c/How Ireland Beat Dark Ads – Foreign Policy2018-06-02T17:21:31+00:00
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/01/abortion-referendum-how-ireland-resisted-bad-behaviour-online/
jmIn practice, while these recognizable attempts to disrupt the democratic debate with microtargeted ads, bot activity, and misinformation were active, they appear to have been relatively ineffective and may even have turned voters away from those employing them.
Given the battleground online discourse has become in democracies across the world, this small country’s resistance to it may offer some cause for hope. The resilience offered by the small size and close-knit nature of the Irish electorate may be difficult to reproduce in larger democracies. But the active measures taken by media, volunteer groups, and campaigners against potentially corrosive techniques can be a powerful inspiration.
+1 -- it's heartening that we were able to defeat these 21st century dirty tricks after the damage they did with Trump and Brexit.]]>brexit elections trump fake-news propaganda bots dark-ads facebook social-media repealthe8th referenda abortion ireland repeal-shield twitterhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7fa6d59ac179/If only Brexit had been run like Ireland’s referendum | Fintan O’Toole | Opinion | The Guardian2018-05-30T13:22:12+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/29/brexit-ireland-referendum-experiment-trusting-people
jmIrish voters were subjected to the same polarising tactics that have worked so well elsewhere: shamelessly fake “facts” (the claim, for example, that abortion was to be legalised up to six months into pregnancy); the contemptuous dismissal of expertise (the leading obstetrician Peter Boylan was told in a TV debate to “go back to school”); deliberately shocking visual imagery (posters of aborted foetuses outside maternity hospitals); and a discourse of liberal elites versus the real people. But Irish democracy had an immune system that proved highly effective in resisting this virus. Its success suggests a democratic playbook with at least four good rules.
]]>trump fake-news abortion referendum repealthe8th democracy ireland fintan-o-toolehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0b4017240fc7/TheJournal.ie FactCheck is first Irish outlet to officially tackle misinformation on Facebook2018-04-26T13:23:51+00:00
http://www.thejournal.ie/factcheck-thejournal-facebook-partnership-3979720-Apr2018/
jmTheJournal.ie FactCheck project has signed on to carry out third-party fact-checking on Facebook. This will involved testing the veracity of articles posted on the platform and attaching a rating and contextual information to contested items.
Awesome. nice one TJ]]>the-journal fact-checking facebook fake-news facts journalismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:070395217293/Forget Facebook, Russian agents have been pretending to be furries on Tumblr2018-03-28T21:46:22+00:00
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/03/forget-facebook-russian-agents-have-been-pretending-be-furries-tumblr
jmtumblr russia spies fake-news furries yiffing omgwtfhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d82f296fe48f/He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He's Worried About An Information Apocalypse.2018-02-15T21:03:10+00:00
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news
jm“In the next two, three, four years we’re going to have to plan for hobbyist propagandists who can make a fortune by creating highly realistic, photo realistic simulations,” Justin Hendrix, the executive director of NYC Media Lab, told BuzzFeed News. “And should those attempts work, and people come to suspect that there's no underlying reality to media artifacts of any kind, then we're in a really difficult place. It'll only take a couple of big hoaxes to really convince the public that nothing’s real.”
]]>fake-news reality news ai propaganda future black-mirror media hoaxes dystopiahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1cd514f6c1c1/'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth2018-02-05T16:19:50+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth
jmyoutube truth fake-news conspiracy-theories google algorithms politics brexit trumphttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:df7c145c28da/What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right'2017-12-19T17:39:51+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump
jm
Prominent critics of the Trump administration need to learn from Gamergate. They need to be prepared for abuse, for falsified concerns, invented grassroots campaigns designed specifically to break, belittle, or disgrace. Words and concepts will be twisted, repackaged and shared across forums, stripping them of meaning. Gamergate painted critics as censors, the far-right movement claims critics are the real racists.
Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
]]>politics fascism gamergate history alt-right milo fake-news propaganda nazis racism misogynyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c70eeb8f71e4/Tech Leaders Dismayed by Weaponization of Social Media - IEEE Spectrum2017-11-20T23:07:03+00:00
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/internet/tech-leaders-dismayed-by-weaponization-of-social-media
jm“We have passed the fail-safe point,” McNamee said. “I don’t think we can get back to the Silicon Valley that I loved. At this point we just have to save America.”
]]>propaganda fake-news facebook twitter social-media us-politics brexit internet russia silicon-valley usahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c3eb69f3b256/Kremlin info-ops measured to have a total reach of 340 million with dark, divisive ads2017-10-09T10:25:13+00:00
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/05/russian-propaganda-may-have-been-shared-hundreds-of-millions-of-times-new-research-says/
jmvirality news fake-news facebook politics russiahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:17f31e6432e4/Prior Exposure Increases Perceived Accuracy of Fake News2017-05-03T09:22:31+00:00
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2958246
jmCollectively, our results indicate familiarity is used heuristically to infer accuracy. Thus, the spread of fake news is supported by persistent low-level cognitive processes that make even highly implausible and partisan claims more believable with repetition. Our results suggest that political echo chambers not only isolate one from opposing views, but also help to create incubation chambers for blatantly false (but highly salient and politicized) fake news stories.
(via Zeynep Tufekci)
See also: http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE100/PE198/RAND_PE198.pdf , _The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model_, from RAND.]]>propaganda psychology fake-news belief facebook echo-chambers lies truth mediahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f0157e2dfd3e/UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it2017-03-31T14:39:51+00:00
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-the-information-war-is-real-and-were-losing-it/
jmStarbird sighed. “I used to be a techno-utopian. Now I can’t believe that I’m sitting here talking to you about all this.”
Yep :(
]]>journalism media news fake-news infowars twitter facebookhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f74e181a70be/Google’s featured snippets are worse than fake news2017-03-05T22:46:04+00:00
https://theoutline.com/post/1192/google-s-featured-snippets-are-worse-than-fake-news
jmgoogle news lies fake-news obama factshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5dd733cc78ff/Facebook, patient zero in fake news epidemic, proudly advertises ability to sway elections2017-03-02T14:02:56+00:00
https://mic.com/articles/169942/facebook-selling-campaign-political-ads-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg#.5NB3HvSbr
jmThe online social network is highlighting the Toomey campaign's ability to make ads that performed exceptionally well on Facebook even as it downplays the ability of the site to influence elections. In the days following the President Donald Trump's election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to the potential influence of fake news on the election as "a pretty crazy idea."
Taking Facebook at its word means holding two contradictory beliefs at once: that the site can sway an election on behalf of paying customers, but doesn't exert influence when it comes to the spread of misinformation by independent profiteers.
]]>facebook fake-news elections news pat-toomey republicans advertisinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:dce2eab6f1cf/Hacking the Attention Economy2017-01-07T18:04:00+00:00
https://points.datasociety.net/hacking-the-attention-economy-9fa1daca7a37#.btsmwwrbe
jmThe Internet has long been used for gaslighting, and trolls have long targeted adversaries. What has shifted recently is the scale of the operation, the coordination of the attacks, and the strategic agenda of some of the players.
For many who are learning these techniques, it’s no longer simply about fun, nor is it even about the lulz. It has now become about acquiring power.
A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.
]]>danah-boyd news facebook social-media gaslighting trolls 4chan lulz gamergate fake-newshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3d0fb16fbb96/Trump’s lies have a purpose. They are an assault on democracy2016-11-29T11:31:03+00:00
https://thinkprogress.org/when-everything-is-a-lie-power-is-the-only-truth-1e641751d150#.70wbvzi88
jmBy attacking the very notion of shared reality, the president-elect is making normal democratic politics impossible. When the truth is little more than an arbitrary personal decision, there is no common ground to be reached and no incentive to look for it.
To men like Surkov, that is exactly as it should be. Government policy should not be set through democratic oversight; instead, the government should “manage” democracy, ensuring that people can express themselves without having any influence over the machinations of the state. According to a 2011 openDemocracy article by Richard Sakwa, a professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, Surkov is “considered the main architect of what is colloquially known as ‘managed democracy,’ the administrative management of party and electoral politics.”
“Surkov’s philosophy is that there is no real freedom in the world, and that all democracies are managed democracies, so the key to success is to influence people, to give them the illusion that they are free, whereas in fact they are managed,” writes Sakwa. “In his view, the only freedom is ‘artistic freedom.’”
]]>post-truth lies donald-trump surkov breitbart pr media news propaganda fake-newshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:dd8267393405/Facebook's Fight Against Fake News Was Undercut by Fear of Conservative Backlash2016-11-14T22:02:53+00:00
http://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204
jmOne source said high-ranking officials were briefed on a planned News Feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people’s feeds. According to the source, the update was shelved and never released to the public. [....] “They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution from the company. The source added, “there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics,” and that “a lot of product decisions got caught up in that.”
]]>facebook politics us-politics trump fail fake-news hoaxes news newsfeedhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ef35fa72b3e7/