DisinfoDocket 4 January
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This morning catch up on developments over the holdidays from -
* Major social media platforms including Twitter, TikTok, Google, YouTube and Meta
* Russian propaganda about Ukraine
* How COVID-19 disinformation has affected uptake of other vaccines
* And much more!
Highlights:
We believe that cause-based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics. Today, we're relaxing our ads policy for cause-based ads in the US. We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 3, 2023
- The terrible options that face social media companies (CNN, 21 December)
- Community Guidelines Enforcement Report Q3 (TikTok, 19 December)
- How YouTube supported the 2022 U.S. midterm elections (YouTube, 19 December)
- Recapping our work on the 2022 U.S. midterm elections (Google, 19 December)
- NCSC Threat Report 22nd December 2022 (NCSC, 22 December)
1. Academia & Research
- The SAGE Handbook of Digital Society (SAGE)
- OSINT Techniques: Resources for Uncovering Online Information - 10th Edition (2023) (IntelTechniques, 2023)
- Post-truth public diplomacy: a detrimental trend of cross-national communication and how open societies address it (T&F, 2 January)
- Digital identity as platform-mediated surveillance (SAGE, 3 January)
2. Platforms & Technology
- Suit accusing YouTube of tracking children is back on after appeal (Ars Technica, 29 December)
- Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire (ProPublica, 21 December)
- Shadowbanning is real: Here’s how you end up silenced by social media (Washington Post, 27 December)
- The Ongoing Insurrection: How Trump Continues to Weaponize Social Media Post Jan. 6th (Accountable Tech, December)
- ChatGPT bot caught spreading misinformation on maritime law. Here’s how (TradeWinds, 2 January)
- Beyond ‘minimizing harms’: Algorithmic bias is still a huge problem — but where do those problems start? (Untangled, 1 January)
Starting today, you’ll start seeing additional icons that provide context for accounts on Twitter. In addition to blue and gold checks, you’ll see grey checks for government and multilateral accounts and square affiliation badges for select businesses. pic.twitter.com/9hLIUYdQGh
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) December 19, 2022
Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times a tweet has been seen! This is normal for video.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2022
Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions.
LISTEN: The Twitter Files and the future of the Democratic Party with Silicon Valley’s congressmen (Honestly with Bari Weiss, 16 December)
- Musk’s Frequent Twitter Polls Are at Risk of Bot Manipulation: New research shows votes can be easily purchased during Twitter polls (Bloomberg, 22 December)
- Twitter in 2022: 5 essential reads about the consequences of Elon Musk’s takeover of the microblogging platform (The Conversation, 21 December)
- What It Really Means for a Tweet to Have a Lot of Views: We looked at how great tweets stack up to great events. (Slate, 29 December)
- A French Perspective on Elon Musk’s Twitter (Lawfare, 3 January)
- Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen says if Elon Musk wants Twitter to be a public square, he should make its algorithms open source (Business Insider, 2 January)
- The influence of Twitter on journalism and politics (Niskanen Center, 27 December)
Twitter Alternatives
- Twitter rival Mastodon rejects funding to keep its non-profit status ‘untouchable’ (Metro, 29 December)
- How We Verified Ourselves on Mastodon — and How You Can Too (The Markup, 22 December)
- Mastodon—and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers (Ars Technica, 2 January)
- Nostr Is The Decentralized Protocol That Might Replace Elon Musk’s Twitter (Forbes, 29 December)
- Did Elon Musk's first actions at Twitter lose the social media platform users to Mastodon and Hive Social? (Sky, 30 December)
Content Moderation
- Twitter’s Fact-Checking System Has a Major Blind Spot: Anything Divisive (Bloomberg, 19 December)
- One in four tweets about Ukraine and climate are misleading (Times, 23 December)
- Twitter Blue profiles are already a hotbed of misinformation (Fast Company, 23 December)
- Musk Has Reduced Twitter’s Ability to Spot Foreign Disinformation, a Former Data Scientist Says (Defense One, 21 December)