Docket+ 19 August

Hi! I'm Victoria and welcome to DisinfoDocket. Docket+ is a weekly roundup of the latest influence operations-related academic research, events and job opportunities.

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Highlights

1. Emma Briant on Disinformation Wars (JHU, August)
2. Researchers Validate the Dangers of Disinformation (Tech Policy Press, 15 August)
3. Olympic Disinformation: An Interview with Cristina López G. on Univision (Graphika, 9 August)
4. Iran Targeting 2024 US Election (Microsoft, 8 August)
5. Girls Who Code Leads Cyber Alliance Providing Resources for Young People (Girls Who Code)
6. AI disinformation: lessons from the UK’s election (ASPI, 16 August)

1. Academia & Research

1.1 Platforms & Technology

1. The TikTok Law and the Foreign Influence Boogeyman (Lawfare, 12 August)
2. The TikTok Case Will Be Determined by What’s Behind the Government’s Black Lines (Lawfare, 13 August)
3. Tracking Elon Musk’s Political Activities (Tech Policy Press, 15 August)
4. T&S is professionalising — but how? (Everything in Moderation, 12 August)
5. From Single-Task to Multi-Task: Unveiling the Dynamics of Knowledge Transfers in Disinformation Detection (SSRN, 9 August)
6. The Manifestation of Affective Polarization on Social Media: A Cross-Platform Supervised Machine Learning Approach (OJS, May)

AI & LLM

1. Generative AI and Democracy: the synthetification of public opinion and its impacts (SSRN, 13 August)
2. Here’s how people are actually using AI (MIT, 12 August)
3. X’s new AI image generator will make anything from Taylor Swift in lingerie to Kamala Harris with a gun (The Verge, 14 August)
4. Interrogating Mainstream Reporting on Artificial Intelligence (Tech Policy Press, 12 August)
5. Innovation & Safety Are Products of Open Source (Tech Policy Press, 14 August)
6. Large language models can consistently generate high-quality content for election disinformation operations (ArXiv, 13 August)
7. Automated Early Detection of Misinformation on Social Media: A Large Language Model Approach with High-Volume Facebook Data (OSF, 13 August)
8. On the Antitrust Implications of Embedding Generative AI in Core Platform Services (SSRN, 12 August)
9. Large language models pose a risk to society and need tighter regulation, say researchers (Phys, 13 August)
10. Generative AI and the liar's dividend: As synthetic images and video grow in sophistication, attempts to portray real events as fake and fake events as real will both proliferate (Conspirator Norteño, 16 August)

Availability and spread of information

1. Report Finds Meta’s Approach to Political Content Reduces Reach for Activist Accounts (Tech Policy Press, 13 August)

1.2 World News 

1. From Social Media to the Streets: How Bangladesh’s Gen-Z Movement Overcame Internet Shutdowns to Overthrow an Autocrat (Tech Policy Press, 12 August)
2. Ireland’s far-right shift: Abortion as a tool for ethno-nationalist agendas (ISD, 13 August)
3. Lukashenka’s cemented dictatorship in Belarus: four years since August 2020 (EUvsDisinfo, 9 August)
4. Georgia: The next colour revolution? (EUvsDisinfo, 13 August)
5. Global misinformation trends: Commonalities and differences in topics, sources of falsehoods, and deception strategies across eight countries (SAGE, 14 August)