Docket+ 3 June

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. Special Issue on Online Harassment in Authoritarian and Semi-democratic States (Journal of Online Trust and Safety, 28 May)
2. Hybrid CoE Working Paper 32: Russia’s hybrid threat tactics against the Baltic Sea region: From disinformation to sabotage (HybridCoE, 30 May)
3. The narratives surrounding Trump’s verdict are strikingly familiar and dangerous (ISD, 31 May)
4. AI-Enabled Influence Operations: The Threat to the UK General Election (Alan Turing Institute, May)
5. Identifying and characterizing superspreaders of low-credibility content on Twitter (Plos One, 22 May)
6. Trust & Safety Approaches an Inflection Point (Anchor Change, 29 May)
7. The $20,000 spam account: A purchase you can't wait to avoid (Conspirator Norteño, 1 June)

1. Academia & Research

1.1 Platforms & Technology

LISTEN: Don't Listen to Us - A conversation with Kat Duffy on why we need the global majority in conversations on tech (Anchor Change, 30 May)

1. TikTok Manipulation Report Is Too Little Too Late (Lawfare, 31 May)
2. Online Platforms & Political Violence (CITAP, 28 May)
3. Digital Town Square? Nextdoor's Offline Contexts and Online Discourse (CSMaP, 29 May)
4. Meta's updated Privacy Policy, effective from 26 June (Meta)
5. The old king is dead, long live the algorithmic king – the decline of Facebook and the rise of TikTok – comparative study of algorithmic design of social media platforms (Wiley, 31 May)
6. Commission designates Temu as Very Large Online Platform under the Digital Services Act (European Commission, 31 May)

AI

1. Anatomy of an AI-powered malicious social botnet (Journal QD, 29 May)
2. Mapping automatic social media information disorder. The role of bots and AI in spreading misleading information in society (Plos One, 31 May)

1.2 World News 

1. Hostile Information Campaigns Could Test a Divided Finland (Tech Policy Press, 30 May)
2. Manipulated voices: Belarus’s disinformation targeting Lithuanian democracy (EUvsDisinfo, 31 May)
3. Tracing Austronesian Supremacy Rhetoric on Social Media: Its Impact on the Fate of Rohingya Refugees (GNET, 28 May)
4. The Houthi (Ansar Allah) Digital Ecosystem (ISD, 28 May)
5. "I Searched for a Religious Song in Amharic and Got Sexual Content Instead": Investigating Online Harm in Low-Resourced Languages on YouTube (ArXiv, 26 May)
6. What characteristics define disinformation and fake news?: review of taxonomies and definitions (ArXiv, 28 May)

Russia & Ukraine

1. Pro-Kremlin content targets South African social media users, pushing narratives around Ukrainian neo-Nazism (Centre for Information Resilience, 23 May)
2. Websites of Moldovan politicians linked to local pro-Russia news outlets (DFRLab, 28 May)
3. The fugitive Florida deputy sheriff who became a Kremlin disinformation impresario (NewsGuard, May)
4. Who’s really in the shadows? (EUvsDisinfo, 27 May)
5. Elections are battlefields for the Kremlin: Sow distrust and discontent (EUvsDisinfo, 27 May)
6. Elections are battlefields for the Kremlin: Flooding the information space (EuvsDisinfo, 31 May)
7. The Kremlin who cried, ‘West!’ (EUvsDisinfo, 30 May)
8. False Russian claims hijacked the biological weapons treaty. Here’s how to reclaim it (The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 27 May)