Social media as a weapon against truth

https://experiments.myhub.ai/ai4communities_post

Matthew Lowry experiment

The vast majority of people browsing social media streams via the web are doing just this: spending a lot of time browsing junk content.

While much of this "junk content" is for entertainment or some means of mental and/or emotional health, at root it becomes the opiate of the masses.

Know and Master Your Social Media Data Flow by [[Louis Gray]]

See commentary at https://boffosocko.com/2017/04/11/a-new-way-to-know-and-master-your-social-media-flow/

A Minimum Viable Ecosystem for collective intelligence by [[Mathew Lowry]]

Relation to Louis Gray's 2009 diagram/post: https://boffosocko.com/2017/04/11/a-new-way-to-know-and-master-your-social-media-flow/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Transfer_Project

see GitHub repo at https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project

for - definition - the spectacle - context - the society of the spectacle - cacooning - the spectacle - social media - the spectacle

definition - the spectacle - context - the society of the spectacle - A society where images presented by mass media / mass entertainment not only dominate - but replaces real experiences with a superficial reality that is - focused on appearances designed primarily to distract people from reality - This ultimately disconnects them from - themselves and - those around them

comment - How much does our interaction with virtual reality of - written symbols - audio - video - two dimensional images - derived from our screens both large and small affect our direct experience of life? - When people are distracted by such manufactured entertainment, they have less time to devote to important issues and connecting with real people - We can sit for hours in social isolation, ignoring our bodies need for exercise and our emotional need for real social connection - We can ignore the real crisis going on in the world and instead numb ourselves out with contrived entertainment

Ben Shneiderman's work is deeply influential in HCI; his work has assisted in creating strong connections between tech and creativity, especially when applied to fostering innovation.

his 2007 national science foundation funded report on creativity support tools, led by UMD, provides a seminal overview of the definitions of creativity at that time.

What To Do With Substack? by [[Dan Allosso]]

The "recency" problem is difficult in general in social media which tends to accentuate it versus the rest of the open web which is more of a network.

Comment by chrisaldrich: Something about this is reminiscent of WordPress' mission to democratize publishing. We can also compare it to Facebook whose (stated) mission is to connect people, while it's actual mission is to make money by seemingly radicalizing people to the extremes of our political spectrum.

This highlights the fact that while many may look at content moderation on platforms like Facebook as removing their voices or deplatforming them in the case of people like Donald J. Trump or Alex Jones as an anti-democratic move. In fact it is not. Because of Facebooks active move to accelerate extreme ideas by pushing them algorithmically, they are actively be un-democratic. Democratic behavior on Facebook would look like one voice, one account and reach only commensurate with that person's standing in real life. Instead, the algorithmic timeline gives far outsized influence and reach to some of the most extreme voices on the platform. This is patently un-democratic.

for - example - social media platforms bleeding content producers - Meta - Facebook - Instagram

Weird. That means one user must start a topic. Whereas a topic like "Obama" could be started by multiple folks, not knowing about each other, later on discovering and interconnecting their reasoning, if they so wish.

Additionally: community-based management, ban polls.

Alternative: per-user configuration of access. Let rooms be topics on which peers discuss. A friend can see what he's friends and foafs are saying.

https://typepals.com/

Pen pals with typewriters. Pre-Twitter/Facebook social media modality.

Moderate people, not code by [[Ryan Barrett]]

Introducing a network for thoughtful conversations by [[Jatan Mehta]]

This has broadly been implemented by Tumblr and is a first class feature within the IndieWeb.

Existence of an RSS feed could be used as a filter to remove large swaths of social media content which don't have them.

ShareOpenly https://shareopenly.org/<br /> built by Ben Werdmuller

Ongweso Jr., Edward. “The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-Searching with the Tech ‘Journalist.’” The Baffler, March 29, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso.

ᔥ[[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manton/indie-microblogging-owning-your-short-form-writing/posts/4000016?ref=ksr_email_backer_project_update_registered_users

Read The Evaporative Cooling Effect in Social Network : Networks Course blog for INFO 2040/CS 2850/Econ 2040/SOC 2090

ᔥ[[Doug Belshaw]] in I am so tired of moving platforms

via ref to Xianhang Zhang in Social Software Sundays #2 – The Evaporative Cooling Effect « Bumblebee Labs Blog [archived] who saw it

via [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] in Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

One could easily replace World War I and idea of war here with social media/media and the essay broadly reads well today.

Untangling Threads by Erin Kissane

Wells would really hate social media, which he seems to have perfectly defined with this statement.

Untangling Threads by Erin Kissane on 2023-12-21

This immediately brings up the questions of how the following - founder effects and being overwhelmed by the scale of an eternal September - communism of community interactions being subverted bent for the purposes of (surveillance) capitalism (see @Graeber2011, Debt)

On the “Death” of the Typosphere, a Few Thoughts and Ideas by Ted Munk on 2018-06-02

TTSSASTT = To Type, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth…

https://handwiki.org/wiki/Typecasting_(blogging)

Read 2023-12-18

Yes!

The World Wide Web takes on an ecological identity in that it is defined by the ecology of relationships exercised within, determining the "environmental" aspects of the online world. What of media ecology and its impact on earth's ecology? There are climate change ramifications simply in the use of social media itself, yet alone the influences or behaviors associated with it: here is a carbon emissions calculator for seemingly "innocent" internet use:

Following the Not So Online<br /> by Ryan Barrett

Competitive in what way? Grades? Jobs? Finances? Material things? Relationships?

wow...tell me more.

A nice encapsulation of evolutionary challenges that humans are facing.

One could argue that Adler and Van Doren would lump social media into the sources of amusement category.

https://bryanalexander.org/future-trends-forum/social-media-platform-numbers-how-many-people-are-using-what-today/

DiResta, Renee. “Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach.” Wired, August 30, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-free-reach/.

• for: annotate, annotate - social media, progress trap - social media

• source: connectathon 2023 09 23

  • session on social media

• for: doppleganger, conflict resolution, deep humanity, common denominators, CHD, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Into the Mirror World, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy culture, nonduality, self-other, human interbeing, polycrisis, othering, storytelling, myth-making, social media amplifier -summary
  • This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
  • It makes me think of the old cliches:
    • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
    • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
  • the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
    • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
    • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
      • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
  • The conversation explores the process of:
    • othering,
    • coopting and
    • abandoning
  • of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
  • and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
  • In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
  • Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
  • There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
  • however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
    • a sense of helplessness,
    • anger emerging from injustice
  • a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
  • is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
  • Another cliche springs to mind
    • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
    • hence the amplifying role of social media
  • When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere:

https://factr.com/

A social network for "organizing and sharing your knowledge".

T9 (text prediction):generative AI::handgun:machine gun

Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/n6wXvkeNEe6DOFexaCD-Qg

• for: quote, quote - Sam Adams, quote - social media
• quote, indyweb - support, people-centered
  • I do expect new social platforms to emerge that focus on privacy and ‘fake-free’ information, or at least they will claim to be so.
  • Proving that to a jaded public will be a challenge.
  • Resisting the temptation to exploit all that data will be extremely hard.
  • And how to pay for it all?
  • If it is subscriber-paid, then only the wealthy will be able to afford it.
• author: Sam Adams
  • 24 year IBM veteran -senior research scientist in AI at RTI International working on national scale knowledge graphs for global good
• comment
  • his comment about exploiting all that data is based on an assumption
    • a centralized, server data model
• this doesn't hold true with a people-centered, person-owned data network such as Inyweb

• for: quote, quote - Janet Salmons, quote - online communities, quote - social media, indyweb - support
• paraphrase
  • Will members-only, perhaps subscription-based ‘online communities’ reemerge instead of
  • ‘post and we’ll sell your data’ forms of social media?
  • I hope so, but at this point a giant investment would be needed to counter the mega-billions of companies like Facebook!

David E. Williams, Spencer P. Greenhalgh. (2022). Pseudonymous academics: Authentic tales from the Twitter trenches. The Internet and Higher Education. Volume 55, October 2022 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2022.100870

• for: quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias,quote - future of democracy, quote - tilting elections, quote - progress trap, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap, indyweb - support, future - education
• quote
  • The big tech companies, left to their own devices , have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide.
  • At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose
    • aggressive surveillance,
    • arbitrary suppression of content,
      • the censorship problem, and
    • the subtle manipulation of
      • thoughts,
      • behaviors,
      • votes,
      • purchases,
      • attitudes and
      • beliefs
    • are unchecked worldwide
• author: Robert Epstein
  • senior research psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology
• paraphrase
  • Epstein's organization is building two technologies that assist in combating these problems:
    • passively monitor what big tech companies are showing people online,
    • smart algorithms that will ultimately be able to identify online manipulations in realtime:
      • biased search results,
      • biased search suggestions,
      • biased newsfeeds,
      • platform-generated targeted messages,
      • platform-engineered virality,
      • shadow-banning,
      • email suppression, etc.
  • Tech evolves too quickly to be managed by laws and regulations,
    • but monitoring systems are tech, and they can and will be used to curtail the destructive and dangerous powers of companies like Google and Facebook on an ongoing basis.
• reference
  • seminar paper on monitoring systems, ‘Taming Big Tech -: https://is.gd/K4caTW.

• for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
• summary
  • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.

• for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
• paraphrase
• quote
  • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
    • http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/could-google-tilt-a-close-election/2013/03/29/c8d7f4e6-9587-11e2-b6f0-a5150a247b6a_story.html?ref=hackernoon.com
  • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
  • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
    • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
    • stats begin
    • search results favoring one candidate
    • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
    • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
    • stats end
    • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
    • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
    • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
    • stats begin
    • Google’s search engine 
      • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
    • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
    • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
      • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
    • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
    • stats end

• for: Hiliary Clinton could have won, voting, democracy, voting - social media, democracy - social media, election - social media, facebook - election, 2016 US elections, 2016 Trump election, 2016 US election, 2016 US election - different results, 2016 election - social media
• interesting fact
  • If Facebook had sent a "Go out and vote" message on election day of 2016 election, Clinton may have had a boost of 450,000 additional votes
    • and the outcome of the election might have been different

Applying the WEF meme about pods and bugs to Threads inspiring Bluesky and one Mastodon app to push algorithmic feeds.

I don't understand how you could audit this, unless you had to force a default of chronological presentation of posts etc.

the folly of endless bla, bla bla, people viewing the mind as a big boy, while in reality, it is a little boy who is undisciplined and goes on random rants and tangents, liking and disliking everything it sees on social-media

Babylon Bee article with made up Mark Zuckerberg quote touting the virtues of Threads. This is some of the Bee's finest writing and not at all inaccurate.

(14:20-19:00) Dopamine Prediction Error is explained by Andrew Huberman in the following way: When we anticipate something exciting dopamine levels rise and rise, but when we fail it drops below baseline, decreasing motivation and drive immensely, sometimes even causing us to get sad. However, when we succeed, dopamine rises even higher, increasing our drive and motivation significantly... This is the idea that successes build upon each other, and why celebrating the "marginal gains" is a very powerful tool to build momentum and actually make progress. Surprise increases this effect even more: big dopamine hit, when you don't anticipate it.

Social Media algorithms make heavy use of this principle, therefore enslaving its user, in particular infinite scrolling platforms such as TikTok... Your dopamine levels rise as you're looking for that one thing you like, but it drops because you don't always have that one golden nugget. Then it rises once in a while when you find it. This contrast creates an illusion of enjoyment and traps the user in an infinite search of great content, especially when it's shortform. It makes you waste time so effectively. This is related to getting the success mindset of preferring delayed gratification over instant gratification.

It would be useful to reflect and introspect on your dopaminic baseline, and see what actually increases and decreases your dopamine, in addition to whether or not these things help to achieve your ambitions. As a high dopaminic baseline (which means your dopamine circuit is getting used to high hits from things as playing games, watching shortform content, watching porn) decreases your ability to focus for long amounts of time (attention span), and by extent your ability to learn and eventually reach success. Studying and learning can actually be fun, if your dopamine levels are managed properly, meaning you don't often engage in very high-dopamine emitting activities. You want your brain to be used to the low amounts of dopamine that studying gives. A framework to help with this reflection would be Kolb's.

A short-term dopamine reset is to not use the tool or device for about half an hour to an hour (or do NSDR). However, this is not a long-term solution.

https://nostr.com/

Peter Kominski likes this generally.

From late 2022

https://trakt.tv/dashboard

https://atomicbooks.com/pages/john-waters-fan-mail

John Waters receives fan mail via Atomic Books in Baltimore, MD.

https://firesky.tv/

reply to u/bestlunchtoday at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12gadut/benefits_of_sharing_permanent_notes/

I love the diversity of ideas here! So many different ways to do it all and perspectives on the pros/cons. It's all incredibly idiosyncratic, just like our notes.

I probably default to a far extreme of sharing the vast majority of my notes openly to the public (at least the ones taken digitally which account for probably 95%). You can find them here: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich.

Not many people notice or care, but I do know that a small handful follow and occasionally reply to them or email me questions. One or two people actually subscribe to them via RSS, and at least one has said that they know more about me, what I'm reading, what I'm interested in, and who I am by reading these over time. (I also personally follow a handful of people and tags there myself.) Some have remarked at how they appreciate watching my notes over time and then seeing the longer writing pieces they were integrated into. Some novice note takers have mentioned how much they appreciate being able to watch such a process of note taking turned into composition as examples which they might follow. Some just like a particular niche topic and follow it as a tag (so if you were interested in zettelkasten perhaps?) Why should I hide my conversation with the authors I read, or with my own zettelkasten unless it really needed to be private? Couldn't/shouldn't it all be part of "The Great Conversation"? The tougher part may be having means of appropriately focusing on and sharing this conversation without some of the ills and attention economy practices which plague the social space presently.

There are a few notes here on this post that talk about social media and how this plays a role in making them public or not. I suppose that if I were putting it all on a popular platform like Twitter or Instagram then the use of the notes would be or could be considered more performative. Since mine are on what I would call a very quiet pseudo-social network, but one specifically intended for note taking, they tend to be far less performative in nature and the majority of the focus is solely on what I want to make and use them for. I have the opportunity and ability to make some private and occasionally do so. Perhaps if the traffic and notice of them became more prominent I would change my habits, but generally it has been a net positive to have put my sensemaking out into the public, though I will admit that I have a lot of privilege to be able to do so.

Of course for those who just want my longer form stuff, there's a website/blog for that, though personally I think all the fun ideas at the bleeding edge are in my notes.

Since some (u/deafpolygon, u/Magnifico99, and u/thiefspy; cc: u/FastSascha, u/A_Dull_Significance) have mentioned social media, Instagram, and journalists, I'll share a relevant old note with an example, which is also simultaneously an example of the benefit of having public notes to be able to point at, which u/PantsMcFail2 also does here with one of Andy Matuschak's public notes:

[Prominent] Journalist John Dickerson indicates that he uses Instagram as a commonplace: https://www.instagram.com/jfdlibrary/ here he keeps a collection of photo "cards" with quotes from famous people rather than photos. He also keeps collections there of photos of notes from scraps of paper as well as photos of annotations he makes in books.

It's reasonably well known that Ronald Reagan shared some of his personal notes and collected quotations with his speechwriting staff while he was President. I would say that this and other similar examples of collaborative zettelkasten or collaborative note taking and their uses would blunt u/deafpolygon's argument that shared notes (online or otherwise) are either just (or only) a wiki. The forms are somewhat similar, but not all exactly the same. I suspect others could add to these examples.

And of course if you've been following along with all of my links, you'll have found yourself reading not only these words here, but also reading some of a directed conversation with entry points into my own personal zettelkasten, which you can also query as you like. I hope it has helped to increase the depth and level of the conversation, should you choose to enter into it. It's an open enough one that folks can pick and choose their own path through it as their interests dictate.

Introducing Substack Notes<br /> by Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi

Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/U95jEs0eEe20EUesAtKcuA

Is this phenomenon of "complex narratives" related to misinformation spread within the larger and more complex social network/online network? At small, local scales, people know how to handle data and information which is locally contextualized for them. On larger internet-scale communication social platforms this sort of contextualization breaks down.

For a lack of a better word for this, let's temporarily refer to it as "complex narratives" to get a handle on it.

Related here is the horcrux problem of note taking or even social media. The mental friction of where did I put that thing? As a result, it's best to put it all in one place.

How can you build on a single foundation if you're in multiple locations? The primary (only?) benefit of multiple locations is redundancy in case of loss.

Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene are counter examples, though Greene's books are distinct projects generally while Holiday's work has a lot of overlap.

Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’ by [[Taylor Lorenz]]

shifts in language and meaning of words and symbols as the result of algorithmic content moderation

instead of slow semantic shifts, content moderation is actively pushing shifts of words and their meanings

article suggested by this week's Dan Allosso Book club on Pirate Enlightenment

Could it be the sift from person to person (known in both directions) to massive broadcast that is driving issues with content moderation. When it's person to person, one can simply choose not to interact and put the person beyond their individual pale. This sort of shunning is much harder to do with larger mass publics at scale in broadcast mode.

How can bringing content moderation back down to the neighborhood scale help in the broadcast model?

follow up on this for the relevant forthcoming paper....

Where's the balance for professionalism with respect to dodging the algorithmic filters for serious health-related conversations online?

link to: https://hypothes.is/a/uBq9HKqWEe22Jp_rjJ5tjQ

What about non-marginalized toxic communities like Neo-Nazis?

Social media has slowly moved away from communication between people who know each other to people who are farther apart in social spaces. Increasingly in 2021 onward, some platforms like TikTok have acted as a distribution platform and ignored explicit social connections like follower/followee in lieu of algorithmic-only feeds to distribute content to people based on a variety of criteria including popularity of content and the readers' interests.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/2/2/donovan-forced-leave-hks/

This is a massive loss for HKS, but a potential major win for the school that picks the project up.

It seems to be a sad use of "rules" to shut down a project which may not jive with an administrations' perspective/needs.

Read on Fri 2023-02-03 at 7:14 PM

One of the values of social media is that it can allow you to practice or rehearse the potential value of ideas and potentially getting useful feedback on individual ideas which you may be aggregating into larger works.

https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/

https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb

We become what we behold, a game by Nicky Case.

A commentary on news cycles and social media.

This technical jargon, in the context of Cohost.org, means "a website".

reply to u/theinvertedform at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zkguan/is_zettelkasten_gamification_of_notetaking/

Social media and "influencers" have certainly grabbed onto the idea and squeezed with both hands. Broadly while talking about their own versions of rules, tips, tricks, and tools, they've missed a massive history of the broader techniques which pervade the humanities for over 500 years. When one looks more deeply at the broader cross section of writers, educators, philosophers, and academics who have used variations on the idea of maintaining notebooks or commonplace books, it becomes a relative no-brainer that it is a useful tool. I touch on some of the history as well as some of the recent commercialization here: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/.

Misinformation exposure and extreme right-wing ideology appear associated in this report. Others find that it is partisanship that predicts susceptibility.

This suggests the misinformation sharing elites may influence whether followers become more extreme. There is little incentive not to stoke outrage as it improves engagement.

Estimated ideological extremity is associated with higher elite misinformation-exposure scores for estimated conservatives more so than estimated liberals.

Political ideology is estimated using accounts followed10. b Political ideology is estimated using domains shared30 (Red: conservative, blue: liberal). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

Estimated ideological extremity is associated with higher language toxicity and moral outrage scores for estimated conservatives more so than estimated liberals.

The relationship between estimated political ideology and (a) language toxicity and (b) expressions of moral outrage. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for visualization purposes. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

In the co-share network, a cluster of websites shared more by conservatives is also shared more by users with higher misinformation exposure scores.

Nodes represent website domains shared by at least 20 users in our dataset and edges are weighted based on common users who shared them. a Separate colors represent different clusters of websites determined using community-detection algorithms29. b The intensity of the color of each node shows the average misinformation-exposure score of users who shared the website domain (darker = higher PolitiFact score). c Nodes’ color represents the average estimated ideology of the users who shared the website domain (red: conservative, blue: liberal). d The intensity of the color of each node shows the average use of language toxicity by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher use of toxic language). e The intensity of the color of each node shows the average expression of moral outrage by users who shared the website domain (darker = higher expression of moral outrage). Nodes are positioned using directed-force layout on the weighted network.

Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with the use of toxic language and moral outrage.

Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the toxicity of the language used in their tweets, measured using the Google Jigsaw Perspective API27, and (b) the extent to which their tweets involved expressions of moral outrage, measured using the algorithm from ref. 28. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for visualization purposes. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with sharing news from lower-quality outlets and with conservative estimated ideology.

Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by professional fact-checkers21, (b) the quality of the news outlets they shared content from, as rated by layperson crowds21, and (c) estimated political ideology, based on the ideology of the accounts they follow10. Small dots in the background show individual observations; large dots show the average value across bins of size 0.1, with size of dots proportional to the number of observations in each bin.

Notice that Twitter’s account purge significantly impacted misinformation spread worldwide: the proportion of low-credible domains in URLs retweeted from U.S. dropped from 14% to 7%. Finally, despite not having a list of low-credible domains in Russian, Russia is central in exporting potential misinformation in the vax rollout period, especially to Latin American countries. In these countries, the proportion of low-credible URLs coming from Russia increased from 1% in vax development to 18% in vax rollout periods (see Figure 8 (b), Appendix).

We applied two scenarios to compare how these regular agents behave in the Twitter network, with and without malicious agents, to study how much influence malicious agents have on the general susceptibility of the regular users. To achieve this, we implemented a belief value system to measure how impressionable an agent is when encountering misinformation and how its behavior gets affected. The results indicated similar outcomes in the two scenarios as the affected belief value changed for these regular agents, exhibiting belief in the misinformation. Although the change in belief value occurred slowly, it had a profound effect when the malicious agents were present, as many more regular agents started believing in misinformation.

Social media should be comprised of people from end to end. Corporate interests inserted into the process can only serve to dehumanize the system.

Robin Sloan is in the same camp as Greg McVerry and I.

https://atproto.com/guides/faq

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jackjack/issues/a-native-internet-protocol-for-social-media-1503112?via=twitter-card&client=DesktopWeb&element=issue-card

This list is particularly good.

Proper regulation of end to end services would encourage the creation of filtering and other tools which would tend to benefit users rather than benefit the rent seeking of the corporations which own the pipes.