Maybe It’s Not YouTube’s Algorithm That Radicalizes People
A counter to the "red pill" theory of YouTube radicalization
Tag: DIG101
Verge exposé on the horrific working lives of Facebook content moderator
“Facebook needs to shut down” says one content moderator.
AI Ethics: Seven Traps
The traps that discussions about AI ethics fall into. Especially appreciate "the rule of law" trap, wherein we assume laws about AI will inherently be ethical.
The Fyre Festival and the Trumpet of Amplification
Terrific/terrifying post by Mike Caulfield showing that the same principles that underwrote the Fyre Festival apply to disinformation and conspiracy theories
“Blackfishing” on Instagram
Adding this to future syllabuses, to be paired with Lauren Michele Jackson's digital blackface article in Teen Vogue.
Walmart’s Patent for a Biometric-Enhanced Cart
Walmart just patented a procedure for capturing customer health data via shopping cart handles. No way this data could be misused, no-sir.
Two popular conservative Twitter personalities were just outed as Russian trolls
Revisiting this 2017 article after reading about Kathleen Hall Jamieson's new "Cyberwar" book.
Amazon Alexa Will Take Over Your Home – The Atlantic
Will probably add this to my DIG 101 syllabus. And it would pair well with Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
GIFs as Disinformation Remedy (aka The GIF Curriculum)
Explainer GIFs for link-averse media consumers…Perfect for my DIG 101, where we’re discussing animated GIFs next week and Internet conspiracies a few weeks later.
THE MEANING OF COLORS by Molleindustria
An MS Painterly send-up of conspiracy culture
Around the Antenna Tree: The Politics of Infrastructural Visibility
We touched upon Lisa Park’s critique of the hypervisibility/weird invisibility of antenna trees yesterday in DIG 101. Wish we could have spent more time on it.
AI Literacy: The basics of machine learning
Just discovered this great AI primer from Liz Daly. Perfect for the syllabus.
Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one
Key quote: “It is unclear what other criteria Facebook measures to determine a user’s score, whether all users have a score, and in what ways they’re used.”
twitter.com
Gotta pull this out whenever we talk about infrastructure in class.
Why Reddit’s face-swapping celebrity porn craze is a harbinger of dystopia
There are a lot of deep fake articles out there, but I think this is the one I'll use in Intro to Digital Studies this year.
Microsoft’s Undersea Data Center
You can easily apply Holt and Vonderau’s critique of the discourse around data centers in “Where the Internet Lives” to Microsoft’s discourse about its undersea data center.
PYMK: A Controversial Facebook Feature’s 10-Year History
Facebook’s People You May Know “mines information users don’t have control over to make connections they may not want it to make.”
Watch an Art Work About the Dark Web, on the Dark Web | The New Yorker
Dark Content is a video series on the dark web about people who perform commercial content moderation on the open web.
Who are QAnon supporters? The QAnon subreddit, analyzed with data. – Vox
Excellent digital forensics work on QAnon. Surprise! Most QAnon posters also post on videogames and Men’s Rights.
What HBR Gets Wrong About Algorithms and Bias · fast.ai
“algorithms can often exacerbate underlying societal problems”
How journalists should not cover an online conspiracy theory | Opinion | The Guardian
Another great piece by Whitney Phillips, one of the best thinkers about toxic media. A critique of they way the news has covered QAnon conspiracists.
This is why Alex Jones has been able to get away with exploiting social media – The Washington Post
Worth including on my DIG 101 syllabus, where I will have a whole section on conspiracies.
Unintended Consequences to Google Context Cards on Conspiracy Videos?
A good look at how affordances of platforms could enable a kind of crackpot hermeneutics.
Yelp, The Red Hen, And How All Tech Platforms Are Now Pawns In The Culture War
A Buzzfeed piece on the way fringe political groups hijack social media platforms.
The Oxygen of Amplification | Data & Society
Fantastic report from Data & Society on the ways the media inadvertently amplifies the messaging of hate groups