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The True Costs of Misinformation
Producing Moral and Technical Order in a Time of Pandemonium

Of course we’re avid, avid watch­ers of Tucker Carlson. But inso­far as he’s like the shit fil­ter, which is that if things make it as far as Tucker Carlson, then they prob­a­bly have much more like…stuff that we can look at online. And so some­times he’ll start talk­ing about some­thing and we don’t real­ly under­stand where it came from and then when we go back online we can find that there’s quite a bit of dis­course about would­n’t it be fun­ny if peo­ple believed this about antifa.”

The Breakdown: Joan Donovan on Domestic Misinformation

We are immersed in a hyper­par­ti­san media ecosys­tem where the future of jour­nal­ism is at stake, the future of social media is at stake. And right now I’m real­ly wor­ried that the US democ­ra­cy might not sur­vive this moment.

The Breakdown: Daphne Keller Explains the Communications Decency Act

The key thing that Congress realized…was that if you want plat­forms to mod­er­ate, you need to give them both of those immu­ni­ties. You can’t just say, You’re free to mod­er­ate, go do it,” you have to also say, And, if you under­take to mod­er­ate but you miss some­thing and there’s you know, defama­tion still on the plat­form or what­ev­er, the fact that you tried to mod­er­ate won’t be held against you.” 

The Breakdown: eve­lyn douek on Doctored Media, Platform Response and Responsibility

The ques­tion also does come up, you know, is there any­thing real­ly new here, with these new tech­nolo­gies? Disinformation is as old as infor­ma­tion. Manipulated media is as old as media. Is there some­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly harm­ful about this new infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment and these new tech­nolo­gies, these hyper­re­al­is­tic false depic­tions, that we need to be espe­cial­ly wor­ried about? 

Data & Society Databite #119: Mary L. Gray on Ghost Work

I’m just going to say it, I would like to com­plete­ly blow up employ­ment clas­si­fi­ca­tion as we know it. I do not think that defin­ing full-time work as the place where you get ben­e­fits, and part-time work as the place where you have to fight to get a full-time job, is an appro­pri­ate way of address­ing this labor market.

The Oppenheimer Moment

Where did this evil stuff come from? Are we evil? I’m per­fect­ly will­ing to stip­u­late you are not evil. Neither is your boss evil. Nor is Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. And yet the results of our work, our best most altru­is­tic work, often turns evil when it’s deployed in the larg­er world. We go to work every day, gen­uine­ly expect­ing to make the world a bet­ter place with our pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy. But some­how, evil is sneak­ing in despite our good intentions.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

One of the things that I think is real­ly impor­tant is that we’re pay­ing atten­tion to how we might be able to recu­per­ate and recov­er from these kinds of prac­tices. So rather than think­ing of this as just a tem­po­rary kind of glitch, in fact I’m going to show you sev­er­al of these glitch­es and maybe we might see a pattern.

What Do We Do About the Haters?

A lot of the top­ics that we’re try­ing to tack­le” or try­ing to deal with on the Internet, we’re not actu­al­ly defin­ing ahead of time. And so what we’ve end­ed up with is a sys­tem where­by both com­pa­nies, and gov­ern­ments alike, are work­ing some­times sep­a­rate­ly, some­times togeth­er, to rid the Internet of these top­ics, of these dis­cus­sions, with­out actu­al­ly delv­ing into what they are.

Loving Out Loud in a Time of Hate Speech

Dangerous speech, as opposed hate speech, is defined basi­cal­ly as speech that seeks to incite vio­lence against peo­ple. And that’s the kind of speech that I’m real­ly con­cerned about right now. That’s what we’re see­ing on the rise in the United States, in Europe, and elsewhere.

Beyond Legal Talismans

Once we under­stand that legal tal­is­mans are pro­tec­tive invo­ca­tions, we have to be crit­i­cal of them. Even the ones we like. The short­hand is not com­pre­hen­si­ble to users. And the short­hand is not com­pre­hen­si­ble to peo­ple more generally. 

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