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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: Claire Wardle on Journalism and Disinformation

I think those of us who study and think about mis- and dis­in­for­ma­tion, it’s very tempt­ing to study what’s in front of us. And so there’s a dis­pro­por­tion­ate focus on Twitter, because it’s the eas­i­est to study because there’s an open API—although, caveats—and Facebook. That’s a lot of the places that we study. And sim­i­lar­ly, that’s a lot of the places that jour­nal­ists look for con­tent and sources and sto­ries. And so we end up kind of real­ly just think­ing about that as the prob­lem,” when actu­al­ly we need to think about the full ecosystem.

How To Lose A Country: The New Political Ice Age

When did we decide that we no longer need to watch news? We no longer have to watch these dis­turb­ing images? That’s why I’m writ­ing a book. I’m think­ing about these issues.

Post-Enlightenment, Media, and Democracy

I think this is the end of the news. Not the end of jour­nal­ism, end of news. And I think the whole dis­cus­sion about busi­ness mod­els, or qual­i­ty, or trust, or ethics are sec­ondary to what is the real prob­lem, which is a cul­tur­al prob­lem and a social problem.

Biases Abound

I’ve expe­ri­enced first hand the chal­lenges of try­ing to cor­rect mis­in­for­ma­tion, and in part my aca­d­e­m­ic research builds on that expe­ri­ence and tries under­stand why it was that so much of what we did at Spinsanity antag­o­nized even those peo­ple who were inter­est­ed enough to go to a fact-checking web site.

Emily Bell on Elusive Objectivity

This idea of con­trol is so baked into the jour­nal­is­tic psy­chol­o­gy that actu­al­ly this artic­u­la­tion, done in a highly-controlled envi­ron­ment with an adver­tis­ing agency, is one which even though it’s not new to the open Web is still very very very new to jour­nal­ism. And what we don’t have at the moment is any­thing like a bal­anc­ing invest­ment in the kinds of things which allow us to par­tic­i­pate in the crowd. 

Define American

The real­i­ty is we have been so busy call­ing peo­ple names, obsess­ing over bor­ders and walls, and spread­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion that we haven’t even asked hard ques­tions like why do peo­ple move? What does US for­eign pol­i­cy and US trade agree­ments have to do with migra­tion pat­terns? Remember when those chil­dren start­ed walk­ing from Central America to here, and CBS News and a lot of orga­ni­za­tions called them ille­gal immi­grant” chil­dren instead of call­ing them the refugees that they are? What did we do to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala so that their coun­tries got so vio­lent that they have to come here? Who start­ed the drug war? What did NAFTA do not only to the United States but to Mexicans, right?

The Conspiracy Trap

Conspiracies are per­fect for sim­ple think­ing. Because con­spir­a­cy is by def­i­n­i­tion some­thing that explains every­thing. A real­ly great con­spir­a­cy explains some­thing that has already hap­pened and some­thing that’s going to happen.

FollowBias: Supporting Behavior Change Toward Gender Equality on Social Media

In 2011, the cul­tur­al crit­ic Emily Nussbaum reflect­ed on the flow­er­ing of online fem­i­nism through new pub­li­ca­tions, social media con­ver­sa­tions, and dig­i­tal orga­niz­ing. But Nussbaum wor­ried, even if you can expand the sup­ply of who’s writ­ing, will that actu­al­ly change the influ­ence of wom­en’s voic­es in soci­ety? What if online fem­i­nism was just an echo chamber?

Mythophysics of the New Normal

The future is on the whole a won­der­ful thing because it will bring us new things that we haven’t seen before. And that’s why we stick around.

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