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Rashad Robinson on Interventions for Institutions

I want to inject a lit­tle cul­ture into this con­ver­sa­tion. And as we talk about the rea­sons that we make inter­ven­tions in this work, the rea­son why we advo­cate for truth in the media, and the rea­son why orga­ni­za­tions like mine do that work is for our com­mu­ni­ty, for the folks that we represent.

Ellen Miller on Interventions for Institutions

I’ve long had this fan­ta­sy in my entire career, which has most­ly been in the field a mon­ey and pol­i­tics, to be able to find one place where you could enter a search term like this one, General Electric,” and see every­thing you could find out about a com­pa­ny, a cor­po­rate profile—what they do in Washington, what they do at the state level.

Micah Sifry on Combatting Institutions That Promote Misinformation

I actu­al­ly want to go beyond the way we think about the Internet to think about this whole ques­tion we’ve been wrestling with, which is you know, our infor­ma­tion sys­tem, and to take a metaphor that my friend Craig Newmark likes to say, which is that the press or the media is the immune sys­tem of democracy.

Gilad Lotan on Interventions for Individuals

Lo and behold human­i­ty is fair­ly con­sis­tent. We would men­tion morn­ings in the morn­ings. We get tired sort of towards the evenings. Talk about cof­fee more fre­quent­ly in the morn­ing. These are the sort of nor­mal diur­nal pat­terns that we see on Twitter, right. As expect­ed. But when inter­est­ing events hap­pen and events that are out of the ordi­nary hap­pen it’s very clear that they happen.

Interventions for Individuals to Fight Spin

I will tell to you a few things about the first Twitter bomb that with my col­league we found a cou­ple years ago. And there it was a case in which some­body was attack­ing the can­di­date Martha Coakley in the last Massachusetts elec­tions. We found out that actu­al­ly it was easy to detect this kind of attack.

Christian Sandvig and Eszter Hargittai on Tools for Truth Empowerment

[Stefik’s] four ideas about the Internet is that we think about Internet, num­ber one as a library. And this was the 90s and we had this elec­tron­ic library, the dig­i­tal library. That does­n’t mean that we dig­i­tized libraries, it means that that’s the metaphor we used to think about the Internet, as a place that has infor­ma­tion that we can look up. His sec­ond was we think of it as the mail. Or you could say the tele­phone. And so that’s more about indi­vid­u­als and inter­per­son­al­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing in some way. The third is that we think of it as a vir­tu­al world. And the fourth is that we think of it as a marketplace.

Reflection & Synthesis on Truthiness

I’d like to clus­ter my thoughts and struc­ture them into four cat­e­gories. One is what I will call foun­da­tion­al issues. Second, a few words and obser­va­tions regard­ing meth­ods. Third, a few areas of appli­ca­tion that we touched upon this morn­ing, and maybe also high­light­ing one or two that we haven’t talked so much about but that I think are increas­ing­ly impor­tant. And then final­ly also as a segue to the fol­low­ing ses­sions, a few words about poten­tial points of intervention.

Ethan Zuckerman on Truthiness

When you’re look­ing at some­thing as big as these ques­tions of ver­i­fi­a­bil­i­ty, truth, truthi­ness, dis­in­for­ma­tion, so on and so forth, I find myself now try­ing to pick apart the ques­tions we talked about this morn­ing from the per­spec­tive of tractabil­i­ty. So let me use that to sort of frame a cou­ple of the con­ver­sa­tions we’ve had and then a cou­ple of things that haven’t come up, and then see if I can sort of push us for­ward a lit­tle bit into where we go this afternoon.

Inflection Point on Truthiness

Well I believe there is a truth we share. I think it’s our sense of jus­tice. I think of the great Paul Newman depic­tion in The Verdict, his clos­ing argu­ment when he speaks to the jury and says, You are the law. I believe there is jus­tice in our hearts.” So the truth, the ver­dict. Vera dic­tos, speak the truth. That’s what juries are told to do.

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.

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