Good review article in the NYRB (via Schneier) on digital disinformation as a nation-State resource for Great Power competition. One of the three books reviewed is Philip Howard’s latest, Lie Machines (Yale UP), which I am thinking of adopting for my course next year.
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Logic magazine
Just discovered (via the BKC newsletter) a cool publication, Logic. They do three themed issues a year on topics at the intersection of tech and society. Vol. 10: Security (from May this year) looks particularly close to the kind of things I am working on. There’s a long piece by Matt Goerzen and Gabriella Coleman on the intertwined histories of hacking and computer security, and a couple of in-depth interviews with Tawana Petty on facial recognition and with Alison Macrina on Tor. Good stuff: I need to get my hands on a hard copy.
Electoral Integrity Partnership
Yesterday, I attended the webinar for the public launch of the Election Integrity Partnership between Stanford, U Dub, Graphika and the Atlantic Council. Quite serious and professional public-interest work being done, and clearly timely.
The definition of electoral disinformation the Partnership adopted as their operational target seemed quite well-tailored and manageably factual (e.g. information such as voting hours and poll locations, the presence or absence of massive queues, mis-documented instances of fraud…).
What struck me as remarkable, however, is that there would be plausible user cases in which this type of factual information would be sought first and foremost, or with greater assurance and trust, on random posts on social media platforms: this really speaks to a gigantic lack of authoritativeness or communication ability on the part of election officials.