My latest book review for ERQ, Francesca Bolla Tripodi‘s The Propagandists’ Playbook.
Tag Archives: US
Workshopping trust and speech at EDMO
It was a great pleasure to convene a workshop at the European Digital Media Observatory today featuring Claire Wardle (Brown), Craig Matasick (OECD), Daniela Stockmann (Hertie), Kalypso Nicolaidis (Oxford), Lisa Ginsborg (EUI), Emma Briant (Bard) and (briefly) Alicia Wanless (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). The title was “Information flows and institutional reputation: leveraging social trust in times of crisis” and the far-ranging discussion touched on disinformation, trust vs. trustworthiness, different models of content moderation, institutional design, preemptive red-teaming of policies, algorithmic amplification, and the successes and limits of multi-stakeholder frameworks. A very productive meeting, with more to come in the near future on this front.
Independent technology research
This looks like a very worthwhile coalition, advocating for open access to aggregate social media data for research purposes (not necessarily only for academics and journalists), while emphasizing a duty of independence in research and upholding standards and oversight. The coalition is US-focused, but its efforts dovetail with draft legislation currently making its way through the European institutions that seeks to guarantee similar rights of access. Inasmuch as large platforms lay a claim to embodying the contemporary public sphere, such calls for openness will only persist and intensify.
More interesting cybersecurity journalism (finally)
A study (PDF) by a team led by Sean Aday at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs (commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation) sheds light on the improving quality of the coverage of cybersecurity incidents in mainstream US media. Ever since 2014, cyber stories in the news have been moving steadily away from the sensationalist hack-and-attack template of yore toward a more nuanced description of the context, the constraints of the cyber ecosystem, the various actors’ motivations, and the impactof incidents on the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.
The report shows how an understanding of the mainstream importance of cyber events has progressively percolated into newsrooms across the country over the past half-decade, leading to a broader recognition of the substantive issues at play in this field. An interesting incidental finding is that, over the course of this same period of time, coverage of the cyber beat has focused critical attention not only on the ‘usual suspects’ (Russia, China, shadowy hacker groups) but also, increasingly, on big tech companies themselves: an aspect of this growing sophistication of coverage is a foregrounding of the crucial role platform companies play as gatekeepers of our digital lives.
A global take on the mistrust moment
My forthcoming piece on Ethan Zuckerman’s Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them for the Italian Political Science Review.