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DIRESTA_2020
July 04, 2021
July 21, 2021
A sketch of some notes on an interview in
2020 of Renee DiResta, conducted by
Vidya Krishnamurthy:
Claire Wardell term: "information disorder"
misinformation-- inadvertantly wrong
disinformation-- intent to influence and intent to decieve
not always *untrue* so not exactly lies
propaganda-- information with an agenda. (attempts at influence?)
fake news-- completely made up lies,
demonstrably untrue but outrageous click bait.
who runs campaigns:
state actors government
domestic partisans local volunteers, poltical groups
extremists ?
spammers commercial, "remarkably inovative"
conspiracy theorists ? (What? CTFO, seriously?)
conspiracy theorists:
Remarkably dynamic, their passion to communicate
at all times about what they believe.
No counter-speech.
(So, that breakdown is a melange of different
attributes and categorizations; including nearly
content-free terms like "extremists".) Beware of the
modrats.
goals:
They're always,
distract by definition,
persuade the only reasonable
entrench people.
divide
Talk about being
immune to
"counter-speech".
How about:
discourage, alienate
Propaganda designed to make you feel like
you're an outsider, an isolated weirdo who
has no one on your side.
phrase:
"flood the zone"
Turning a truth into a controversy,
a who knows which story might be right?
Vidya Krishnamurthy:
"muddy the waters", make truth, facts impossible
confidence intervals on
what do we think happened, who do we think was behind it.
"By the time a story has gone viral, it's over."
The internet was originally celebrated for
the "removal of the gatekeepers",
"but the editors ... had some value".
"That curation process, when run by an AI,
is not surfacing the kinds of things we want."
The AIs are "remarkably effective at finding correlations"
"You see this intersection of people who share one
angle of their thinking, and the platform recognizes
that and pushes those people together, without really
understanding what it is they're nudging."
"how do you design a content moderation regime
that deals with some of the content, how do you
decide what behaviors are appropriate"
network activism:
anyone can do it
no guardrails on the system
anyone can use the tools
without any sort of oversight.
if you don't want the platforms deciding what
stays up and what stays down
they have to be more adept at curating and
thinking about who they're nudging together
what kind of content they're inavertantly
amplifying and what the downstream harms of
that content are
The sheer quantity of double-talk (and double-think)
in every one of DiRestas pronouncements is truly mind-
numbing:
We don't want them to decide,
but we want them to decide.
Anyone can post anything, yay, freedom!
As long as no one can see it.
If people are seeing *certain* things too
much, we're not going to *ban* it, we're
just going to "nudge" them away from it.
So: who decides what "downstream harms" are a big enough concern,
who decides what "downstream harms" are likely to be caused by
particular information from where, etc.
This is not going to be a government
censorship office (That Would Be Wrong),
Instead the ministry of truth is going to be
*inside* the socmeds, the masters of the
algorithm had better do a good job or we're
going to be very very angry with them, and hit
them with more hearings
(Unless of course, they pony up some
nice campaign contributions, then we
might let it slide again.)
The only type of recognized harm has been
"immediate incitement to violence"
but that's "not the only type of harm", Doesn't sound right to me:
now we have the example of covid-19. offering unqualified medical
advice has always been
regarded as dubious, right?
"How do we decide, in this world of very
fast paced viral commentary how should the
platforms engage and potentially-- in my
opinion, one of the best things they have at
their disposal is to reduce that virality,
to throttle it, to introduce friction. That Here she starts to
at least would give the fact checkers time sound like she's saying
to come in and try to help people understand the kind of stuff I
this information in context." might say:
DRAG
The difference: my point would be that
slowing *everything* down is something that
can be done in an even-handed manner by
government fiat.
What DiResta wants is some sort of selective
drag applied to certain kinds of messages
from certain kinds of sources and she seems
allergic to stating where the boundaries are
going to be, and what agency is going to
decide the edge cases.
Later on, the interviewer remarks:
"We need to make sure we're repeating 'legitimate' voices."
This leave me wondering:
Can you guys *examine one of your assumptions* just once?
Just unpack it, ask the next question,
follow a chain of thought somewhere.
You could start with "what is legitmate?"
And how about: "who is 'we'?"
Another remark: with 40 days to the 2020 election,
facebook announced something vague about doing something
to reign in the bad guys.
The interviewer asks: "what do you make of that?"
A really good question, I'd say... And so DiResta
takes the opportunity to spin all over the map:
She mentions another group at Stanford:
"Election Integrity Partnership"
They've "chosen to focus very narrowly
on voter related narratives" I've re-read this
phrase several times.
Email me if it means
something to you.
"you want to look at stuff that's gaining traction,
or has the potential of gaining traction"
This seems to be DiResta's central approach:
Let 'em say what they want,
but if someone *listens*
we better take action to block that.
She mentions "hopping from twitter to facebook"
as a sign that "maybe they need to take action".
And continues on with the usual torrent of odd phrases:
"the platforms co-operate with each other"
"we also have this relationship where they can cooperate
with outside researchers as well"
"multi-stakeholder approach to ... triaging these narratives"
"Triaging" is good. Is that something
like censoring, or isn't it? Triage is, of course, a principle
invoked in medical emergencies,
Myself, I can't figure out how where scarce resources are
anyone can talk about this without allocated to people they're more
alarm bells going off in their likely to help.
heads. The fate of democracy is in
the hands of an oligarchy of big "Triaging" is not a synonym for
coorperations who are now "pruning". The triage nurse is
*expected* to collude with each not supposed to be asking "who
other? here *deserves* to live?"
In order to do the-- vague-- bidding
of our lords and masters, who DiResta
seems unwilling to name.
Seriously, you don't need to be some sort of fanatic conservative
to wonder what's going on with this. If you *wanted* to trigger
a bunch of conspiracy theories about big California IT companies
hi-jacking an election, this would be an excellent approach to take.
"this is going viral lets reduce the virality,
reduce the number of shares while our
fact-checkers have an opportunity to come in"
You see, if they were talking about, say
shutting down *all* political discussion
in the week before the election, that
might be hard to implement, but at least
I would be able to see what they're thinking
What she actually seems to want is the
ability to throttle the visiblity of
particular messages-- perhaps based on
the degree of virality? Perhaps based
on apparent foreign origin? And I find myself wondering
who "our" fact-checkers are.
DiResta also makes remarks like this:
"if they are going to take something
down, having a really clear policy line
that's articulated that they can point
to when they do the takedown so that it Okay, so now we're going
doesn't seem like an ad hoc act of to have a *clear policy*
censorship" announced concerning what
kinds of things you're
allowed to say.
And that's not going to
seem like censorship?
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