Wednesday, January 13, 2021

How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation — Joan Donovan

Summary.

The attack on the U.S. Capitol building was the culmination of years of disinformation and conspiracy theories that had been weaponized on social media networks. Could that weaponization have been prevented? Perhaps. The dominant business model of these platforms, which emphasized scale over other considerations, made them particularly vulnerable to disinformation networks and related backlash against those networks — both the loss of infrastructure support, as in the case of Parler, and the threat of regulatory crackdown, as in the case of Facebook and Twitter. While the scale-centric business model paid off for these networks in the short to medium term, the overlooked risks of that model have brought these platforms to the reckoning they face today.
Harvard Business Review
How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation
Joan Donovan | Research Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy

Also
The 2020 election has been a busy time for Samuel Woolley, an assistant professor of journalism and project director for propaganda research at the Center for Media Engagement (CME) at the University of Texas at Austin. Woolley is a researcher who focuses on propaganda, emerging media, and the ways in which political groups leverage digital tools to attempt to manipulate public opinion. After spending months tracking down fake news and disinformation campaigns, he is worried that “we have outdated ways of understanding propaganda and disinformation.”...
ProMarket
The “Next Frontier of Propaganda”: Micro-Influencers are Paid to Spread Political Messages, Disinformation
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1 comment:

.fadE said...

*Link

https://hbr.org/2021/01/how-social-medias-obsession-with-scale-supercharged-disinformation