Noupside

Noupside, 20 days ago to random

🧵 I wrote ab the “is Signal secure?” manufactroversy on X. The Guardian wanted an explainer on why Elon & Jack were “concerned” about Signal. The answer, though, has nothing to do w/Signal’s product. It was part of an extended fight over whether woke NPR should be defunded & the CEO fired. Why? Because the CEO of NPR is on the board of Signal; by the Transitive Property of Bad People, Signal is thus compromised.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/18/npr-elon-musk-signal

Noupside, 5 months ago to random

Conversations with the 3yo on this family holiday visit: “what are you going to be when you grow up?”

“A human. But a little bit taller.”

Noupside, 7 months ago to random

Sunday morning coffee read. This is the full story of the conspiracy theory that some members of Congress, former Trump officials, and AGs - all of whom worked to overturn or discredit the 2020 election - have spent nearly a year pursuing, with the help of the Substack propagandists who wrote the “Twitter Files”. This nonsense has eaten up the last 6 months of my life, and the lives of many colleagues.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/jim-jordans-conspiratorial-quest-for-power

Noupside, 6 months ago to random

This is a bad decision. And this is ridiculous: “Executives at Meta made the decision based on free-speech considerations after weighing past U.S. elections in which the results might have been contested by a portion of the electorate, according to people familiar with the issue.” Ads are paid political speech. If they do this, they are profiting from the Big Lie.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-allows-ads-claiming-rigged-2020-election-on-facebook-instagram-309b678d

Noupside, 6 months ago to random

“The people no longer paying me to amplify their speech because they didn’t want to associate with my speech are actually oppressors of YOUR speech!”

Noupside, 1 year ago to random

Their job isn’t to “make news”, it’s to cover news. This was a pseudoevent - a produced moment envisioned by an outlet, made for entertainment. No one learned anything new about the world from it.

Noupside, 2 months ago to random

I used to reference chemtrails in 2015-era talks as one of those conspiracy theories that were prevalent in online fringe groups but which largely stayed confined to niche communities…and now these sorts of things are popping up and passing in state legislatures https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/04/05/minnesota-republicans-introduce-legislation-inspired-by-the-chemtrails-conspiracy-theory/

"If you look at a thousand planes, you won't see one (chemtrail). But then all of a sudden you see one," the author of the Tennessee Senate bill told the Tennessee Lookout last month. "So we're just asking the question: Are they putting anything in the air that could be toxic?" The Minnesota House version of the bill was authored by GOP Rep. Jeff Dotseth of Kettle River and co-sponsored by Reps. Pam Altendorf of Red Wing, Dawn Gillman of Dassel and Krista Knudson of Lake Shore. The Senate version was authored by GOP Sen. Eric Lucero of Saint Michael and co-sponsored by Sens. Glenn Gruenhagen of Glencoe, Bruce Anderson of Buffalo, Nathan Wesenberg of Little Falls and Eichorn, the assistant minority leader. Some of the language in the bill is nonsensical. "I don't think xenobiotic electromagnetism and fields is a thing - it doesn't even make sense," Buck said. The lead authors of both chambers' bills did not respond to a request to define "xenobiotic electromagnetism," or to provide a real-world example of it.

Noupside, 11 months ago to random

Couple years back I wrote an article for Wired arguing that AI-generated text had far greater potential for undetectable, persuasive propaganda than a deepfaked video. Now that the technology is democratized and low-cost, empirical studies seem to be bearing out that theory. This NPR piece covers 2 very interesting papers:

http://npr.org/2023/06/29/1183684732/ai-generated-text-is-hard-to-spot-it-could-play-a-big-role-in-the-2024-campaign

Noupside, 6 months ago to random

As I head into my eighth month of having become a bête noire in the cinematic universe of Substack propagandists & partisan hacks with a victim complex, I feel that the full scale of the splintering of American society into bespoke realities has not yet been fully internalized by most people.

Noupside, 10 months ago to random

I have a new paper out in Annals of Internal Medicine today. My coauthors and I argue for creating capacity for a networked response to health rumors & misinformation and describe a case study involving some work we did during the pandemic enabling frontline doctors to understand what rumors were beginning to go viral so that they could create content to respond.

Counter speech is critical, and yet social media requires networked distribution.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M23-1218

Noupside, 5 months ago to random

Since Alex Jones is back on Twitter and it is being processed in the context of “free speech” I would like to share one of my favorite content policy documents of all time: Infowars’ TOS.

All civilizations have rules.

Noupside, 1 year ago to random

More on Google’s plans to watermark AI generated images, detect watermarking in others (Midjourney apparently on board), and more readily display image provenance. All good initiatives.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/as-ai-generated-fakes-proliferate-google-plans-to-fight-back/

Noupside, 5 months ago to random

Academic institutions - many institutions - just do not know how to respond to bad faith attacks. The game has changed. The opponents don’t care about facts, only optics. Communications teams must start to understand what they’re actually engaging with.

Noupside, 7 months ago to random

Our team analyzed one of the networks in here a few years back. It’s worth noting that every team mentioned in this article that does analysis work to uncover these operations is currently under fire, being investigated by Congress and getting sued. The right-wing culture warriors in Congress and behind the legal orgs claim that Russian interference on social media was all a hoax…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/21/percepto-africa-france-russia-disinformation/

Noupside, 1 year ago to random

The Liar's Dividend - a claim that real videos are in fact deepfakes, since it might be too hard to tell what's true - has moved beyond Trump surrogates speculating on Twitter that maaaaaybe that Access Hollywood tape was really Adobe Voco, and popping up in courtroom filings. @riana covers this dynamic in this NPR article.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/08/1174132413/people-are-trying-to-claim-real-videos-are-deepfakes-the-courts-are-not-amused

Noupside, 8 months ago to random

New study out that reflects what we saw while working on the Virality Project: the AV movement is good at evasive responses to moderation and has a full understanding of how to get algorithmic lift. Networked responses and counterspeech for rumors that break out of niche communities is what remains lacking. Content moderation whack-a-mole isn’t doing it:

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/9/16/23875579/facebook-meta-vaccine-covid-19-misinformation-study

Noupside, 8 months ago to random

Harassment works. They know it, and it’s why they do it. Excellent and infuriating essay here by @yoyoel describing his own personal experience in the context of the broader moment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opinion/trump-elon-musk-twitter.html

image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/jpeg

Noupside, 10 months ago to random

Voluntarily killing the Twitter brand is a really incredible choice. “X”, besides being lame (“xeeting?” “Xing?”) creates an explicit new association with the tone & tenor the place has now, which will likely weaken advertiser interest.

He’s built the first moderately-successful alt-social network not from the ground up, as Parler and Truth and the others tried, but by shaving off other communities and sending them to other places.

Noupside, 9 months ago to random

Excellent. More of this. Smear campaigns have real costs, and hacks who willingly destroy people for political objectives deserve accountability. I hope the award is massive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/us/politics/giuliani-defamation-georgia.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Noupside, 11 months ago to random

It’s not the “end” of the social media era. It’s Late Stage Big Social.

Noupside, 2 months ago to random

Matt Taibbi is currently having a multi-day meltdown over the extent to which his Twitter Files conspiracy theory was destroyed in SCOTUS oral arguments Monday. And in keeping with his deception over the last year, he deliberately misquoted and lied about me again.

First image is Matt’s post. Second is what I actually said. I was literally expressing the opposite point of view - that CDA 230 is not a fix for misinformation and it’s a waste of time when Govt tries to use it that way.

"Asking or expecting the platforms to take action on certain types of health misinformation may be reasonable, but this sort of dynamic that we've all watched unfold over the last year and a half makes clear how this approach has some potentially problematic pitfalls," she said. DiResta also warned that focusing narrowly on how platforms handle specific types of content, whether it's lies about vaccines or baseless claims of election fraud, risks ignoring the bigger picture of how information is created and spread - both on social media and in other channels. "There's hope that we can cure all of the problems of the world by amending [Section 230]," she said. "It's not so simple as we're going to regulate social media platforms and this is all going to go away."

Noupside, 1 year ago to random

BlockParty - which has been massively useful in dealing with trolling on Twitter, particularly for high-volume brigades - has to go on hiatus due to Twitter API price changes, per an email I just got.

Noupside, 1 month ago to random

Last week Twitter Files substack blogger Paul Thacker was back in my inbox, wanting to speak to the manager. Paul, if you didn’t send me stupid emails, I wouldn’t post them to the internet.

Here are excerpts from the latest bad faith media inquiry from the Bullshit Industrial Complex, shared to explain how it works. This man -a notorious hack- claimed to have “whistleblower” docs showing that I secretly ran election interference ops, particularly for the U.S. Dept of Defense.

This is a lie.

This whistleblower has also said that New Knowledge won an award from the DoD to create automated disinformation for elections. Again, you have denied such involvement in election disinformation and have tried to portray yourself as an actual expert on detecting disinformation--not creating it.

Noupside, 1 year ago to random

I was going to write a whole thread on how/why state media labels came about, because the story is really interesting. It ties in to China’s actions in the early pandemic, and to state actors beginning to coordinate on overt propaganda to target democratic audiences even as they banned Western social media platforms in their own countries. (Some of our work informed the early labeling decisions)

But I’m not sure there is a point! Are ppl interested? What impact would explaining it have?

Noupside, 28 days ago to random

📣 SOME PERSONAL NEWS: 1 month from today, my book is out! 🎉

🏢 It’s about propaganda, influence, influencers, & institutions.

🪡It explains why people increasingly live in bespoke realities.

🤑 It breaks down how paranoid cranks run smear campaigns for clout, money, & power.

I wrote it during a wild year in which Jim Jordan subpoenaed me & Stephen Miller sued me. It’s time to tell the story.

Preorders are open — and really matter, so I appreciate your support!

https://amzn.to/44BjAII