This week…
I had a chance to listen to a podcast this week that I’ve linked in my recommendation list below about incels and the Atlanta shootings. The episode brought up for me a few memories: When I first dated a white person and it became a little bit more serious, we started having those big discussions about kids. Being a mixed-race kid myself I’ve always known it’s going to be a bumpy ride for this kid – now add to that the “hapa incel” dilemma.
My reservation wasn’t so much about wanting or not wanting kids, but having a kid with a white person, in white people community. I literally had a bookmark folder in my browser about the Isla Vista killings (the shooter being half-Malaysian hits too close to home), and a sub-folder about all the academic writings on race-based sexism and self-loathing, and interracial dating (for the kid) and interracial parenting (for me) and... you know, it consumed me. I was at the very least, mildly obsessive about the topic. Fast forward to the present day, we are now married, in Canada, planning a family – and then this pandemic-fueled anti-Asian hate crime thing is on the rise and it gives me a lot of anxiety.
And this is why I didn’t speak up much on this topic; I probably won’t.
Blindspotter big on Twitter
Ground News’ Blindspotter made its rounds on Twitter this week, with users sharing analyses of their news diets. However, as with anything, the tool is not without its expected limitations:
Our tool cannot decipher if an interaction with news content is positive or negative.
The results of the tool may be less meaningful for accounts largely run by assistants/staffers.
Our tool only records interactions with news sources that have a bias rating, so smaller local publications may not be included as a “news interaction.”
We source our bias ratings from allsides, mediabiasfactcheck and adfontesmedia. You can read more about the methodology behind our bias ratings here.
And, as usual, it uses data from very much Western-based, English language media only. UK-based tech journalist Charles Arthur also contends that “it’s all very dependent on what you classify as ‘left’ and ‘right’ and ‘centrist’. I get the feeling that the New York Times is classed as ‘left’ and that it’s all very US-centric. Rather different from the view one might get this side of the Atlantic.”
Nonetheless, try it out if you like. I’m 49% centrist, apparently, on my main account.
Critical disinformation studies
I spent the last couple of days looking into the new, and downloadable, syllabus written by Alice Marwick, Rachel Kuo, Shanice Jones Cameron and Moira Weigel for the Center for Information, Technology & Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The authors argue that “disinformation is a key way in which whiteness in the United States has been reinforced and reproduced, in addition to heteronormativity and class privilege” and provide case studies to “demonstrate the historical complicity of media, the state, and the political establishment in strategically spreading inaccurate information to maintain structural inequality.”
Large majorities of Newsmax and OAN News consumers also go to Fox News
Amy Mitchell for Pew Research Center:
Following the 2020 election, questions arose as to whether these two newer and less established outlets were drawing Republicans who were angry about the election results and particularly angry with Fox News for being among the first media outlets to call the hotly contested state of Arizona for Joe Biden.
But the findings reveal that among Republicans, Fox News still far outpaces the other two.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading the current issue of Maclean’s, which marks the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic by “giving [the] entire magazine over to a single piece – invoking, with humility, the New Yorker’s spirit in doing so with its 1946 Hiroshima issue.”
I’m watching Asha Tomlinson’s report for CBC Marketplace on a COVID-19 conspiracy boot camp. Osteopath Sherri Tenpenny made around USD 200,000 from one boot camp alone – and that’s only a fraction of what social media giants such as Facebook are making from allowing misinformation posts on their sites:
I’m listening to Incels with Munira Mustaffa on He Says, She Says, They Say, hosted by Azielia Anne and Iqbal Fatkhi:
Chart of the week
From SEO specialist Rand Fishkin blog, which shows that two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click:
There are a lot of discussions already about how Google’s featured snippets steal clicks and traffic (and thus, advertising money) from sites that rely on them, which is among the reasons Australia made tech giants Facebook and Google pay for news.