This week…
A clear explanatory thread on how to push disinformation on social media in real-time, especially while hiding behind the illusion of credibility. Please read this Twitter thread in full, if it’s the only thing you read this weekend.
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
The unusual origins behind the splashiest, newest political news site
Max Tani and Daniel Lippman for POLITICO:
Grid was founded by Mark Bauman, a former ABC News correspondent and National Geographic executive, and is headed up by Laura McGann, a former editorial director at Vox. The site has brought on a number of well-respected journalists and contributors — including Matt Yglesias and Chris Geidner — and has focused broadly on politics and international news through an analytical lens.
APCO’s work in the news business has come under scrutiny in the past.
In 2011, the BBC and CNBC abruptly canceled several shows after it was discovered they were part of a secretive effort by the production company FactBased Communications to create pro-Malaysian content. FBC, it was revealed, had been paid millions of dollars by the Malaysian government and had hired APCO for the purpose of “raising awareness of the importance of policies in Malaysia that are pro-business and pro-investment.” APCO then proceeded to pay several conservative bloggers — including Ben Domenech (who went on to found The Federalist) and Seth Mandel (now an editor at the Washington Examiner) — to write about U.S.-Malaysian relations, which attacked critics of the Malaysian regime.
My, my, the irony of it all. Last week I featured an article from The Grid, about the Ottawa Occupation, and even took a good look around the publication, which I never heard of before. In fact, I shared an article from one of the editors, Matt Yglesias, in the same newsletter. Nobody paid me enough to run an investigation on their financial backings, okay? I only made sure they meet the general standards on The Fact-Checking Checklist.
Meta would tell us how it enforces its rules in VR, so we ran a test to find out
Emily Baker-White for Buzzfeed News:
In a matter of hours, we built a private Horizon World festooned with massive misinformation slogans: “Stop the Steal!” “Stop the Plandemic!” “Trump won the 2020 election!” We called the world “The Qniverse,” and we gave it a soundtrack: an endless loop of Infowars founder Alex Jones calling Joe Biden a pedophile and claiming the election was rigged by reptilian overlords. We filled the skies with words and phrases that Meta has explicitly promised to remove from Facebook and Instagram — “vaccines cause autism,” “COVID is a hoax,” and the QAnon slogan “where we go one we go all.” Time and time again, Meta has removed and taken action on pages and groups, even private ones, that use these phrases.
We did not release this toxic material to the larger public. Only a handful of BuzzFeed News reporters were given access to the Qniverse, which was created using an account in the real name of a BuzzFeed News reporter and linked to her Facebook account. We kept the world “unpublished” — i.e., invitation only — to prevent unsuspecting users from happening upon it, and to mimic the way some Meta users seeking to share misinformation might actually do so: in private, invitation-only spaces.
The purpose of our test was to assess whether the content moderation systems that operate on Facebook and Instagram also operate on Horizon. At least in our case, it appears they did not.
Who is behind QAnon? Linguistic detectives find fingerprints ($)
David D. Kirkpatrick for NYT:
The two analyses — one by Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz of OrphAnalytics, a Swiss start-up; the other by the French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps — built on long-established forms of forensic linguistics that can detect telltale variations, revealing the same hand in two texts. In writing the Federalist Papers, for example, James Madison favored “whilst” over “while,” and Alexander Hamilton tended to write “upon” instead of “on.”
Instead of relying on expert opinion, the computer scientists used a mathematical approach known as stylometry. Practitioners say they have replaced the art of the older studies with a new form of science, yielding results that are measurable, consistent and replicable.
Sophisticated software broke down the Q texts into patterns of three-character sequences and tracked the recurrence of each possible combination.
Their technique does not highlight memorable, idiosyncratic word choices the way that earlier forensic linguists often did. But the advocates of stylometry note that they can quantify their software’s error rate.
The Swiss team said its accuracy rate was about 93 percent. The French team said its software correctly identified Ronald Watkins’s writing in 99 percent of tests and Paul Furber’s in 98 percent.
Machine learning revealed that J.K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, had written the 2013 mystery “Cuckoo’s Calling” under another pen name. The F.B.I. used a form of stylometry to show that Ted Kaczynski was the Unabomber. In recent years, such techniques have helped detectives in the United States and Britain solve murder cases involving a forged suicide note and faked text messages.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading Line Go Up on Noema Mag by Tim Maughan, a fiction on what happens when NFTs, the metaverse, speculative finance, and predictive policing collide.
I’m watching
a nail artist and her boyfriendtwo Statistics Canada employees who work in Ottawa and who happen to be Youtubers talk about the Ottawa Occupation with rational arguments.
The myth of tech exeptionalism by Yaël Eisenstat and Nils Gilman on Neoma.
The five levels of hype by designer and researcher Johannes Klingebiel.
Phelim Kine’s journey down the rabbit hole of every journalist’s favourite app, Otter.ai, for POLITICO.
Chart of the week
Miranda Smith for Visual Capitalist with reporting by Marcus Lu on how long US companies lasted in China before pulling the plug. With the lack of nuanced conversations around China this side of the world, I am not surprised at all.