DisinfoDocket 14 December

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Highlights:

Russian trolls found manipulating audiences on Trump’s Truth Social, new research finds (The Record, 13 December)

1. Want to protect the information environment? Change how it's studied: Data access alone isn’t enough to address disinformation—research on the information environment must be accelerated through shared engineering infrastructure, argue Alicia Wanless and Jacob N. Shapiro (OECD, 13 December)
2. Dangerous speech, misogyny, and democracy: A review of the impacts of dangerous speech since the end of the Parliament Protest (The Disinfo Project, 29 November)
3. Former top Twitter official forced to leave home due to threats amid ‘Twitter Files’ release (CNN, 12 December)
4. CDT Condemns Disbanding of Twitter Trust & Safety Council (Center for Democracy & Technology, 13 December)
5. Russian propagandists could be tried in the Hague, Putin ducks annual press meet, and Musk enables abuse (Coda Story, 13 December)

LISTEN: Moderated Content: The Propaganda Platform (Moderated Content, 13 December)

1. Academia & Research

1. Wieambilla shooting: analysis of perpetrator’s online footprint (ISD, 14 December)
2. Content Moderation as Systems Thinking (Harvard Law Review, 12 December)
3. A smart tool for fairer online advertising: In a new contribution, OII researchers led by Dr Johann Laux show there’s a smart way to govern personalised adverts, balancing the benefits of personalisation against the risks. (Oxford Internet Institute, 8 December)
4. Platforms’ Efforts to Block Antisemitic Content Are Falling Short (CIGI, 7 December)
5. “Suggested for You”: Understanding How Algorithmic Ranking Practices Affect Online Discourses and Assessing Proposed Alternatives (ISD, 9 December)
6. It would work for me too": How Online Communities Shape Software Developers' Trust in AI-Powered Code Generation Tools (ArXiv, 7 December)
7. High level of agreement across different news domain quality ratings (PsyArXiv, 14 December)
8. Democratize social-media research — with access and funding (Nature, 13 December)

2. Platforms & Technology

1. What the debate around content moderation gets wrong (DEMOS, 6 December)
2. Are Social Media Platforms a Legitimate Component of Democracy? (Tech Policy Press, 12 December)
3. WhatsApp raises threat of UK shutdown in encryption row (Telegraph, 10 December)
4. Social media must be harnessed to hinder – rather than facilitate – ethnic cleansing (Telegraph, 12 December)
5. Rise of Open-Source Intelligence Tests U.S. Spies: China outpaces efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to harness power of publicly available data (WSJ, 11 December)
6. How Elon botched his war on bots: Why it's time to start leaving Twitter behind (Platformer, 12 December)
7. How mercenary spyware threatens democracy (NED, 13 December)
8. Social Media’s Role in the Violence in Jahangirpuri, India (Tech Policy Press, 13 December)

Twitter

1. Freedom of Speech: It is Twitter's platform scale, rather than its users' speech, that should worry proponents of democracy. (American Purpose, 5 December)
2. Decentralized discourse: How open source is shaping Twitter’s future (Tech Crunch, 13 December)
3. Fauci responds to Elon Musk: Twitter a ‘cesspool of misinformation’  (The Hill, 13 December)