DisinfoDocket 3 May

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* Google clashes with Brazil over disinformation law
* Climate disinformation ads proliferate on YouTube
* How Moscow is preparing propaganda messaging ahead of anticipated Ukrainian offensive.
Highlights
- How Social Media Incentives Helped Drive the Discord Leaks (Tech Policy Press, 1 May)
- Inauthentic activity and Twitter Blue verification: When "verification" boils down to "someone has a phone and paid $8", it's not surprising that spam and fake accounts slip through the cracks (Conspirator Norteńo, 1 May)
LISTEN: Ghouling: The trolls targeting bereaved people (BBC, 29 April)
🧵Best practices for positioning community engagement journalism as a bulwark against mis/disinformation:@wearehearken @EngagingNews @anxious_maria @TexasTribune @anniezyu @politico @Derrick_Resolve @resolvephilly @laurencaguirre @VotebeatUS
— PEN America (@PENamerica) May 1, 2023
1. Academia & Research
- After Musk’s takeover, big shifts in how Republican and Democratic Twitter users view the platform (Pew, 1 May)
2. Platforms & Technology
- AI-enabled disinformation: Waging an unviable war of scale (Rappler, 1 May)
- Undercover in the metaverse: Human moderators in the metaverse are proving essential to digital safety (MIT, 1 May)
- Top scientist quits Google, issues AI warning: ‘Bad actors’ could use it ‘for bad things’ (The Hill, 1 May)
- AI Chatbots Have Been Used to Create Dozens of News Content Farms (Bloomberg, 1 May)
- Tech industry allowing 'deluge' of misinformation (France 24, 3 May)
- Google, Microsoft CEOs called to AI meeting at White House (Reuters, 2 May)
BlueSky
- Bluesky's big moment: A new Twitter clone is surging in popularity. Could it have legs? (Platformer, 2 May)
Twitter's new API paywall is pricing out even well-resourced institutions like ours. "If we don't have research on the impact of these platforms on society then how can we make good policy?" asks @j_a_tucker in @FT https://t.co/Zeq4aNRlpH pic.twitter.com/V94X7fw5Xl
— NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics (@CSMaP_NYU) May 1, 2023
- Companies wary as Twitter checkmark policy fuels imposter accounts (Reuters, 2 May)
TikTok
- TikTok Parent ByteDance’s ‘Sensitive Words’ Tool Monitors Discussion Of China, Trump, Uyghurs (Forbes, 1 May)
- TikTok’s head of US trust and safety is leaving: He was a key leader for the separate entity TikTok recently created to try and avoid a US ban. (The Verge, 2 May)