Disinfo Docket 7 August

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Highlights

45 accounts that appear to be bots on X have generated over 4 billion views while amplifying racist and sexualized abuse, conspiracy theories and climate disinformation, according to a Global Witness investigation. https://t.co/RyBKRkqf5N

— E Rosalie (@Info_Rosalie) August 6, 2024

1. How Online Misinformation Stoked Anti-Migrant Riots in Britain (TIME, 5 August)
2. Google Monopolized Search Through Illegal Deals, Judge Rules (Bloomberg, 5 August)
3. Meta’s Fundamental Digital Rights Blunder - And a German Antitrust Fix (Tech Policy Press, 6 August)
4. Venezuelan government ratchets up digital repression surrounding tainted election (The Record, 6 August)

🧵🚨1/ It's insane that @Elonmusk replied to @europeinvasionn's tweet about UK riots. The account EuropeInvasionn, as I have stated many times now, is an influence operation. It's a hijacked X account that exclusively deals in anti-migrant & anti-Muslim great replacement disinfo pic.twitter.com/oGBQWIe3Eh

— Marc Owen Jones (@marcowenjones) August 5, 2024

1. Academia & Research

1. Plinko: Eliciting beliefs to build better models of statistical learning and mental model updating (British Journal of Psychology, 3 August)
2. A qualitative analysis of Chinese higher education students’ intentions and influencing factors in using ChatGPT: a grounded theory approach (Nature, 5 August)

Although outright COVID-19 vaccine misinformation reduced vaccination intentions, factually-true "vaccine-skeptical" content that was unflagged by fact checkers on Facebook had a 46x greater impact on vax intentions, finds @_JenAllen @duncanjwatts @DG_Rand https://t.co/OqaNoNJOVt pic.twitter.com/3c27L1TNQl

— Ross Dahlke 🔑 (@Ross_Dahlke) August 6, 2024

2. Platforms & Technology

1. Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI (404 Media, 5 August)
2. AI Unlikely To Ever Work Unsupervised, At Least For The Big Stuff (Forbes, 5 August)
3. Elon Musk has gone too far – the UK has laws which can stop him (iNews, 6 August)
4. In the Age of A.I., What Makes People Unique? (The New Yorker, 6 August)

3. Russia & Ukraine

1. Russian authorities inform local Internet service providers that most YouTube access is now capped at a piddling 128 kbps (Meduza, 6 August)
2. ‘We publish local stories that no one else does’: Ukraine’s frontline newspapers defy Russian bombs and propaganda (The Irish Times, 4 August)