Disinfo Docket 8 January

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Highlights

1. The Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust (NYT, 31 December)
2. False-flag conspiracy theories go viral on Twitter after school shooting (Weaponised Spaces, 5 January)

1. Academia & Research

1. The "bot farm" that wasn’t: In which The Daily Beast attempts to report on social media manipulation, but winds up generating disinformation of its own instead (Conspirator Norteño, 29 December)
2. Policy Is Urgently Necessary to Enable Social Media Research (Tech Policy Press, 20 December)
3. GAN-tastic politics enthusiasts: Come for the artificially generated faces, stay for the artificially generated text and accompanying error messages (Conspirator Norteño, 6 January)

2. Platforms & Technology

1. Lessons in building a safe platform from scratch (Anchor Change, 28 December)
2. How Big is YouTube? (Ethan Zuckerman, 22 December)
3. New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement (Guardian, 28 December)
4. A global watermarking standard could help safeguard elections in the ChatGPT era (The Hill, 2 January)
5. AI Watermarking Won't Curb Disinformation (EFF, 5 January)

Meta

1. Meta tracks your Facebook link history, but now you can opt out (ZDNet, 4 January)

Substack 

1. Substack Says It Will Not Ban Nazis or Extremist Speech (NYT, 22 December)
2. Substack Cofounder Defends Commercial Relationships with Nazis (Tech Policy Press, 22 December)
3. The substack conundrum (wiczipedia, 22 December)

X (Twitter)

1. How to Succeed on Elon Musk’s Twitter (Weaponised Spaces, 30 December)
2. The Co-opting of Twitter: The alternative to mainstream social media came from inside the house. (The Atlantic, 26 December)
3. All the Elon Musk controversies we've seen this year (EuroNews, 30 December)