Docket+ 6 January 2025

Hi! I'm Victoria and welcome to DisinfoDocket. Docket+ is a weekly roundup of the latest influence operations-related academic research, events and job opportunities.

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Highlights

1. Do Minds Have Immune Systems? (Psycnet, 12 December)
2. AI tools used in Kenya to discredit protesters and allege Russian connections (DFRLab, 20 December)
3. Our Year in Review: Meta’s 2024 Highlights (Meta, 27 December)
4. Schrödinger’s Musk: Known for his vocal support of Elon Musk on X, Adrian Dittmann has become the subject of widespread debate. Here we examine what we can learn from account behavior. (InfoEpi, 1 January)
5. The IRGC Center for Basij who Can't Meme Good (Memetic Warfare, 1 January)
6. This landscape does not exist: The Facebook AI slop machine rolls merrily onward (Conspirator Norteño, 28 December)
7. Observatory on Social Media Annual Report 2023-2024 (OSoME)

1. Academia & Research

1.1 Platforms & Technology

1. The public mental representations of deepfake technology: An in-depth qualitative exploration through Quora text data analysis (Plos One, 30 December)
2. Deciphering Social Behaviour: a Novel Biological Approach For Social Users Classification (ArXiv, 19 December)
3. Regulators unveil new rules, Anthropic's 'bottom-up' safety tool and Bluesky ban reckoning (Everything in Moderation, 20 December)
4. The New Social Contracts: Terms of service are essentially public law for the internet, with no oversight. (Lawfare, 20 December)
5. Pre-Deployment Evaluation of OpenAI’s o1 Model (AISI, 18 December)
6. Critical Reasoning with AI: How we know LLMs are applying reasoning patterns, and not just reverse image searching (The End(s) of Argument, 31 December)
7. Spam in the firehose, part II: A closer look at a growing astroturf network on Bluesky (Conspirator Norteño, 21 December)
8. These defenders of democracy do not exist: In which inauthentic Bluesky accounts posing as liberal activists and organizations use AI-generated reply spam and mass following to attempt to build an audience (Conspirator Norteño, 5 January)

Availability and spread of information

1. Mobile and platform users’ mediatized rituals in response to terrorist attacks: a discourse analysis of continuously collected screenshots (Oxford Academic, 31 December)

1.2 World News 

1. The theoretical wedding of computational propaganda and information operations: Unraveling digital manipulation in conflict zones (Sage, 22 December)
2. Role of moral disengagement and media literacy in the relationships between risky online content exposure and cyberaggression among Korean adolescents (Nature, 28 December)
3. Using ERPs to unveil the authenticity evaluation and neural response to online rumors (Nature, 28 December)
4. New Challenges to Xi Jinping’s Alternative Facts on Taiwan: Lessons for the Human Rights Space, Too (Just Security, 20 December)
5. Baltic subsea sabotage: We’re letting Russia (and China) undertake target practice (ASPI, 31 December)