How propaganda exploits the infrastructure of truth: A case study of #IStandWithPutin

How propaganda exploits the infrastructure of truth: A case study of #IStandWithPutin

This paper investigates the #IStandWithPutin hashtag campaign as a case study to conceptualise “infrastructural propaganda,” an influence strategy that manipulates the invisible processes and syste...

Language Models Trained on State Media Sources Launder Propaganda

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PropagandaScope

Tracking articles from newspapers. Real-time analysis of propaganda transmission patterns.

Data Feminism for AI

Attacks on women and trans people are not happening in a vacuum. Communications scholars W. Lance Bennett and Marianne Kneuer recently argued that we are witnessing the intensification of "illiberal public spheres" around the world (Bennett and Kneuer, 2023). These are characterized by a set of anti-democratic communications tactics that include the denigration and exclusion of minoritized people, targeted attacks on the press and political institutions, and transgression of norms of civil discourse. Such tactics are enabled and amplified by the social media platforms owned by Big Tech, whose business model elevates attention above all other metrics, such that they profit richly off extremism, threats, spectacle, and lies. The success of this corporate partnership with right-wing extremism is evident in the proliferation of book bans (Magnusson, 2024), the demonization of DEI and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 2022), and mob tactics to doxx, intimidate, misrepresent, and otherwise silence people that study misinformation, speak out against racial and gender violence, or rule against insurrectionists (Edmonds, 2024). At the same time, we have seen the continued work of feminists, including Latin American, Indigenous, and abolitionist feminists in the US and globally, doing the work of imagining alternate worlds (Cullors, 2021; Davis, 2022; Ricaurte, 2019; Simpson, 2017). This paper represents our own first attempt to imagine a more equitable, sustainable, feminist world for AI research.

The spreading of misinformation online

Significance The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web is a fruitful environment for the massive diffusion of unverified rumors. In this work, using a massive quantitative analysis of Facebook, we show that information related to distinct narratives––conspiracy theories and scientific news––generates homogeneous and polarized communities (i.e., echo chambers) having similar information consumption patterns. Then, we derive a data-driven percolation model of rumor spreading that demonstrates that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size. , The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15––where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., “echo chambers.” Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size.

A quote by Garry Kasparov

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

EKI and Propastop Studied AI Resistance to Propaganda

Fresh comparisons of large language models show that AI’s ability to recognise Kremlin propaganda varies dramatically. At first glance, the leading models appear reliable, but targeted testing reveals that some of them remain surprisingly vulnerable to manipulation.

+KAOS: Ten Years of Hacking and Media Activism

At the end of the 20th century, hacking was bleeding edge. When the ideas, practices and pranks of this experimental niche of technophiles attracted the attention of a handful of activists in Italy, they understood that information and communication were what would give shape and voice to social, political, and cultural processes in the near future. +KAOS is a cut and paste of interviews, like a documentary film transposed on paper. It describes the peculiar relationship between hacktivism and activism, in Italy and beyond, highlighting the importance of maintaining digital infrastructures. While this may not sound as glamorous as sneaking into a server and leaking data, it is a fundamental topic: not even the most emblematic group of hacktivists can operate without the services of radical server collectives. Autistici/Inventati  (https://www.autistici.org - https://www.inventati.org)

Uncovering Coordinated Networks on Social Media: Methods and Case Studies

Coordinated campaigns are used to influence and manipulate social media platforms and their users, a critical challenge to the free exchange of information online. Here we introduce a general, unsupervised network-based methodology to uncover groups of accounts that are likely coordinated. The proposed method constructs coordination networks based on arbitrary behavioral traces shared among accounts. We present five case studies of influence campaigns, four of which in the diverse contexts of U.S. elections, Hong Kong protests, the Syrian civil war, and cryptocurrency manipulation. In each of these cases, we detect networks of coordinated Twitter accounts by examining their identities, images, hashtag sequences, retweets, or temporal patterns. The proposed approach proves to be broadly applicable to uncover different kinds of coordination across information warfare scenarios.

Angriffe auf Yandex-Rechenzentren: Unklarheit über Auswirkungen auf russische Propaganda

Zahlreiche anekdotische Beobachtungen legten einen Rückgang nahe, doch Experten warnen vor voreiligen Schlussfolgerungen

The echo chamber effect on social media

Significance We explore the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and the formation of echo chambers. To assess the different dynamics, we perform a comparative analysis on more than 100 million pieces of content concerning controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. The analysis focuses on two main dimensions: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation in homophilic clusters of users dominates online dynamics. However, a direct comparison of news consumption on Facebook and Reddit shows higher segregation on Facebook. , Social media may limit the exposure to diverse perspectives and favor the formation of groups of like-minded users framing and reinforcing a shared narrative, that is, echo chambers. However, the interaction paradigms among users and feed algorithms greatly vary across social media platforms. This paper explores the key differences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and echo chambers’ formation. We perform a comparative analysis of more than 100 million pieces of content concerning several controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. We quantify echo chambers over social media by two main ingredients: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook.

Bias, Skew, and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity

U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its own distorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize “engagement”—serving up content that keeps YouTube or Facebook users watching videos or scrolling through their feeds—for radicalizing users or strengthening their partisanship. Sociologist Shoshana Zuboff15 even argues that “surveillance capitalism” uses optimized algorithmic feedback for “automated behavioral modification” at scale, writing the “music” that users then “dance” to.

Bias, Skew, and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity

U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its own distorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize “engagement”—serving up content that keeps YouTube or Facebook users watching videos or scrolling through their feeds—for radicalizing users or strengthening their partisanship. Sociologist Shoshana Zuboff15 even argues that “surveillance capitalism” uses optimized algorithmic feedback for “automated behavioral modification” at scale, writing the “music” that users then “dance” to.

The Dynamics of Distortion: How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News

This work advances and tests a theory of how news information evolves as it is successively retold by consumers. Drawing on data from over 11,000 participants across ten experiments, the authors offer evidence that when news is repeatedly retold, it undergoes a stylistic transformation termed “disagreeable personalization,” wherein original facts are increasingly supplanted by opinions and interpretations with a slant toward negativity. The central thesis is that when retellers believe they are more (vs. less) knowledgeable than their recipient about the information they are relaying, they feel more compelled to provide guidance on its meaning and to do so in a persuasive manner. This enhanced motivation to guide persuasively, in turn, leads retellers to not only select the subset of facts they deem most essential but, critically, to provide their interpretations and opinions on those facts, with negativity being used as a means of grabbing their audience’s attention. Implications of this work for research on retelling and consumer information diffusion are explored.

The Dynamics of Distortion: How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News

This work advances and tests a theory of how news information evolves as it is successively retold by consumers. Drawing on data from over 11,000 participants across ten experiments, the authors offer evidence that when news is repeatedly retold, it undergoes a stylistic transformation termed “disagreeable personalization,” wherein original facts are increasingly supplanted by opinions and interpretations with a slant toward negativity. The central thesis is that when retellers believe they are more (vs. less) knowledgeable than their recipient about the information they are relaying, they feel more compelled to provide guidance on its meaning and to do so in a persuasive manner. This enhanced motivation to guide persuasively, in turn, leads retellers to not only select the subset of facts they deem most essential but, critically, to provide their interpretations and opinions on those facts, with negativity being used as a means of grabbing their audience’s attention. Implications of this work for research on retelling and consumer information diffusion are explored.