Interesting People mailing list archives

Re Oxford Report: Computational Propaganda Worldwide

From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2017 17:58:47 -0400




Begin forwarded message:

From: L Jean Camp <ljeanc () gmail com>
Date: June 21, 2017 at 3:41:40 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, woolleysam () gmail com
Cc: ip <ip () listbox com>, dguilbeault () asc upenn edu
Subject: Re: [IP] Oxford Report: Computational Propaganda Worldwide
Reply-To: ljeanc () gmail com

Silencing disagreement is a critical third role of bots, and they were effective. This report  adds disappearing the 
impact of bots and hate campaigns to the disappearing of voices online. 

I was a member of multiple secret groups on Facebook that existed for women to express support without facing abuse, 
threats, and retaliation.   Massive targeted threats of violence and death are silencing. This report misses a 
critical experience of Clinton supporters: threats and the associate silencing. The invisible Clinton supporter was 
invisible for a reason. And that reason was silencing. 

I have copied the authors because I do not know if they think silencing harassment of women is such an online norm it 
is not worth exploring further; if they do not think matters; or they do not believe it exists and so did not look 
for it. 

You can measure the absence of these voices with the tools that are being used but YOU HAVE TO LOOK FOR THEM. To my 
knowledge no one has looked for the creation and then silencing of pro-Clinton voices as voices spoke up and then 
were silenced.

This matters because women were being silenced with mass attacks and continue to be silenced.  Not just during the 
election and by GamerGate, even earlier.  Any pro-women Usenet group was slammed with jerks explaining the world to 
and dumping abuse on women. That is why Systers was created in the nineties. So it is not as if it is some new thing 
no one would know to look for in new media.

The tools do not generate the hypothesis. You have to look at the data a different way for the question. Choosing not 
to look at the participants in the discussion over time instruments an opinion that this silencing is not important. 
Stating that it was not a role of bots makes that explicit.

I was recently told by a male colleague that he had never had a death threat online. I thought my teeth would fall 
out. My first online threats of murder and sexual assault  were at CMU.  My most recent were when Hannity mentioned 
me on his show, but those were mostly general eliminationist threats not more personal death threats, even if they 
came in my personal email.  Interestingly I have not gotten any death threats on twitter, possibly because I am lower 
profile and also block at first idiot contact. 

Why is this invisible to so many people? I do not know. But I know its invisibility matters. And this report reifies 
it. 

As an aside, I thought the turn of phrase "democratizing propaganda" was a bad choice, given the demographics of 
exclusion.  I guess it is the post-Voting Rights Act or pre-1921 kind of democratizing. 

Please do not let this disappear the act of silencing.

Prof. L. Jean Camp
http://www.ljean.com

Make a Difference 
http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/govfel/congfel.asp

On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 8:03 AM, Dave Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org>
Date: Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 7:02 AM
Subject: Oxford Report: Computational Propaganda Worldwide
To: Infowarrior List <infowarrior () attrition org>
Cc: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

Computational Propaganda Worldwide: Executive Summary

http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/2017/06/19/computational-propaganda-worldwide-executive-summary/

We’re very excited to announce the launch of our case study series on computational propaganda in 9 different 
countries.

Find the executive summary, written by Sam Woolley and Phil Howard, here.

The Computational Propaganda Research Project at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, has researched 
the use of social media for public opinion manipulation. The team involved 12 researchers across nine countries who, 
altogether, interviewed 65 experts, analyzed tens of millions posts on seven different social media platforms during 
scores of elections, political crises, and national security incidents. Each case study analyzes qualitative, 
quantitative, and computational evidence collected between 2015 and 2017 from Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, 
Poland, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

The reports can be found at the following links:

        • United States
        • China
        • Russia
        • Poland
        • Brazil
        • Canada
        • Germany
        • Ukraine
        • Taiwan

http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/2017/06/19/computational-propaganda-worldwide-executive-summary/
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Re Oxford Report: Computational Propaganda Worldwide Dave Farber (Jun 21)