Notices by Renee DiResta (noupside@saturation.social), page 3

People who have apparently never considered the design of social media platforms or the business incentives of companies are missing the point here.

Put another way: a proliferation of harassment and brigading - things twitter struggled with in the past, which technically qualify as “free speech” - stifles assembly on the platform, as other users self-censor or leave to avoid that harassment.

Everything You've Ever Wanted To Know about Generative AI and Influence Operations - a new report out today by my team at SIO, Georgetown CSET, and OpenAI.

That is not really the title. It's "Generative Language Models and Automated Influence Operations: Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigations". But it's a whitepaper hopefully of interest to both AI research and disinfo/influence ops research communities. :)

https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/publication/generative-language-models-and-automated-influence-operations-emerging-threats-and

Facts don’t matter when an influencer commands an online mob. This has been true for years now. There is no counter-speech from outsiders that will be taken seriously or trusted. The targets of lies aren’t asked for their side, and wouldn’t be believed anyway, so there’s little incentive to participate (and legitimize the “controversy”). There is no 3rd party fact-check that will be carefully evaluated on its merits.

This is really the only dynamic that matters in our politics today.

Life comes at you fast.

The Platform Accountability and Transparency Act got reintroduced- here’s a summary of the latest. If you’re an academic who studies social media, or a civil society researcher or journalist, this is one to be paying attention to. The mercurial dynamics of the bird app - API access at the whims of management - should hopefully clarify why this has always mattered and why regulatory attention is worthwhile.

https://techpolicy.press/the-platform-accountability-and-transparency-act-take-two/

Interesting graph of follower growth of certain politicians on Twitter…the top few appear among the Suggested Follows list that shows up after following EM.