I had a great chat last week with @cward1e.bsky.social, looking back at the growth of open source investigation from when it was just a small bunch of people trying to figure stuff out, how the counter-disinformation community formed out of that, and why it's causing us all so many headaches now.

Really looking forward to chatting with @eliothiggins.bsky.social tomorrow to discuss the insane journey we've been on since we first 'met' in 2011/2012, when we both started working on social media verification efforts. Little did we know how bananas everything would get.

Don’t know what to trust on your feed? How did we get here? Next Thursday, @eliothiggins.bsky.social and @cward1e.bsky.social unpack the rise, backlash and future of counter-disinformation. Join us for a live Q&A on Discord. 11am EST / 5pm CET discord.gg/ApEnkSK6?eve...

I've been doing a soft launch of my new Substack, Sensemaking Distortion, a blog about how our ability to make sense of the world around us is being profoundly distorted by digital and social media. I just published the Welcome post this morning. open.substack.com/pub/katestar...

Seeking nominations: The CIP Award for Impact & Excellence recognizes outstanding contributions and achievements that advance civic health and promote an informed society by helping individuals, communities, and institutions navigate complex information challenges.

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

A major perk for @indicator.media members is our monthly workshop. This Friday, @craigsilverman.bsky.social will walk folks through how to look for valuable documents hiding in open air, the topic of our latest guide. Upgrade to paid now to attend the workshop!

We have to (have to!) break this "chat shit for money" version of the internet.

Not surprising, but still very important to document.

As someone on a county library board: we track checkouts, we track event attendance, hell we track door counts. Just visit your local library and show them some love

X is considering exporting its Community Notes bridging algorithm to the main feed. This...might not be a bad idea? techcrunch.com/2025/07/24/x...

I wrote somethingfor @fullfact.org about the ways in which the disappearing archive makes their work even harder but more important. I'm a trustee & continue to be amazed at their resiliency in an age of AI slop and attacks against those who investigate accuracy. fullfact.org/technology/m...

🚨 Now out in Nature Human Behaviour 🚨 We show that following the news on WhatsApp or Instagram (N = 3,395 🇫🇷🇩🇪) increases current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to discern true from false news stories, awareness of true news stories, as well as trust in the news. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Community expertise is essential for monitoring potential information harms, but current “social listening” efforts often bring community input late in the process. It’s time to update our tracking approaches to foreground that shift. @cward1e.bsky.social and I offer one approach in a new paper.

Portugal is taking online disinformation and fake news seriously. As part of a broader attempt to encourage media literacy, it’s offering 15-18 year olds a free digital subscription to a range of respected newspapers and magazines as well as online upstarts that don’t spread lies. (Monocle)

“It was the first time in Arizona judicial history — and possibly nationwide — that AI has been used to create a deceased victim’s own impact statement.”

I’m about to give a talk at the Information Architecture conference in Philly in the beautiful Quaker meeting house. I love the bingo card (I know what Wawa is and I have a humanities BA)

OK I wrote about the database www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

The very smart, very lovely @whitneyphillips.bsky.social has a new book out. As ever she's thinking about things in very different, but very important ways.

On today’s #DogShirtTV, @benjaminwittes.bsky.social & @hollybfletcher.bsky.social welcome Alicia Wanless @lageneralista.ca to discuss her new book, The Information Animal, a historical & contemporary survey of human information consumption. #InformationEcosystem www.youtube.com/watch?v=c29o...

Ivan Sigal writes that many of us, caught in the amnesia of our endless scrolling, seem to have forgotten that we control our attention. But if enough of us act, he says, we will create the demand signal that builders of technologies that privilege human agency need to validate their work.

More of this is needed. In health communication, a story narrative is so important to engage an audience... It's why big-on- emotion, empty-on-fact antivax efforts are so effective. This sobering story told by a physician highlights using the power of narrative for good and in a respectful way. 🛟

They're called public records for a reason. Starting today, WIRED will *stop paywalling* articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, becoming the first publication to partner with @freedom.press to offer this for our new coverage.

For Slate, I dived into what a viral real estate influencer in NYC may reveal our increasingly polluting news environment of, and how a profitable business model of amplifying polarizing political and cultural content is making it even worse. slate.com/technology/2...

"Our problem is not simply that the public does not trust us, it’s that they do trust other dishonest brokers. We are not just witnessing a crisis of credibility, we are experiencing a crisis of credulity as well." — Jelani Cobb. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/full-te... Let it sink in.

Really wild that there was a moment in like 2011 where we believed that social media, and Twitter specifically, were going to lead to a new golden age of democracy and human rights.

The attention economy is devouring politics. Social scientists need to understand how. As do we all. www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-attent...

4:00 pm – The Good, Bad and the Ugly: The Role of #GenAI in Undermining but (potentially) Rebuilding Trust Renee Cummings, David Rand, and Claire Wardle take a broad look at how AI tools are shaping our trust in the media we consume and the future. @dgrand.bsky.social @cward1e.bsky.social

"You don't even have to be political. Just do the things you're supposed to do. And resist all attempts to make you do something else, because if you do something else, guess what? Your institution is already lost, even if the name is still there." broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-united...

Hate that it has come to this, but it's time to consider PubMed vulnerable to enshittification. My latest post @plos.org discusses the lines we need to fight to hold – and alternatives we can rely on internationally: absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/02/14/w... #medlibs

🧵 Yesterday I shared my views on how disordered discourse has captured the US state and the risk of that happening elsewhere, but I don’t want to leave you hanging without proposing a solution.

Spent time with @carolecadwalla.bsky.social and @marklittle.bsky.social on a new podcast based on Carole's column - 'How to Survive the Broligarchy' from back in November. Considering everything, I'd recommend re-reading it & if you have time, have a listen. broligarchy.substack.com/p/how-to-sur...

As ever @lageneralista.ca leading the charge in helping us all understand information ecosystems, this time focusing on national differences and how we compare across borders.

News that wiki editors are facing threats from Musk and the Heritage Foundation because of “bias” should be raising alarm bells for platforms that rely on user moderation (basically all of them, but Reddit esp. since its mods have come under fire recently).

"If you want a labor force, a regulatory bureaucracy, or accountability to disappear, you simply say, 'AI can do it.' Then, the conversation shifts from explaining why these things should or should not go away to questions about how AI would work in their place." - @eryk.bsky.social

A LOT of folks in the US have moved away from texts, WhatsApp, iMessage, etc. to Signal. That’s a good thing. Also - Signal is a non-profit. If you’re relying on @signal.org to have your back, make sure you have their back too. Go donate and get your friends to do so as well! signal.org/donate/

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

“The current crisis of imminent loss of information exists not only because government information is being changed, but because it is being erased. The erasure is possible because of the gaps in the current preservation infrastructure.” @freegovinfo.bsky.social freegovinfo.info/node/14747/

Tip of the day: did you know that you can archive an archive? If there's something archived on Wayback Machine that you want to create a secondary archive of just in case Wayback Machine goes down, you can just paste the Wayback Machine URL into archive.is to create a secondary copy of the archive.

Another banger from @404media.bsky.social

For @us.theguardian.com, I wrote about how Silicon Valley’s right-wing politics go back to the dotcom mania of the 1990s — and how they’re far more central to the tech industry than we’ve previously thought www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

Just finished up an in-person talk with 150 community public health people about meeting community needs in this moment. For the first time in days felt the anxiety lift and some of the fight return.

“The work of fact-checkers and the involvement of communities against disinformation are not contradictory, but rather both are essential and complement each other.” maldita.es/nosotros/202...

“In a world fragmented by increasingly bespoke reality perceptions, science, facts, rationality have become an existential threat to most of our cherished co-created beliefs and worldviews” www.protagonist-science.com/p/how-social...

Excellent clear account of why Meta’s moderation changes are very likely to breach UK OSA when i/f inforrm.org/2025/01/14/m...

Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the thousands of apps hijacked to spy on your location A hack of location data company Gravy Analytics has revealed which apps are—knowingly or not—being used to collect your information behind the scenes. 🔗 www.404media.co/candy-crush-...

Meta's announcement on Tuesday has gotten a lot of attention, but IMHO the most important part was the one that no one seems to be talking about: changes to Facebook's feed algorithm that will make it more likely to recommend extreme and polarizing content. Quick 🧵 to explain:

Not lost on me that it's nonprofit tech, app.watchduty.org, showing up & actually working in the midst of the LA fires (donate to them!) Meanwhile platforms fail to surface key news, vital info is paywalled... As I've been saying, we need a new tech paradigm, yesterday!

Great post by @mantzarlis.com in Nieman Lab, fact-checking Zuckerberg's nonsense. www.niemanlab.org/2025/01/zuck...