- Kate Starbird. “Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem Through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on Twitter” (2017)
- Mattia Samory and Tanushree Mitra. “Conspiracies Online: User discussions in a Conspiracy Community Following Dramatic Events” (2018)
Brief: The two papers extend the discussion from filter bubbles and echo chambers that are as a result of blackbox platforms and onto crippled epistemology or “intellectual isolation” that are due to the lack of source diversity due to mostly driven by user actions.
Lens: The two papers apply different lenses in looking at alternative theories surrounding dramatic events, Starbird vs Samory: Journalist/alternative media vs user lens, Twitter vs Reddit. While wanted an overall picture of the alternative media ecosystem — who the big hitters were, so followed the network approach, Samory focused on who the users are, how their behaviors both typifies them as conspiracy theorists, and how this behavior develops. Starbird’s work is also (mostly) qualitative while Samory follows quantitative analysis.
Countering Conspiracy
There is a thin line between conspiracy/alternative narrative and weaponized disinformation. The latter is touched in Starbird’s paper in discussing the #PizzaGate narrative and the role that Russian disinformation played in distributing misinformation. It is only when the line has been crossed from free speech to endangering lives that the law machinery comes to play. Before bridging that line, Samory recommends intervention before the line is breached. This is a starting point based on the quantitative analysis on the type of users in the r/conspiracy subcommunity.
This line between free speech and weaponized misiniformation allows us to apply retrospective lens from which to view both work, but especially the recommendations made in Samory’s paper. We use three examples that preceded and followed both papers:
The three cases allow us to probe for reason: Why do platforms choose to spread misinformation? State actors aside, there other reason is for monetary reason (setting aside the argument that it is easy to churn out massive amount of content if journalistic integrity is not a concern — as notes Starbird). There is money in conflict. Conspiracy is a motherlode of conflict.
Removing the monetary incentive seems to be the way to best counter the spread/flourishing of these platforms. How to do this uniformly and effectively requires the cooperation of the platform and is subject, ironically to the rise shadow banning conspiracy (Twitter/Facebook being blamed for secretly silencing mostly conservative voices).
Why seek veteranship?
I would propose another vector of measurement to best counter theories from veterans: Why do veterans stay and continually post? There is no (overt) monetary compensation that they gain. And even if they are a front of an alternative news source, it does not square the long-game of continually contributing “quality” content to the community — which is counter to the type and volume of “news” from the alternate sources. It is easy to profile joiners and converts as they are mostly swayed by dramatic events, but not veterans. Does they also chase the sense of community with other like-minded people, or the leadership — the clout brought about by the longevity of the posters bring to bear in these decisions? Because these innate, yet almost unmeasurable goals would make it difficult to ‘dethrone’ (for lack of a better term) these veterans from being arbiters of conspiracy theories. The (lack of) turnover of the community’s moderators would also aid in answering these questions.
