Rhys's Newsletter #58
Isabella Garcia-Camargo on Information Counterwarfare, TikTok as a meme-first platform, r/Superstonk IRL
This newsletter goes out to more than 1,000 ambitious frontier people. Please share it with a friend who would like it. (And welcome to all the folks who joined this week!)
Well hi there! Yesterday was my (30th!) birthday, so I didn’t send out the newsletter. Too busy eating ice cream cake 😀
1) This week’s podcast: #85 Isabella Garcia-Camargo: Information Counterwarfare.
Isabella is a super sharp researcher who works at the Stanford Internet Observatory on two amazing projects, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which countered election misinfo, and the Virality Project, which counters anti-vaxx misinfo. I started by asking Isabella:
Rhys: How do you understand information ecosystems as a whole?
Isabella: I like to frame this as what Kate Starbird calls Partipatory Disinformation dynamics. These are well-oiled machines that can take a small narrative, like a Sharpie bleeding through a piece of paper, and produce chanting outside a polling station. That production line is new and it was shocking to see happen during the election.
It's not just that Trump was tweeting that the election was going to be stolen. And it's not just that one person in Maricopa County thought that the Sharpie was going to bleed through the piece of paper. It's the synthesis of these two.
It's the masses looking for evidence and creating these stories among themselves. Then some mid-scale influencers pushing them up to the top. And then large-scale verified influencers taking these narratives and then echoing them down to the bottom.
This vicious cycle happened over and over again and churned out these narratives.
(See below for the amazing thread from Kate Starbird that Isabella was referencing.)
I love this framing of Participatory Disinformation.
The other crazy thing about these new Narrative Machines is that they incentivize folks to join them. Remember, The Culture War Wants You to be part of the Internet of Beefs.
These Narrative Machines are built around a framing, like “the election is a fraud”. Isabella calls these framings a “scaffolding.” I wanted to dive deeper on this:
Rhys: It’s interesting to hear you use the term scaffolding a lot. How do you think about scaffolding? How do these scaffolds work?
Isabella: A scaffolding is like a framework. It's the lens through which you view new information that's coming to you.
Nobody is born out of the womb believing #StopTheSteal. #StopTheSteal is a scaffolding. It is the overall kind of belief that the election itself is going to be not legitimate.
Before the election, more and more people were drawn into this idea that everything is broken. The entire system is rigged and no matter what happens on November 3rd, it will have been cheated.
That #StopTheSteal framework has a network of people pulling you in and bringing you more evidence. Then the sensory data changes. It's like, oh, you see this specific barcode on the outside of your ballot. You should interpret that in this way. It’s a fraud.
This is such a crucial perspective. We understand the world through a given frame/lens/perspective/model. When you start with a frame of "everything is a fraud”, it changes the sensory data itself.
This is quite aligned with how our mind actually processes information, a theory called predictive processing. We're constantly putting on lenses and then shove sensory data into those models.
Or, in Isabella’s words: top-down narratives form a larger scaffolding that bottom-up news gets fit into.
When the lens changes, “the data itself changes.” (Kuhn)
(Side note: We can actually show how these frames are created through Bayesian networks.)
I then asked Isabella about how to positively shape these Narrative Machines. The “classic” answer is to add friction back in. Add nudges because Free Reach is not Free Speech. But Isabella taught me another frame:
Isabella: In addition to the “defensive” friction, we need to think “offensively”.
Our institutions are often reactive towards disinformation. But information is created far more quickly than the rate at which we can fact-check all this information. What we're trying to do with the EIP is start to get that asymmetrical playing field a bit more level.
So bringing pre-bunking tools to people who could actually reach those voters and put those counter-narratives out. Just give them the information, get them that narrative. Not two months later, but day of.
So much of platform moderation is about inserting friction into the system. Isabella helped me see that friction isn’t enough—we also want to spread pre-bunking counternarratives.
The best defense is a good offense.
Much more with Isabella on the podcast itself. Including her work on countering vaccine misinfo with Virality Project. And also this gem:
Isabella: We're not going back to nightly news. But I don't feel great about demigod Twitter celebrities as our new authorities.
😂
2) Delightful and insightful interview from Kevin Kwok and Eugene Wei that touches on many similar topics that we cover in this newsletter:
A few highlights:
First, Eugene defines a meme as “content with built-in distribution.” And that TikTok is a remix-first platform, optimized for memes.
This is the correct way to think about memes! Though I prefer memes as any informational replicator and “Virals” as the specific kind of “internet meme”.
We can think of memes as viruses that travel among a population of human minds. These meme viruses are acquired by their host (our minds), retained, and eventually transmitted.
As Eugene notes, a Viral is a type of meme that is optimized for acquisition and transmission.
TikTok dance #challenges are optimized for spreading.
More on Virals here.
Second, Eugene provides this idea of Feature-Social Graph Fit. A given feature (like Snapchat Stories) was a good fit for the Snapchat Social Graph. Instagram was able to copy Stories because its Social Graph was enough of a fit with that feature. While Stories wouldn’t have been a good fit for, e.g. LinkedIn.
This is quite aligned with our recent post, Medium-Message Fit.
The medium is the message. The social graph is the feature.
3) If you’d like to explore the above ideas (and more!) with a group of similarly divergent folks, apply for RF4 here by June 7.
Or come to our Systems Book Club on Scout Mindset. May 27th at 9am PST. Register here.
LINKS
1) Everyone has forgotten about r/wsb and $GME. But that community has continued to self-perpetuate. $GME went from $10 to $350. And $350 was crazy. Guess what it’s at now?
$200. Still!
The community has forked into r/Superstonk. They’ve been up to various hijinks. As an example, I remember seeing the r/wallstreetbets plane flying around SF and saying “wow, digital into IRL, this is crazy.”
But this weekend, I just looked up randomly and there was a r/Superstonk plane flying around. Digital to IRL is the new IRL.
Also, they’re learning self-reflection (to some extent). r/The_Donald was excited (and a bit surprised) when they memed Trump into existence. But mostly nihilistic.
r/Superstock is more reflective. In this popular thread, a community member shares how he didn’t like that r/Superstonk community members engaged in calls to violence. It was well-received. My two favorite posts:
2) We noted how important framing is in Isabella’s interview above. Here’s a sign of the framing itself changing around US monetary policy:
3) Always great to see the cutting edge of DeFi, Everlasting Options. I don’t fully grok it yet but kinda get it. Here’s the rough summary:
There are these things called perpetual swaps (perps), which give you exposure to an asset (like ETH) without actually purchasing it, and without an end date (it’s “perpetual”). Perps have become quite popular in a small amount of time.
An Everlasting Option is like a perp, but instead of tracking an underlying asset, like ETH, it tracks an option (to buy or sell an asset).
Money legos gonna keep on money legoing.
(Also, your occasional reminder that the derivatives market is worth $700T, compared to stocks at $70T, gold at $7T, and crypto at $1.5T.)
4) Babylon Bee: Texas Passes Law Allowing Students To Lasso Teachers Who Promote Critical Race Theory, Drive Them Out Of Town
5) The Onion: New Orleans Airbnb Touts Location In Heart Of Historic Airbnb Quarter
6) Rhys: Bored Twitter User Waits For Next Global Catastrophe
7) TikTok of the Week from @dumbonem
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet. Nathan Schneider’s lab is holding a cool 3-month cohort exploring how governance was done pre-internet. $1,000 for the best projects. Apply here by June 15, 2021.
Andy Clark’s lab is conducting a research project into the influence of the built environment on the development of the mind. They’re hiring a programmer for two years to develop multi-agent simulations around this. Ping Andy directly at andy.clark@sussex.ac.uk if you’re interested.
New Science is a good new metascience crew trying to do breakthrough bio research. They’re accepting applications for a 2022 Summer Fellowship.
Kialo is a great website that visualizes debates. They’re hiring for DevOps.
EVENTS
Skoll and Oxford are hosting a virtual #SystemsWeek2021 June 7-11.
#NotAnotherBookClub on Scout Mindset. May 27th at 9am PST. Register here.
Rostock Retreat on visualizing uncertainty from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. June 21-23
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
Just learned about this wartime song, Blood on the Risers. It tells of a fatal training jump of a rookie paratrooper whose parachute fails to deploy. This results in him falling to his death.
Here are some soldiers singing it in Band of Brothers:
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
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