Is There a New Conversation From Free Speech or Freedom of Reach?

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Renee: The ease with which people can encode or remember a message is how true we think it is so if you get hit again and again with a message you've seen a lot so it's easy to encode but humans also have a rhyming bias. We're saying that we have to have a new conversation from free speech talking about reach and amplification, she says. Renee: If these platforms weren't hacking into our nervous systems what could they be doing i know oftentimes we can sound anti-technologyWe're not the point is technology is shaping exponentially more of the human experienceso what is the world we actually want to build?

Today’s online propaganda has evolved in unforeseeable and seemingly absurd ways; by laughing at or spreading a Kermit the Frog meme, you may be unwittingly advancing the Russian agenda. These campaigns affect our elections integrity, public health, and relationships. In this episode, the first of two parts, disinformation expert Renee DiResta talks with Tristan and Aza about how these tactics work, how social media platforms’ algorithms and business models allow foreign agents to game the system, and what these messages reveal to us about ourselves. Renee gained unique insight into this issue when in 2017 Congress asked her to lead a team of investigators analyzing a data set of texts, images and videos from Facebook, Twitter and Google thought to have been created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency. She shares what she learned, and in part two of their conversation, Renee, Tristan and Aza will discuss what steps can be taken to prevent this kind of manipulation in the future.