Is Virality a Form of Power?

In Episode 288 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Renee DiResta about the recent revelations stemming from the Twitter Files, why we should care about them, and what we can do to fix the problems of unaccountable censorship and misinformation on social media.

Renée is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she investigates the spread of narratives across social media and how actors leverage these networks to exert influence. She has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare, which makes her the perfect person to speak to about this incredibly important and timely topic.

For those who are unfamiliar with this story, Elon Musk, who recently purchased Twitter for 44 billion dollars invited Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and several other journalists to look into the Twitter archives. What they found has confirmed many of the pre-existing beliefs of the American right, who see the published internal Twitter communications as evidence that partisan executives took deliberate actions to limit access to information and voices that could damage Democrats. The most salient argument here is that Twitter put its thumb on the scale by removing certain prominent accounts from trending, through suppression of both search and amplification. Even if the intent wasn't partisan, the impact was. At least, that’s the way the right sees it. On the left, the Twitter Files are being dismissed as a “nothing burger,” or at least as not revealing anything that we didn’t already know about for years. Defenders note that Twitter's terms of service say that the company limits the reach of certain posts in select cases and that Musk himself advocates for a similar policy. Indeed, Musk recently suspended the accounts of several journalists on the platform, including Lenett Lopez, whose social media account he raided four years ago. These defenders add further that Weiss provided anecdotes, rather than a comprehensive investigation, so it's impossible to conclude that such limitations were slanted in one direction or another.

Demetri wanted to use this opportunity to shift the conversation away from politics and towards something more constructive by speaking to both sides of the political spectrum. In their conversation, Kofinas and DiResta discuss a wide range of social, philosophical, and policy issues related to social media, including ways of bringing more transparency and accountability to these technology platforms.

If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation, you can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 12/15/2022