Michael Golebiewski of Microsoft coined the term “data void” in May 2018 to describe search engine queries that turn up little to no results, especially when the query is rather obscure, or not searched often. Source: Data & Society — Data Voids
Category: Information Activism
September | 2021 | Hapgood
Anyway, this is my attempted contribution to get us past the endless cycle where people involved with theorizing one level explain to people theorizing the other levels why their work is not the Real Work (TM). In reality, no link in the intervention chain can function meaningfully without the others. (And yes, I am mixing […]
Deconstructing the Disinformation War – MediaWell
It will be impossible to defeat all perpetrators of disinformation, or successfully anticipate where all the threats might emerge from. Communities must anticipate that the worst will happen and develop processes to nimbly manage the harm. We should spend more time thinking about how to organize the “first responders” to disinformation and misinformation disasters, rather […]
Surgeon General and Health Misinformation
What can we do to clean up the health information environment?
Dissenting from algorithms
So, how can we make algorithmic systems more democratic, so that collective decision-making can be expansive rather than restrictive? This essay explores three intersections of AI and dissent: dissenting from algorithmic decisions, protecting political dissent, and fostering the sensibility to dissent from a given system. Source: A New AI Lexicon: Dissent. Can an algorithmic system […]
Infodemic
The parallels between the spread of the new strain of coronavirus and the spread of misinformation and confusion about it — between the actual pandemic and what the World Health Organization called an “infodemic” — offer a number of important and urgent lessons in news and information literacy. Source: The Sift: Practicing information hygiene | […]
Steps for minimizing our misinformation footprint
Minimize your own “misinformation footprint” by being more thoughtful about what you post and share on social media. Do a quick fact-check first. Shift your focus from arguing points to explaining things to others. Edit and improve Wikipedia articles. Create explanatory YouTube videos. Post pages on blogs or wikis that provide helpful guidance on important […]
Cleaning up the information environment
The idea behind “info-environmentalism” is that if our information environment is polluted, we shouldn’t abandon it—instead, we should help to clean it up. That is, if we are frustrated with the content posted on platforms like Facebook or YouTube or with low-quality Google search results, why not clean it up by posting as much reliable […]
