THE PROPAGANDISTS’ PLAYBOOK
” Disinformation is not a bug in the code , it is a feature wielded for political gain and a great risk to American democracy”
– Francesca Bolla Tripodi
7 Tactics Summarized
- Know your audience and filter all news around the concerns they care about.
- Build a network by bridging platforms together and leveraging all forms of media.
- Engage in their form of media literacy. Understand that groups interact with media differently.
- Know how information flows/search engine optimization matters.
- Set the traps by creating new catchphrases (keyword curation) to strategically signal information.
- Recycle old ideas. Rising influencers on emerging platforms (e.g., TikTok) can make decades-old information seem fresh.
- Encourage audiences to “do their own research.” The IKEA effect of misinformation creates faux autonomy in information seeking.
MORE WORKS
Wikipedia Gender Bias (Ms. Categorized)
Many people know that less than 20% of biographies on English Wikipedia are about women, but few people understand the extra hurdles editors must jump through to get those pages to stick. My research finds that biographies about women are nominated for deletion at a disproportionate rate and that women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more likely to be considered non-notable and less worthy than men.
NPR Appearance On All Things Considered
This study matters for three reasons:
- It complicates our understanding of how women’s contributions to society are assessed;
- It calls attention to the limitations of pronoun use;
- Wikidata trains AI systems used by Google, Alexa, Siri, etc., so these absences reverberate.
Nearly all my work is accessible via open-access agreements. Here are the direct links for you to download her research. If you are a researcher interested in accessing my work and you can’t access my research, please contact me before paying for the publication.
Articles on Information Integrity
- “Do your own research”: affordance activation and disinformation spread
- Abortion near me? The implications of semantic media on accessing health information
- ReOpen demands as public health threat: a sociotechnical framework for understanding the stickiness of misinformation
- You’ve got mail: how the Trump administration used legislative communication to frame his last year in office
- Libraries Combating Disinformation: From the Front Line to the Long Game
- Searching for Alternative Facts: Analyzing Scriptural Inference in Conservative News Practices
Articles on Inequality on Wikipedia
- Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia
- “Too Soon” to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia
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