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Internet Musicking Conference (20–21 May 2022): Registration Open
by Steven Gamble 11 Apr '22

11 Apr '22

Internet Musicking: Popular Music and Online Cultures A free academic conference sharing new research into cultural practices of music taking place online 20–21 May 2022 ::: Programme announced & registration now open ::: ::: https://internetmusicking.com ::: We are delighted to announce the programme and open registration for Internet Musicking. There are 36 original research presentations with speakers in over 10 timezones and representing almost 40 institutions. The conference will be run in two parallel Zoom rooms. Registration and agreeing to a code of conduct is required. The conference will be of interest to anyone researching (or curious about) internet-based cultural practices of popular music, including social media, virality, streaming platforms, algorithms and big data, the platformisation of culture, online music communities, digital divides, and more. Please register now at https://www.internetmusicking.com/register/ Best wishes, Steve (on behalf of the organisers) _ Dr. Steven Gamble (he/him) | https://stevengamble.com Marie Curie Research Fellow | Department of Music, University College Cork, Ireland | https://digitalflo.ws Conference May 2022 | Internet Musicking: Popular Music and Online Cultures Book | How Music Empowers: Listening to Modern Rap and Metal (Routledge, 2021)

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CFP: Asian Communication Research (ACR) Vol. 19 No. 2, Due June 10th
by Kyun Soo Kim 09 Apr '22

09 Apr '22

Dear All, We are currently accepting submissions for our second issue of 2022 (Vol. 19 No. 2). Asian Communication Research (ACR) is a peer-reviewed, international journal of the Korean Society for Journalism and Communication Studies (KSJCS). ACR is a refereed international publication that features cutting-edge scholarship in all areas of communication with a focus on Asian contexts, while contributing to understanding of communication phenomena around the world. ACR is registered in the Korean Citation Index (KCI) and published three times a year in April, August, and December. New submissions are always open, but manuscripts submitted by June 10 will be given a priority to undergo peer review after initial editor screening for publication, scheduled to be on August 31, 2022. ● Submission Deadline: June 10, 2022 ● Scheduled Date of Publication: August 31, 2022 ● New Online Submission Site: https://www.dbpiaone.com/acr/index.do To be considered for publication, the submitted manuscripts must adhere to the submission guidelines. Please download and use the manuscript template: http://acr.comm.or.kr/download/ACR_manuscript_template.docx We are also inviting reviews of books on topics relevant to the scope of the journal. Eligible books for review are those published within the last five years and appealing to an international readership. Authors should provide a clear account of the major issues dealt with in the book and critically evaluate the book’s contribution to the field (2,000–3,00 words). Potential book reviewers should contact the book review editor in advance. If you have any inquiry, please contact: Editor‐in‐Chief Sungeun Chung (Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, chseun(a)skku.edu) Associate Editors Minsun Shim (Inha University, Korea, mshim(a)inha.ac.kr) Borae Jin (Joongbu University, Korea, bjin23(a)gmail.com) Kyun Soo Kim (Chonnam National University, Korea, kimk(a)jnu.ac.kr) Christopher J. Carpenter (Western Illinois University, USA, cj-carpenter2(a)wiu.edu) Book Review Editors JongHwa Lee (Angelo State University, USA, jonghwa.lee(a)angelo.edu) Associate Managing Editor Daeun Jeong (Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, acr(a)comm.or.kr) -- *Kyun Soo Kim, Ph.D.* Chair & Professor, Department of Communication Chonnam National University 77 Yongbongro Bukgu Gwangju, Republic of Korea 61186 Office: +82-62-530-2671 Fax: +82-62-530-2679 Zoom meeting ID: 620 636 1798

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Virtual Cultures in Pandemic Times
by Tom Boellstorff 09 Apr '22

09 Apr '22

Dear all: the documentary Virtual Cultures in Pandemic Times is now freely available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wgJKr744hY <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wgJKr744hY>. This film, by the wonderful filmmaker Bernhard Drax, is about research I conducted with three colleagues about how people were using Animal Crossing and Second Life during the early days of the pandemic. Bernhard really is a remarkable filmmaker, who also directed Our Digital Selves (https://youtu.be/GQw02-me0W4 <https://youtu.be/GQw02-me0W4>), a film about earlier collaborative research I conducted regarding disability and virtual worlds. I term this kind of work “paraethnographic film,” about which I recently published an article in Visual Anthropology Review (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/512046md) including a teaching supplement (https://www.visualanthropologyreview.org/var371-suppl-boellstorff) I hope you enjoy it! All the best, Tom Boellstorff

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Digital Black Feminism book talk w/ Catherine Knight Steele
by Rafael Grohmann 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

Hello! Today 4PM EST, Book Talk with Catherine Knight Steele, presenting the book Digital Black Feminism. Youtube: [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P6KQkiy2Rg Organization: Brazilian Association of Media and Communication Program (COMPÓS) See you soon, Rafael Grohmann References 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P6KQkiy2Rg

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CfP 4S/ESOCITE 2022 Open Panel: Technologies of Scalable Power: Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’ services, and scalable technoepistemics in global computing
by Yoehan Oh 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

Dear colleagues, ***Apologies for cross-posting.*** Our panel for 4S/ESOCITE 2022 (Cholula, México; 7-10 December 2022), entitled "Technologies of Scalable Power: Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’ services, and scalable technoepistemics in global computing," is open for submissions, which is due on Thursday, April 14, 2022. Please find the details below. Please also feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. I look forward to receiving your abstracts! Best regards, Yoehan ---- *CONFERENCE INFORMATION* The 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) / ESOCITE (Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología) 2nd Joint meeting - *Title: *Reunion, recuperation, reconfiguration: Knowledges and technosciences for living together - *Date*: 7-10 December 2022 - *Location*: Cholula, México - *Conference meeting website*: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/ - *Key dates*: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/key-dates/ *OPEN PANEL INFORMATION* - *Webpage*: https://www.4sonline.org/127-technologies-of-scalable-power-big-data-big-te… - *Call for Abstract *(as below): 127. *Technologies of Scalable Power**: * *Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’ services, and scalable technoepistemics in global computing* This open panel invites global scholars interested in critical studies of scalability technologies, computing and network architectures, and their epistemic assumptions and infrastructures, which collectively render various computing media scalable. Empirical examples include, but are not limited to: - Cloud computing’s scalable/on-demand architectures - Big data analysis tools (e.g. Hadoop; Stevens 2016) - Distributed and parallel computing systems (e.g. MapReduce, GPU) - microservices (vs. monolithic), Observability, DevOps, AIOps - Open source cloud infrastructure (e.g. OpenStack, Apache CloudStack) Our shared consciousness is threefold. First, thematically/politically, this open panel collectively aims at elaborating on the recent macroscale theses interested in global extractive data practices by a few Big platforms, such as “Data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias 2021) and “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2017; Birch & Cochrane 2021) by focusing on the specificity and technicality of certain computing and media practices in their micro/mesoscale that have provided such global platforms with various kinds of means of scalable growth and expansion in computational, material, operational, and logistic terms. We also interrogate how those practices have reinforced Silicon Valley’s privilege of leading global techno-episteme. We hope our work to contribute to the discussions as to how decolonial and deimperial digital cultures could be conceived of (Asif 2019; Ochigame 2020). Second, epistemologically, this panel means to contribute to works in critical and hermeneutic understandings of computing architectures, programming languages, and its accompanying logistical assumptions and epistemic infrastructures (Malazita 2022) such as Ubiquitous Computing (Dourish & Mainwaring 2012), UNIX’s modular principles with pipeline communications (McPherson 2012), and the success of a Brazil computer scientists-invented programming language in Silicon Valley but not in its homecountry (Takhteyev 2015). Third, methodologically and theoretically, this panel deepens our meta-reflections by ethically and responsibly relying upon existing conceptual works about scalability from ethnography (Fortun 2009; Tsing 2012), Computer supported cooperative work (Ribes 2014), critical geography (Frickel & Kinchy 2015), and innovation policy studies (Pfotenhauer et al. 2021) among others. REFERENCES - Asif, Manan Ahmed. 2019. “Technologies of Power – From Area Studies to Data Sciences.” *Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures*, no. #5 Spectres of AI (November). https://spheres-journal.org/contribution/technologies-of-power-from-area-st… . - Birch, Kean, and D. T. Cochrane. 2021. “Big Tech: Four Emerging Forms of Digital Rentiership.” *Science as Culture*, May, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.1932794. - Couldry, Nick, and Ulises Ali Mejias. 2021. “The Decolonial Turn in Data and Technology Research: What Is at Stake and Where Is It Heading?” *Information, Communication & Society*, November, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1986102. - Dourish, Paul, and Scott D. Mainwaring. 2012. “Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse.” In *Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing – UbiComp ’12*, 133–42. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2370216.2370238. - Fortun, Kim. 2009. “Scaling and Visualizing Multi-Sited Ethnography,” in M.-A. Falzon (ed.), *Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Social Research*, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 73–85. - Frickel, Scott, and Abby Kinchy. 2015. “Lost in space: Geographies of ignorance in science and technology studies.” In *Routledge international handbook of ignorance studies*, pp. 174-182. Routledge. - Malazita, James W. 2022. “Epistemic Infrastructures, the Instrumental Turn, and the Digital Humanities” *People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center*, Eds. Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, Siobhan Senier, University of Minnesota Press. - McPherson, Tara. 2012. “US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX.” In *Race after the Internet*, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, 21–37. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10535025. - Ochigame, Rodrigo. 2020. “Informatics of the oppressed.” *LOGIC *11: 53-74. https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/ - Pfotenhauer, Sebastian, Brice Laurent, Kyriaki Papageorgiou, and and Jack Stilgoe. 2021. “The politics of scaling.” *Social Studies of Science*: 03063127211048945. - Ribes, David. 2014. “Ethnography of scaling, or, how to fit a national research infrastructure in the room.” In *Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing*, pp. 158-170. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531624 - Srnicek, Nick. 2017. *Platform Capitalism*. John Wiley & Sons. - Stevens, Hallam. 2016. “Hadooping the Genome: The Impact of Big Data Tools on Biology.” *BioSocieties* 11 (3): 352–71. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-016-0003-6. - Takhteyev, Yuri. 2012. *Coding places: Software practice in a South American city*. MIT Press. - Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2012) “On nonscalability: The living world is not amenable to precision-nested scales.” *Common Knowledge* 18(3): 505–524. *Contact*: yoehan.oh(a)gmail.com *Keywords*: scalability, cloud computing, critical data studies, software studies, information infrastructure studies *Submission website*: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/ssss22/ -- Yoehan Oh Ph.D. Candidate Department of Science and Technology Studies The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Rensselaer Polytechnic institute 110 Eighth Street Troy, NY 12180 United States https://hass.rpi.edu/sts-graduate-students https://info.rpi.edu/people/yoehan-oh e-mail: ohy(a)rpi.edu ; yoehan.oh(a)gmail.com phone: (518) 368-1257 pronoun: he/him

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ZOOM RECORDING: Platforms and Cultural Production book event | LSE Digital Ethnography Collective
by Glatt,ZA (pgr) 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

Hi all, For those of you who were unable to attend yesterday’s LSE Digital Ethnography Collective event on Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021), with authors Brooke Erin Duffy, Thomas Poell and David Nieborg, the zoom recording is now available to watch here: https://tinyurl.com/4w3k5nby It was a lovely event, thanks so much to everyone who joined and engaged with the authors! You can read more info below and find a 20% discount code for the book, which will be active until the end of the year. All the best, Zoe --- The authors will presented some of the findings of the book, which examines both the processes and implications of platformisation across the cultural industries. This was be followed by an audience Q&A. The event was be chaired by LDEC Co-Founder Zoë Glatt, with Q&A moderated by Ludmila Lupinacci. BOOK DESCRIPTION: The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok – is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at a breakneck pace. In 'Platforms and Cultural Production', the authors identify key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labour, creativity, and democracy. Foregrounding simultaneous changes in institutional relations and cultural practices, the authors define platformisation as: the penetration of digital platforms’ economic, infrastructural, and governmental extensions into the cultural industries, as well as the organization of cultural practices of labour, creativity, and democracy around these platforms. Exploring how these interrelated changes take shape in different industrial and geographic contexts, they discuss key variations in the trajectories of transformation. This analytical framework should assist students, scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners in their efforts to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are evolving in the era of platforms. **You can purchase the book with a 20% discount provided by Polity Books using the code 'PCP02' at checkout HERE<https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=platforms-and-cultural-pro…>. Code eligible until the end of 2022** SPEAKER BIOS: Brooke Erin Duffy is an Associate Professor at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the Department of Communication and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Her specific areas of interest include digital and social media industries; gender, identity, and inequality; and the impact of new technologies on creative work and labour. She's the author of two monographs on gender and cultural production, including (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017), which Wired ranked as one of the "Top Tech Books of 2017." Thomas Poell is Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Research Priority Area on Global Digital Cultures. His research is focused on the societal consequences of the rise of digital platforms. He has published widely on social media and popular protests around the globe, as well as on the role of these media in the development of new forms of journalism. Poell is co-author of three books, including The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (Oxford University Press, 2018). David B. Nieborg is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto. He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam and held visiting and fellowship appointments with MIT, the Queensland University of Technology, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He published widely on the game industry, app and platform economics, and game journalism in academic outlets such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society and Media, Culture and Society. ~We are the LSE Digital Ethnography Collective, an interdisciplinary group exploring the intersections of digital culture and ethnographic methods. We invite scholars at all levels to join us for events where we host speakers and workshop new ideas. The aim of the group to establish a community of scholars of digital ethnography and to work through challenges in this emerging subdiscipline. Follow us on Twitter (@DigEthnogLSE) and join our mailing list (https://tinyurl.com/y5a6odte) to hear about exciting new scholarship in this area as well as updates on all of our future events.~ ________________________ Zoë Glatt www.zoeglatt.com<http://www.zoeglatt.com/> ESRC PhD Researcher in Media & Communications London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Co-Founder: LSE Digital Ethnography Collective @DigEthnogLSE<https://twitter.com/DigEthnogLSE> Graduate Student Rep 2019-2021: Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Managing Editor 2018-2020: ICA journal Communication, Culture & Critique<https://academic.oup.com/ccc/pages/About> YouTube channel<https://www.youtube.com/user/Zedstergal> | Twitter<https://twitter.com/ZoeGlatt> | LSE bio<http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/people/phd-researchers/zoe-gl…>

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"A European Perspective on Platformization" – a public lecture by José Maria Van Dijck - University of Siena (IT) April 12
by tiziano bonini 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

Someone in this list might be interested in this public lecture: "A European Perspective on Platformization" – a public lecture by José Maria Van Dijck (Utrecht University) Tuesday, April 12, 2.30-4.15 pm (UTC +2) External Pavilion, Lecture Hall A+B, San Niccolò, Via Roma 56, Siena The event is part of the 2018-2022 Visiting Scholarship program funded by DISPOC (Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences) at the University of Siena (IT) and will be streamed live on this link: *http://meet.google.com/fyo-twsq-wwr <http://meet.google.com/fyo-twsq-wwr>* *Abstract* The growing pains of digitization involve intense struggles between two platform ecosystems fighting for information control: a Chinese and American-based ecosystem. A handful of American Big Tech platforms have overwhelmingly penetrated Western-European societies, disrupting markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democracies. At the heart of the online media’s industry’s surge is the battle over information control: who owns the data generated by online social activities? While two large ecosystems fight for information control in the global online world, the European perspective on digital infrastructures lags behind. This lecture takes up two questions. First, how can we govern public values in platform societies across Europe? Values such as privacy, security, transparency, equality, public trust, and institutional sovereignty are important principles upon which the design of platform architectures should be based. Democratic principles and the common good are the very stakes in the struggle over platformization of societies around the globe. Secondly, the lecture focuses on what responsibilities companies, governments and citizens have in building such a sustainable platform ecosystem? Who is responsible for anchoring public values in an online world and who can be held accountable? Particularly in the European context, governments and civil society organizations can be more proactive in negotiating public values on behalf of citizens and consumers. *Biographical note* José van Dijck is a distinguished university professor at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands); she was the president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences from 2015 until 2018. She was a visiting professor at MIT (USA), University of Toronto (CAN), Stockholm University (SWE) and University of Technology, Sydney (AUS). She received an honorary doctorate from Lund University (SWE). In 2022, she was rewarded the Spinoza Prize, the highest academic award in Dutch academia. Van Dijck’s academic field is media studies and digital society. Her work covers a wide range of topics in media theory, media and communication technologies, social media, and digital culture. She is the (co-)author and (co-)editor of ten books and over one hundred journal articles and book chapters. Van Dijck’s book *The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media* (Oxford UP, 2013) was distributed worldwide and was translated into Spanish, Chinese and Farsi. Her latest book, co-authored by Thomas Poell, Martijn de Waal is titled *The Platform Society. Public values in a connective world* (Oxford University Press, 2018). -- Tiziano Bonini ||| Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and media ||| DISPOC Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali, Politiche e Cognitive Università degli studi di Siena Via Roma 56, 53100 Siena ::: Academia ::: https://unisi.academia.edu/TizianoBonini

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our new book: Cybersecurity and Local Government
by Richard Forno 07 Apr '22

07 Apr '22

Hello AoIRistas --- I am pleased to announce that our book, 'Cybersecurity and Local Government' has been published by Wiley. Working with lead authors Don Norris (Professor Emeritus, Public Policy) and Laura Mateczun (PhD Student, Public Policy), it is the culmination of several years of interdisciplinary UMBC research exploring a real-world issue with significant national security implications. (disclosure: Don and I are on Laura's PhD committee.) We believe this is one of the first books, if not the first book, specifically focused on the state of cybersecurity at America's grassroots. Among other things, it reports out the findings of some groundbreaking surveys regarding American local government cybersecurity preparedness (or lack thereof) previously conducted with the support of the International City/County Management Association and other UMBC faculty. It also provides several (sadly, all-too-basic) recommendations on improving cybersecurity for over 90,000 local governments across the United States, and offers a look into some of the cybersecurity challenges they'll likely face in the future. One of the most striking takeaways from this work is knowing that nearly one-third of America's local governments would be unable to tell if they're under active cyberattack or already compromised by one. I think you'll agree this is more than a little unsettling on a good day in the modern era - and even moreso given recent and ongoing geopolitical events. We hope these efforts will contribute meaningful data and informed analysis to the broader national cybersecurity discussion. Additional follow-on survey work and analysis is being planned.... -- rick See also: Cybersecurity and Local Government (2022) 256pp. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Cybersecurity+and+Local+Government-p-9781119788… Local governments are attractive targets for hackers and are ill-prepared https://theconversation.com/local-governments-are-attractive-targets-for-ha… -- Dr. Richard Forno Principal Lecturer, CSEE Director, Graduate Cybersecurity Program Assistant Director, UMBC Center for Cybersecurity

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NEW Witness Statement & Open Letter Published
by Dr. Emma Briant 07 Apr '22

07 Apr '22

Dear Colleagues, I am delighted to share with you today the latest updates in an important thread of my work investigating and highlighting how secrecy is undermining our national security, democracy and ability to defend public debates from foreign influence operations. Please take a look at this recent witness statement I provided to the UK parliament <https://emma-briant.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e7f9f1379bf0f0311ebb…> which has just been published by the UK Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee Inquiry into the Cabinet Office’s implementation of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. My witness statement, makes clear how vital defending FOIA is to securing public trust, strong national security reporting and, perhaps counterintuitively given secrecy is often advanced on the basis of security arguments, to undermining Russian influence operations. I include an NEW example of a leak of an SCL Group document - the defense contractor parent firm of Cambridge Analytica - on its training for NATO. I gave extensive evidence to the UK Parliament on this in 2018, highlighting how this fuelled Russian disinformation and hoping they would do something serious to regulate influence firms like these. This was part of private testimony and evidence from me and is the first time I have publicly written about it. Some of you will be aware that I have frequently highlighted how what we are seeing today are essentially paranoia operations, more than just disinformation (deliberate falsehood) they hinge on creating uncertainty and distrust in our institutions. This form of propaganda, where it is most effective in undermining democracy, hinges on distorted interpretations of truth. If you can undermine reality and create distrust, this leaves fertile ground for bare faced lies. I point out how the UK Government has been suppressing information more and more widely due to a concern about 'mosaic intelligence', an elastic concept that can be used to deny almost anything. Actions by militaries and governments which seek to suppress and control information about what they do in the information domain - or who are not up front with citizens about what they are doing - are routinely exposed of course. The negative impact of these 'suppressed truths' creates far more distrust than being honest generates criticism. Furthermore, distrust created is then leveraged to promote lies as 'suppressed truths'. This is why today I am a proud signatory of this Open Letter with 110 other academics, journalists, MP's and civil society organizations - published by Open Democracy: Editors and MPs urge watchdog to act over escalating government secrecy <https://emma-briant.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e7f9f1379bf0f0311ebb…>. We need to build trust in governments, platforms and all institutions that support a democracy, scrutinizing systems and enforcing transparent ethical practices. If reporting has already come out in larger media or academic research, ideological or foreign outlets have less of a 'scoop' on western propaganda operations. The UK Government instead has been trying to impose secrecy and control with profoundly damaging effects on rising distrust. I have done a longer thread of this open letter and my most recent 3 statements to parliament on the issues of online influence operations and responses to them here <https://emma-briant.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e7f9f1379bf0f0311ebb…>if you would like to share. I have seen numerous examples, where secrecy, poor understanding of actors behind campaigns, and ill-thought out knee jerk responses are *worsening the distrust* that fuels the deliberate propaganda attacks that are enabling war crimes in Ukraine. Similarly, platforms unwisely often have a greater concern with and focus on falsehood than trust - worsened by a complete inability to understand the actors and communities involved in generating propaganda and misinformation, let alone the wider effects different responses have in the communities they target. Just consider Scott Ritter's take-down by Twitter in the last couple of days - Ritter was suspended for making false claims about the Kremlin's massacre in Bucha. He was suspended then reinstated enabling a wide-reaching reinforcing narrative about how he was 'silenced' for speaking the 'wrong narrative' <https://emma-briant.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e7f9f1379bf0f0311ebb…> . Supporters then are able to share screenshots of the banned tweet <https://emma-briant.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e7f9f1379bf0f0311ebb…>, which gives further credentials within the receptive community as well as enabling large numbers of people to read the message Twitter sought to 'suppress'. His return helps reinforce a sense that there must be something to what he says, he's been allowed back so this underscores the belief it was arbitrary. Transparency and consistency for platforms, as well as an understanding of how their actions will play out is of paramount importance. Please do share and cite any of the publications linked above. I also regularly speak on digital disinformation threats and how we can respond to them better as citizens, as journalists, as organizations, as governments. Thank you all for supporting me and my work as readers, as colleagues and as friends. Best wishes, Dr. Briant -- Dr Emma L Briant Website: www.emma-briant.co.uk Associate at University of Cambridge, Center for Financial Reporting & Accountability Author of: *Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change *from Manchester University Press Co-Author of: *Bad News for Refugees* with Prof. Greg Philo and Dr. Pauline Donald from Pluto Press. Sign up for my Newsletter <http://emma-briant.co.uk/sign-up-for-important-updates/>! Follow me on Twitter @emmalbriant

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Summer Institue in Computational Social Science - Bologna, Italy
by Riccardo Nanni 07 Apr '22

07 Apr '22

Hi there! Apologies for cross-posting. >From June 6th to the 16th, 2022, the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Bologna will sponsor the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, to be held at the University of Bologna. The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and beginning faculty interested in computational social science. The Summer Institute is for both social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists (broadly conceived). You can apply until April, 25th! More info through this link: https://sicss.io/2022/bologna/ Best, Riccardo Nanni

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