Is the Decline in Local Journalism a Cause for Increasing Misinformation?

Too Much (dis)Information

Episode #1 The link between local journalism and disinformation

Theodora Skeadas recently left Twitter’s public policy team. Earlier in her career, she worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she worked closely with defense institutions. More recently, Theodora has been consulting for civil society organizations working toward combatting disinformation.

Topics covered:

Her experience combatting disinformation from all angles - the public sector, private sector, and from within social media platforms

The link between disinformation and the decline of local and regional journalism

How nudge behavior can work on social media platforms to help raise awareness of the content we are interacting with

Here are the links mentioned during the episode:

• PEN America's Hard News: Journalists and the Threat of Disinformation

• Twitter Moderation Research Consortium:

1. Unheard Voice --> Initial reporting & Pentagon
2. My Heart Belongs to Kashmir
3. Assessing Inauthentic Networks Commenting on the US Midterms --> Washington Post and on Twitter by the author

• Twitter's misinformation-focused policies are:

1. Crisis misinformation
2. Covid misinformation (recently removed)
3. Synthetic and manipulated media
4. Civic integrity

• Twitter's efforts to combat misleading information include:

1. Labels, Prompts with context, Debunks
2. Moments

• Twitter's efforts to combat and mitigate abuse include:

1. @Mention Controls: The ability to remove oneself from a Tweet which one doesn’t want to be associated with.
2. Reply Prompts: Prompts that encourage people to pause and reconsider a potentially harmful or offensive reply before Tweeting.
3. Safety Mode: Feature that detects and blocks potentially abusive or spammy accounts.

• NYT opinion piece: Disinformation Is Not the Real Problem With Democracy

Too Much (dis)Information

The podcast that explores everything related to disinformation and online networks. To help us make sense of the global town square that is social media, in every episode, our host speaks to a fresh voice to uncover the good, bad, and fake online.

This podcast believes that we are at a pivotal moment in the fight against disinformation. Many people apply the word disinformation to everything from fake news, bot networks, malicious actors, influence operations, manipulation, inauthentic accounts, social media imposters, OSINT threat intelligence, and much more.

So do we...

From the trends to the tools, Too Much (dis)Information brings you the experts on the front line fighting disinformation, and all its forms, across the public sector, brands, cyber security professionals, and academia.

Brought to you by Cyabra