Media Bits and Bytes – March 20, 2024
- Election Misinfo
- Who’s Afraid of TikTok?
- Videogame Workers Get a Union
- NYT Unfair to Workers… and Readers
- Knee-Bending at The Guardian
- Troll Buster Shafiqah Hudson 1978-2024
- Picking Apart Starship Troopers
- The Left’s Media Watchdog
- How to Verify a Data Breach
- AI Health Care Chatbots
By Josh Richman and Nathan Sheard
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Even well-meaning efforts to control election misinformation through regulation inevitably end up silencing a range of dissenting voices and hindering the ability to challenge ingrained systems of oppression. While platforms and regulators struggle to get it right, internet users must be vigilant about checking the election information they receive for accuracy.
- China Skullduggery? By Shaomin Li, The Conversation
- Bad News for Democrats By Cameron Joseph, Columbia Journalism Review
By Vikki Blake
Euro Gamer
600 Activision Blizzard quality assurance (QA) workers have voted to unionise with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) to form Activision Quality Assurance United - CWA. Of the 398 votes submitted, just eight voted not to unionise. Microsoft – which acquired Activision Blizzard last year for $69bn – voluntarily agreed to recognise the union, making it the largest game union in the US.
NYT Unfair to Workers… and Readers
- Wage Theft By Natalie Korach, The Wrap
- Pimping for Walmart By Alex N. Cross, Jacobin
- What’s Up With the Coverage? By Dan Froomkin, Press Watchers
By Rivkah Brown
Novara Media
For having started her career as an unflinching author-activist, someone who appeared to be centring her journalism on the Palestinian struggle, Katharine Viner has since ascended to one of the most powerful positions in global media. According to Guardian journalists, the ascent has changed her – and how a paper that sees itself as a beacon of liberalism has covered “a textbook case of genocide”.
Troll Buster Shafiqah Hudson 1978-2024
Lipstick Alley
Ms. Hudson set out to combat what she quickly realized was a coordinated action by trolls. She began to aggregate the trollers’ posts under her own hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing. She began to aggregate the trollers’ posts under it, and encouraged others to do so and to block the fake accounts. Her Twitter community took up the mission, including Black feminists and scholars.
Picking Apart Starship Troopers
By Jordan Pearson
Vice
It’s futile to argue with people who have already decided to gleefully celebrate fascism, but having re-watched the film this weekend, there is one element that people on both sides ignore: its strange psychic subplot. This puzzling inclusion, which wasn’t explicitly in the original novel, holds the key to the film’s message.
By Craig Aaron
Free Press
You can’t have a free society without a credible press system. The Framers took that very seriously from the very beginning, with the postal subsidies that really spawned our press system. The name Free Press, we thought, would draw attention to the politics of setting up a press system. That the media was a legitimate political issue, and we had to take it seriously by demanding a “Free Press.”
Every data breach is different and requires a unique approach to determine the validity of the data. Verifying a data breach as authentic will require using different tools and techniques, and looking for clues that can help identify where the data came from.
By Thalia Beaty
Associated Press
Myna Mahila Foundation, a women’s organization in Mumbai, is developing running on OpenAI’s ChatGPT model. Komal Vilas Thatkare asks the Myna Bolo chatbot questions and it offers answers. The chatbot draws on a customized database of medical information about sexual health, but the chatbot’s potential success relies on test users like Thatkare to train it.