Disinformation As Collaborative Work-Starbird
#notesFromPaper Year : Tags : disinformation CSCW Authors: Starbird Arif Wilson
Kate Starbird, Ahmer Arif, and Tom Wilson. 2019. Disinformation as Collaborative Work: Surfacing the Participatory Nature of Strategic Information Operations. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 127 (November 2019), 26 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3359229
Strategic information Operations (e.g. disinformation, political propaganda and other forms of online manipulation) can actually be thought of as a form of distributed cognition; a collaborative work within online crowds. This distributed work goes far beyond the simplistic ideas of bots and trolls and represent “a persistent challenge for researchers, platform designers, and policy makers - distinguishing between orchestrated, explicitly coordinated information operations and the emergent, organic behaviors of an online crowd”. These information operations appear like legitimate and organic operations of the crowd, and claim that they are just “setting the record straight” or “combating the status quo”, and by doing so, shield themselves from criticism. Alternatively, these disinformation operations attempt to distract and confuse, thus killing legitimate debate and discourse around a topic. These operations pull in well meaning individuals, who then amplify the work of automated or mass produced systems. These operations leave behind digital traces that can be analyzed. This paper analyzed information operations through three case studies: The dissemination of anti-black lives matter sentiment, disinformation targeting the white helmets in the Syrian Civil War, and conspiracy theories surrounding crisis events. These disinformation styles are not new, and have been used by a variety of fascist regimes in the past, but modern distributed cognition allows disinformation to spread at an unprecedented rate.
I chose this paper because it highlights a problem specific to distributed cognition, which is that advances in distributed cognition can be dangerous in a societal sense. Advancement in GOMS, or Fitt’s Law cannot be problematic in the same way, but social media sites or general distributed cognition tools can allow for disinformation, harassment, self-image problems, and more. When building these tools, HCI researchers have to not only consider the efficiency of these tools, but the robustness against attack from malicious actors who can use the efficiency of the tool to cause mayhem at an unprecedented speed. While this is not a critique of distributed cognition’s efficacy, it is a critique of the unfortunate fact that distributed cognition techniques are often implemented without enough thought on their negative implications.
