Departments

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social media

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    4/5/2022

    Confident that Ukraine is Winning the Info War? Think Again

    by Carl Miller

    Westerners are likely to shun Russian propaganda and mock its falsehoods; social media network research suggests that Russia isn't interested in convincing Westerners, and it may be reaching its intended audience quite effectively. 

  • 3/13/2022

    A New Kind of Memory for a New Kind of War?

    by Shannon Bontrager

    "The terrain of combat has changed, digital images are just as important as ammunition and digital platforms are just as important as factories and military hardware."

  • SOURCE: Substack
    1/6/2022

    How Twitter Explains the Civil War (and Vice Versa)

    by Ariel Ron

    Violence in the Capitol a year ago called to mind events like Preston Brooks's brutal caning of Charles Sumner. But a closer look shows that, like today, antebellum politics were disrupted and made volatile by revolutions in communciation technology. 

  • 12/19/2021

    Veracity or Virality? How Social Media are Transforming History

    by Jason Steinhauer

    History is a growing content category on social media, but history content going viral has very little to do with its quality or reliability. The author of a new book on history on social media says historians and readers need to understand how political agendas and content algorithms are shaping history on the web. 

  • SOURCE: Harper's
    8/17/2021

    Selling the Story of Disinformation

    Today's concern with "disinformation" has roots in the postwar advertising industry, but do programs to fight it repeat faulty ideas about information and persuasion that admen created to persuade companies their ads would work? 

  • SOURCE: Wired
    5/2/2021

    Josh Hawley’s Virtual Reality

    Writer Gilad Edelman says that Josh Hawley's book twists the history of antitrust policy to fit the needs of today's Republican culture war against the social media giants. 

  • SOURCE: Perspectives on History
    3/10/2021

    Tweeting To Find Community

    by Varsha Venkatasubramanian

    Don't fear Twitter, new historians. Use it for learning, networking, and fun.

  • SOURCE: Governing
    12/21/2020

    Has Twitter Changed How History Will See This Era?

    Carole McGranahan, a professor of history and anthropology, says that social media need to be taken seriously as sources of insight into the actions of prominent and anonymous people alike, and need to be preserved as sources.

  • SOURCE: N+1
    12/12/2020

    We Live in a Society

    by Gabriel Winant

    Despite lamentations that social media have replaced face-to-face social life, those media platforms are increasingly important as sites of human contact and interaction. Anyone seeking political change must recognize this power and organize social networks to supplant it. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    12/15/2020

    Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

    Facebook isn't exactly like they hypothetical "Doomsday Machine" theorized by Cold War nuclear deterrence experts. But its vast scope and capacity to distribute misinformation faster than in can be detected and corrected mean that lessons from the philosophy of nuclear annihilation are apt for understandign the danger of the social media giants.