social media 
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
4/25/2022
Trying to Change Twitter's Content Moderation is Going to Disappoint Elon Musk
by Evelyn Douek
Musk is delusional if he thinks that Twitter can function without moderation. The problem this highlights is the ability of a small number of billionaires to make the decisions that shape the contemporary public sphere.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
4/12/2022
New Generation Whitewashes History of Marcos Dictatorship in Philippines
Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, Jr. is at the brink of winning the presidency in the Philippines, partly because of social media campaigns denying the atrocities committed by his father's regime.
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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.
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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."
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SOURCE: Slate
2/14/2022
The Enlightenment Precursor of the Social Media "Wife Guy"
by Meghan Roberts
The "wife guy" who self-servingly projects an image of domestic bliss and romantic devotion is not just a creation of the social media age.
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SOURCE: Observer
1/24/2022
Art Historians Shake Up Narratives on TikTok
"TikTok’s art historians are using the platform to explore points of view often excluded in more established spaces like galleries and museums."
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/5/2022
Extremism Expert: America's Biggest Threat is Within, Needs New Approach
by Cynthia Miller-Idriss
"Because extremist ideas are no longer limited to an isolated, lone-wolf fringe, the United States needs a public health approach to preventing violent extremism."
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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.
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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.
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SOURCE: Now & Then (Vox Media)
12/7/2021
Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman on the Corrosive Effects of Disinformation (Podcast)
The early American press, the telegraph, and broadcast media have all been vectors of the kind of political disinformation we are plagued by today.
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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?
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SOURCE: Perspectives on History
7/8/2021
What Story do You Want to Tell? Learning Narrative Storytelling through Podcasting
by Hayley R. Bowman
Historians looking to work in new media need to stop asking who will care about their research and figure out the story they want to tell in a podcast.
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SOURCE: Jerusalem Post
6/29/2021
Does Banning Holocaust Denial on Social Media also Block Education?
Incidents where social media algorithms take down articles that explore legitimate controversies about the Holocaust suggest that the work of controlling denialism and hate speech needs more refinement.
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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.
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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.
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SOURCE: Vice
1/12/2021
Archivists Are Mining Parler Metadata to Pinpoint Crimes at the Capitol
Before it was removed from Amazon Web Services, researchers archived a significant number of the posts on Parler, the network favored by many on the far right. That data could prove useful in figuring out what happened around and inside the Capitol on January 6.
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SOURCE: The Guardian
1/3/2021
‘Cancel Culture’ is Not the Preserve of the Left. Just Ask Our Historians
by David Olusoga
British media has enthusiastically demonized historians whose work challenges myths of national glory by focusing on slavery and colonialism.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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