Oppo and Plagiarism

Joe Rodota at Oppo File says that opposition researchers used to have a hard time detecting plagiarism.

That changed in 2000, as “plagiarism consultant” Jonathan Bailey explains:

Though plagiarism had long been against most schools' ethics codes, detecting it was a challenge. In 2000, Turnitin.com was launched. Though the technology was originally designed to detect “frat file” plagiarism, a pre-internet plagiarism technique that involves storing copies of physical essays for use in later years, it was adapted to deal with internet plagiarism, as well.

There are other “content similarity detection” programs out there, and oppo researchers use them every day.

...

In an earlier campaign cycle, oppo researchers in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee busted a Republican for plagiarism. In 2014, GOP oppo researchers decided to return the favor. They started with a universe of “targeted races” and winnowed that list down, focusing on campaigns that shared consulting teams. The NRCC oppo researchers figured the same people in those firms might be writing copy for two or more candidates, thereby increasing the possibility some of the content might be duplicated.

With that list of campaigns in hand, it became a simple matter of taking pages from candidate websites and entering them into Google. Examples of plagiarism leapt from their laptop screens and a target was identified: Staci Appel, candidate for Congress in Iowa’s 3rd District.

AI and Politics

Emily A. Vogels at Pew:

About six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) are familiar with ChatGPT, though relatively few have tried it themselves, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. Among those who have tried ChatGPT, a majority report it has been at least somewhat useful.

ChatGPT is an open-access online chatbot that allows users to ask questions and request content. The versatility and human-like quality of its responses have captured the attention of the media, the tech industry and some members of the public. ChatGPT surpassed 100 million monthly users within two months of its public launch in late November 2022, setting a world record as the fastest-growing web application. Due to these factors, the Center chose to ask Americans about ChatGPT specifically rather than chatbots or large language models (LLMs) more broadly.

Jim Saksa at Roll Call:

AI is already being used in politics. After President Joe Biden announced his reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee released an AI-generated video that envisioned a dystopian future wrought by his four more years in office. In the Chicago mayoral primary earlier this year, a Twitter account posing as a local news outlet posted a deepfake video impersonating candidate Paul Vallas on the eve of the election. And campaigns have used machine-learning models to guide their ad buys on social media platforms like Facebook for years now.

Right now, though, it’s the potential to use large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to update voter files, perform data analysis and program automated functions that excite political operatives the most. While well-funded Senate or gubernatorial races can afford to hire data scientists to crunch numbers, smaller campaigns rarely have that luxury, said Colin Strother, a Democratic political consultant based in Texas. AI will change that.

“I’m excited about some of the brute work that would be really great to do, but — unless you’re on a big-time campaign, with a ton of money and a ton of staff — you can’t afford to do,” Strother said.

 

Digital News in Trouble

Margaret Sullivan at The Guardian:

In a seminal 2009 essay, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, the brilliant New York University professor Clay Shirky made the point that journalism as we had known it for decades was finished – and for good reason.

The reason, in a mere two words: the internet.

And he certainly proved right. With a few notable exceptions, newspapers – once the core of American journalism – have been dying right and left.

Now, big digital media-news companies, once the great hope of post-print news, seem to be going in the same direction. Down, down, down.

In recent weeks and months, digital newsrooms have taken huge hits. BuzzFeed News suddenly shuttered, leaving scores of extremely talented journalists without employment (and lest you think of BuzzFeed as strictly a place for viral videos about cats, recall that its news division did plenty of prize-winning journalism over the years). Vox Media recently laid off 7% of its staff and raised money based on a valuation about half of what it was worth in 2015.


Then, on Monday, another major blow: Vice was filing for bankruptcy. A New York Times report was unsparing, calling Vice a “decayed digital colossus”, and noting that at one point it was thought to be worth a now-unfathomable $5.7bn.

...

The problem in digital news? The audience, in many cases, was there. But the profits didn’t follow, or at least not in a sustainable way. Digital advertising revenue, once thought to be based on audience size, was going instead to social-media platforms, particularly Facebook.

Polling Has Changed

 Many posts have discussed the problems of surveying public opinion in the 21st century.

From Pew:

California Is Losing Affluent Residents

Many posts have discussed California's many problems.

Hans Johnson and Eric McGhee at PPIC:

During the height of the pandemic, the flows out of the state became so large that almost every demographic and socioeconomic group has experienced net losses. For example, California used to gain college graduates even as it lost less educated adults. But in the last couple of years, the state has started losing college graduates as well, quite markedly—albeit still not to the same extent as less educated adults. Even among young college graduates in their 20s, a group that California has disproportionately attracted in the past, the flows out of the state have been about the same as the flows into the state.

Perhaps most striking, California is now losing higher-income households as well as middle- and lower-income households. During the pandemic, the number of higher-income households moving to California declined a bit, but the number leaving the state increased dramatically (from less than 150,000 in 2019 to almost 220,000 by 2021).

The losses of college graduates and higher-income households are likely related to the ability of many highly educated and highly paid workers to work from home. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse surveys show that about two-thirds of the almost three million Californians who telework full-time (five or more days per week) have at least a bachelor’s degree. Among recent higher-income Californians leaving the state, over half (53%) report working from home.

Tech Beats Antitrust Push

 Emily Birnbaum at Bloomberg:

A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.

The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat.The years-long US legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc. and Apple Inc. for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public.

The closely-watched bills advanced farther than any other antitrust overhaul in decades and emerged from an 18-month House investigation led by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would have prevented the tech giants from using their platforms to disadvantage competitors, while the Open App Markets Act would have pared back Apple and Google’s control over app stores.Despite an aggressive eleventh-hour push, the bills were not included in the end-of-year spending package released Monday, the final shot this year. The Senate included a narrower trio of antitrust bills in the end-of-year spending package. That legislation will give more money and resources to the country’s top antitrust regulators, marking the first time Congress has voted to expand antitrust enforcement measures in decades. But those provisions will not make the sweeping changes to the law that some advocates hoped for.

The Rapid Issue-Attention Cycle Online

At Axios, Sara Fischer and Neal Rothschild report:

The shooting massacre in Uvalde garnered huge attention on social media in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but it's unclear how long that focus will last.

Why it matters: The attention to the attack shows the country isn't numb to shooting tragedies — it's overwhelmed by them.

Details: Data provided exclusively to Axios by NewsWhip shows a public surge of interest in the immediate aftermath, peaking above even the 2018 shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

The interest, measured in social media interactions (likes, shares, comments) on news articles following Parkland, however, was sustained for a much longer period of time, as students who survived the shooting became vocal gun control activists.

The Uvalde tragedy, occurring just 10 days after the deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., came as Americans were already trying to process another shooting tragedy, and provided momentum for a growing debate around gun control and extremism.

Elon Musk and the War Effort in Ukraine

 Elon Musk has many critics, but he is helping Ukraine's fight for freedom.

Rachel Lerman and Cat Zakrzewski at WP:

Elon Musk recently challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to a one-handed fistfight for the future of Ukraine. But the entrepreneur’s real defense of the besieged country is his effort to keep Ukrainians online with shipments of Starlink satellite Internet service.

Starlink is a unit of Musk’s space company, SpaceX. The service uses terminals that resemble TV dishes equipped with antennas and are usually mounted on roofs to access the Internet via satellite in rural or disconnected areas.

When war broke out in Ukraine, the country faced threats of Russian cyberattacks and shelling that had the potential to take down the Internet, making it necessary to develop a backup plan. So the country’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, tweeted a direct plea to Musk urging him to send help. Musk replied just hours later: “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.”

BUT NOTE AN IMPORTANT UPDATE:

Cristiano Lima at WP:

After Russia launched its invasion, Ukrainian officials pleaded for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to dispatch their Starlink terminals to the region to boost Internet access. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route,” Musk replied to broad online fanfare.


Since then, the company has cast the actions in part as a charitable gesture. “I’m proud that we were able to provide the terminals to folks in Ukraine,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at a public event last month, later telling CNBC, “I don’t think the U.S. has given us any money to give terminals

But according to documents obtained by The Technology 202, the U.S. federal government is in fact paying millions of dollars for a significant portion of the equipment and for the transportation costs to get it to Ukraine. to the Ukraine.”

Information Disorder

From the Aspen Institute:

The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder is making 15 recommendations to help government, private industry, and civil society advance solutions to and reduce the greatest harms in America’s urgent mis- and disinformation crisis. Among many other critical challenges, the ambitious report covers legislative and executive action on transparency, disclosure, and platform immunity; the collapse of local journalism; community-led methods for resisting imbalances of power further propagated by bad actors; and accountability mechanisms for “superspreaders” of lies.

Published in the Commission’s Final Report, launched today, the recommendations together aim to increase transparency and understanding, build trust, and reduce harms. A summary of each is provided at the end of this press release, along with a list of the commissioners.

…

Read the Final Report detailing the recommendations on the Aspen Institute’s website. Those seeking to learn more about the Commission on Information Disorder are invited to visit AspenInfoCommission.org.

RECOMMENDATIONS

What follows is a high-level overview of the final recommendations of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder.

Recommendations to increase transparency

Public interest research

1. Implement protections for researchers and journalists who violate platform terms of service by responsibly conducting research on public data of civic interest.
2. Require platforms to disclose certain categories of private data to qualified academic researchers, so long as that research respects user privacy, does not endanger platform integrity, and remains in the public interest.

High reach content disclosure
Create a legal requirement for all social media platforms to regularly publish the content, source accounts, reach and impression data for posts that they organically deliver to large audiences.

Content moderation platform disclosure
Require social media platforms to disclose information about their content moderation policies and practices, and produce a time-limited archive of moderated content in a standardized format, available to authorized researchers.

Ad transparency
Require social media companies to regularly disclose, in a standardized format, key information about every digital ad and paid post that runs on their platforms.

Recommendations to build trust

Truth and transformation
Endorse efforts that focus on exposing how historical and current imbalances of power, access, and equity are manufactured and propagated further with mis- and disinformation — and on promoting community-led solutions to forging social bonds.

Healthy digital discourse
Develop and scale communication tools, networks, and platforms that are designed to bridge divides, build empathy, and strengthen trust among communities.

Workforce diversity
Increase investment and transparency to further diversity at social media platform companies and news media as a means to mitigate misinformation arising from uninformed and disconnected centers of power.

Local media investment
Promote substantial, long-term investment in local journalism that informs and empowers citizens, especially in underserved and marginalized communities.

Accountability norms
Promote new norms that create personal and professional consequences within communities and networks for individuals who willfully violate the public trust and use their privilege to harm the public.

Election information security
Improve U.S. election security and restore voter confidence with improved education, transparency, and resiliency.

Recommendations to reduce harms

Comprehensive federal approach
Establish a comprehensive strategic approach to countering disinformation and the spread of misinformation, including a centralized national response strategy, clearly-defined roles and responsibilities across the Executive Branch, and identified gaps in authorities and capabilities.

Public Restoration Fund
Create an independent organization, with a mandate to develop systemic misinformation countermeasures through education, research, and investment in local institutions.

Civic empowerment
Invest and innovate in online education and platform product features to increase users’ awareness of and resilience to online misinformation.

Superspreader accountability
Hold superspreaders of mis- and disinformation to account with clear, transparent, and consistently applied policies that enable quicker, more decisive actions and penalties, commensurate with their impacts — regardless of location, or political views, or role in society.

Amendments to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996

1. Withdraw platform immunity for content that is promoted through paid advertising and post promotion.
2. Remove immunity as it relates to the implementation of product features, recommendation engines, and design.

 

Newsroom Employment

 Many posts have discussed the decline of American newspapers.  Newsroom employment has cratered at newspapers, though digital-native employment increases have offset a portion of the loss.

 From Pew:

Insurrection, Six Months Later

 Alanna Durkin Richer and Michael Kunzelman at Associated Press:

The first waves of arrests in the deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol focused on the easy targets. Dozens in the pro-Trump mob openly bragged about their actions on Jan. 6 on social media and were captured in shocking footage broadcast live by national news outlets.

But six months after the insurrection, the Justice Department is still hunting for scores of rioters, even as the first of more than 500 people already arrested have pleaded guilty. The struggle reflects the massive scale of the investigation and the grueling work still ahead for authorities in the face of an increasing effort by some Republican lawmakers to rewrite what happened that day.

Among those who still haven’t been caught: the person who planted two pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees the night before the melee, as well as many people accused of attacks on law enforcement officers or violence and threats against journalists. The FBI website seeking information about those involved in the Capitol violence includes more than 900 pictures of roughly 300 people labeled “unidentified.”

Ryan J.  Reilly at Huffington Post:

They call themselves sedition hunters, and they have receipts. They’re members of a loosely affiliated network of motivated individuals and pop-up volunteer organizations with names like Deep State Dogs and Capitol Terrorists Exposers that developed after the Jan. 6 attack to identify the Trump supporters who organized the Capitol riot and brutalized the law enforcement officers protecting the building.

The sedition hunters scour the web for any and all photographs, videos and posts from people at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack across well-known websites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter along with lesser-used sites and apps like Rumble, Gab and Telegram. They’ve got spreadsheets, Google Docs, links, bookmarks, unlisted YouTube backups, group chats and screenshots, as Joan puts it, “coming out the rear end.” They can uncover new evidence of conduct that’ll elevate a misdemeanor trespassing case into something much more serious; find the highest-quality image of a suspect that could generate new leads through facial recognition; and compile multimedia databases that turn the Jan. 6 attack into an interactive, high-stakes and soul-crushing edition of Where’s Waldo.

 

Death Penalty Opinion: Online v. Phone Interviews

 

Andrew Daniller and Jocelyn Kiley at Pew:

Six-in-ten U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, according to an April Pew Research Center survey that was conducted online using the Center’s American Trends Panel. The share of adults who support capital punishment for convicted murderers has been relatively stable in the Center’s online surveys over the past few years.

Opinions about the death penalty have also remained stable in the Center’s telephone surveys during this period. But while there has been relative continuity in Americans’ views across both survey modes, the public consistently expresses more support for the death penalty online than on the phone – a finding that has important consequences for understanding trends on the issue.

As the Center has previously noted, people sometimes – though not always – respond differently to similar questions on the same topics in online and telephone polls. There are a variety of reasons why that might be the case, including the fact that survey respondents’ answers might be influenced by the presence of a live phone interviewer (as opposed to online polls, which are self-administered).

AI and Astroturf

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier

This month, the New York state attorney general issued a report on a scheme by “U.S. Companies and Partisans [to] Hack Democracy.” This wasn’t another attempt by Republicans to make it harder for Black people and urban residents to vote. It was a concerted attack on another core element of U.S. democracy — the ability of citizens to express their voice to their political representatives. And it was carried out by generating millions of fake comments and fake emails purporting to come from real citizens.

This attack was detected because it was relatively crude. But artificial intelligence technologies are making it possible to generate genuine-seeming comments at scale, drowning out the voices of real citizens in a tidal wave of fake ones.

...

The big telecommunications companies paid millions of dollars to specialist “AstroTurf” companies to generate public comments. These companies then stole people’s names and email addresses from old files and from hacked data dumps and attached them to 8.5 million public comments and half a million letters to members of Congress. All of them said that they supported the corporations’ position on something called “net neutrality,” the idea that telecommunications companies must treat all Internet content equally and not prioritize any company or service. Three AstroTurf companies — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media — agreed to pay nearly $4 million in fines.

The fakes were crude. Many of them were identical, while others were patchworks of simple textual variations: substituting “Federal Communications Commission” and “FCC” for each other, for example.

Next time, though, we won’t be so lucky. New technologies are about to make it far easier to generate enormous numbers of convincing personalized comments and letters, each with its own word choices, expressive style and pithy examples. The people who create fake grass-roots organizations have always been enthusiastic early adopters of technology, weaponizing letters, faxes, emails and Web comments to manufacture the appearance of public support or public outrage.

Bellingcat: Open Source Investigative Journalism

Russia, as Mitt Romney said eight years ago, is our most important geopolitical adversary.

From The Dispatch:

Bellingcat is a website that focuses on open-source investigative journalism, and its work has become invaluable in the years since it was founded in 2014. Yesterday, investigators for the site published a recorded conversation in which a member of Russia’s FSB poison squad admitted his role in the attempted murder of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. “The inadvertent confession was made during a phone call with a person who the officer believed was a high-ranking security official,” the post reads. “In fact, the FSB officer did not recognize the voice of the person to whom he was reporting details of the failed mission: Alexey Navalny himself.”

Russian Hack

At NYT, David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth and Eric Schmitt report on the Russian intelligence hack. Administration officials acknowledged that the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and parts of the Defense Department had been compromised. 

Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack.

United States officials did not detect the attack until recent weeks, and then only when a private cybersecurity firm, FireEye, alerted American intelligence that the hackers had evaded layers of defenses.

It was evident that the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the first agencies reported to be breached, were only part of a far larger operation whose sophistication stunned even experts who have been following a quarter-century of Russian hacks on the Pentagon and American civilian agencies.

About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update — a Trojan horse of sorts — that gave its hackers a foothold into victims’ systems, according to SolarWinds, the company whose software was compromised.

...

 Analysts said it was hard to know which was worse: that the federal government was blindsided again by Russian intelligence agencies, or that when it was evident what was happening, White House officials said nothing.

Most Secure Election in History

  From the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA):

The members of Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee... released the following statement:

“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result. 

“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.

“Other security measures like pre-election testing, state certification of voting equipment, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) certification of voting equipment help to build additional confidence in the voting systems used in 2020.

“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too. When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”

Partisan Local News Sites

Davey Alba and Jack Nicas at NYT:

Maine Business Daily is part of a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country. Yet the network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals, a Times investigation found.

The sites appear as ordinary local-news outlets, with names like Des Moines Sun, Ann Arbor Times and Empire State Today. They employ simple layouts and articles about local politics, community happenings and sometimes national issues, much like any local newspaper.

But behind the scenes, many of the stories are directed by political groups and corporate P.R. firms to promote a Republican candidate or a company, or to smear their rivals.

The network is largely overseen by Brian Timpone, a TV reporter turned internet entrepreneur who has sought to capitalize on the decline of local news organizations for nearly two decades. He has built the network with the help of several others, including a Texas brand-management consultant and a conservative Chicago radio personality.

The network is one of a proliferation of partisan local-news sites funded by political groups associated with both parties. Liberal donors have poured millions of dollars into operations like Courier, a network of eight sites that began covering local news in swing states last year. Conservative activists are running similar sites, like the Star News group in Tennessee, Virginia and Minnesota.

But those operations run just several sites each, while Mr. Timpone’s network has more than twice as many sites as the nation’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett. And while political groups have helped finance networks like Courier, investors in news operations typically don’t weigh in on specific articles.

The local sites include

• Ann Arbor Times
• Illinois Valley Times 
• North Cook News
• DuPage County Journal
• Empire State Today

 In July, Jessica Mahone and Philip Napoli reported at Nieman:

The growth of partisan media masquerading as state and local reporting is a troubling trend we’ve seen emerge amid the financial declines of local news organizations. But what do these outlets mean for journalism in American communities?

Using previous research and news reports as a guide, we’ve mapped the locations of more than 400 partisan media outlets — often funded and operated by government officials, political candidates, PACs, and political party operatives — and found, somewhat unsurprisingly, that these outlets are emerging most often in swing states, raising a concern about the ability of such organizations to fill community information needs while prioritizing the electoral value of an audience.

We found that while the (few) left-leaning sites prioritize statewide reporting, right-leaning sites are more focused on local reporting, suggesting different strategies for engaging with targeted audiences and indicating the potential for these sites to exacerbate polarization in local communities.

Here’s our map of how these sources are distributed across the U.S., along with their partisan orientation:

Most Americans Live in Wireless-Only Households

From CDC's National Center for Health Statistics:

Since 2007, the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) Early Release Program has regularly released preliminary estimates of the percentages of adults and children living in homes with only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones). These estimates are the most upto-date estimates available from the
federal government concerning the size and characteristics of this population.

In January 2019, the NHIS launched a redesigned questionnaire. Among other changes, it is now possible to estimate the percentage of adults who live in wireless-ly households and have their own wireless telephone (wireless-only adults).

Estimates in this report are based on the first six months of 2019. During this time period, 59.2% of adults and 70.5% of children lived in wireless-only households.
In comparison, a slightly smaller percentage of adults were wireless-only adults (58.4%). Four in five adults aged 25–29 (80.2%) and aged 30-34 (78.3%), and three in four adults renting their homes (75.1%), were wireless-only adults.

...
Many health surveys, political polls, and other types of research are conducted using random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone surveys. Most survey research organizations include wireless telephone numbers when conducting RDD surveys. If they did not, the exclusion of\ households with only wireless telephones (along with the small proportion of households that have no telephone service) could bias results. This bias— known as coverage bias—could exist if there are differences between persons with and without landline telephones for the substantive variables of interest.

Coronavirus and the Digital Divide

Margaret Harding McGill at Axios:

• The 2020 Census will be "online first" this year, raising concerns that it could undercount Americans who lack internet access. Coronavirus could add to that worry, complicating backup plans to count people in person. (The census will also accept responses by phone or in the mail.)
• Coronavirus is prompting schools and businesses to consider shifts to online-only classes and work, but not every district or company has that option.
• An $8 billion emergency federal funding package allows Medicare to expand the use of telemedicine in response to the coronavirus outbreak — though that may not be much immediate help to people who can't get to a reliable internet connection.

What they're saying: "Coronavirus, without some immediate changes being made, is certainly going to exacerbate the haves and have nots for who's digitally connected," Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks told Axios.

• Starks, a Democrat, wants to see his agency direct funds under the FCC's telecom subsidy programs toward helping serve connectivity needs laid bare by coronavirus.

By the numbers: The FCC estimates 21 million Americans don't have access to high-speed broadband, though that number could be higher due to problems with data collection.

• According to the FCC's most recent report, the gap is largest on rural and Tribal lands — more than 26% of residents in rural areas and 32% on Tribal lands lack access.

Russian Disinformation

Freelon, Deen; Lokot, Tetyana (2020). Russian Twitter disinformation campaigns reach across the American political spectrum. The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-003

Summary:

• The IRA is a private company sponsored by the Russian government, which distributes Kremlin-friendly disinformation on social media under false identities (see DiResta et al., 2018; Howard, Ganesh, Liotsiou, Kelly, & Francois, 2018). 
• The IRA engaged with several distinct communities of authentic users—primarily conservatives, progressives, and Black people—which exhibited only minimal overlap on Twitter.
• Authentic users primarily engaged with IRA accounts that shared their own ideological and/or racial identities.
• Racist stereotyping, racial grievances, the scapegoating of political opponents, and outright false statements were four of the most common appeals found among the most replied-to IRA tweets.
• We conducted a network analysis of 2,057,747 authentic replies to IRA tweets over nine years, generated ideology ratings for a random sample of authentic users, and qualitatively analyzed some of the most replied-to IRA tweets.
• State-sponsored disinformation agents have demonstrated success in infiltrating distinct online communities. Political content attracts far more engagement than non-political content and appears crafted to exploit intergroup distrust and enmity.  
• Collaboration between different political groups and communities might be successful in detecting IRA campaigns more effectively.