Intro post: I'm a professor of #Biology at the #UniversityOfWashington. My training is in #EvolutionaryBiology, #BehavioralEcology, #PopulationGenetics, and #Epidemiology. I did lots of work in #Bibliometrics and #NetworkTheory. I teach #DataLiteracy. These days I spend a lot of time thinking about the spread of #Misinformation, the #ScienceOfScience, and #PhilosophyOfScience. I do a lot of #BirdPhotography and love #ravens, #crows, and all #corvids.
For your trouble, here's a perfect crow.
@ct_bergstrom your book is awesome!
(And I love corvids too, as you may have guessed based on my username "corvina" 😁)
@ct_bergstrom @corvina Now of course we are seeing an acceptable level of bullshit coming out of corporations. What’s that level? About 75 percent accuracy out of standard news media. Keep in mind I fact checked the bird site(bird watch)(community-notes). I was aghast, at what I saw trying to be passed along as truth. Often times a video or text would have millions of views sometimes before 5 people could act in the blind before we got a note out.
@ct_bergstrom @corvina It actually was becoming better. Right before the site was sold and after, before I deactivated my account. About 2 weeks ago. I saw the ultimate craziness, which was fact checkers, in complete disarray. It wasn’t the greatest system. You have 5 people working in the blind. If they all click the same set of boxes, within a small margin of error, a community note would be displayed. Keep in mind it’s not easy.
@ct_bergstrom @corvina There was about 8-10 different boxes and then a second set of 8-10 different boxes the first set was usually what type of offense. Then underneath it was another 8-10. All of the language was fairly close, but specific, misinfo, relevance, etc. It was a decent crowd sourced platform. It needed improvements but it was a start. Now no idea. I wish the best to the users. I had planned on fighting disinformation and keeping my account active.
@ct_bergstrom @corvina This was cut short because many in infosec were cautioning, against staying on the site and recc, deactivating. When I have accounts I trust recommending this I listened but I still feel bad to the two networks, I was connected to then. Many who were high profile scientists, who I tried to help let my friends in the autistic community, who would sometimes not know who to trust in science, so I was trying to pass the messages downstream.
@ct_bergstrom @corvina Considering some in the science community were targeted with hate speech abuse and bullying, not to mention threats. I deactivated my account to protect both of my social accounts on the platform. It was sad for me because the science community, in essence had saved my family’s lives and helped the other community local and online, and provided unwavering accuracy. I will forever be grateful for A,C, G,T,F,Tb,J and many others.
@ct_bergstrom @corvina I hope I can with lists I can build this flow of information to those who want to learn and signal who to trust. But I’m much more cautious now. As I don’t want to bring more pain to either party. Mastadon to me bridges a lot of these gaps. Not quite the same as it’s not quite as easy. It’s a work in progress, plus I myself am still a researcher, who is learning, as well, although since I have reached a stopping point until I can wade through info.
@ct_bergstrom @corvina It should be a textbook for data science, cyber, IT/IS, mandatory reading material.We knew about a lot of these threats in the 90’s however. The populace and networks, didn’t really allow most things to be weaponized threats. Mostly bad actors from within the community, or focused threats, hostile countries. Imho,Social Engineering,imho was always the greatest threat. Because humans are much easier to succumb to bullshit, rather then a firewall.