Down the rabbit hole: how QAnon conspiracies thrive on Facebook
“Facebook is a unique platform for recruitment and amplification,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who has been studying QAnon for years. “I really do not think that QAnon as we know it today would have been able to happen without the affordances of Facebook.”
Moreover, Facebook is not merely providing a platform to QAnon groups. Its powerful algorithms are actively recommending them to users who may not otherwise have been exposed to them.
A ban that stuck
While QAnon thrives on Facebook, another social media site took timely and decisive action against it. Nearly two years ago, Reddit, the link-sharing network of interest-based message boards, carried out a site-wide purge of QAnon – and made it stick.
‘Taking the red pill’
QAnon did not disappear after Reddit pulled the plug, however. Instead, its believers moved on to other platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Discord and – crucially – Facebook. At the time of the Reddit ban, one of the largest closed Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon, “Qanon Follow the White Rabbit” had 51,000 members, according to NBC News. Today that group has grown to more than 90,000 members.
Will Partin, a research analyst with Data & Society, and Alice Marwick, a professor of communication at the University of North Carolina, describe QAnon as a “dark participatory culture”, which is to say that it is a community that takes advantage of the infrastructure of social networking sites to bring disparate people together and foster discussion, collaboration, research and community, but directs those energies toward anti-democratic, regressive and even violent ends.
“Everything about our research suggests that these people are not irrational; they’re hyper-literate, even if they’ve come to beliefs that are empirically inaccurate ,” Partin said. “That’s partly because they have a fundamentally different epistemology to judge what is true and false.”
There are innate societal and individual harms to convincing people of a version of reality that is simply false, as QAnon does, said Data & Society research analyst Will Partin. “When a common sense of what is real and what is correct breaks apart, it becomes nearly impossible to reach a democratic consensus.”
Uscinski is skeptical of the idea that kicking QAnon off Facebook would help anyone. He regularly polls conspiracy theories and consistently finds that QAnon is “one of the least believed things” out there, well below belief in theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s death, anti-vaccine hoaxes, and Holocaust denialism. Uscinski also cautions against overly exoticizing the QAnon narrative, noting that “most of the component parts of QAnon have been around forever”,...
See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/25/qanon-facebook-conspiracy-theories-algorithm
Inside Lost Horizon, the virtual reality version of Glastonbury’s Shangri-La
Finally we arrive at the new Nomad stage, which I decide is my favourite as soon as I see how lovingly rendered the mud underfoot is. It doesn’t squelch, though. We can only hope that in the future teams of experts will update this world using a thorough taxonomy of Somerset mud, carefully categorised all the way from easy-walking to the dreaded wellie-sucker.
– Lost Horizon is held July 3 and July 4. For further information visit www.losthorizonfestival.com. Sign up to experience LostHorizonin VR or on PC at www.sansar.com/losthorizon
Two days. Four stages. Fifty-plus performances from a star-studded global lineup, including Fatboy Slim, Carl Cox, Jamie Jones and more. Welcome to Lost Horizon, from the team behind Glastonbury’s Shangri-La - the world’s biggest music and arts festival in virtual reality! Join us from wherever you live, across desktop PC and VR here at Sansar.
See the full story here: https://www.nme.com/features/lost-horizon-virtual-reality-glastonbury-2020-shangri-la-2693862
Mollywood (Macao-Hollywood) Listed: China Will Build an “Eastern Hollywood”
Yesterday, the “China Mollywood” project, co-sponsored by hundreds of artists from Chinese film and television entertainment industry, was officially released and launched at Xianghe Guohua Film and Television Base in China. ...
According to the organizer, this new film and television landmark, headquartered in Macao and critically acclaimed as “Eastern Hollywood,” is jointly sponsored by more than 100 renowned Chinese entertainment industry giants including Wang Haige, Jackie Chan, Yu Dong, Gong Yu, Sammo Hung, Wen Jun, Liu Jiang, Chen Baoguo, Gaowa Siqin, Gong Hanlin. Moreover, Mollywood will be built into another cultural industry cluster with the output value of hundreds of billions of dollars in the future for the diversified development of Macao, China.
Based on the film industry, music industry, e-commerce and smart technologies, the project will build a comprehensive ecosystem as a “platform+content+data+community” model, and create a “global technology and film culture center in the new era of intelligence.” Succeeding Hollywood and Bollywood, it will be another world film, music, fashion production and communication hub. Meanwhile, it will also become an experimental base for the combination of technology and film and television.
40+ Resources For Bringing AR/VR To The Classroom
[PhilNote: this is a list of general use tools and specific topic tools.]
Do you work within or interested in the education industry and looking to bring VR/AR to the classroom? In this blog, you’ll find a collection of links to FREE apps plus much more!
See the full story here: https://www.vrfocus.com/2020/06/40-resources-for-bringing-ar-vr-to-the-classroom/
Seeing isn’t always believing: Google starts fact-checking images
The fact-check label will appear on any image that is included in an article that fact-checks a photo or another claim. A larger preview of the photo will show a short summary of the fact-check and direct users to its source.
Google’s efforts are the first widespread initiative to try to fact-check images, said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation specialist at the Wilson Center and author of the forthcoming book “How to Lose the Information War.”
Seeing manipulated images and video can be a lot more convincing to people than disinformation in text, Jankowicz said, and she’s hopeful that Google’s labels will at least cause people to think before they post.
Google said it is launching the feature fully this week.
See the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/22/google-fact-check-images/#comments-wrapper