Kara Swisher, The New York Times; The Sandy Hook Father Who Refused to Let Alex Jones Win
Ethically-tangled aspects of 21st century societies and cultures. In the vein of Charles Darwin’s 1859 “entangled bank” metaphor—a complex and evolving digital ecosystem of difference and dependence, where humans, technologies, ethics, law, policy, data, and information converge and diverge. Kip Currier, PhD, JD
Thursday, February 10, 2022
The Sandy Hook Father Who Refused to Let Alex Jones Win; The New York Times, February 10, 2022
Monday, February 7, 2022
Republicans censure Cheney, Kinzinger, call Jan. 6 probe attack on 'legitimate political discourse'; Reuters, February 4, 2022
Doina Chiacu, Reuters; Republicans censure Cheney, Kinzinger, call Jan. 6 probe attack on 'legitimate political discourse'
"The Republican Party on Friday censured U.S. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for joining Congress' investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack and Donald Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat, calling the probe an attack on "legitimate political discourse."...
The resolution censuring Cheney and Kinzinger, approved at a Republican National Committee meeting in Salt Lake City, accused them of "participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse."
Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol that day, smashing windows, assaulting police officers and sending lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence running for their lives after Trump made a fiery speech repeating his false claims that his election defeat was the result of widespread fraud."
China’s Peng Shuai says there was ‘misunderstanding’ over her allegations, announces retirement; The Washington Post, February 7, 2022
Christian Shepherd, The Washington Post; China’s Peng Shuai says there was ‘misunderstanding’ over her allegations, announces retirement
"Lu Pin, a prominent Chinese women’s rights activist and founder of the media platform Feminist Voices, who now lives in the United States, said Peng’s new account of what happens “demonstrates a great deal of absurdity.” But Peng, Lu adds, should not be blamed for falling into a “trap set by a violent system” that engages victims to be part of denying that violence to the world.
“We should allow Peng to be safe in the way she can be,” but at the same time, “we must be aware of the system’s brutality and the harm it causes to our universal humanity and moral standards,” Lu said.
While Chinese feminist activists have praised the WTA for demanding an independent investigation and canceling tournaments in the country over Peng’s allegation, they have accused the IOC of being complicit in the Chinese government’s effort to end international scrutiny of the case."
Wednesday, May 26, 2021
Belarus’s dictator isn’t winning. He’s desperate.; The Washington Post, May 25, 2021
David Ignatius, The Washington Post; Belarus’s dictator isn’t winning. He’s desperate.
"Dissident journalist Ihar Losik had been arrested in June 2020, but Protasevich continued a blog called Nexta on the encrypted social media app Telegram. The KGB beat and arrested people, but the young journalists and their followers continued to share the truth...
One American who has met with Protasevich recently explained: “What I took away is that he is committed to the integrity of the journalistic profession. He’s willing to work in the most dire situation. This isn’t just a hobby for him. It’s a mission to provide information direct to the people.”"
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
A ‘beautiful’ female biker was actually a 50-year-old man using FaceApp. After he confessed, his followers liked him even more.; The Washington Post, May 11, 2021
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
The Post Office Mess Is Meant to Exhaust You. Don’t Let It.; The New York Times, August 17, 2020
Trump is “flooding the zone.” It’s a form of modern censorship.
"Despite Mr. Swan’s persistent and admirable grilling and calling out of the president’s lies, a number of Mr. Trump’s claims (including one about climate change) slipped past unchallenged. Had Mr. Swan rebutted each one, the conversation would have ground to a halt — there were simply too many lies per minute.
It’s exhausting and deliberate, part of a strategy best explained by the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon to “flood the zone” with garbage information. Vox’s Sean Illing detailed this in February, suggesting that the strategy was one reason that Mr. Trump’s impeachment did little to change public opinion of the president.
Flooding the zone, Mr. Illing wrote, “seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories. And it produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search.” It is, as many have noted, a form of modern censorship and has an effect on the media, causing journalists to waste time not just chasing lies but also repeating them. Each time we speak out against a lie — especially if we’re not careful in how we frame it — we risk also giving it the oxygen it needs to spread."
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Seeking Ethics Through Narrative During COVID-19; PittWire, April 16, 2020
"In her redesigned Literature and Medicine course, Uma Satyavolu challenges students to study both past and current writings to deal ethically with pandemics such as COVID-19.
“The moment I heard of this pandemic, I reached for Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’ and Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year,’” said Satyavolu, a lecturer in the University of Pittsburgh Department of English in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. “I often teach the latter in my Essay and Memoir class. These books help people understand how people dealt with disruptions and being isolated due to epidemics in previous generations, like we relatively are today,” with stay-at-home orders in place in much of the U.S.
The course has pivoted to having students analyze narratives surrounding COVID-19 to tracehow medical knowledge is or is not transmitted during the pandemic, with particular attention to how some narratives gain authority and the status of “truth.” Their analyses will be posted in April on the Center for Bioethics and Health Law’s website, COVID-19 Narratives.
“What I want students to take away from this course is that we’re not just reading a few books. This is a form of important public engagement,” she said. “The course is based upon the idea of literature and the humanities serve as a bridge between ‘expert’ knowledge and the general public.”...
But Satyavolu isn’t stopping with the course; she also recently led the gathering of medical humanities materials to create COVID-19 Medical Humanities Resources, a webpage that went live in late March. The resource page contains suggested novels, essays, podcasts and films to analyze how stories taking place during epidemics and pandemics are told...
People interested in the ethical issues raised by the pandemic can visit the Center’s COVID-19 Ethics Resources webpage."
Friday, March 20, 2020
We will need a coronavirus commission; The Washington Post, March 20, 2020
"We will need a commission on par with the 9/11 Commission when the immediate emergency is over. The commission will need full subpoena power and access to any government official and document it needs. Among the questions we need answered:
- When was the president briefed?
- What was he told about the coronavirus?
- What steps did he take to prepare for the virus?
- What other officials in the executive and legislative branches were aware of the threat? What did they do?
- Why, until this week, was Trump downplaying the magnitude of the threat?
- What precisely was the sequence of events that held up distribution of testing kits?
- What resources were available that could have been tapped had governors, mayors and ordinary Americans understood the extent of the threat?
- Who, if anyone, in government profited from advance knowledge of the threat?
- What government structures or policies did the current administration make that impacted the response, either positively or negatively?
- Why was the Defense Production Act not activated sooner?
- Why were wealthy and famous individuals given tests when ordinary Americans still could not access them?"
Sunday, January 19, 2020
The National Archives was wrong to alter history. Fortunately, it reversed course.; The Washington Post, January 18, 2020
Friday, November 15, 2019
Finding Truth Online Is Hard Enough: Censors Make It A Labryinth; The New York Times, November 13, 2019
"The most insidious and damaging effect of this political purgatory is that many Turks may not even know what information they are missing...
A heavily censored society not only loses access to information; it ceases to know itself. The greatest loss the Turks face under Erdogan might be their knowledge of one another."
Thursday, September 12, 2019
The misinformation age; Axios, September 12, 2019
- Beginning with this article, Axios is launching a series to help you navigate this new avalanche of misinformation, and illuminate its impact on America and the globe, through 2020 and beyond.
Friday, March 29, 2019
With Vaccine Misinformation, Libraries Walk a Fine Line; Undark, March 22, 2019
Friday, March 1, 2019
Jill Abramson Plagiarized My Writing. So I Interviewed Her About It; Rolling Stone, February 13, 2019
Jill Abramson Plagiarized My Writing. So I Interviewed Her About It
When journalist Jake Malooley talked to the former New York Times executive editor, she admitted only to minor mistakes — but her responses were revealing
[Kip Currier: In yesterday's Information Ethics class session, looking at Plagiarism, Attribution, and Research Integrity and Misconduct, we explored this illuminating 2/13/19 interview of Jill Abramson--veteran journalist and the former first-ever female Executive Editor of The New York Times from 2011 until her firing in 2014--by Rolling Stone reporter Jake Malooley.
I also played the first ten minutes of a 2/20/19 radio interview of Abramson by WNYC's Brian Lehrer, in which Abramson fields questions from Lehrer about her ongoing plagiarism controversy and research/writing process.
The Abramson plagiarism controversy is a rich ripped-from-the-headlines case study, emphasizing the importance and implications of plagiarism and research integrity and misconduct. Imagine being in Abramson's Harvard University class this term, where the 1976 Harvard FAS alumna is teaching an Introduction to Journalism course...
Speaking of Harvard, The Harvard Crimson has an interesting 2/15/19 article on the continuing Abramson controversy, as well as prior instances of alleged plagiarism by a trio of prestigious Harvard professors in the early 2000's, who, following investigations, "faced no public disciplinary action": Current Policy, Past Investigations Offer Window Into Harvard’s Next Steps In Abramson Plagiarism Case]
"In the days that followed, Abramson gave interviews to Vox and CNN. She unconvincingly sidestepped definitions of plagiarism upheld by the Times and Harvard, contending she is guilty of little more than sloppiness. She also claimed Vice
is “waging an oppo campaign” against her book. Amid all the
equivocation and attempts to duck the plagiarist label, Abramson still
had not sufficiently explained how my writing and that of several other
journalists ended up running nearly word-for-word in her book. I didn’t feel personally aggrieved, as some colleagues believed I rightfully should. But I
did think I was owed straight answers. So late last week, I requested
an interview with Abramson through Simon & Schuster, the publisher
of Merchants of Truth.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Trapped in a hoax: survivors of conspiracy theories speak out; The Guardian, January 24, 2019
"Conspiracy theories used to be seen as bizarre expressions of harmless eccentrics. Not any more. Gone are the days of outlandish theories about Roswell’s UFOs, the “hoax” moon landings or grassy knolls. Instead, today’s iterations have morphed into political weapons. Turbocharged by social media, they spread with astonishing speed, using death threats as currency.
Together with their first cousins, fake news, they are challenging society’s trust in facts. At its most toxic, this contagion poses a profound threat to democracy by damaging its bedrock: a shared commitment to truth...
Amid this explosive growth, one aspect has been under-appreciated: the human cost. What is the toll paid by those caught up in these falsehoods? And how are they fighting back?"
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Trump Knows His Only Legal Hope Is to Win in the Court of Public Opinion; Slate, December 18, 2018
"Watch for the pattern: The president is both too big and too small to be held to legal account. He is too busy and too important. But also, he doesn’t understand, and he cannot recall. The crimes weren’t “big.” The president—in this conception—exists on some astral plane that courts, and facts, cannot touch. It’s as if we’ve arrived at a point in the Mueller probe where all of federal law must be reduced to something a small child could color over a long car ride for Trump to be expected to understand it. This is a PR play that works only as long as we all accede to the central principle that this one man is above—or below—the law. That isn’t something the courts, or Bob Mueller, or Rudy Giuliani can adjudicate. It’s the thing we’ll at some point have to determine for ourselves."
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Meme Warfare to Divide America; Wired, December 17, 2018
"All of this demonstrates, according to the report authors, that “over the past five years, disinformation has evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war.” And yet, rather than fighting back effectively, Americans are battling each other over what to do about it. “We have conversations about whether or not bots have the right to free speech, we respect the privacy of fake people, and we hold congressional hearings to debate whether YouTube personalities have been unfairly downranked,” the report reads. “It is precisely our commitment to democratic principles that puts us at an asymmetric disadvantage against an adversary who enthusiastically engages in censorship, manipulation, and suppression internally.”"
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again; The Washington Post, December 10, 2018
Time's 2018 'Person of the Year' is killed and imprisoned journalists; NBC News, Decemeber 11, 2018
Sunday, December 9, 2018
The Empress of Facebook: My Befuddling Dinner With Sheryl Sandberg; Wired, December 7, 2018
"When you’re making money hand over fist, and your company seems to be on the right side of history, it’s natural to think you’re a very moral and whole person, who has made some lovely decisions, and who has a lot to teach other women about work and families. But what about … when the company founders?...
“You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable,” Doris Lessing once said. “And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.”
Empires vanish. The memes that kept them glued together for a short time—from "Dieu et mon droit" to "Bring the world closer together"—are exposed as fictions of state. And the leaders are, surprise, mortals with Napoleon complexes."
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Supreme Court hands Fox News another win in copyright case against TVEyes monitoring service; The Washington Post, December 3, 2018
"The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case could leave media critics scrambling. How to fact-check the latest gaffe on “Hannity”? Did Brian Kilmeade really say that? To be sure, cable-news watchers commonly post the most extravagant cable-news moments on Twitter and other social media — a democratic activity that lies outside of the TVEyes ruling, because it’s not a money-making thing. Yet Fox News watchdogs use TVEyes and other services to soak in the full context surrounding those widely circulated clips, and that task is due to get more complicated. That said, services may still provide transcripts without infringing the Fox News copyright."