TTO 2022 is excited to announce an additional day of online pre-conference events to be held on October 12th, 2022. These events will include a selection of online talks, “ask me anythings”, workshops, and panels.
workshops
09:15 am – 10:00 am (EST)
Reveddit.com: Improving online discourse with transparent moderation
Rob Hawkins (Founder of Reveddit.com)
Several online forums, including Facebook and Reddit, show users their removed content as if it is not removed. This workshop will seek to answer questions such as: What happens when content is removed without notifying the user? What happens when you show users their secretly removed content? How many people are impacted by shadow moderation? Rob Hawkins reviews the implications of this style of moderation using real-world examples.
10:00 – 11:30 am (EST)
Tracking Exposed: a tool for TikTok algorithmic audits and shadow-ban/shadow-promotion detection.
Salvatore Romano (Head of Research, Tracking Exposed)
Description:
The workshop will show the participants how to collect and analyze data to investigate TikTok’s algorithm.
The user experience is almost exclusively centered around the content surfaced by the For You feed, which greatly influences this algorithm in shaping our culture and informational environment. During the first five years of its life, the platform has raised several concerns involving censorship, misinformation, data privacy, and interferences with political elections. Recently, Tracking Exposed uncovered how TikTok has “shadow-promoted” content to users in Russia – content that’s supposed to be banned. “Shadow-promotion” is a new term we have coined to describe this previously unobserved phenomenon of algorithmic promotion of content that is supposedly banned on a platform. At the same time, there have been accusations of TikTok using its algorithm to shadow-ban black people, plus-size people, and pro-LGBTQ+ messages hiding posts from the ForYouPage. During the workshop, we will collect data and then create some visualization thanks to our tool-chain for data analysts (based on Gephi and Python Notebook) or with a more straightforward tool such as Excel.
The TikTok Tracking Exposed is a free (and open) software to monitor TikTok’s recommendation algorithm behavior and personalization patterns. It enables researchers and journalists to investigate which content is promoted or demoted on the platform, including content regarding politically sensitive issues. With the browser extension installed, every TikTok video watched from that browser would be saved on a personal page as long as the suggested videos. Later, the investigator can retrieve the evidence in CSV format by using the public API to compare two different profiles, as shown in this short tutorial.
TikTok Tracking Exposed is under the umbrella project https://tracking.exposed
Book TALKs / Ask me Anythings
11:30 am – 12:15 pm (EST)
Sophia Smith Galer (Senior News Report, Vice World News)
What do you get when medical manufacturers still call speculums “virgin size”; when YouTube pickup artists try to give tips on how to turn a girl’s “no” into a “yes”; when Amazon classes dilators that help women fix psychosexual disorders as sex toys?
What do you get when campaign groups spreading inaccurate information about the body are allowed to speak at schools – or when fixers for hymen repair doctors are allowed to get hundreds of thousands of YouTube and TikTok followers?
You get a sex misinformation crisis.
Sophia Smith Galer explores some of the research she gathered for her book Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century that not only charts a worldwide sex misinformation crisis but – crucially – looks at the problem solvers and solutions that could fix it, and the obstacles in their way; internet censorship, out of control engagement optimisation tools and lingering taboo around the horizontal tango.
Recorded Presentations and Live Q&A
12:15 pm – 1:45 PM (EST)
2020 U.S. Internet Election Memes: Political Propaganda With More Than a Creative Information Disorder Twist by Ann Jabro, Stephanie McVicker
Building trust in online spaces to enhance young people’s health and wellbeing by Louise Holly
Information Behavior of Fact-Checkers as a Basis for Designing Human-Centered AI Tools for Automated Fact-Checking by Andrea Hrckova
Increasing the credibility of vaccine-related information on Wikipedia through collaboration by Netha Hussain
Real-Time Detection of Ephemeral Bot Attacks: The Case of Fake Trend Bots on Twitter Turkey by Tuğrulcan Elmas
Labelling a Catastrophe: Digital Databases, Evidence, and Accountability in Syria by Amre Metwally
The Fake News Arms Race: How AI Can Create – and Detect – Fakes by Or Levi
Live Product Demos
1:45 pm – 2:45 pm (EST)
Title: Tracking Propaganda Landscapes Across Social Media with SimPPL
Swapneel Mehta, Ph.D. candidate at NYU Data Science
SimPPL is a platform that uses Probabilistic AI to advance network science. With SimPPL, we operationalize cutting-edge simulation intelligence research into a tool for the public to understand the harms of online disinformation. In this talk, I will provide a case study of how we use the platform to track propaganda spread by a state-backed media outlet on Twitter, a popular microblogging social network. We provide a news dataset to our software which can detect instances of coordinated inauthentic behaviour through a detailed analysis of public traces of activity around the diffusion of these articles online. The insights from this platform provide a transparent look into how propaganda is disseminated online. These are necessary to design adequate safeguards against the subsequent propagation of disinformation.
Case study presentation
3:00 – 4:00 pm (EST)
Neglected challenges of gendered health misinformation: intersections with sexism and transphobia
led by Jenna Sherman (Digital Health Lab Program Manager, Meedan)
Women, trans, and nonbinary people experience the impacts of health misinformation in unique and disproportionate ways. With less access to quality healthcare, these individuals often turn to harmful online information ecosystems, which can lead to high risk health outcomes.
For example, people seeking out information online about infant feeding may be led to create homemade baby formula that can stunt growth and development of their children. People seeking out information online about coping with chest dysphoria may be led to unsafely bind which can cause permanent damage to chest tissue, lungs, and ribs. And people seeking out information about abortion access may be led to use herbs that can cause problems from seizure to septic shock.
While social media platforms are still working on building out their health misinformation policies, the stakes for leaving up harmful content online is growing more urgent as more people turn to the internet for answers to gendered health questions.
In this panel, experts in medicine, health misinformation, online ecosystems, and education speak to the unique challenges of unregulated gendered health misinformation online, its impacts, and potential solutions.
grant opportunities
4:15 – 4:45 pm (EST)
WikiCrededibility Grants Initiative 2022 – Call for Proposals & Live Q&A by Hacks/Hackers & Wikimedia DC Chapter
Ariel Cetrone of the WikiCredibility Grants Initiative (WikiCred), a project of Hacks/Hackers, will discuss its upcoming grant cycle. WikiCred grants are open to individuals, groups, or organizations seeking funding support for the development of tools, projects or initiatives that strengthen credibility and reliability of information within Wikimedia projects.
Applicants should expand on the ideas, themes, or work of past WikiCred projects with the ultimate goal of helping to build movements dedicated to addressing knowledge gaps, editing and creating citations, producing reliable source lists, exploring Wikimedia data as an indicator of site reliability, building tools for educational purposes, and teaching media literacy.