How much should we think about the role of information in society?
In this article, I use the recent media coverage surrounding #lableak versus #zoonosis to point toward a new threat we have not yet wrapped our heads around:
#Velocity is a metric for the transmission efficacy of information given a particular content payload, its viral packaging, and its host environment.
Basically the R0 of information, a measure of #contagiousness.
Info pathogens with high velocity outcompetes good information.
In the attention economy, velocity #hacking is the true business model of information merchants (e.g marketers, influencers, even independent journalists, news outlets, or organizations)
There are legitimate and #toxic ways to do it.
Guess which we see most?
This is a concept I find useful to talk about both information #diffusion and how our collective decisions to engage with content is shaped by our social environment.
Information cascades also #restructure our social connections.
This makes information cascades very potent when combined with information pathogens.
While velocity hackers reap in #profits from riding on information cascades, our social structure changes, and information pathogens can #evolve to overwhelm our defenses, and infect our minds.
Barack Obama famously said:
“The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves.”
So why is democracy in decline?
With the rise of the broadband #internet and #social media, many hoped that with the power of a #democratic information sphere came the power of a democratic society.
What went wrong?
I think we have been sold a false promise by #tech companies about the information age.
Yet today, even before our voices are drowned out by the #noise on social media, or #overwritten by velocity hacking information combatants, we lose our #agency and decision #autonomy to systems we don’t fully understand.
Where do we go from here?
Well, I certainly think we need a software upgrade for the information age.
We have to tackle our current #vulnerabilities and safeguard a democratic information sphere from undue #influence.
There will be a ramp-up of media coverage to bring the false #lableak myth back to the attention of the masses; right when the general election heats up.
Multiple reasons for this, first and foremost the political need for emotional activation of potential voters
A short🧵
As I have written previously, the #lableak myth is a powerful emotional narrative that profits from the many incentive asymmetries in our modern information ecosystems.
This ensures not only attention, but retention in public discourse.
Emotional myths that provide a simple explanation for why a large, traumatic world event like a pandemic had to be the cause of some shadowy powerful actors are appealing; they offer an agent to blame, and the illusion of control of these phenomena.
Very interesting paper from Jijón S. et al., using a population-dynamic approach (not a whole genome seq. approach) to date the first spillover event of the Wuhan outbreak
--> Nov.28
This is a methodologically independent confirmation of previously published estimates.
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The idea is to look at how an epidemic progresses (based on branching) and infer these dynamical parameters from known progressions
Once the model is calibrated, it can be used to estimate a time window when the first infection likely occurred; which might be before the tMRCA 2/
This is a complementary approach to phylogenetic dating that uses the mutational divergence over time to calculate back when the first cases likely occurred.
Overall, it matches previous estimates. So nothing new?
Let me quickly explain why I think this is important work:
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As 2024 ushered in a new year of myth, #manipulation & magical thinking, too few have adjusted to counterbalance the #vulnerabilities of our broken information ecosystem
During US elections, this might spell democratic backsliding as online #discourse will be weaponized
A 🧵
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The disruption of our information technology broke a few things we needed as guardrails for democracy, such as the free flow of information & journalistic principles for information sharing
Today, gatekeepers have changed to:
#Algorithms, #influencers & #audience demand
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The dynamics and incentives between those three largely shape what information average citizens get to see
This is problematic because info #shapers are not aligned with public interest or democracy, but rather with the pursuit of #popularity, #persuasion, #profit, or #power
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One thing that is fascinating with the history of the #lableak myth is how many people have been fooled by naïve claims that "one can not tell from the genome" one way or the other whether this is a natural virus.
This is false.
In the case of SARS-CoV-2, there is zero doubt. 1/
People might have encountered arguments such as we can modify viruses with "no see 'um" genetic methods, or just design a sequence & synthesize whole cloth
-> this implies nobody can ever #disprove whether a new genome has been man-made, only sometimes prove that it was 2/
There are multiple reasons why this popularized idea is flawed, both in general, but especially in the #specific circumstances of SARS-CoV-2.
First an analogy:
Merely learning how to write musical notes does not bestow the ability to suddenly create a complete symphony
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