Kinzen’s team is always on top of the developments in disinformation. In our latest blog post, my colleague Karolin Schwarz and I explore how anti-vaccine activists are creating an alternative service economy. For years, we’ve seen conspiracy theorists build an alternate reality online. But the rise of unvaccinated dating sites and travel agencies, for example, shows how they are developing this infrastructure offline. Check it out here.

PS

Are you a content moderator for a digital platform? Or do you work as part of a team of trust and safety experts? Kinzen is looking for people like you to help with research that will shape our work protecting online communities from dangerous content. 

If you’d like to take part, complete this short survey (5 minutes). We’ll share the broad insights with the wider community at a later date, keeping everyone’s contribution anonymous. Thanks in advance for your time. 

PPS

Razeen Ibraheem, Senior Editorial Analyst at Kinzen, was on Irish television during the week talking about the challenges of and solutions to disinformation. Check out a short clip here.

For Your Headphones This Weekend: Podcast Slot

On Decoder with Nilay Patel, Patreon CEO Jack Conte spoke about the creator economy and the history of art. His perspective on the role of humans in his platform’s content moderation policies is worth listening to. He explains how their moderators talk through any issues with the creators on Patreon and 90% of the time issues are resolved without a need for deplatforming. Check it out here.

Editor’s Pick: Book Slot

As information circulates faster than ever before, how do we know what to believe? How does our brain process all this, and how can we identify flaws in our reasoning? That’s the subject of The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts us all at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World by David Robert Grimes (also published as Good Thinking). 

For so much of our waking moments, we rely on unconscious instinct. That can push us away from thinking clearly. Grimes illustrates this countless times throughout the book. This is a problem hard-wired into us. 

With social media, we are all working out our messy understanding of the world one tweet at a time. This book will help you navigate this complex world. You won’t ever be free of your paleolithic emotions, but you will be able to think more critically, more clearly, and live a better life as a result.

Recommended Articles: From the Kinzen Slack channels this week

Protocol. How Twitter hired tech's biggest critics to build ethical AI

A fascinating insight into how Twitter has leaned into some of the criticism coming its way. Clearly, the company is thinking about how building responsible and ethical AI will be a competitive advantage. As users, we are demanding this all the time. We must continue to do so.

WIRED. The Efforts to Make Text-Based AI Less Racist and Terrible

Another example of a movement toward more responsible AI. When large databases are based on training data that skews in favour of certain biases, it has awful consequences. GPT-3 is an artificial intelligence language model that has lots of people excited about the future of technology. But it's also capable of creating toxic content. For a humane AI future, we need more smart people working on these challenges.