Thread on moving the Overton window

2 thoughts re: supply chain attacks that led to exploding pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon. 1. While these attacks had a networked component, the crucial part was the hardware: in case of the pagers, an Israeli front company inserted itself in the hardware supply chain. /1

Ok wow. It currently looks like Israel *manufactured* thousands of IEDs and sold those to Hezbollah, camouflaged as working comms devices, one looked like a Taiwanese pager, the other like a Japanese walkie-talkie. No supply chain compromise as such, certainly no cyber op as such

"The reason we don’t see exploding battery attacks more often is not because it’s technically hard, it’s because the erosion of public trust in everyday things isn’t worth it." bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/turn…

The extreme minority makes social media worse Mean tweets receive more likes and Retweets than tweets that engage constructively with opponents. Why? Hyperpartisans amplify mean messages even though the silent majority prefers constructive dialogue. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

At #ECREA2024 Ike Picone presents findings from our research on news doubters and their distinct coping tactics: 1) taking away doubt by verifying 2) holding on to doubt and letting "news find me" 3) letting go of doubt with "minimizing efforts" as one of the guiding principle

About 250 scientists from 31 countries have signed another open letter homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~preneel/Open_… criticizing the latest EU #chatcontrol draft patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/upl…. The letter confirms 2 earlier letters from July 2023 edri.org/wp-content/upl… and May 2024 nce.mpi-sp.org/index.php/s/eq…

Excellent keynote by Dr Jelena Kleut at #ECREA2024 how too much focus is put on individual resilience to deal with uncertainties, rather than looking at means of resistance against top down uncertainties that shape media consumption 👏

The climate crisis becomes more and more tangible with each day, and yet our policymakers are throwing their ambitions out the door since attention is dispersed towards other crises. We must stay loud that WE👏 STILL👏 WANT 👏CLIMATE👏ACTION 👏

I wonder if in the future, GenAi companies will be held accountable for contaminating the useful internet to this level. Especially, as searches of basic things are now littered with GenAi slop. Like a devastating environmental oil spill, but for our information systems.

Crucial caveat buried at the end of report

Our new paper takes you Inside the funhouse mirror factory and explains How social media distorts perceptions of norms 0.1 % of users share 80% of fake news! A tiny proportion of bad actors cause most of the problems and distort the norms. sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Via

Ok I did my research and I found the weather machines that are making all the hurricanes, heatwaves, wild fires, heat waves and worse.

Ah yes, famously the stats show that young people today are more anxious than they used to be. I’m just leaving this here, from our recent piece for the Australian Academy of the Humanities… #SocialMediaSummitNSWSA humanities.org.au/uncategorised/…

Sudan is the world’s gravest humanitarian disaster – but almost nobody cares | Jonathan Freedland | The Guardian theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

my god how are we supposed to live with the knowledge that this is happening.

I truly hope we won't see much more replications of the awful 'ban social media for teens' policy conversations based on cherrypicked research as is currently happening in Australia, with US imported 'concern manufacturers'. Great description by Axel Bruns how that's going