Unreal Bird #8: Landslide

Railway bridge over the Potomac river, photographed from a Metro train.
If only all typos were so clearly labeled.

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In this issue:

What I'm up to

I have two new pieces to share: the first, in Information, Communication, & Society, is a retrospective critique on election counter-disinformation programs in the Global South, and the second, a short piece on civic engagement and social media for the Kettering Foundation. A third piece, on the Transatlantic far-right, may not be out by Tuesday morning, so I'll save it for the next issue.

More than two years ago, I joined a project with Jonathan Ong (UMass Amherst), exploring how the counter-disinformation superstructure—tech companies, foundations and government development agencies in the US and Europe, and implementing organizations which compete for large contracts—shaped and constrained the nature of coalitions in Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia (the "Global South").

One of my foundational beliefs is the (I think pretty obvious) observation that funding shapes fields. Everybody has to eat. That means if Meta and the US government offer scholars and journalists in a given country financial incentives to pursue a certain strategy—establishing fact-checking partnerships before an election, say—that strategy tends to become dominant. But maybe your organization was really good at doing other stuff, like investigative journalism or legal advocacy? Too bad. You're a fact-checker now. Oh, there are a dozen other fact-checking outlets already and the work feels redundant? That's not important. You have quotas to hit for your fact-checking project. This is essentially how things went down in many countries.

I'm not trying to unfairly pick on fact-checking, which is just one prominent example. The point is that funding dependency constrained the options for media and civil society. There were things that were harder to find funding for, like community depolarization, and so less of that work got done. Unfortunately, research on what's effective in the Global South is less common, and so these decisions were often made by Westerners based on evidence collected from the West. Even worse, they were often made by Westerners who worked for or in partnership with tech companies, and the overall funding agenda was oriented toward consumer-focused interventions instead of accountability for multi-billion dollar international corporations. Funny how that happens.

It's hard to do the full article justice here, so I encourage you to give the full thing a look.

My second piece is for the Kettering Foundation, where I have written before. They have a new series of polling results out from their partnership with Gallup, this one looking at "the people's role" in democracy. It's full of interesting insights: Many people want to be more involved than they are but don't know how or are too intimidated to jump in (in addition to the very common lack of free time). People believe voting is the most important way to get involved (I would argue voting is important but not the most important; there are ways to show up more consistently). Many of the questions were about social media, and the results were surprising. Heavy social media users were more likely to engage with their community offline, not less; but they were also more likely to agree with anti-democratic statements and attitudes.

I think these results paper over a lot of variety in how people live their online lives. To fully interpret them, I think we need to know more about how people are using social media, which platforms they use, and whom they are following and engaging with. After I finished this piece, Kettering provided me with some additional data addressing these questions, and I look forward to digging into it in a future essay.

Landslide

Spring is the in air, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been kicked to the curb after sixteen years in power. Over that time, he passed constitutional reforms that gave him greater control of the courts and legislative redistricting, closed down a prestigious university, silenced the media, rewarded his cronies, passed a law against "gay propaganda," worked to undermine the European Union and NATO from the inside, and embraced antisemitic conspiracy theories about George Soros and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

If all of this sounds like a wishlist for the Republican Party, that's not a coincidence: Orban's "illiberal democracy" was a prototype for MAGA Trumpism. There's a reason JD Vance went to stump for the guy.

Below, I've pulled together some of the most interesting coverage and commentary since the April 12 election, in which opposition candidate Peter Magyar's party won a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Field notes

Snoot watch

Close-up photo of a greyhound's snoot.
BOOP.

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