Showing posts with label digital voice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital voice. Show all posts
Friday, 26 July 2024
Content suppression techniques against dissent in the Fifth Estate - examples of COVID-19 censorship on social media
Written for researchers and others interested in the many methods available to suppress dissidents' digital voices. These techniques support contemporary censorship online, posing a digital visibility risk for dissidents challenging orthodox narratives in science.
The Fourth Estate emerged in the eighteenth century as the printing press enabled the rise of an independent press that could help check the power of governments, business, and industry. In similar ways, the internet supports a more independent collectivity of networked individuals, who contribute to a Fifth Estate (Dutton, 2023). This concept acknowledges how a network power shift results from individuals who can search, create, network, collaborate, and leak information in strategic ways. Such affordances can enhance individuals' informational and communicative power vis-à-vis other actors and institutions. A network power shift enables greater democratic accountability, whilst empowering networked agents in their everyday life and work. Digital platforms do enable online content creators to generate and share news that digital publics amplify via networked affordances (such as 💌 likes, " quotes " and sharing via # hashtag communities).
In an ideal world, social media platforms would be considered to be a public accommodation, and the Fifth Estate's users would benefit from legal protection of their original content, including strong measures against unjustified suppression and censorship. The latter should recognise the asymmetric challenges that individual dissenters, whistleblowers and their allies must confront in contradicting hegemonic social forces that can silence their opponents' (digital) voices: As recently evidenced in the COVID-19 "pandemic", the Twitter Files and other investigations reveal how multinational pharmaceutical companies, unelected global "health" organisations, national governments, social media and traditional broadcast companies all conspired to silence dissent that oppossed costly COVID-19 interventions. Regardless of their levels of expertise, critics who questioned this narrative in the Fourth or Fifth Estate were forced to negotiate censorship for the wrong-think of sharing "dangerous" opinions.
Such sanctions reflect powerful authorities' interests in controlling (scientific) language, the window of permissable opinion, and the social discourses that the public might select from, or add. Under the pretext of public "safety", the censorship industrial complex strong arms the broadcast media and social media companies into restricting dissidents' voices as "misinformation" that is "unsafe". Facing no contest, the views of powerful officialdoms earn frequent repetition within a tightly controlled, narrow narrative window. At the same legitimate reports of mRNA injuries are falsely redefined to be "malinformation", and censored.
Consequently, instead of a pluralist distribution of power in the Fifth Estate that can support vital expression, powerful authorities are enforcing internet policy interventions that increasingly surveil and censor users' digital voices. Infodemic scholars whose work endorses such suppression would seem to be ignorant of how problematic it is to define disinformation, in general. Particularly in contemporary science, where: knowledge monopolies and research cartels may be dominant; dissenting minds should be welcomed for great science, and a flawed scientific consensus can itself be dangerous. Silencing dissent has important public health ramifications, particularly where the potential for suggesting, and exploring, better interventions becomes closed. Science-, health communication, and media studies scholars may also ignore the inability of medical experts to accurately define what disinformation is, particularly where global policy makers face conflicts of interest (as in the World Health Organisation's support for genetic vaccines).
Censorship and the suppression of legitimate COVID-19 dissent is dangerously asymmetrical: health authorities already benefit from ongoing capital cascades whose exchange largely serve their interests. Such exchanges span financial, social, cultural, symbolic and even other (e.g. embodied) forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986:2018). By contrast, individual critics can quickly be silenced by attacks on their limited capital, effectively preventing their exercise of the basic right to free speech, and delivering sustained critiques. A related concern is that the censorial actions of artificial intelligence designers and digital platform moderators are often opaque to a platforms' users. Original content creators may be unaware that they will be de-amplified for sharing unorthodox views, as algorithms penalise the visibility of content on 'banned' lists, and any accounts that amplify "wrongthink".
Content suppression on social media is an important, but neglected topic, and this post strives to flag the wide variety of techniques that may be use in digital content suppression. Techniques are listed in order of seemingly increasingly severe techniques:
#1 Covering up algorithmic manipulation
Social media users who are not aware about censorship are unlikely to be upset about it (Jansen & Martin, 2015). Social media platforms have not been transparent about how they manipulated their recommender algorithms to provide higher visibility for the official COVID-19 narrative, or in crowding out original contributions from dissenters on social media timelines, and in search results. Such boosting ensured that dissent was seldom seen, or perceived as fringe minority's concern. As Dr Robert Malone tweeted, the computational algorithm-based method now 'supports the objectives of a Large Pharma- captured and politicised global public health enterprise'. Social media algorithms have come to serve a medical propaganda purpose that crafts and guides the 'public perception of scientific truths'. While algorithmic manipulation underpins most of the techniques listed below, it is concealed from social media platform users.
#2 Fact choke versus counter-narratives
A fact choke involves burying unfavourable commentary amongst a myriad of content. This term was coined by Margaret Anna Alice to describe how "fact checking" was abused to suppress legitimate dissent.
An example she tweeted about was the BBC's Trusted New Initiative warning in 2019 about anti-vaxxers gaining traction across the internet, requiring algorithmic intervention to neutralise "anti-vaccine" content. In response, social media platforms were urged to flood users' screens with repetitive pro-(genetic)-vaccine messages normalising these experimental treatments. Simultaneously, messaging attacked alternate treatments that posed a threat to the vaccine agenda. Fact chokes also included 'warning screens' that were displayed before users could click on content flagged by "fact checkers" as "misinformation".
An example she tweeted about was the BBC's Trusted New Initiative warning in 2019 about anti-vaxxers gaining traction across the internet, requiring algorithmic intervention to neutralise "anti-vaccine" content. In response, social media platforms were urged to flood users' screens with repetitive pro-(genetic)-vaccine messages normalising these experimental treatments. Simultaneously, messaging attacked alternate treatments that posed a threat to the vaccine agenda. Fact chokes also included 'warning screens' that were displayed before users could click on content flagged by "fact checkers" as "misinformation".
With the "unvaccinated" demonised by the mainstream media to create division, susceptible audiences were nudged to become vaccine compliant to confirm their compassionate virtue. At the same time to retain belief in mRNA genetic vaccine "safety", personal accounts, aggregated reports (such as "died suddenly" on markcrispinmiller.substack.com) and statistical reports (see Cause Unknown) for genetic vaccine injuries became suppressed as "malinformation" despite their factual accuracy. Other "controversial content", such as medical professionals' criticism of dangerous COVID-19 treatment protocols (see What the Nurses Saw) or criticism of a social media platform's policies (such as application of lifetime bans and critiques of platform speech codes) have been algorithmically suppressed.
Critical commentary may also be drowned out when platforms, such as YouTube, bury long format interviews amongst short 'deep fake' videos. These can range from featuring comments the critic never made, to fake endorsements from cybercriminals (as described on X by Whitney Webb, or Professor Tim Noakes on YouTube).
#3 Title-jacking
For the rare dissenting content that can achieve high viewership, another challenge is that title-jackers will leverage this popularity for very different outputs under exactly the same (or very similar) production titles. This makes it less easy for new viewers to find the original work. For example, Liz Crokin's 'Out of the Shadows’ documentary describes how Hollywood and the mainstream media manipulate audiences with propaganda. Since this documentary's release, several videos were published with the same title.
#4 Blacklisting trending dissent
Social media search engines typically allow their users to see what is currently the most popular content. In Twitter, dissenting hashtags and keywords that proved popular enough to feature amongst trending content, were quickly added to a 'trend blacklist' that hid unorthodox viewpoints. Tweets posted by accounts on this blacklist are prevented from trending regardless of how many likes or retweets they receive. On Twitter, Stanford Health Policy professor Jay Bhattacharya argues he was added to this blacklist for tweeting on a focused alternative to the indiscriminate COVID-19 lockdowns that many governments followed. In particular, The Great Barrington Declaration he wrote with Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, which attracted over 940,000 supporting signatures.After its publication, all three authors experienced censorship on search engines (Google deboosted results for the declaration), social media platforms (Facebook temporarily removed the declaration's page, while Reddit removed links to its discussion) and on video (Youtube removed a roundtable discussion with Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis whose participants questioned the efficacy and appropriateness of requiring children to wear face masks).
This newsletter from Dr Steven Kirsch's (29.05.2024) described how a Rasmussen Reports video on YouTube had its 'like' button removed. As Figure 1 shows, users could only select a 'dislike' option. This button was restored for www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS_CapegoBA.
G3P stakeholders have a strong stake in growing a censorship industrial complex to thwart legitimate dissent. Critiques of the official COVID-19 "pandemic" measures are just one example The industrial censorship complex also strives to stifle robust critiques of (1) climate change "science", (2) "gender affirming" (transgender) surgery, (3) mass migration (aka the Great Replacement), (4) and rigged "democratic" elections, amongst other "unacceptable" opinions. Rather than being for the public's good, such censorship actually serves the development of a transhumanist, global technocratic society. The digital surveillance dragnet of the technocracy suits the interests of a transnational ruling class in maintaining social control of Western society, and other vassals. This will be expanded upon in a future post tackling the many censorship and suppression techniques that are being against (ii) accounts.
#5 Blacklisting content due to dodgy account interactions or external platform links
Limited visibility filtering also occurs when comments are automatically commented on by pornbots, or feature engagement by other undesirable accounts. For example, posts mentioning the keywords/subjects such as 'vaccine, Pfizer' may receive automated forms of engagement, which then sees posts receiving such "controversial" engagement becoming added to a list ensuring these posts censorship (see 32 mins into Alex Kriel's talk on the 'The Role of Fake Bot Traffic on Twitter/X'.
Social media platforms' algorithms may also blacklist content from external platforms that are not viewed to be credible sources (for example, part of an alternative {alt-right} media), or seen as competing rivals (X penalises the visibility of posts that feature links to external platforms).
#6 Making content unlikeable and unsharable
This newsletter from Dr Steven Kirsch's (29.05.2024) described how a Rasmussen Reports video on YouTube had its 'like' button removed. As Figure 1 shows, users could only select a 'dislike' option. This button was restored for www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS_CapegoBA.
Figure 1. Youtube only offers dislike option for Rassmussen Reports video on Vaccine Deaths- sourced from Dr Steven Kirsch's newsletter (29.05.2024)
Social media platforms may also prevent resharing such content, or prohibit links to external websites that are not supported by these platforms' backends, or have been flagged for featuring inappropriate content.
#7 Disabling public commentary
Social media platforms may limit the mentionability of content, by not offering the opportunity to quote public posts. User's right-to-reply may be blocked, and critiques may be concealed by preventing them from being linked to from replies.
#8 Making content unsearchable within, and across, digital platforms
Social media companies applied search blacklists to prevent their users from finding blacklisted content. Content contravening COVID-19 "misinformation" policies was hidden from search users. For example, Twitter applied a COVID-19 misleading information policy that ended in November, 2022. In June 20023, META began to end its policy for curbing the spread of "misinformation" related to COVID-19 on Facebook and Instagram.
#9 Rapid content takedowns
Social media companies could ask users to take down content that was in breach of COVID-19 "misinformation" policies, or automatically remove such content without its creators' consent. In 2021, META reported that it had removed more than 12 million pieces of content on COVID-19 and vaccines that global health experts had flagged as misinformation. YouTube has a medical misinformation policy that follows the World Health Organisation (WHO) and local health authorities guidance. In June 2021, YouTube removed a podcast in which the evidence of a reproductive hazard of mRNA shots was discussed between Dr Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch on Prof Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse channel. Teaching material that critiqued genetic vaccine efficacy data was automatically removed within seconds for going against its guidelines (see Shir Raz, Elisha, Martin, Ronnel, Guetzkow, 2022). The WHO reports that its guidance contributed to 850,000 videos related to harmful or misleading COVID-19 misinformation being removed from YouTube between February 2020 and January 2021.PropagandaInFocus describes how LinkedIn users are subject to a policy of misinformation that prevents content being shared that 'directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organisations and public health authorities'. Dr David Thunder shared an example of his automated LinkedIn post removal for (1) sharing a scientific study that confirmed that children are at negligible risk of suffering severe disease from COVID-19, and (2) questioning the FDA decision to approve Emergency Use Authorisation for COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months old. No matter that many other studies confirm both positions, LinkedIn took this post down and threatened to restrict his account.
#10 Creating memory holes
Extensive content takedowns can serve a memory-holing aim, whereby facts and memories of the past become suppressed, erased or forgotten for political convenience. Long after the COVID-19's "pandemic", an Orwellian Ministry of Truth continues to memory-hole many health authority decision makers' failures, plus those of the mainstream media's and most national governments. As discussed here on YouTube by Mary Lou Singleton, Meghan Murphy and Jennifer Sey, such failures included: mandating masking and school-closures for children (who were never at risk); never questioning the official COVID-19 statistics (such as CNN's 'death ticker'); straight quoting Pfizer press releases as "journalism", whilst mocking individuals who chose to 'do their own research'.
Dr Mark Changizi presents four science moments on memory-holing. In X video 1 and X video 2, he highlights how memory-holing on social media is very different from its traditional form. He uses X (formerly X) as an autobiographical tool, creating long threads that serve as a form of visual memory that he can readily navigate. The unique danger of social media account removal/suspension for censorship extends beyond losing one's history-of-'use' on that platform, to include all 'mentions' related to its content (ranging from audience likes, to their reply and quote threads). This changes the centrally-controlled communication history of what has occurred on a social media platform. Such censorship violates the free speech rights of all persons who have engaged with that removed account, even its fiercest critics, as they also lose an historical record of what they said.
By contrast decentralised publications (such as hardcopy publications) are very hard for authorities to memory hole, since sourcing all hardcopies can be nearly impossible for censors. While winners can write history, historians who have access to historical statements can rewrite it. As COVID-19 memory-holing on social media platforms challenges such rewriting, its users must think around creating uncensorable records (such as the book Team Reality: Fighting the Pandemic of the Uninformed). In X video 3, he highlights that freedom of expression is a liability, as expressions push reputation chips on the table. The more claims one stake's, the greater the risk to one's reputation if they're wrong. So, another aspect of memory holing lies in an individual's potential desire for memory-holing their own platform content, should they prove to be wrong. In X video 4, Dr Changizi also spotlights that the best form of memory-holing is self-censorship, whereby individuals see other accounts been suspended, or removed for expressing particular opinions. The witnesses then decide not to express such opinions, since it might endanger their ability to express other opinions. While such absence of speech is immeasurable, it would seem the most powerful memory-holing technique. Individuals' silencing their own voices do not create history.
#11 Rewriting history
Linking back to the Fact Choke technique are attempts at historical revisionism by health authoritians, and their allies. An example of this are claims in the mainstream media that critics of the orthodox narrative were "right for the wrong reasons" regarding the failure of COVID-19 lockdowns, the many negative impacts of closing schooling, businesses, and enforcing mandatory vaccination policies.
#12 Concealing the motives behind censorship, and who its real enforcers are
Social media platforms not only hide algorithmic suppression from users, but may also be misused to hide from users the full rationale for censorship, or who is ultimately behind it. Professor David Hughes prepared a glossary of deceptive terms and their true meanings (2024, pp 194-195) to highlight how the meaning of words is damaged by propaganda. A term resonating with technique #9 is “Critical” - pretending to speak truth to power whilst turning a blind eye to deep state power structures.
The official narrative positioned COVID-19 as a (i) pandemic that had zoonotic (animal-to-human) origins, and alternate explanations were strongly suppressed. As this is the least likely explanation, other hypotheses merit serious investigation as they are more plausible. SARS-COV-2 might have stemmed from (ii) an outbreak at the Wuhan Lab's "gain of function" research, or a (iii) deliberate release in several countries from a biological weapons research project? (iv) Critics of these three explanations allege that a prior endemicity was ‘discovered’ by an outbreak of testing. Some critics even dispute the existence of SARS-COV-2, alleging that (iv) viral transmission is unproven, and that the entire COVID-19 "pandemic" is a psychological propaganda operation.
By silencing dissident views like these, social media platforms stop their users from learning about the many legitimate COVID-19 debates that are taking place between experts. This is not a matter of keeping users "secure" from "unsafe" knowledge, but rather networked publics being targeted for social control in the interests of powerful conspirators. In particular, the weaponised deception of social media censorship suits the agenda of the Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP or G3P), and its many stakeholders. As described by Dr Joseph Mercola in The Rise of the Global Police State, each organisational stakeholder plays a policy enforcement role in a worldwide network striving to centralise authority at a global level.
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| Figure 2. Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P) stakeholders - sourced from IainDavis.com (2021) article at https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/12/investigative-reports/the-new-normal-the-civil-society-deception. |
N.B. This post is a work-in-progress and the list above is not exhaustive- kindly comment to recommend techniques that should be added, and suggestions for salient examples are most welcome.
Thursday, 8 April 2021
From informal academic debate to cyber harassment - navigating the minefield as a responsible contributor #WNS2021
This World Nutrition Summit (WNS2021) talk focuses on clinicians’ opportunities for becoming responsible digital content contributors on social media (plus several pitfalls).
These scholars are fighting for academic free speech in Higher Education (HE), where such speech is an important ideal but not a reality. Very few IRMCIH scholars enjoy opportunities to research and teach this emergent paradigm. Notably, there is very little debate in Higher Education concerning the dominant “cholesterol” model of chronic disease development (CMCDD) versus its IRMCIH rival. Skeptics of IRMCIH and low-carb diet interventions largely seem to ignore the role of scientific suppression in stifling IR scholarship. The most vocal skeptics do not seem to engage with the literature on the suppression of dissent or the sociology of scientific knowledge.
As Christopher Holmberg’s research has described, dissenting IR scholars in Sweden have turned to using digital platforms for contesting flawed nutritional guidelines; this raised political awareness around low carb diets, providing vital opportunities to contest the nutritional “authorities”. Notably, social media enabled low-carb experts to network their expertise and start conventional scientific research approaches that shift from the anecdotal. This does not seem to have happened in most other countries, though. Scientific suppression of the IRMCIH model in HE seems globally strong.
An emergent form of such suppression sees advocates for IRMCIH being targeted by cyberbullies from academia. Professor Tim Noakes and my Heliyon publication flags the emergence of Online Academic Bullying (OAB), which is an emergent challenge from HE employees whose academic cyberbullies dissident experts must confront. OAB included the distinctive attacks academic cyberbullies used against an Emeritus Professor- sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402100431X. In addition to academics, the Online Academic Bullying concept also applies to health professionals and those outside academia who become recipients of intellectual and other forms of harassment by higher education’s cyberbullies. A few emergent cyber harassment strategies are shown in the article's graphic abstract.
Cyberbullies in HE may also draw on many other forms of digital harassment for attacking others, as listed here.
While there are university policies that protect the public from racist, sexual and homophobic harassment, few universities seem to have tackled intellectual cyber harassment from their employees under anti-bullying policies. At The Academic Parity movement's STEM the BULLYING conference, probably the most important insight for the OAB research project emerged from Professor Loraleigh Keashly's talk; 'Without anti-bullying policies, incidents in HE are seen in isolation as once-off, rare and framed as subjective. Thus, they are not related to systemic or structural problems.'
This links to Academic Free Speech, since academic mobs can target dissident scholars being secure in the knowledge that even if they are removed unfairly that investigations are unlikely to identify a systemic pattern. In particular, one across several scholars over many years that has constrained free speech and dissent by the recipients of bullying. Further, an anonymised PostDoc pointed out that there are 'academic mafias' in the Health Sciences. These ensure that any dissenting Principal Investigators(PIs)/young researchers become ostracised and lose funding. Dissident PIs are soon replaced with compliant PIs who can be relied upon to adhere to the orthodox view. Given this context, anti-bullying policies and reporting are vitally important- not just to protect scholars from harassment, but for supporting free speech itself in HE.
To help reporting on the OAB phenomenon, Dr Patricia Harpur and I are currently researching an OAB reporting instrument (see https://bit.ly/3pnyE6w). We are approaching diverse IRMCIH scholars and LCHF activists to report their experiences with the form and to advise us on its strengths and weaknesses. Anonymised data from those who give us permission will be used to explore the varieties of OAB. In particular, we hope to explore differences by gender, nationality and profession. If you have experienced formal suppression and been targeted by academic cyberbullies and are interested in generating a report and even becoming a research participant, do email me on noakest@cput.ac.za for a Google Form invite and research consent form.
By contrast to IR scholars, who may lose their livelihoods for teaching, researching and promoting the IRMCIH model, many clinicians enjoy the professional freedom to share LCHF science and prescribe low-carb interventions. Clinicians need support with contributing to both the online and academic IR issue arenas. It starts with participating in networks, such as the Nutrition Network’s, where clinicians learn not only what works… but what is not known. This connection may motivate clinicians to help protect their peers by becoming ‘upstanders’ against cyber harassment. Upstanders are former bystanders who have recognised patterns of bullying behaviour and choose to intervene in a bid to stop bullying (Padgett & Notar, 2013).
Clinicians may also be able share the latest research with their clients. For those who are not English-speaking, clinicians have a huge opportunity to spotlight academic literature for those whose first language is not English, or clients who prefer to follow users in their home languages. The OAB research project has seen examples of this with Spanish interlocutors of an IRMCIH scientific editorial on YouTube. With the right support, health experts with the time and interest to contribute to scholarship, may be able to help close IRMCIH research gaps by researching their patients’ outcomes.
In sharing their work online, health professionals must choose how they present themselves: genuine identities are a norm for health professionals, but a pseudonymous identity is appropriate where dangers exist from public visibility. Likewise, there are trade-offs in choosing to portray a strictly professional role online, versus one with a blend of interests that could be more relatable to general public. Creators must also consider their preference in mode of communication: the academic default is verbal, social media is multi-media. However, digital content creators may choose to foreground productions with spoken-word, imagery, slides, or even video and coding projects.
With such a broad range of possibilities, it is important that health professionals define their main aim (such as producing a unique portfolio of content). They may have the luxury of time to develop a well-planned strategy for achieving that aim that draws on the examples of Nutrition Network influencers… or content creators might focus on learning-by-doing, gonzo approach where the plan is to continually experiment for finding what works. For example, the research literature does not address which academic social media sites’ audiences will best-respond to manuscripts, so developing presences on the most popular ones, then sharing a manuscript draft via all, would seem the best way to learn firsthand. Over time, health professionals will develop an understanding of who they want to speak to and how to move content across platforms for reaching witnesses and interlocutors.
For example, if a health professional is interested in pursuing civil debate, there are interesting options, such as: Reddit’s ‘change my view’, Debate.org and Letter Wiki. A particularly IRMCIH/LCHF-friendly space is subreddit/ketoscience, which has 175k members. These platforms are designed specifically for civil discussion, so are arguably better venues for agonistic exchange than social media networks. These have much greater reach, but are marred by underwhelming moderation and safety policies/procedures.
For health professionals on Twitter, Professor Murphy’s chapter Twitter and Health flags this platform’s influence on opening-up discussions on health: patients are using Twitter in a form of ‘update culture’ to share intimate information about their health (similar to a public diary of their health, but now as one’s personal Twitter domain on one’s IR scores for followers’ support). Such patients can potentially become a source of expertise whilst contributing to a support community for patients’ confronting the same condition(s). Health professionals can use Twitter to understand their patients’ behaviours better and to pursue research that might otherwise be difficult to arrange patients’ feedback on successful alternative treatments from. Notably, Johns Hopkins university has used the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Untangled project with researchers to capture 40 reviews of alternative and off-label treatments. Its participants and other ALS patients are encouraged to ask questions on the state-of-the-art science (for example, by engaging with the ALS Twitter account). This is similar to IRMCIH experts being contacted around LCHF lifestyle queries. Such shifts for patients, clinicians and researchers reveal how Twitter facilitates the circumvention of traditional controls in healthcare and life-sciences industries. This facilitates a poly-vocal approach in healthcare and the life-sciences versus the traditional uni-directional prescriptions from "The Anointed" experts in the Cathedral combining HE and media.
‘Scientific Twitter’ has emerged a popular choice for IRMCIH scholars to update each other, reach out of to sympathetic digital publics in the broader LCHF space. It also provides a platform for public disagreements with CMCDD supporters. For LCHF proponents' examples, please view a Twitter list featuring updates from The Noakes Foundation and other #LCHF advocates at https://twitter.com/i/lists/974554836850032640.
As Professor Noakes describes, by following LCHF proponents on Twitter, he can more easily stay current with their research than via journal notifications. Twitter provides him with as much scholarly information each day as he ever received in the years of his career as a researcher and teacher. He also describes how it supports the sharing of a message with a large number of people beyond one’s own immediate social circle.
As a highly influential and accessible platform for news and networking, Twitter provides an interesting example concerning how different forms of capital can be developed via microblogging as social media. Firstly, Twitter is free and easy-to-use, meaning there is no direct cost in ECONOMIC capital to its users. Twitter users own the copyright of the CULTURAL capital (or tweet content) posted via its service. Highly engaged Twitter users can develop SOCIAL CAPITAL via high numbers of followers. Interestingly, the number of Twitter users with more than a million followers is rarer than the number of dollar billionaires! This spotlights what an exclusive achievement cultivating a large Twitter audience is.
Twitter handles with large followings place their producers in a very exclusive category of high influence microblogger. Twitter itself is an influential news platform which does shape traditional media and the public debates it features. While rare, scientific research articles that break on Twitter can become widely shared. Not only does this contribute to an article’s ALTmetrics but, quite likely, a research publication’s citation rate.
Outside the Twitter platform, there are many other influences that undermine legitimate online debate
These include:
Overall, a polarized Twitter discussion may create great stats for its usage… and raise the visibility of its most frequent interlocutors… but Twitter’s limitations mean that high-quality debate is an unlikely outcome for participants!
Twitter’s algorithms reward controversy and highly emotive engagement with attention. So, if one wants to attract users to discussions, one must foreground what one is AGAINST. This is an effective strategy as it depositions one's opponents (who probably don’t want to be described as representing Fiat Science™!). It also serves as a lightning rod for witnesses and the critical interlocutors they might refer. Focusing on what one is FOR on the left is “nice”, but largely ineffective in terms of visibility. Speaking up in strong terms about what one is against will stoke more intense reactions and attention. Instead of hating the algorithm, savvy Twitter users must stoke IR and CMCDD controversies for lighting Twitter’s dumpster fires!
It’s also useful to be mindful of the limitations of what stats implicitly suggest that one focuses on. For example for scholars, ALTmetrics does not distinguish between sentiment in publications, which may all be negative as shown in the blue text. So, as a responsible online content contributor, one must be mindful of BOTH how one’s aims link to a preferred platform’s stats… and differs from them. For example, one may serve a niche LCHF interest that is unlikely to attract a high number of followers… nevertheless, its social impact in creating a support network for an under-served group of patients, whose examples come to be featured in the IRMCIH research literature, might be the best metric of success for one’s digital content contribution!SLIDE 27
Thank you for reading this post. I’d also like to thank the OAB Research team for their contribution to the research insights shared here.
And thanks to Create With for providing the Shushmoji graphics, which were designed as end-of-conversation points for cyberbullies. Check out Create With's work on Pinterest, Instagram or Facebook.
The post-conversion image quality of slides shared via Slideshare leave a lot to be desired. As a multimodal researcher, I'm exploring the talk's remediation into a blog post for online audience's ease-of-access. I trust its "slides" as 'images' plus reworked "presenter notes" as 'post text' do prove fit-for-purpose:
#WNS2021 was organised by the Nutrition Network, which digitally educates, trains and connects clinicians (ranging from doctors to health coaches) concerning up-to-date Insulin Resistance Model of Chronic Ill Health (IRMCIH) science and research in the field of Low Carb, High Fat (LCHF) nutrition interventions.
SECTION 1 covers why IRMCIH scholars have turned to digital platforms for promulgating their model… and the cyber harassment they negotiate from academic cyberbullies in HE. The latter is a core focus of the Online Academic Bullying (OAB) research project. SECTION 2 focuses on bridging the veracity of experiences shared on social media with the legitimacy associated with traditional scholarship publications. SECTION 3 focuses on the example of Twitter for developing capitals, as well as the challenges of engaging in online debates in online platforms.
#WNS2021 was organised by the Nutrition Network, which digitally educates, trains and connects clinicians (ranging from doctors to health coaches) concerning up-to-date Insulin Resistance Model of Chronic Ill Health (IRMCIH) science and research in the field of Low Carb, High Fat (LCHF) nutrition interventions.
Polishing one’s digital profile is an unusual practice, just like curating one’s photos. Many WNS2021 participants did not enter comprehensive details about themselves for their Accelevents profile and few added profile photos. Such inaction exemplifies how in most professional communities, becoming an original online content creator puts one in an exclusive category. Historic (and likely outdated!) research around online content creation suggests that 89% of Web 2.0 platform users are viewers, while 9% comment, rate and re-share content. Just 1% actively produce original/creative content (van Dijk, 2009). The NN community seems to be doing better (of the 6,000 professionals who have done NN courses, 150 have digital presences linked from its directory). There is plenty of scope to build on this (2%) and it also presents many interesting opportunities for media scholars. For example, given the scientific and professional suppression that IRMCIH scholars and LCHF proponents face, how many use pseudonymous accounts that these experts do not want to be linked back to their genuine identity? Chat feedback and polls linked to my virtual talk suggested that several do!
My talk encouraged low-carbohydrate clinicians to leverage an opportunity mindset in sharing their professional roles and interests via digital practices to raise their visibility and spotlight low-carb interventions’ successes. Ideally, clinicians should be supported with turning such successes into academic publications, to best support the precarious opportunities of IRMCIH scholars.
My talk encouraged low-carbohydrate clinicians to leverage an opportunity mindset in sharing their professional roles and interests via digital practices to raise their visibility and spotlight low-carb interventions’ successes. Ideally, clinicians should be supported with turning such successes into academic publications, to best support the precarious opportunities of IRMCIH scholars.
SLIDE 2
SECTION 1
SLIDE 3
These scholars are fighting for academic free speech in Higher Education (HE), where such speech is an important ideal but not a reality. Very few IRMCIH scholars enjoy opportunities to research and teach this emergent paradigm. Notably, there is very little debate in Higher Education concerning the dominant “cholesterol” model of chronic disease development (CMCDD) versus its IRMCIH rival. Skeptics of IRMCIH and low-carb diet interventions largely seem to ignore the role of scientific suppression in stifling IR scholarship. The most vocal skeptics do not seem to engage with the literature on the suppression of dissent or the sociology of scientific knowledge.
SLIDE 4
Rather than HE being an ideal place to lead scientific innovation, which pseudoskeptics typically present it as, it can be a CMCDD dictatorship. Here, academic mafias stifle dissenting scholars for daring to challenge an old model and high-carb, low-fate guidelines. IRMCIH proponents in HE Health Sciences become ostracised as “heretics”; just as other medical dissidents have been (Martin, 2004).
SLIDE 5
As Christopher Holmberg’s research has described, dissenting IR scholars in Sweden have turned to using digital platforms for contesting flawed nutritional guidelines; this raised political awareness around low carb diets, providing vital opportunities to contest the nutritional “authorities”. Notably, social media enabled low-carb experts to network their expertise and start conventional scientific research approaches that shift from the anecdotal. This does not seem to have happened in most other countries, though. Scientific suppression of the IRMCIH model in HE seems globally strong.
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An emergent form of such suppression sees advocates for IRMCIH being targeted by cyberbullies from academia. Professor Tim Noakes and my Heliyon publication flags the emergence of Online Academic Bullying (OAB), which is an emergent challenge from HE employees whose academic cyberbullies dissident experts must confront. OAB included the distinctive attacks academic cyberbullies used against an Emeritus Professor- sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402100431X. In addition to academics, the Online Academic Bullying concept also applies to health professionals and those outside academia who become recipients of intellectual and other forms of harassment by higher education’s cyberbullies. A few emergent cyber harassment strategies are shown in the article's graphic abstract.
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Cyberbullies in HE may also draw on many other forms of digital harassment for attacking others, as listed here.
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While there are university policies that protect the public from racist, sexual and homophobic harassment, few universities seem to have tackled intellectual cyber harassment from their employees under anti-bullying policies. At The Academic Parity movement's STEM the BULLYING conference, probably the most important insight for the OAB research project emerged from Professor Loraleigh Keashly's talk; 'Without anti-bullying policies, incidents in HE are seen in isolation as once-off, rare and framed as subjective. Thus, they are not related to systemic or structural problems.'
This links to Academic Free Speech, since academic mobs can target dissident scholars being secure in the knowledge that even if they are removed unfairly that investigations are unlikely to identify a systemic pattern. In particular, one across several scholars over many years that has constrained free speech and dissent by the recipients of bullying. Further, an anonymised PostDoc pointed out that there are 'academic mafias' in the Health Sciences. These ensure that any dissenting Principal Investigators(PIs)/young researchers become ostracised and lose funding. Dissident PIs are soon replaced with compliant PIs who can be relied upon to adhere to the orthodox view. Given this context, anti-bullying policies and reporting are vitally important- not just to protect scholars from harassment, but for supporting free speech itself in HE.
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To help reporting on the OAB phenomenon, Dr Patricia Harpur and I are currently researching an OAB reporting instrument (see https://bit.ly/3pnyE6w). We are approaching diverse IRMCIH scholars and LCHF activists to report their experiences with the form and to advise us on its strengths and weaknesses. Anonymised data from those who give us permission will be used to explore the varieties of OAB. In particular, we hope to explore differences by gender, nationality and profession. If you have experienced formal suppression and been targeted by academic cyberbullies and are interested in generating a report and even becoming a research participant, do email me on noakest@cput.ac.za for a Google Form invite and research consent form.
SLIDES 10 and 11
There is a paucity of research into how dissenting IRMCIH scientists and clinicians have used digital platforms for working around scientific suppression and censorship. In response, The Noakes Foundation supports the research theme ‘Academic Free Speech and Digital Voices’, which the OAB research project falls under. This theme largely aims to flag the importance of digital voice for IRMCIH scholars in Higher Education. By contrast, TNF’s theme ‘From clinical practice to published research’ seeks to leverage the freedom that clinicians’ enjoy in prescribing low-carb interventions. It links them to research and supporting clinicians with doing research and preparing manuscripts that can help address gaps in the IRMCIH academic literature.
SECTION 2
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SLIDES 13 & 14
By contrast to IR scholars, who may lose their livelihoods for teaching, researching and promoting the IRMCIH model, many clinicians enjoy the professional freedom to share LCHF science and prescribe low-carb interventions. Clinicians need support with contributing to both the online and academic IR issue arenas. It starts with participating in networks, such as the Nutrition Network’s, where clinicians learn not only what works… but what is not known. This connection may motivate clinicians to help protect their peers by becoming ‘upstanders’ against cyber harassment. Upstanders are former bystanders who have recognised patterns of bullying behaviour and choose to intervene in a bid to stop bullying (Padgett & Notar, 2013).
Clinicians may also be able share the latest research with their clients. For those who are not English-speaking, clinicians have a huge opportunity to spotlight academic literature for those whose first language is not English, or clients who prefer to follow users in their home languages. The OAB research project has seen examples of this with Spanish interlocutors of an IRMCIH scientific editorial on YouTube. With the right support, health experts with the time and interest to contribute to scholarship, may be able to help close IRMCIH research gaps by researching their patients’ outcomes.
SLIDE 15
In sharing their work online, health professionals must choose how they present themselves: genuine identities are a norm for health professionals, but a pseudonymous identity is appropriate where dangers exist from public visibility. Likewise, there are trade-offs in choosing to portray a strictly professional role online, versus one with a blend of interests that could be more relatable to general public. Creators must also consider their preference in mode of communication: the academic default is verbal, social media is multi-media. However, digital content creators may choose to foreground productions with spoken-word, imagery, slides, or even video and coding projects.
With such a broad range of possibilities, it is important that health professionals define their main aim (such as producing a unique portfolio of content). They may have the luxury of time to develop a well-planned strategy for achieving that aim that draws on the examples of Nutrition Network influencers… or content creators might focus on learning-by-doing, gonzo approach where the plan is to continually experiment for finding what works. For example, the research literature does not address which academic social media sites’ audiences will best-respond to manuscripts, so developing presences on the most popular ones, then sharing a manuscript draft via all, would seem the best way to learn firsthand. Over time, health professionals will develop an understanding of who they want to speak to and how to move content across platforms for reaching witnesses and interlocutors.
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SLIDE 17
For example, if a health professional is interested in pursuing civil debate, there are interesting options, such as: Reddit’s ‘change my view’, Debate.org and Letter Wiki. A particularly IRMCIH/LCHF-friendly space is subreddit/ketoscience, which has 175k members. These platforms are designed specifically for civil discussion, so are arguably better venues for agonistic exchange than social media networks. These have much greater reach, but are marred by underwhelming moderation and safety policies/procedures.
SLIDE 18
Media studies researchers who focus on participatory culture and Connected Learning have shown the importance of an opportunity-mindset in education for teenagers’ practices with digital affinity networks. The same likely applies for leaders in the LCHF and IRMCIH connective movements. If clinicians develop a positive mindset to the opportunities that online content development and sharing afford, they will be in a better position than those who have not developed or shared content, perhaps owing to a pessimistic focus on the potential harms of technology.
SECTION 3
SLIDE 19
For health professionals on Twitter, Professor Murphy’s chapter Twitter and Health flags this platform’s influence on opening-up discussions on health: patients are using Twitter in a form of ‘update culture’ to share intimate information about their health (similar to a public diary of their health, but now as one’s personal Twitter domain on one’s IR scores for followers’ support). Such patients can potentially become a source of expertise whilst contributing to a support community for patients’ confronting the same condition(s). Health professionals can use Twitter to understand their patients’ behaviours better and to pursue research that might otherwise be difficult to arrange patients’ feedback on successful alternative treatments from. Notably, Johns Hopkins university has used the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Untangled project with researchers to capture 40 reviews of alternative and off-label treatments. Its participants and other ALS patients are encouraged to ask questions on the state-of-the-art science (for example, by engaging with the ALS Twitter account). This is similar to IRMCIH experts being contacted around LCHF lifestyle queries. Such shifts for patients, clinicians and researchers reveal how Twitter facilitates the circumvention of traditional controls in healthcare and life-sciences industries. This facilitates a poly-vocal approach in healthcare and the life-sciences versus the traditional uni-directional prescriptions from "The Anointed" experts in the Cathedral combining HE and media.
SLIDE 20
‘Scientific Twitter’ has emerged a popular choice for IRMCIH scholars to update each other, reach out of to sympathetic digital publics in the broader LCHF space. It also provides a platform for public disagreements with CMCDD supporters. For LCHF proponents' examples, please view a Twitter list featuring updates from The Noakes Foundation and other #LCHF advocates at https://twitter.com/i/lists/974554836850032640.
As Professor Noakes describes, by following LCHF proponents on Twitter, he can more easily stay current with their research than via journal notifications. Twitter provides him with as much scholarly information each day as he ever received in the years of his career as a researcher and teacher. He also describes how it supports the sharing of a message with a large number of people beyond one’s own immediate social circle.
SLIDE 21
As a highly influential and accessible platform for news and networking, Twitter provides an interesting example concerning how different forms of capital can be developed via microblogging as social media. Firstly, Twitter is free and easy-to-use, meaning there is no direct cost in ECONOMIC capital to its users. Twitter users own the copyright of the CULTURAL capital (or tweet content) posted via its service. Highly engaged Twitter users can develop SOCIAL CAPITAL via high numbers of followers. Interestingly, the number of Twitter users with more than a million followers is rarer than the number of dollar billionaires! This spotlights what an exclusive achievement cultivating a large Twitter audience is.
Twitter handles with large followings place their producers in a very exclusive category of high influence microblogger. Twitter itself is an influential news platform which does shape traditional media and the public debates it features. While rare, scientific research articles that break on Twitter can become widely shared. Not only does this contribute to an article’s ALTmetrics but, quite likely, a research publication’s citation rate.
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SLIDE 23
Sadly, this is far from the norm, as Twitter was not designed to facilitate scholarly debate… Rather, Twitter facilitates status updates via concise tweets, rather than the lengthy interchange of in-depth content that a scholarly debate might cover. So, it is unsurprising that the multiple pitfalls shown here can stifle anyone’s attempts at engaging with a ‘public debate’ on Twitter:
- As an asynchronous platform, micro-bloggers can argue at times and in threads that are hard to respond to
- The attribution of user’s re-embedded tweets can be challenging
- A stalker can use the open network to call on hypercritical users to respond to tweets
- Since it is hard to vet responders, a lot of time can be wasted responding to trolls,
- such as sealions, who want to waste one’s time by posing questions, but not learning from responses.
- Twitter users can also abuse its reporting, muting and blocking features for hampering their opponents digital voices.
SLIDE 24
Outside the Twitter platform, there are many other influences that undermine legitimate online debate
These include:
- A gap in guidelines for how debaters might best conduct themselves on particular platforms;
- Legitimate online debate examples seem to be missing in the research literature;
- Online profiles can give a poor indication of who is a genuine debater… for example, the profiles of cyber harassers are not flagged. By contrast, accounts of legitimate, but dissenting scholars, may not be verified with Twitter’s blue tick for expressing "controversial" opinions;
- It may also be hard to distinguish upstanders from the cyberbullies they strongly chastise;
- Online debaters may not know how to use the full range of online modes well;
- For debaters, it can be unclear what the personal rewards and social impact of lengthy online debate is.
SLIDE 25
Overall, a polarized Twitter discussion may create great stats for its usage… and raise the visibility of its most frequent interlocutors… but Twitter’s limitations mean that high-quality debate is an unlikely outcome for participants!
SLIDE 26
Twitter’s algorithms reward controversy and highly emotive engagement with attention. So, if one wants to attract users to discussions, one must foreground what one is AGAINST. This is an effective strategy as it depositions one's opponents (who probably don’t want to be described as representing Fiat Science™!). It also serves as a lightning rod for witnesses and the critical interlocutors they might refer. Focusing on what one is FOR on the left is “nice”, but largely ineffective in terms of visibility. Speaking up in strong terms about what one is against will stoke more intense reactions and attention. Instead of hating the algorithm, savvy Twitter users must stoke IR and CMCDD controversies for lighting Twitter’s dumpster fires!
It’s also useful to be mindful of the limitations of what stats implicitly suggest that one focuses on. For example for scholars, ALTmetrics does not distinguish between sentiment in publications, which may all be negative as shown in the blue text. So, as a responsible online content contributor, one must be mindful of BOTH how one’s aims link to a preferred platform’s stats… and differs from them. For example, one may serve a niche LCHF interest that is unlikely to attract a high number of followers… nevertheless, its social impact in creating a support network for an under-served group of patients, whose examples come to be featured in the IRMCIH research literature, might be the best metric of success for one’s digital content contribution!
SLIDE 27
Thank you for reading this post. I’d also like to thank the OAB Research team for their contribution to the research insights shared here.
SLIDE 28
RELATED RESOURCES
February 2021's OAB research project update is on ResearchGate under News on https://www.researchgate.net/project/Online-academic-bullying.There’s more background on the OAB project in my introductory talk at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_pGqxcrmc.
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