The disinformation landscape and the lockdown of social platforms

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue considers how independent research on mis/disinformation campaigns can be conducted in a corporate environment hostile to academic research. We provide an overview of the disinformation landscape in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and social platforms’ decision to enforce access lockdowns and the throttling of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for data collection. We argue that the governance shift from user communities to social media algorithms, along with social platforms’ intensive emphasis on generating revenue from user data, has eroded the mutual trust of networked publics and opened the way for dis/misinformation campaigns. We discuss the importance of open, public APIs for academic research as well as the unique challenges of collecting social media data to study highly ephemeral mis/disinformation campaigns. The introduction concludes with an assessment of the growing data access gap that not only hinders research of public interest, but that may also preclude researchers from identifying meaningful research questions as activity on social platforms becomes increasingly more inscrutable and unobservable.

KEYWORDS:

• Disinformation
• misinformation
• social media platforms
• Application Programming Interface
• community

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Shawn Walker is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington Information School. He is a founding member of the Social Media (SoMe) Lab and a member of the DataLab at the University of Washington [email: [email protected]].

Dan Mercea is Reader in the Department of Sociology at City, University of London. He is the author of Civic Participation in Contentious Politics: The Digital Foreshadowing of Protest.

Marco Bastos is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Department of Sociology at City, University of London and an affiliate of Duke University’s Network Analysis Center.

ORCID

Shawn Walker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7052-5705

Dan Mercea http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3762-2404

Marco Bastos http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0480-1078

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

S.W. acknowledges financial support from the Arizona State University to host ‘Locked out of Social Platforms: An iCS Symposium on Challenges to Studying Disinformation’. D.M. and M.B acknowledge financial support from City, University of London.