E-Pluribus | July 25, 2023
Educating the public against disinformation; two universities remain undiscouraged by DEI failures; and courageous women working to expose the Taliban.
A round-up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Yasmin Green: Fake News Meets Artificial Intelligence
Those interested in fighting misinformation and disinformation are utilizing new ideas to aid their cause. At The Dispatch, Yasmin Green, the CEO of Google’s Jigsaw, details some of the efforts that her company and others are using to better prepare consumers of media to recognize the signs of manipulation before false information has a chance to get a foothold.
For much of the 20th and early 21st centuries disinformation was primarily a weapon wielded by the state, either against a rival country or its own population. The Soviet Union, for example, used disinformation as a potent political weapon during the Cold War. Just as the advent of the internet transformed the economics of disinformation, the dawning era of generative AI promises to reshape this ecosystem again. It will require applying lessons of the recent past urgently and at scale to redress the attendant risks.
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The good news is that the arrival of this new generation of generative AI technologies is driving a wave of investment and the formation of new partnerships across industry and civil society to address the looming risks. For example, watermarking AI-generated content and uniquely verifying individuals from around the world have been floated as potential approaches to limit the use of machine generated content for manipulation. While these proposals hold promise, even under the best of circumstances, it’s likely that some amount of convincingly human but machine generated content will get through our defenses. In the absence of comprehensive technical protections, it is essential for governments, social media platforms, researchers and civil society to better equip people with the capacity to identify for themselves content intended to manipulate them.
For the past five years, in partnership with universities in the U.S. and Europe, we at Jigsaw have researched a technique called “prebunking.” Building on the work of social psychologist William McGuire in the 1960s, prebunking aims to help people recognize and refute manipulative content before they encounter misleading claims. Prebunking requires a simple formula: a warning about future manipulation attempts; a microdose of the manipulation; and a thorough explanation of how that manipulation strategy works. Our applied research on the topic suggests that this simple formulation could scale online: 73 percent of individuals who watched a prebunking video were more likely to consistently spot misleading claims online and prebunking videos running as YouTube ads boosted recognition of manipulation techniques by 5 percent.
Read it all.
Scott Yenor: Inclusion Bowl
If there was a DEI equivalent to college football’s bowl games, Scott Yenor at City Journal writes that Auburn and the University of Alabama would be checking their mailboxes in vain for invitations. Despite leaning into the diversity, equity, and inclusion culture, these universities have little to show for their efforts.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion campus regimes grow in unexpected places. Both the University of Alabama and Auburn University—schools popularly associated with traditional cultural values—have been slowly building DEI infrastructures for nearly a decade (see my recent report). Both universities emphasize the recruitment of students, faculty, and staff, with race as a central consideration. If the overt goal of these initiatives has been to boost minority enrollment, the programs have been failures: each university actually has fewer black students on campus than it did before instituting the programs. Instead, the schools have created an ideological and administrative superstructure that infuses DEI into every aspect of university life.
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Yet all these efforts have coincided with declines in the percentages of black students at Alabama. In 2011, 12.4 percent of Alabama students were black, 78.1 percent were white, and 2.5 percent were Hispanic. In 2016, 10.8 percent were black, 76.5 percent were white, and 4.2 percent were Hispanic. In 2021, the last year with good numbers, those percentages were 11.2, 74.3, and 5.3.
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Auburn deems its programs successful, though they also coincide with decreases in minority presence on campus. As DEI efforts have intensified, the percentage of black students at Auburn has declined, as have the absolute numbers of blacks at Auburn. The percentage of black students has shrunk from a high point of 8.2 percent in 2006 to under 5 percent in 2022.
Such incongruence between promise and result is common in DEI programs. At Texas A&M, efforts to encourage a more inclusive and welcoming culture have soured whites, blacks, and Hispanics on being Aggies. At the University of Texas, efforts to raise the share of minority faculty have coincided with declines in the number of minority faculty. At Alabama and Auburn, initiatives to boost the number of blacks have coincided with actual declines in the number of blacks. Yet no one calls such DEI efforts failures. In fact, no administrators question the efficacy of such programs, even when the programs produce the opposite of the promised results.
Read it all here.
Olivia Cuthbert: Slipping Past Taliban Censors
Pluribus largely focuses on illiberal trends in the United States and other Western societies, but given that the U.S. arguably shares some culpability in the current situation in Afghanistan, here’s Olivia Cuthbert writing at Persuasion about what journalists, particularly female journalists, in that country now face. These courageous women (and men) should be recognized for the dangerous but important work they are doing that will hopefully someday see Afghanistan on the path to liberty for all its citizens.
When the Taliban first seized power in 2021, there was some suggestion that they would stand by promises to respect human rights, including access to education for women and girls. That hope quickly drained away as they barred teenage girls from school and rolled back the rights of women with strict limits on dress and conduct, compelling them to stay at home and limit their presence in public life.
Meanwhile, reports of torture, disappearances, public floggings and executions revealed by local reporters and rights groups show how quickly Afghanistan has reverted to the darkest days of the first Taliban regime in the 1990s. A culture of fear prevents many from speaking out about family members who have been tortured or murdered.
Journalists like Sana and Tamana* continue to uncover the truth at great personal risk. But they know that at any time, they might be discovered. “The Taliban sees reporters as spies. If they find us reporting, especially for a foreign media agency, it would put our lives in danger,” Tamana explains. “At the very least, they would stop our work and put us in prison.” Reporting in the streets, she is careful to keep a low profile. “Even holding a phone makes us suspicious,” she says.
Tamana works for an organization called Radio for Peace International, which is producing a series on the stories of Afghan women. The program’s coordinator, Jamila Karimi, was forced to flee Afghanistan shortly before the Taliban seized power. Now she is helping female reporters to continue their work on the ground because she sees it as one of Afghanistan’s last hopes. “Saving gender journalism means saving a diverse society and ensuring pluralism in the country,” she says.
It’s not just the security situation and Taliban censorship that are making life difficult for journalists in Afghanistan. The country’s economy is close to collapse, starved of its lifeline from international aid programs. A UN report published in April this year revealed that nearly 34 million Afghans out of a population of 40 million are now living in poverty, amid soaring food prices and high unemployment.
For most Afghan reporters operating in secret, overseas funding is the only means of sustaining their work. Using a grant, Hoor Sabah* launched her online magazine Zane Rooz in November last year to tell the stories of Afghan women. “We are shedding light on the horrible atrocities the Taliban and their people are committing. Otherwise, people will become accustomed to what they are seeing and start to accept this new reality,” the 26-year-old explains.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter
Yes, you read that right, we’re sticking with “Around Twitter.” The long-term impact of Elon Musk’s rebranding have yet to be seen, but early reviews are less than glowing:
Here’s a short thread from Goucher College Associate Professor Dr. Julie Chernov on the impact of administrative bloat on the cost of higher education:
And finally, yesterday’s round up included a piece on California Community Colleges and its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility standards. Here’s how the CCC defines “merit”: