#53: Russia's invasion of Ukraine on social media

💎 Word gems

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been disheartening and scary to watch, even from afar. While it’s not the first conflict to be broadcast on the internet, the scale it has consumed my social feeds feels unlike anything I’ve seen before.

These articles all share a unique analysis on how the tech platforms we use are being influenced by, and influencing, the invasion of Ukraine.

1/ The extremes of context collapse:

Everything will be all the time and everywhere (Garbage Day / Ryan Broderick)

Memes are colliding with conspiracy theories and fake war footage posted by former meme accounts. Programmatic ads are appearing next to gruesome photos of the dead or Russian propaganda. Our current information landscape was created by American companies and was meant to algorithmically shield its users and, more importantly, brands in walled gardens, safe from the realities of proxy wars fought in far-off places, not a land war in Europe. Bloated and broken capitalist social media platforms run by Silicon Valley monopolies, creaking with age at this point, now have to respond to what could be the first battles of a much bigger war. And, if the last 24 hours are any indication, they are simply not up to the task.

2/ Misinformation in real-time:

Social media fuels new type of ‘fog of war’ in Ukraine conflict (The Washington Post / Craig Timberg & Drew Harwell)

The torrent of social media posts during Thursday’s attack on Ukraine harked back to the first live TV broadcasts of the Persian Gulf War, when visceral video of missile strikes helped usher in a new era of military reporting — and brought a foreign war into American living rooms.

But the modern combination of smartphones, social media and high-speed data links now are providing images that are almost certainly faster, more visual and more voluminous than in any previous major military conflict.

They’ve also brought, experts say, new efforts to deceive, and the new conflict is unfolding alongside an aggressive and widely distributed campaign of disinformation that makes it hard for crowdsourcing to establish facts on the ground.

3/ How social media does provide some positives:

The internet is a force multiplier for Ukraine (Platformer / Casey Newton)

Social networks have made this war feel like something that average people around the world can participate in.

When the (incredible, in all senses of the word) Twitter account of the government of Ukraine tweeted asking for donations in cryptocurrencies, people contributed $9.9 million in two days. (It’s now above $20 million.) When Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation announced the creation of a volunteer “IT army” for cyber defense and attacks, 175,000 people joined the Telegram channel. Since then, they’ve conducted distributed denial-of-service attacks against more than 25 Russian websites, including banks and government websites.

And a few other interesting things I’ve read this week:

Against Access (McSweeney’s / John Lee Clark)

Clark, who is deafblind, shares an excellent analysis on the limits of access alone in accessibility.

When the word access comes up, it usually refers to tools or avenues that complement the sensory experience people already enjoy. Captions for movies, TV shows, and videos are excellent examples. They are said to provide access for Deaf people, who, I need to stress, already have a relationship with the images flitting across the screen. When blind people ask for audio descriptions, this accommodation merely supplements what they already hear. For example, the audio description might helpfully note that “the King is waving his sword, his cloak billowing in the wind” when a king shouts, “Follow me, ye good knights!” But then there are the efforts to feed captions into Braille displays so DeafBlind people can have “access” to radio, TV, and film. This isn’t complementary access. It’s a replica, divorced entirely from the original. This is how we frequently find accessibility features—as sorry excuses for what occasioned them in the first place. Access itself is too often all we have, a dead end, leading nowhere: captions without images, lyrics without music, raised lines without color, labels without objects, descriptions without anchors.

What makes writing more readable? (The Pudding / Rebecca Monteleone, Jamie Brew & Michelle McGhee)

An interactive essay on readability which gives you the ability to switch to a plain language mode.

Readability scores just give us an “estimate” about how hard something is to read. That means the scores are not perfect. But they give us a good idea about how hard it might be for different groups of people to read something.

But the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality said, “these formulas are often interpreted and used in ways that go well beyond what they measure.” This quote means people use these scores in ways they were not made to be used.

💩 Cool shit

Digital Public Goods Registry - A list of open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that aim to do no harm and protect our privacy.

DVD Menus - A library of DVD movie menus, including gems like the one for Memento.

Population around a point - Select a radius and click anywhere on a map to see how many people live there.

Dial Up Sound - If you’re in need of some internet nostalgia.

Brainstream - An interactive animated film where you and other participants massage someone’s brain activity.

Emojimix - A slot-machine interface that lets you mix emojis together.

Semantle - Tired of Wordle? See how semantically close your guesses are to the daily word.

Batname - Enter a name and generate a logo in the font style of The Batman.

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