Madeleine Daepp

Are you comfortable being recorded?

Great. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much. We really appreciate this, and I think we're coming back with some more context and questions. Feel free also to make it more of a conversation.

I think maybe the question that I really wanted to ask you was: you use a lot of metaphors in your work. Something that I've been thinking about a lot as we embark on this project is how metaphors can help us see things, but they can also prevent us from seeing things.

A lot of the metaphors that I've seen in concerns about information integrity have been cyber warfare metaphors, military metaphors, combatting...

Yes. And you really draw from public health frameworks. I'm curious if you could walk us through that choice and what you see as the value, as well as other metaphors, other ways of thinking that you suggest we look into.

But with a virus, there's no such thing as a good virus.

Okay.

Okay, let me give you where I'm trying to go with that.

Well, it's important when you use metaphors, the deeper you understand the metaphor, the more you can play with it. What I'm thinking about is if you work in a social movement space or you work in organizing, right?

Community organizing, often you're trying to get what you see as positive messages to spread. And so sometimes when I look at the bridging algorithm space, or when I look at some of these efforts to make our digital conversation spaces more robust to the spread of problematic messages, I really worry about the ability of community organizers and social movements to do that work.

I think I worry about it because sometimes those messages come from very small groups, right? And groups that are very marginalized. And so whenever you really foster bridging, you can almost end up with the most milquetoast position.

Yeah. So it's hard to fundamentally shift a conversation or to throw a really wild new idea into information.

And you think that's competencies like social competencies and interpersonal competencies, digital affordances, and digital competencies.

Do you have any online spaces that you really like?

Are there some that you think do this well?

Are you still contributing on GitHub?

Love the good green streak on GitHub. Wow.

I wonder if there are other active ministers with that kind of green streak on GitHub. So just one more question about GitHub and then I know Robert has 27 questions. Our colleague Denae Ford worked really hard on some really cool stuff on GitHub around a community maintainer toolkit. Recognizing that open source is wonderful in theory, in practice, you can be trapped forever in maintenance. And what it means to support people in maintenance, and what it means to bring in new people and give them things like green streaks for community building, might be kind of a challenge.

And I'm just curious. Yeah, because we're absolutely going to go home and chat with Denae and run these ideas by her, I'm curious if you've noticed that, if you have any thoughts in that space that we could share back.

You know the phrase "Wikipedia without Wikipedians doesn't work"?

So it's almost like social norms.

Yeah, yeah. I have many more questions, but I feel like we should probably focus in a little bit. Robert, do you want to ask yours?

Yes.

But if somebody in the media... You're suggesting like an information quarantine policy almost, right?

But if there's cooperation, yeah.

So, yes, okay. So when somebody gets it, like, I got an eSIM at the airport, and when you do that, you check their identity, you make sure that they are a resident or qualified. And then is that also unique? Each person only gets one.

Okay. And so that gives you this robust entry point to the information system and a way of checking.

Yeah.

And then are there privacy concerns with that? Do you then end up with every...

The COVID status?

Yeah.

Did you have enough participation even though it was an opt-in system?

It's surprising to me, given the behavioral psychology evidence, that opt-in versus opt-out are fundamentally different thresholds. Do you have any sense of why participation was so high?

Wow.

So when you have the system set up and you have this quite robust use of SMS as a privacy-protecting way to verify that somebody is a resident or a citizen, why don't the platforms use that?

So, you know, something that I've heard that I haven't verified is that, for example, with the Spamouflage case, right, when many accounts were taken off of the different platforms, there were not Spamouflage actors on PTT. I'm curious if you think that was a factor.

So they know, the freezing, you can now make new accounts on PTT again, right?

So the freezing period, that was sort of a period where they were trying to really clean up their ecosystem before. That's really helpful.

But Facebook doesn't have... I mean, you can have a two-factor authentication, but there's not like a little flag that says, this person has a Taiwanese phone, right? There's not...

Okay, that's very interesting.

We don't have this in the United States. It's quite easy to get a SIM card in the United States. Am I wrong?

Yeah. I don't think you have to register or prove residency or show a passport. Yeah.

I'm just wondering if this is right. Like, we've been studying misinformation and the role of generative AI in disinformation, and so far most people are like, haven't really seen much.

There are issues here, there is a lot going on, but this sort of massive increase in scale, massive change in quality. Most of the organizations that we're talking with say, I'm seeing a few here and there, but nothing massive. And I'm curious if this is the bottleneck.

When you get a credit card number, then there's...

Social security number.

Yeah, I mean, the problem is, right, we have like a non-negligible fraction that is not banked. We have an unbanked population.

And we don't want to disenfranchise them.

Okay, so that's a key difference between using credit cards versus SIM cards in a context where bandwidth is considered a human right and you've made active efforts to spread, is this strong equity concern that the credit card approach...

Yeah.