Introducing Footnotes: A place for ideas
First Draft director and co-founder, Claire Wardle, introduces our revamped Medium publication as the organisation turns five years old.
In the summer of 2015, First Draft published its first Medium post. The website came slightly later, and with it the flurry of articles, guides, videos, resources, studies, courses and quizzes that have come to define the organisation’s work at the forefront of understanding information disorder.
On the one hand, the topics that inspired the creation of the First Draft coalition five years ago are as relevant as ever. The three tags accompanying that first post are ‘verification,’ ‘UGC’ and ‘eyewitness media.’ There is no doubt that eyewitness footage continues to shape history, as the devastating video of George Floyd’s death demonstrated. And as the global protests continue, videos and images swirl incessantly with associated claims and counter-claims, requiring journalists to apply strict verification protocols in order to document what was happening on the ground.
What’s new are the tactics of media manipulation, the sheer volume of lies being pushed so brazenly by official sources, and the scale of our polluted information environment. 2015 seems quaint in comparison. The terms misinformation, disinformation and coordinated inauthentic activity all feel thoroughly inadequate to describe this moment. And similar patterns are being seen around the world, from expected places such as Brazil, the Philippines and India, as well as countries where the tactics feel less familiar — the UK, France, Australia and Canada, for example.
If the agents of disinformation borrow tactics and techniques from each other, which they do, then so must we.
It’s been three years since I created the seven types of m/disinformation and spent a summer with Hossein Derakhshan writing the report “Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy making.” The world looks very different now; the frameworks we’re using, even the terminology and research we’re drawing from, all feel hopelessly out of date. None of us is able to keep up with the speed at which things are moving.
In June, a new piece of research was published that analyzed the impact of the “10 Tips on how to Spot False News” that Facebook rolled out in newsfeeds across 14 countries in April 2017. I’m so glad we have some empirical measure of the impact of that initiative, but it’s over three years after the fact. Do we have to wait until 2023 to find out the impact of Twitter’s new manipulated media labels?
We really hope you will join the growing community of people thinking deeply about these issues so the early ideas published here can be taken apart and made even stronger
The Harvard Misinformation Review, which I helped set up, is doing an amazing job of speeding up the process of getting peer-reviewed research out much more quickly. It’s been an incredible addition to this emerging field.
And in that same vein, we decided that we wanted to create a space for our own staff and guest contributors to test out some early thinking and ideas. So we’ve decided to create Footnotes, a dedicated online space for people to publish new ideas, preliminary research findings, and innovative methodologies. To open up some of our own inspirations and processes to the wider community in the hope that they can be picked apart and borrowed from, driving the conversation ever forwards. If the agents of disinformation borrow tactics and techniques from each other, which they do, then so must we.
We want to encourage people to share early ideas so there is an opportunity to pull them apart and build on them. We hope it might be a place to work through research questions and design, before the process of starting to collect and analyze data. We want it to be a place to suggest, critique and compare notes on ideas and concepts.
We hope the blog will be useful for an expert audience including researchers, disinformation beat reporters, fact checkers and policy makers. Initially we aim to publish once per month, but maybe that will increase with guest contributors.
Our first piece will be out later this week, in which our head of policy and impact, Tommy Shane, shares some early thinking about how different ways of knowing — such as the differences between searching for ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ — may be fuelling misinformation online.
We hope Footnotes is useful, and we really hope you will join the growing community of people thinking deeply about these issues so the early ideas published here can be taken apart and made even stronger.
