Invisible Rulers

51 Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/channel/jawboning.

52 Will Oremus with David DiMolfetta, “Disinfo Researchers Are Under Pressure from the Right. They’re Starting to Push Back,” Washington Post, August 3, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/03/disinfo-researchers-are-under-pressure-right-theyre-starting-push-back.

53 Mike Masnick, “5th Circuit Cleans Up District Court’s Silly Jawboning Ruling About the Biden Admin, Trims It Down to More Accurately Reflect the 1st Amendment,” Techdirt, September 11, 2023, https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/11/5th-circuit-cleans-up-district-courts-silly-jawboning-ruling-about-the-biden-admin-trims-it-down-to-more-accurately-reflect-the-1st-amendment.

54 Stanford University filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, as we had with the Fifth Circuit, fact-checking the claims about us and our work. That can be found at http://www.supremecourt.gov /DocketPDF/23/23-411/294255/20231226143930837_Murthy%20v.%20Missouri%20--%20SCOTUS%20Amicus%20FINAL.pdf.

55 Yoel Roth, “Getting the Facts Straight: Some Observations on the Fifth Circuit Ruling in Missouri v. Biden,” Jawboning (blog), Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, September 27, 2023, https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/getting-the-facts-straight-some-observations-on-the-fifth-circuit-ruling-in-missouri-v-biden-1.

56 State of Missouri, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden Jr., et al., 3:22-CV-01213 (W.D. La. Jul. 4, 2023), https://ago.mo.gov/wp-content/uploads/missouri-v-biden-ruling.pdf.

57 Robby Soave, “Inside the Facebook Files: Emails Reveal the CDC’s Role in Silencing COVID-19 Dissent,” Reason, January 19, 2023, https://reason.com/2023/01/19/facebook-files-emails-cdc-covid-vaccines-censorship.

58 For coverage of the controversy, see David Ingram, “Elon Musk’s Twitter Faces Censorship Allegations in India Free Speech Battle,” NBC News, January 25, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/modi-twitter-bbc-musk-elon-documentary-watch-video-rcna67497. Also see Lumen’s post about Twitter ceasing contributions: Lumen (@lumendatabase), “As of April 15th, 2023, Twitter has not submitted copies of any of the takedown notices it receives to Lumen…” Twitter, April 27, 2023, 4:25 p.m., https://twitter.com/lumendatabase/status/1651578251599310849.

59 Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971).

60 Renée DiResta, “How Online Mobs Act like Flocks of Birds,” NOEMA, November 3, 2022, https://www.noemamag.com/how-online-mobs-act-like-flocks-of-birds.

61 Kaitlyn Tiffany, “Very, Very Few People Are Falling Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2023, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/youtube-rabbit-holes-american-politics/675186.

62 Sandra González-Bailón et al., “Asymmetric Ideological Segregation in Exposure to Political News on Facebook,” Science 381, no. 6656 (July 2023): 392–398, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ade7138.

63 Kai Kupferschmidt, “Does Social Media Polarize Voters? Unprecedented Experiments on Facebook Users Reveal Surprises,” Science, July 27, 2023, https://www.science.org/content/article/does-social-media-polarize-voters-unprecedented-experiments-facebook-users-reveal; Brendan Nyhan et al., “Like-Minded Sources on Facebook Are Prevalent but Not Polarizing,” Nature 620 (July 2023): 137–144, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06795-x.

64 Justin Hendrix and Paul M. Barrett, “The Meta Studies: Nuanced Findings, Corporate Spin, and Media Oversimplification,” Tech Policy Press, August 2, 2023, https://www.techpolicy.press/the-meta-studies-nuanced-findings-corporate-spin-and-media-oversimplification.

65 Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn, “Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness Across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance,” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, October 26, 2023, https://knightcolumbia.org/content/bridging-systems.

66 Tom Cunningham, “Ranking by Engagement,” Tom Cunningham, May 8, 2023, https://tecunningham.github.io/posts/2023-04-28-ranking-by-engagement.html; “Ranking by Engagement,” Integrity Institute, May 8, 2023, https://integrityinstitute.org/blog/ranking-by-engagement.

67 Jonathan Stray, “Designing Recommender Systems to Depolarize,” First Monday 27, no. 5 (2022), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i5.12604.

68 For example, studies suggest that platforms play a role in driving people to untrustworthy websites and that Facebook played a smaller role in 2020 than in 2016. Ryan C. Moore, Ross Dahlke, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Exposure to Untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 US Election,” Nature Human Behaviour 7 (2023): 1096–1105, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01564-2.