DL 288

Dark Patterns

Published: May 1, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 288. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Facebook Knew About Stop the Steal: Internal report shows movement grew as network while enforcement was piecemeal—treating it as network revealed coordination
FTC Tackles Dark Patterns: Workshop examines how user interfaces "obscure, subvert, or impair consumer autonomy, decision-making, or choice"
AI and Children's Rights: Technology could help children thrive online but may hurt a generation growing up "shared" in unprecedented ways
American-Style Free Speech Is Dead on Platforms: Evelyn Douek argues platforms now balance societal interests rather than claiming absolutism
Tools Shape Us: The concern isn't that educational technologies become self-aware—it's that humanity becomes less aware

Welcome back friends. Thank you to all who regularly (or irregularly) reach out and say hey each week. I value learning how you're doing in your worlds.

This week I published the following:

Healthy Avatars and Sick People - Challenges of critical digital literacies in health care.
Digitally Literate English Language Learners - A discussion about what is "hot or not" in education led me to unpack thinking about multilingual learners.
We Shape Our Tools and Then Our Tools Shape Us - The concern isn't that educational technologies become self-aware. Much more concerning is that humanity becomes less aware, less cognizant, less thoughtful, even possibly, less human.
Carriage House Flooring - Documenting work on our new home.

📺 Watch

Old Shovel: Bike Restoration ASMR

As the kids get older, we're able to head out more and go on adventures. What once was a battle to take a walk around the block might soon lead to a family bike ride.

I've been in the market for a mountain bike to rebuild with the kids. The YouTube algorithms brought me the oldshovel channel—part ASMR, part bike repair. It was just the therapy I needed this week.

📚 Read

Facebook Knows It Was Used to Help Incite the Capitol Insurrection

TLDR of the internal report:

Stop the Steal (StS) grew rapidly after the election as a movement, but Facebook enforcement was piecemeal
Treating StS as a network allowed Facebook to understand coordination and how harm persisted at the network level—this harm was more than the sum of its parts
Examining the network allowed Facebook to observe the growth of Patriot Party
Facebook learned a lot and is building tools and protocols as part of the Disaggregating Networks taskforce

The question remains: why did it take an insurrection to prompt this analysis?

Taking Action on Dark Patterns

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted a workshop on "dark patterns."

The concept, coined by user experience designer Harry Brignull in 2010, describes "deceptive user interfaces."

The FTC seeks to "explore the ways in which user interfaces can have the effect, intentionally or unintentionally, of obscuring, subverting, or impairing consumer autonomy, decision-making, or choice."

This Twitter thread by Yael Eisenstat is an excellent review of questions we should be asking. For more on dark patterns, see this video from The Nerdwriter.

Ethical AI? Children's Rights and Autonomy in Digital Spaces

Artificial Intelligence has potential to help children thrive online. AI is being used to track down child predators, help eliminate bias in child welfare cases, and predict which schoolchildren need extra assistance.

But as an exponentially growing field, this technology—if not used ethically and thoughtfully—might hurt a generation of children growing up "shared" in ways adults could never have dreamed when they came of age even a decade ago.

Major platforms' policies aren't actually inspired by the First Amendment. evelyn douek says that's a good thing.

In a new article in Columbia Law Review, she argues the pandemic exposed the hollowness of platforms' claims to American-style free speech absolutism.

"The First Amendment–inflected approach to online speech governance that dominated the early internet no longer holds. Instead, platforms are now firmly in the business of balancing societal interests."

How to Be an Antiracist Supervisor

What would we call ourselves if we were not using terms rooted in oppression? What would we do differently?

What would it be like to center health and wellness in our approach to our work with our teams?

🔨 Do

GyShiDo: The Art of Getting Things Done

Thankful to Doug Belshaw for sending this along:

Relentless focus
Single task
Boring consistency
No bullshit
No meetings
Follow up
Don't be an asshole

Simple principles. Hard to follow. Worth trying.

🤔 Consider

The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand.

Dan Kaminsky

Kaminsky's observation about the internet's incomprehensibility connects to this issue's threads—dark patterns designed to manipulate, platforms that can't control the networks they enabled, and AI shaping children in ways we don't fully grasp. We built something we don't understand, and it's shaping us back.

Bonus: Next on the menu...foolproof cacio e pepe.

Previous: DL 287 • Next: DL 289 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts:

Media Literacy — Dark patterns, Stop the Steal network analysis, platform speech
Privacy Rights — FTC workshop, children's AI rights, deceptive interfaces
Pedagogy — Antiracist supervision, AI in education, tools shaping us
Civic Engagement — Capitol insurrection, platform accountability
Philosophy — Kaminsky on internet incomprehensibility, GyShiDo principles