Information Literacy

Open Measures found that users who posted about Cracker Barrel on alt-platforms frequently tied criticism about its new logo to anti-diversity narratives promoted by conservative political figures in recent years. These findings suggest that anti-diversity narratives in conservative media played a significant role in generating outrage over the restaurant’s updated logo design.

These cases show a consistent pattern: everyday brand decisions are being reframed into political flashpoints. The difference now is that AI-driven bots can amplify these narratives at scale, making them appear larger and more urgent than they truly are.

Open Measures’ analysis affirmed prior reporting that online accusations of racism levied at American Eagle’s “great jeans” pun had been fringe until conservative figures amplified them in an attempt to disparage their political enemies. These narratives were amplified more frequently and significantly by users on predominantly conservative alt-platforms than by users elsewhere.

Taken together, our analysis suggests that a majority of the vitriol surrounding the ad campaign centered not on the need to criticize the content of the ad itself, but to use the ad as a vehicle to criticize perceived political opponents.

Claims that the backlash surrounding American Eagle’s “great jeans” ad campaign was sparked by liberals who believed the ads contained racist undertones have been severely overstated by political and news media personalities. Though liberal criticism of American Eagle’s “great jeans” ads did increase over time, it didn’t rise until prominent conservative figures attacked liberals for their supposed outrage.

Conclusion

The general process of attacks on the cognitive domain of individuals is illustrated below. These attacks not only feed manipulated disinformation and false information into direct sensory inputs such as sight and hearing but also act through narratives (stories) to affect working memory based on an individual’s memories. Through cognitive filters that select and discard information, they influence the interpretation of reality (internal representation) produced within the individual’s cognitive domain. As a result, they attempt to influence the individual’s emotions and behavior and elicit the outcome which is the given objective of the attack.[14]

The Cognitive Domain as the Sixth Battlefield

‘World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.’

As scholars, our job is to call attention to underappreciated threats and to provide the knowledge base for informed decision-making.

Worldwide, the unprecedented restructuring of human communication is having an enormous impact on issues of social choice, often to our detriment

current technologies have been developed and deployed largely for the orthogonal purpose of keeping people engaged online. We cannot expect that an information ecology organized around ad sales will promote sustainability, equity, or global health. In the face of such impediments to rational democratic action, how can we hope to overcome threats such as global warming, habitat destruction, mass extinction, war, food security, and pandemic disease? We call for a concerted transdisciplinary response, analogous to other crisis disciplines such as conservation ecology and climate science.

The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.

We need to move fast and fix things.

disinformation, misinformation, and malign influence (DMMI).

1) research into individual and group vulnerabilities and building resilience to DMMI, 2) long-term research into the effectiveness of media literacy/critical thinking interventions, 3) research into the effectiveness of interventions on the general public, 4) research on emerging threats, including actors and technologies, and 5) interdisciplinary research to understand why people believe and spread DMMI.

the problems of DMMI are common in the literature but policy makers, platforms, and funding institutions need to be able to make decisions now, not only about which evidence-based interventions to prioritize but about what research to prioritize

when asked which interventions should be prioritized over the next five years, experts believed that the top priority should be a more robust regulatory framework for social media companies to be overseen and enforced by a dedicated standards body. This was followed by improving media and information literacy (including critical thinking) and by raising awareness about the dangers of DMMI (especially in schools).

more robust regulatory framework for social media companies to be overseen and enforced by a dedicated standards body

While most people across the political spectrum believe that digital disinformation is a problem, they also believe that they would personally not fall victim to it - despite studies proving otherwise.

emoving this human feedback loop by having no place for things like comment sections or public forum posts represents a sea change in the trajectory of our online landscape.

All of the generative AI products on offer today either sharply reduce or entirely remove the human feedback loop, to the detriment of the entire information ecosystem.

Since that sharply impacts the type of information that generative AI will produce, it is important - but currently impossible - to practise “trust but verify” with generative AI at scale.