May 2026 - Test-list - communitydata.science

FOSSY 2026: Call for Proposals!
by Community Data Science Collective 20 May '26

20 May '26

Post : FOSSY 2026: Call for Proposals! URL : https://blog.communitydata.science/fossy-2026-call-for-proposals/ Posted : May 20, 2026 at 13:59 Author : madisondeyo Categories : Uncategorized The Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference ( https://2026.fossy.ca/ ) (FOSSY) is back for the fourth year in a row, and we'll be running the Science of Community track, inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues ( https://wiki.communitydata.science/Dialogues ) , bringing together practitioners and researchers to talk about scholarly work that's relevant to the efforts of practitioners. https://blog.communitydata.science/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/05/Scree… Does your work touch open source, communities, technology, or cooperation? Do you want to help bridge the gaps between research and practice? Join our track! The call for proposals ( https://2026.fossy.ca/call-for-proposals/ ) is open and we're looking for presenters interested in speaking to FOSS practitioners, developers, community organizers, contributors, and people into and curious about FOSS. As researchers, we benefit so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations will focus on how that work relates to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners. FOSSY is a low-stress opportunity to talk to people who your work can benefit. For topics, consider presenting implications from past papers, synthesizing work from your field overall, or floating ideas and problems (lightning talks! long talks! short talks!). A full track description and answers to common questions is available on our wiki ( https://wiki.communitydata.science/FOSSY_(2025) ) . ( https://wiki.communitydata.science/FOSSY_(2025) ) The CFP deadline is May 22nd and uses this form ( https://2026.fossy.ca/call-for-proposals/ ) . We can't wait for you to join us! Add a comment to this post: https://blog.communitydata.science/fossy-2026-call-for-proposals/#respond -- Manage Subscriptions https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email… Unsubscribe: https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email…

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Political discussion in non-political online communities is more likely to see policy opinion expression
by Community Data Science Collective 19 May '26

19 May '26

Post : Political discussion in non-political online communities is more likely to see policy opinion expression URL : https://blog.communitydata.science/political-discussion-in-non-political-on… Posted : May 19, 2026 at 07:37 Author : Yibin Fan Categories : Uncategorized It seems natural to think that online political discussion happens in political spaces: comment sections under news articles, campaign pages, partisan forums, or video-sharing communities built around elections and public affairs. But anyone who spends time online knows that politics does not stay neatly contained in those spaces. It shows up in local forums, hobby groups, gaming communities, entertainment discussions, and personal social media feeds. A conversation that begins with everyday life can suddenly become a debate about policy, rights, or government. Communication scholars call this incidental political discussion: political talk that emerges in spaces not primarily organized around politics. Our research team were interested in a simple question: what happens when people talk about politics in non-political online communities? A common expectation in political communication research is that these conversations might be less polarized ( https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2112552118 ) and more civil ( https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/18081 ) than political talk in explicitly political spaces. The logic makes sense: In non-political communities, people may not arrive with partisan identities already activated. They may also be guided by community norms built around shared interests, local concerns, or social connection rather than political conflict. In other words, we are supposed to expect political talk in non-political spaces to be less polarized, and perhaps less uncivil. We wanted to test whether that was actually the case in real-word digital communities. To do so, we (Yibin Fan ( http://yibinfan.cc ) , Benjamin Mako Hill ( http://mako.cc ) , and Patricia Moy ( https://com.uw.edu/person/patricia-moy/ ) ) examined Reddit discussions about mass shootings and gun control in October 2017. Sampling from over 100 thousand comments on gun control issue across the whole platform within that month, we compared comments from 15 explicitly political communities with comments from 15 non-political communities, including culture-, location-, and game-based ones, in addition to others. The results surprised us. As the figure below from our study shows, policy opinion expression was, on average, more common in non-political communities than in political ones. Several non-political subreddits—including r/Wisconsin ( https://www.reddit.com/r/wisconsin/ ) , r/Christianity ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/ ) , r/videos ( https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/ ) , and r/funny ( https://www.reddit.com/r/funny ) —had especially high levels of policy opinion expression; in total, 10 non-political subreddits had policy opinions in more than half of the sampled comments. By contrast, only three political subreddits—r/progun ( https://www.reddit.com/r/progun ) , r/ShitGunControllersSay ( https://www.reddit.com/r/shitguncontrollerssay ) , and r/Political_Revolution ( https://www.reddit.com/r/political_revolution ) —crossed the same 50% threshold. This pattern suggests that policy talk is not confined to explicitly political spaces; in some cases, it appears even more frequently in communities organized around local life, religion, entertainment, or humor. https://blog.communitydata.science/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2026/05/image… Statistical test results are here. After accounting for a range of factors in our regression model, comments in non-political communities were more likely to contain a clear policy opinion than comments in explicitly political communities. The model estimated that the predicted probability of expressing a clear policy position was about 34% in political communities, compared with 51% in non-political communities. This difference was statistically significant. At the same time, we found no significant difference in incivility between political and non-political communities. This combination of findings was especially interesting, and contrary to what's mostly reported in current social science literature on digital political communication. When political issues appeared in non-political spaces, people were more likely to state a clear policy position, and not necessarily more civil in discussion. This challenges a common way of thinking about political discussion in such a polarized digital world. One possible explanation is that participants in explicitly political communities are often immersed in ongoing political debate. Their comments may include detailed argumentation, interpretation, irony, criticism of political actors, or discussion of the news cycle without always stating a clear policy position. By contrast, when a major political issue enters a non-political community, participants may be more likely to be freshly exposed to this issue, and react by saying what they think should be done. Another explanation for incivility is that Reddit’s community-based moderation matters. Many communities, political and non-political alike, rely on rules, moderators, and shared expectations that can limit openly uncivil behavior. This helps explain why we did not find a significant difference in incivility and both types of communities see a low level (around 6% of sample) of uncivil comments. The broader lesson is that political communication does not only happen where politics is expected. It also happens in the ordinary spaces of digital life, where people gather to talk about games, cities, hobbies, entertainment, or shared interests. If we want to understand democracy online, we need to pay attention not only to where people go to talk about politics, but also to where politics shows up uninvited. This work was published in New Media & Society: Fan, Y., Hill, B. M., & Moy, P. (2026). “Unintended politics: Opinion expression and incivility in incidental political discussion ( https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448261441875 ) .” New Media & Society. Note: This work started as my (Yibin Fan) master thesis ( https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=-ZSV1… ) work at Univeristy of Washington. Thanks to the committee: Benjamin Mako Hill, Patricia Moy, and Yuan Hsiao. Add a comment to this post: https://blog.communitydata.science/political-discussion-in-non-political-on… -- Manage Subscriptions https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email… Unsubscribe: https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email…

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Performing the News: Rhetoric, Trust, and the Fight Against Video Disinformation in India
by Community Data Science Collective 07 May '26

07 May '26

Post : Performing the News: Rhetoric, Trust, and the Fight Against Video Disinformation in India URL : https://blog.communitydata.science/performing-the-news-rhetoric-trust-and-t… Posted : May 7, 2026 at 11:13 Author : srishchatters Categories : Uncategorized Apart from being generally chronically online on political X/Bluesky/Tiktok/Instagram, I also study science disinformation for a living, which means I spend a lot of time reading things that aren't true. More specifically, I spend time reading the corrections, the careful, methodical, often thankless articles that community media organizations publish after a manipulated video has already been seen by millions. I am currently working on a paper examining exactly this, structurally: how the Indian news organization AltNews debunks video disinformation in India, and what the rhetorical structure of that work reveals about the challenge of fighting falsehoods at scale. India is, according to the World Economic Forum, the country most susceptible to large-scale disinformation in the world, with 750 million internet users, 22 constitutionally recognized languages, a WhatsApp-dominated information ecosystem that is largely invisible to automated detection systems, and a political environment in which viral video disinformation is regularly amplified by mainstream media, fringe actors, and national political parties. In this context, the question of how fact-checkers write, not just what they correct, but how they construct their corrections and the knowledge ecosystems they engage with, warrants deeper examination. The cognitive trap that makes video disinformation so effective "Seeing is believing" is a popular folk saying. It describes a genuine and well-documented cognitive bias in that visual evidence carries a persuasive weight that text cannot replicate. My paper draws on Fazio et al.'s (2015) finding that knowledge does not reliably protect against illusory truth; that even informed, attentive readers can be swayed by false information that looks credible. Video disinformation exploits this bias with particular efficiency, because the clip itself functions as apparent evidence. You don't need a caption to believe what you watched. But there is a second, less obvious problem. As institutional trust erodes and the awareness of manipulation grows, audiences become susceptible not only to false videos, but to disbelieving real ones. The disinformation ecosystem, at its most corrosive, inserts falsehoods and destabilizes the category of visual truth. The anatomy of a debunk My analysis of 150 AltNews video debunking articles reveals a consistent rhetorical structure that departs from the conventions of mainstream journalism. Where standard news follows an “inverted pyramid,” placing most important information first and subsequent information in decreasing order of priority, debunking articles are circular. The headline announces a verdict; the final line confirms it, but this time as a logical conclusion earned through evidence. The piece begins and ends with the same claim, but the reader arrives at the ending differently than they arrived at the beginning. "Debunking arguments do not show their target beliefs to be false but rather undermine the justification a subject may have for holding them." — Hanno Sauer (2018) AltNews is not simply telling readers that a video is fake. It is systematically dismantling the reasons a reader "might have believed it," such as the political authority of the person who shared it, the apparent plausibility of its imagery, or the emotional register in which it circulated. Particularly relevant to COVID-19 scientific misinformation, each article acknowledges in some way the overwhelming scale of the disinformation [like by alluding to its “virality”], and also the fear and confusion in the social circumstances surrounding the disinformation. The correction is not a verdict delivered from above; it is an argument the reader is invited to construct alongside the fact-checker, building collective capacity to discern. The lead paragraph of each article enacts this invitation with notable rhetorical precision. It uses passive voice and hedged language: "A video in which a woman is seen lying in the bushes is doing the rounds on social media." The word "seen" does careful work: it acknowledges what the reader has probably watched, validates their experience, but withholds editorial endorsement of the content. According to rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke, this is an act of identification: establishing consubstantiality with the audience before introducing dissonance. This identification, a recognition of the reader’s circumstance, allows the reader to be persuaded in the direction of the truth, which is stated once at first in the headline, and repeated at the end. The pedagogical burden of video verification What distinguishes video fact-checking from other forms of debunking is the technical weight it carries. To verify a manipulated clip, AltNews staff extract keyframes, run reverse image searches, conduct metadata forensics, and deploy AI-detection tools. Each of these methods must then be explained—plainly, with screenshots, with links to original sources—to a general readership. The articles are, in this sense, simultaneously corrections and tutorials. By modeling the process of finding out, AltNews both corrects the misinformation, and provides technical clarity in how information is produced and distributed, attempting to build readers’ skill in verifying images and videos out there. This "show your work" norm is a deliberate strategy for building what Dourish and Bellotti (1992) call awareness, through establishing the sense that one understands not just an outcome but the process that produced it. For debunking, transparency about method is the mechanism by which readers are gradually equipped to verify things themselves. Why human-centered collaboration is the only viable response AltNews's staff of journalists, scientists, engineers, OSINT specialists, social activists and people working on intersections of those roles, function as a distributed, multidisciplinary verification network. India's disinformation ecosystem is, as Starbird, Arif, and Wilson (2019) demonstrate, fundamentally collaborative: coordinated networks of accounts, platforms, and political organizations working in concert to amplify false narratives. Automated platform moderation, such as the content bots of Facebook and X, has proven structurally inadequate to this complexity, particularly given India's linguistic diversity and the closed architecture of WhatsApp groups. What is needed, and what AltNews partially models, is a collaboratively-informed approach: human-centered, context-specific, and built for heterogeneity rather than scale. The fact that this work runs on donations, in a country where disinformation reaches hundreds of millions, tells us something important about where the gaps in our collective response still lie. Add a comment to this post: https://blog.communitydata.science/performing-the-news-rhetoric-trust-and-t… -- Manage Subscriptions https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email… Unsubscribe: https://subscribe.wordpress.com/?key=65cad9df3c24375c969692300da5e2ea&email…

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