TrustCon 2024
Internet Democracy Initiative affiliates Hong Qu and Jason Radford will be hosting workshops on misinformation at TrustCon. Jason Radford will simulate election safety challenges using tabletop scenarios to anticipate and prepare for threats to election safety. Hong Qu will train trust and safety professionals to use network analysis to find superspreaders of misinformation.
About TrustCon
TrustCon is the global conference dedicated to trust and safety professionals who are responsible for the challenging work of keeping our platforms and communities safe. TrustCon, the only conference of its kind, is the culmination of TSPA’s vision to create and foster a global community of practice among trust and safety professionals. This conference will create an enduring and supportive community; offer workshops and presentations focused on the practice of trust and safety; and explore successes, lessons learned, and the future of the field. Attendees have the opportunity to collaborate, hear from trust and safety thought leaders, and connect with peers from all over the world.
Date
July 22-24
Location:
San Francisco, CA
Tabletop Scenarios for Trust and Safety during Elections
Workshop by Jason Radford, Internet Democracy Initiative Affiliate
Elections present unique challenges to platform integrity and user safety. The goal of this 120-minute workshop is to provide T&S professionals with a safe and creative way to think through how they would respond to election safety challenges. Facilitators will engage participants in simulations of election safety challenges. Participants will have the chance to think through how they would respond to these challenges and get feedback on their responses. Participants will walk away with an understanding of some of the most salient threats to election safety around the world and ideas for how they can rise to meet the challenge.
Network Analysis to Discover Emerging Influencers and Superspreaders
Workshop by Hong Qu, Internet Democracy Initiative Affiliate
To overcome the limited availability of social network platform data, we will use the NetworkX Python package to uncover opinion leaders by tracking and analyzing real-time sharing data as a temporal network in an iterative process. At each time interval, the network graph grows as new nodes are identified and added based on how often their posts are being shared; additionally, we will calculate social media influencers’ centrality score to rank their influence and reveal emerging threats to the community.
This workshop will train trust and safety analysts to apply social network analysis (SNA) to identify producers and superspreaders of messages. No previous knowledge of Python or SNA required. We will provide an overview of network modeling, data structures, and analysis concepts. Then, we will utilize NetworkX to construct, quantify, visualize relationships and interactions. The workshop will conclude by discussing how to build the technical infrastructure within your organization to capture signals and surface alerts.