Chapter 7 Further Reading: The Rise of Digital and S...

Annotated Bibliography

The sources below are organized thematically and annotated to guide students toward materials most relevant to their specific interests. Items marked with an asterisk (*) are particularly accessible to undergraduate readers.

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations*. Penguin Press, 2008.

An optimistic account of how internet platforms enable collective action, information sharing, and social organization at unprecedented scale. Shirky's framework — that lowering the cost of communication and coordination produces qualitatively new social possibilities — remains influential, though subsequent events have complicated his optimism. Essential context for understanding the "democratization" narrative that shaped early social media thinking. The gap between Shirky's 2008 predictions and the subsequent decade of social media misinformation is itself an object lesson in the limits of techno-optimism.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.

A comprehensive and sometimes polemical account of how digital platforms generate economic value by surveilling, predicting, and modifying human behavior. Zuboff's concept of "behavioral surplus" — the data extracted from users beyond what is needed to provide the service — provides a structural explanation for why platform design systematically prioritizes engagement over accuracy. Dense but important for understanding the political economy of social media.

Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads*. Knopf, 2016.

A historical account of the attention economy from 19th-century newspapers through contemporary digital platforms. Wu traces the long arc of advertising-supported media and the recurring pattern in which new communication technologies are captured by attention-monetization models. Accessible and well-written; particularly valuable for placing social media in historical context.

Blogging and Citizen Journalism

Gillmor, Dan. We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People*. O'Reilly Media, 2004.

The foundational text of citizen journalism optimism, written by a Silicon Valley journalist at the height of the blogosphere's influence. Gillmor articulates the promise of networked journalism — accountability, democratization, speed — with intelligence and nuance. Reading this alongside the Rathergate case study illustrates both the genuine insight in Gillmor's vision and its blind spots regarding verification and motivated reasoning.

Benkler, Yochai, Rob Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018.

A rigorous empirical analysis of the American political information ecosystem, based on quantitative analysis of millions of news items and social media posts from the 2016 election cycle. Challenges simple narratives about social media misinformation by showing that the "propaganda feedback loop" in American politics operated primarily through right-wing media ecosystem, with social media playing a secondary amplifying role. Essential for understanding how platform architecture interacts with specific media ecosystem structures.

Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: The New Science of Networks*. Perseus Publishing, 2002.

The accessible introduction to network science by one of its leading researchers. Barabási's explanation of preferential attachment (the "rich get richer" mechanism by which highly connected nodes attract more connections) and scale-free networks provides the theoretical foundation for understanding why social media networks develop powerful "super-spreaders" capable of reaching massive audiences. Essential background for the social network analysis code in this chapter.

Easley, David, and Jon Kleinberg. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

A rigorous but accessible textbook covering network theory, game theory, and their applications to social and economic phenomena. Part IV (on information, crowds, and markets) is particularly relevant to the misinformation context. Available free online through the authors' websites.

Twitter, Breaking News, and Verification

Hermida, Alfred. "Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism." Journalism Practice 4.3 (2010): 297-308.

Introduces the concept of "ambient journalism" — the continuous, ambient awareness of events produced by following many sources on Twitter simultaneously. Hermida is guardedly optimistic about Twitter's potential for networked verification. The paper's limitations, apparent in retrospect, are as instructive as its insights.

Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. "The Spread of True and False News Online." Science 359.6380 (2018): 1146-1151.

The landmark empirical study documenting that false news spreads faster, further, and more broadly than true news on Twitter — and that this difference is driven primarily by human behavior (sharing) rather than by bots. One of the most cited papers in misinformation research. The finding that false news is more "novel" and generates more "surprise" and "fear" than true news is central to understanding the engagement-misinformation nexus. Essential reading.

YouTube and Video Misinformation

Ribeiro, Manoel Horta, et al. "Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4.CSCW1 (2020): 1-27.

The most systematic empirical examination of whether YouTube's recommendation algorithm creates "radicalization pathways" from mainstream to extremist content. Finds evidence of migration from mainstream to far-right channels, with the recommendation algorithm playing a role. The research methodology and its limitations are extensively discussed in the paper and in subsequent commentary.

Chaslot, Guillaume. "The YouTube Algorithm and the Alt-Right Pipeline." Medium*, February 2019.

A first-person account by a former YouTube engineer of how the recommendation algorithm's optimization for watch time creates predictable incentives toward extreme content. Chaslot founded the transparency project AlgoTransparency, which systematically tracks YouTube recommendations. This piece is accessible and provides essential inside-the-platform perspective.

WhatsApp and Private Virality

Resende, Gustavo, et al. "(Mis)Information Dissemination in WhatsApp: Gathering, Analyzing and Counter-Measures." Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference. 2019.

The foundational academic study of WhatsApp misinformation in Brazil during the 2018 election, establishing methodologies for studying content that cannot be directly observed by researchers. Documents both the scale of false information circulation and the difficulty of monitoring it.

Rogers, Richard. "Deplatforming: Studying Conspiracies as a Facebook Group." Social Media + Society 6.3 (2020): 1-11.

Examines what happens when misinformation communities are removed from public platforms and migrate to alternative or private platforms. Relevant to understanding how public platform interventions may displace rather than eliminate misinformation communities.

Influencer Misinformation and the Creator Economy

Audrezet, Alice, Gwarlann de Kerviler, and Julie Guidry Moulard. "Authenticity Under Threat: When Social Media Influencers Need to Go Beyond Passion." Journal of Business Research 117 (2020): 557-569.

Examines how influencers maintain authenticity in sponsored content contexts and how authenticity perceptions affect follower trust. Provides theoretical grounding for understanding why audiences extend trust to influencers in domains (health, finance) where they would not extend similar trust to direct advertising.

Center for Countering Digital Hate. The Disinformation Dozen: Why Platforms Must Act on Twelve Leading Online Anti-Vaxxers*. 2021.

Documents how twelve accounts across social media platforms were responsible for 65% of anti-vaccine content shares between February and March 2021. Illustrates the concentration of misinformation production in small numbers of high-influence accounts and provides empirical grounding for claims about influencer health misinformation. Accessible to general readers.

Platform Design and Architecture

Fogg, BJ. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.

The foundational text on "captology" — the study of computers as persuasive technologies. Fogg's framework for how technology systems influence behavior predates social media but describes the mechanisms that social media designers later systematized. Essential for understanding how platform features are deliberately (and sometimes inadvertently) persuasive.

Sunstein, Cass R. #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton University Press, 2017.

An updated version of Sunstein's earlier work on echo chambers and the internet, incorporating social media research. Particularly valuable for its analysis of default effects — how platform defaults powerfully shape behavior — and for its policy proposals regarding platform design obligations. Sunstein's normative recommendations are contested but thoughtfully argued.

Further Reading list for Chapter 7 of "Misinformation, Media Literacy, and Critical Thinking in the Digital Age." Annotations reflect the state of scholarship as of the chapter's preparation date.

Chapter 7 Further Reading: The Rise of Digital and Social Media