Nice break:

Breaking News in the Hands of a Few: Newsbrokering on X During the Trump Assassination Attempts

• A small number of accounts were highly prominent in the discourse on X/Twitter surrounding both the July and September 2024 assassination attempts on Donald Trump.
• We conceptualize the behaviors of these accounts as newsbrokering — the selective curation and dissemination of information by news influencers during breaking news events.
• Five of the nine most prominent newsbrokering accounts had previously been suspended from X or other platforms. 
• Traditional news outlets, despite having significantly more followers and twice as many tweets, struggled to compete with newsbrokering accounts in terms of audience engagement. 
• In both events, newsbrokering accounts not only curated and disseminated information but also often framed it to fit existing narratives and conspiratorial themes surrounding the assassination attempts. 
• Social media exhibits a trend toward the oligarchization of the news environment, where a few accounts can dominate important discourse. 

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• 11:00 BAA meeting – checked the Overleaf – no new content. Looks like the CwoC piece may not make sense, but the NNM approach might. I also wonder if we could also some D2A where the current state of the game/sim is used as the configuration file and the likely outcomes are instantaneously calculated.

GPT Agents

• Found this nice quote in an article on the 2024 Nobel prize for Economics:
• “Countries with “inclusive” institutions that protected personal property rights and allowed for widespread economic participation tended to end up on a pathway to longer-term prosperity. Those that had what the researchers called “extractive” institutions — ones that helped elites to maintain control, but which gave workers little hope of sharing in the wealth — merely provided short-term gains for the people in power.”