Bridging Social Media and Search Engines: Dredge Words and the Detection of Unreliable Domains

• Proactive content moderation requires platforms to rapidly and continuously evaluate the credibility of websites. Leveraging the direct and indirect paths users follow to unreliable websites, we develop a website credibility classification and discovery system that integrates both webgraph and large-scale social media contexts. We additionally introduce the concept of dredge words, terms or phrases for which unreliable domains rank highly on search engines, and provide the first exploration of their usage on social media. Our graph neural networks that combine webgraph and social media contexts generate to state-of-the-art results in website credibility classification and significantly improves the top-k identification of unreliable domains. Additionally, we release a novel dataset of dredge words, highlighting their strong connections to both social media and online commerce platforms.

Egalitarianism is not Equality: Moving from outcome to process in the study of human political organisation

• Many traditional subsistence groups have been described as ‘egalitarian societies’. Definitions of ‘egalitarianism’, especially beyond anthropology, have often emphasised equality in resource access, prestige or rank, alongside generalised preferences for fairness and equality. However, there are no human societies where equality is genuinely realised in all areas of life. Here we demonstrate, empirically, that nominally egalitarian societies are often unequal across seven important interconnected domains: embodied capital, social capital, leadership, gender, age/knowledge, material capital/land tenure, and reproduction. We also highlight evidence that individuals in nominally egalitarian societies do not unfailingly adhere to strong equality preferences. We propose a new operational framework for understanding egalitarianism in traditional subsistence groups, focussing on individual motivations, rather than equality. We redefine “egalitarianism” societies as those where socio-ecological circumstances enable most individuals to successfully secure their own resource access, status, and autonomy. We show how this emphasis on self-interest — particularly status concerns, resource access and autonomy — dispels naive enlightenment notions of the ‘noble savage’, and clarifies the plural processes (demand-sharing, risk-pooling, status-levelling, prosocial reputation-building, consensus-based collective decision-making, and residential mobility) by which relative equality is maintained. We finish with suggestions for better operationalizing egalitarianism in future research.

Portugal is having a general strike today

Tasks

• Set up shared expense spreadsheet
• Mtn bike today?
• LaTex to HTML converter – installed
  • Let’s see how it works? – pretty good!
• Pay Edwins
• Pay Just Landscaping

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup – done
• 4:00 ADS weekly – done. Need to write up a proposal to explore the theoretical spaces of D2A