[Air-L] TrustDefender Update

[Shulman, Stu]

TrustDefender Update

The free information literacy and digital citizenship platform
TrustDefender is live. It is available to academics for both teaching and
research purposes.
https://TrustDefender.net

We have benefited from the input of a diverse and still growing advisory
board:
https://trustdefender.net/advisory-board

I have loaded sample datasets we are using to adapt these tools to
education and research problems in the trust domain. You are invited to
request a free account and to access samples of these data. In
TrustDefender, users collaborate on a single copy of the data through a
"peer" network. This is not a resource for downloading copies of the data.
It is a web-based collaboration toolkit originally built with NSF-funding
to improve the accuracy, reliability, and workflow in crowd source systems
for recording human observations.

Some of the new sample datasets include:

- Every Tweet (132,732) with a link to RT (Russia Today) purporting to be
from a user in the United States or Canada between January 1 and September
8, 2024.

- Every Tweet (70,031) with a link to GlobalResearch.ca purporting to be
from a user in the United States or Canada between September 1, 2023 and
September 11, 2024.

- A convenience sample (4,015) of Tweets by political users who all employ
an emoji as the first character of their Twitter bio. This data is very
cool visually and provocative when you get into the underlying theory of
communication.

Please contact me if you are an academic interested in learning more about
this project. You do not need to use it in a class, though we are hoping
many will assign it as homework. The barriers to entry as well as the time
for onboarding and training an entire class have never been lower.
Everything is browser-based with a GUI. Tweets are displayed in the live
Twitter display. Deleted and suspended Tweets are not displayed and the
check is in realtime.

A reminder, you can request a new custom Twitter dataset from the last 12
months or load your own data from any source. Anything with text in one or
more columns and metadata in the other columns in a spreadsheet can be
loaded to TrustDefender.
https://tinyurl.com/uploadingspreadsheets

Finally, there is no commercial upsell at the end. This is just what it
looks like when you have an unshakeable belief in the efficacy of your
17-year old invention. It is perfectly analogous to raising a beloved
child. So the door is, as ever, open. Come on in and help me to make
TrustDefender better. The upcoming elections in the United States and
Canada "will be wild" and the question of who to trust is highly salient.
Students need a set of information literacy skills to navigate these
challenges.

~Stu

-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Founder and CEO, Texifter
Editor Emeritus, Journal of Information Technology & Politics
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stuart-Shulman