Unchecked: The architecture of disinformation

Send us Fan Mail
SYNOPSIS
Renée DiResta, associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and author of Invisible Rulers, joins Rachel and Dan to talk about how influencers, algorithms and crowds work together to decide what feels real and true online. She explains how monetization programs reward provocation, how opaque curation fuels stories of shadow banning, and how her MySky project gives users more control over their own feeds and more insight into how they work. Rachel describes the lens of Show Me the Money, and Dan introduces the lens of Authenticity.
NOTE: GreenEarth is now MySky
Throughout the episode Renée refers to her user-adjustable social media feed project with Jonathan Stray as "GreenEarth". Since the interview was recorded, they changed the project name to MySky.
INTERVIEW WITH RENÉE DIRESTA
Renée DiResta
Renée's book: Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality
MySky (project with Jonathan Stray for bridging-based, user-adjustable feed for Bluesky)
“It’s not social media anymore, it’s parasocial media” (essay by danah boyd, cited by Renée)
Facebook “Trending Topics” controversy (the 2016 Gizmodo report on Facebook’s human curators)
For Expertise to Matter, Nonpartisan Institutions Need New Communications Strategies (Carnegie Endowment paper by Rachel Kleinfeld and Renée DiResta)
LENSES
Show Me the Money
Systems are shaped by visible structures like navigation and taxonomy, and also by invisible ones, especially the incentive and monetization rules underneath them. Those rules decide what content gets made, surfaced and rewarded just as much as any content model does.
How do the system’s monetization rules or incentive structures act as an information model, shaping what content people see and how it flows?
What does the system count, and are people gaming it? If so, why?
Who benefits from the incentives in the system: the business, creators, sellers, advertisers or users?
Authenticity
Systems reward authenticity differently. Some expect participants to show up as their true selves, and others reward a curated or performed version of themselves. When trusted experts don’t offer authenticity, people go looking for it elsewhere, which creates space for voices that only perform it.
What does the system expect of participants when it comes to being their true selves?
Does the system reward honest self-representation, or does it reward a curated persona?
How does the system tie contributions to identity, and when is anonymity beneficial or harmful?
_____________________________________________________
Personnel
Dan Brown, Host
Rachel Price, Host
Music
Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot
_____________________________________________________
Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid
Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Send us Fan Mail
Synopsis
Dr. Laura Thomas, a London-based registered nutritionist and author, joins Rachel and Dan to trace how nutrition science gets warped as it moves from academic research through press releases and journalism into social media and, ultimately, into products for sale. Laura argues that framing health as a personal, individual project obscures the social and structural forces — capitalism, class, and gender — that actually shape people's ability to eat well. 
Interview
Dr. Laura Thomas — nutritionist and writer behind the "Can I Have Another Snack?" newsletter
@LauraThomasPhD — Laura's Instagram presence, where she writes about diet culture and nutrition misinformation
Human Microbiome Project — the publicly funded 2007 research initiative Laura traces as the root of the gut-health boom
Priya Fielding-Singh and Merin Oleschuk's research on "food work" — sociological framing of the domestic labor involved in feeding a family
Lenses
Lens 1: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Mainstream responses to health problems tend to focus on individual choices while ignoring that we live inside systems that constrain and shape our decisions. This lens asks us to notice when a "choice" is really an illusion.
What is the environment allowing or disallowing an individual to do, and why?
What judgment does the system cast on what counts as a "good" or "bad" choice?
Is this a real choice, or does it just create the illusion of control — like an account "deactivation" button that doesn't actually delete your data?
Lens 2: Crossing the Streams
Information sometimes flows from a domain governed by rigorous norms — like academic science — into a domain built on entirely different incentives, like social media. When it crosses over, the information tends to take on the incentive structure of its new home, warping the content to align with the new environment.
What incentive structure governs the space where this information originated, versus where you're encountering it now?
Has the information kept the values of its source (accuracy, nuance), or adopted the values of its current home (clicks, sensationalism)?
Whose job is it to bridge that gap — the platform's, or the person consuming the information?
Edited by Jared Landis <https://www.landispodcastediting.com/>
_____________________________________________________
Personnel
Dan Brown, Host
Rachel Price, Host
Music
Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot
_____________________________________________________
Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid
Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Send us Fan Mail
CONTENT WARNING
Descriptions of incarceration, the treatment of detainees
SYNOPSIS
Human rights lawyer and immigration attorney Qasim Rashid joins Rachel and Dan to dismantle the myth of a clear, consistent "legal way" to immigrate. The conversation moves between misinformation about the immigration system itself and misinformation about immigrants as people, ultimately examining the bipartisan failure to counter demonizing narratives. Rachel and Dan close with the lenses of Law-Abiding Citizen and Zero-Sum Framing.
INTERVIEW WITH QASIM RASHID
Qasim Rashid — human rights lawyer, author, and former U.S. congressional candidate
Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl — referenced on rural white communities opposing Medicaid expansion
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander — referenced on sophisticated modern expressions of racism
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi — referenced on racism and education
Cato Institute research on immigration and wages — cited on immigrants' effect on native-born wages
ProPublica report on wrongly detained U.S. citizens — cited on citizens arrested on suspicion of being immigrants
LENSES
Lens 1: Law-Abiding Citizen Systems often assume users can simply intuit and follow their rules, without asking whether those rules are clearly communicated in the first place. This lens asks whether a system's apparent simplicity is real or assumed — and whether confusion or noncompliance is a design failure being  blamed on the individual.
How does the system communicate its rules, and can a user reasonably be expected to understand them without interpretation?
How easy does the system make it to be a "law-abiding citizen" within it?
If the system isn't communicating its rules well, is that a byproduct of messiness — or intentional?
Lens 2: Zero-Sum Framing Many systems, and the narratives built around them, implicitly frame resources, opportunity, or belonging as finite — where one group's gain necessarily means another's loss. This lens looks for where that zero-sum framing is being applied, whether it reflects reality, and who benefits from convincing people to see the world that way.
Where does the system (or the discourse around it) frame things in terms of scarce, competing resources?
Is the zero-sum trade-off actually true, or is it a rhetorical or negotiating tactic?
Who benefits from people believing a situation is zero-sum when it may not be?

Episode edited by Jared Landis https://www.landispodcastediting.com/
_____________________________________________________
Personnel
Dan Brown, Host
Rachel Price, Host
Music
Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot
_____________________________________________________
Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid
Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Send us Fan Mail
SYNOPSIS
Dan and Rachel kick off Season 2 of Unchecked by looking back at what season one taught them and what's ahead. We reflect on the toll of researching disinformation. They also preview season two's research directions, including Rachel's interest in the everyday myths people unconsciously rely on and Dan's theory that there's a "big lie" at the center of every domain, plus topics they're eager to dig into next.
Edited by Jared Landis <https://www.landispodcastediting.com/>
_____________________________________________________
Personnel
Dan Brown, Host
Rachel Price, Host
Music
Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot
_____________________________________________________
Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid
Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design

Send us Fan Mail
Synopsis
Dr. Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, joins Rachel and Dan to pull back the curtain on how economic data is collected, revised, and communicated — and how that process is vulnerable to political manipulation. We talk about the federal statistical agencies that produce employment and wage data, the role of transparency and revision in maintaining trust, and the pressure those institutions are under today. Rachel and Dan close with two lenses: Human vs. System Integrity and Maybe.
Interview
Dr. Elise Gould — senior economist, Economic Policy Institute
Economic Policy Institute — nonpartisan think tank focused on employment, wages, and inequality
EPI Microdata — EPI's publicly accessible economic microdata site
State of Working America Data Library — EPI's public database of wages, employment, and inequality data
EPI Data Accountability Dashboard — EPI's tool for tracking parallel measures and monitoring changes to federal data
Bureau of Labor Statistics — federal agency that produces jobs and unemployment data
Philosophy Minis — Jonny Thomson's Instagram account featuring short philosophical vignettes (referenced by Dan in the lenses segment)
Lenses
Lens 1: Human vs. System Integrity
Information systems rely on some combination of built-in mechanisms and individual actors — whistleblowers, researchers, editors, external stakeholders — to maintain the integrity of their data. This lens asks where that responsibility actually lives.
What mechanisms are built into the system for detecting anomalies or integrity issues?
How much does the system rely on humans to address failures of integrity or reliability?
When there are gaps, inconsistencies, or suspicious patterns in the data, whose job is it to surface them?
What would it take for an integrity failure to go unnoticed — and how much of that risk has the system actually designed against?
Lens 2: Maybe
Drawn from the parable of the lost horse, this lens challenges the impulse to frame information as inherently good or bad news. Data systems — like dashboards and reports — routinely signal conclusions for users, even with incomplete context.
When presenting data as either good or bad, does the system also present the sufficient context to explain why?
How does the system signal urgency or alarm — and how are users empowered to specify the rules of urgency?
What tools does the system offer users to reach their own conclusions without pushing them to a predetermined frame?

Edited by Jared Landis (https://www.landispodcastediting.com/)
_____________________________________________________
Personnel
Dan Brown, Host
Rachel Price, Host
Music
Turtle Up Fool, by Elliot
_____________________________________________________
Unchecked is a production of Curious Squid
Curious Squid is a digital design consulting firm specializing in information architecture, user experience, and product design