华盛顿邮报 被免职学者指控哈佛向科技公司低头（4）（在线收听）

    So, then that kind of brings us back to Joan Donovan, the researcher who was at Harvard up until recently, who we heard about at the top of the episode.

    这就把我们带回到琼·多诺万身上，直到最近，这位研究员还在哈佛大学工作，我们在这期节目的开头介绍过她。

    So, tell me a little bit more about her and her work and how she ended up kind of at the center of this debate about the influence of tech companies at universities.

    请多讲讲她和她的工作，以及她是如何成为这场关于科技公司对大学施加影响的辩论中心的。

    So, like many people who are now spending a lot of time analyzing disinformation and misinformation and how it spreads, Joan Donovan didn't start out doing that. She was trained as a sociologist.

    现在许多人花大量时间分析虚假信息及其传播方式，与他们一样，琼·多诺万起初并不是研究这个领域的。她接受的是社会学家的训练。

    Myself, I'm interested in sociology, and so I want to know how groups behave.

    我对社会学很感兴趣，我想了解群体行为方式。

    So I'm less inclined to talk about psychology or, you know, individual motivations to join certain political parties, but I can talk a lot and at length about all kinds of other garbage, but particularly about how things that we might consider soft messaging or persuasive messaging online is really having a strange effect on our politics.

    我不太愿意谈论心理学，比如，个人加入某个政党的动机，但是我可以详细地谈论各种类型的垃圾信息，尤其是网络上的软消息或说服性消息是如何对我们的政治产生不可思议的后果的。

    And we're starting to see ideas that used to be considered very, very fringe moving closer and closer to the mainstream. And so some of...

    我们开始发现，那些曾经被认为非常边缘的想法越来越接近主流。所以有些......

    One of the things that she was looking at were white supremacists and how they were promoting ideas about DNA testing and how this -- sort of helping them gain traction, because white supremacists in the United States are a lot bigger force than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

    她关注的一个对象是白人至上主义者, 以及这些人是如何推广DNA测试的想法，以及这是如何帮助他们获得支持的，因为美国白人至上主义者的力量比10年前、15年前要大得多。

    And so what we need to do is to think about, "Well, how is social media going to prepare itself for the networking of white supremacists and when they build power and they show up offline at these events?"我们需要做的思考是，“社交媒体如何为白人至上主义者建立关系网做准备，以及他们何时在线上建立权力并在线下的活动中出现？”

    Are social media companies going to begin by trying to disrupt that infrastructure-building in the first place or do they wait till the violence happens and then provide that evidence to law enforcement? Unfortunately, what happens is...

    社交媒体公司是从一开始就试图破坏基础设施建设，等到暴力发生后再向执法部门提供证据吗？不幸的是，发生的事情是……And, you know, one of her core reasons for studying this is that all the tech companies promote what drives engagement, because engagement is what gets them eyeballs, and eyeballs is what gets them advertising money.

    她研究这个领域的一个核心原因是，所有的科技公司都在宣传什么能提高用户粘性，因为用户粘性就是吸引用户眼球，而吸引眼球能让科技公司赚到广告钱。

    Unfortunately, part of that dynamic is the extreme stuff, whether you love it or you hate it, is engaging.

    不幸的是，这种动态的一部分是极端内容，无论喜欢还是讨厌，这些内容都很吸引眼球。