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Why are white supremacists reading my bioRxiv preprints?

Why are white supremacists reading my bioRxiv preprints?. (Especially if you’re hiring postdocs!). Jedidiah Carlson, PhD Harris Lab, UW Genome Sciences. @ jedmsp jedidiah@umich.edu www.jedidiahcarlson.com. Contact. Outline.

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Why are white supremacists reading my bioRxiv preprints?

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  1. Why are white supremacists reading my bioRxiv preprints? (Especially if you’re hiring postdocs!) Jedidiah Carlson, PhD Harris Lab, UW Genome Sciences • @jedmsp • jedidiah@umich.edu • www.jedidiahcarlson.com Contact

  2. Outline • Background: white nationalism, “human biodiversity,” and hereditarian ideology • Meme-ification of Science (or “popgen research as political propaganda”) • Quantifying Appropriation (or “convincing ourselves that this is actually a problem and what to do about it”)

  3. “Human biodiversity?” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right

  4. “Human biodiversity”: scientific racism with a pretty name Interview with Steve Sailer: https://youtu.be/HHqAixoHN28 Donald Trump on genes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AddjbfcMVA&feature=youtu.be&t=40

  5. Discussion • What strikes you about Sailer’s definition and justification of HBD as both a scientific and political discipline? • Google the phrase “human biodiversity” or “race realism” and take a look at the first few results (CW: possible racial slurs, anti-Semitism, etc. if you do an image/video search) • Put yourself in the position of someone with little background in genetics, but who is interested in the topic—what would they find appealing about these sites? • For new HBD acolytes, what do you think comes first, the science or the politics?

  6. Appropriation of genomics research as white nationalist propaganda

  7. When a figure becomes a meme • Population genomics studies often use Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to summarize patterns of population structure in a sample • Individuals who share a more recent common ancestor tend to cluster closer together, often mirroring the past geographical proximity of populations

  8. Original figure (Li et al., 2008) https://animeright.news/tb/8-common-myths-about-race-debunked/ Reddit/4chan

  9. Original figure (Xing et al., 2010) Twitter user @i_aver (2016) Twitter user @unsilencedsci (2016)

  10. David Duke’s website, Stormfront Original figure Need et al., 2010)

  11. “But Jed, why are you making such a big deal about fringe racist groups that clearly just want the attention??”

  12. Quantifying misappropriation • “Altmetrics” already use social media data to quantify papers’ broader impact • Can we mine social media data to quantify a paper’s popularity among ideologically-motivated communities?

  13. Twitter bios as an indicator of audience characteristics • A user’s Twitter bio is (typically) an honest representation of their interests, affiliations, ideologies, etc. • Reasonable to assume that a user’s followers often share similar characteristics to the user

  14. Topic Modeling Crash Course https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/4/147361-probabilistic-topic-models/fulltext#F3 • Each topic is a distribution over words • Each document is a mixture of corpus-wide topics • Each word is drawn from one of those topics

  15. Example paper

  16. MacLean et al. topical breakdown of tweeters

  17. MacLean et al. retweet transmission *size of dot indicates fraction of followers that also follow major white nationalist accounts Retweet Number Time

  18. Discussion • https://biorxiv.altmetric.com/details/53351163/twitter • Browse through the tweets and the profiles of accounts that have referenced this paper • What message are they communicating? Is the perception of the research generally positive or negative? • Why do you think a paper about dog breeds is so popular among white nationalists and white-nationalist adjacent communities? • Where do scientists seem to be entering these conversations?

  19. Final discussion questions • What other academic disciplines have grappled with the political implications of their work? • What similarities/differences do you see with white nationalist appropriation of genomics research? • Should we just ignore bad-faith politicization of genomics research? Why or why not? • What are the responsibilities of scientists, universities, academic journals/societies, news journalists, etc. in broaching/addressing this topic?

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