From extremist bad actors poisoning discourse on social media comment threads, to the words of elected officials provoking angry mobs, there is a fundamental shift that has happened as truly free speech rarely takes place in public forums or the commons and instead is simulated in the echo chambers of mainstream media and social media.
In the wake of the COVID pandemic, social media platforms have resorted to algorithmic filtering, shadow banning, and content warnings – mostly automatically generated – designed to protect us from misinformation and disinformation. In the meantime, valuable information contributing to the scienfic discourse coming out of research institutions around the world is being largely ignored by policy makers. Fact checkers funded by corporations and algorithms trained to defend us from pseudoscientific snake oil on faulty datasets. There is so much misinformation, competing narrative, cognitive biases and sloppy sensemaking. Our current practice of outsourcing public discourse to the underpaid and the algorithms could very well lead humanity down an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
These humble antiheroes not only help combat misinformation but also act as a vital citizen-driven oversight of algorithmically biased fact checkers and state-backed propaganda. Cyber Elves take cues from the Situationists, Anonymous, and ‘Pataphysics to create both visible and invisible provocations in the infosphere. They use memes, humor, interventions and performance art to amplify weak signals above automatic censorship, helping to correct against biases in training data and human content moderators. Cyber Elves are active across a range of causes, from data privacy, to scientific integration of traditional medicine, to environmental stewardship and regeneration.
As the Cyber Elves movement gains momentum in the USA and Eastern Europe (where the movement has been growing), they are building alliances with other figures and organizations dedicated to co-creating a healthy information ecology and responsible governance of our physical and virtual Commons in the 21st century - modeling new 21st century survival skills to dismantle obsolete paradigms with positivity, civics, a dedication to the scientific process and stewardship of the Global Commons.
