— Albert Camus, born in 1913
When the Berlin Wall came down...
Making a hundred friends is not a miracle. The miracle is to make a single friend who will stand by your side even when hundreds are against you.
$1.4 million award against CRA for malicious, high-handed, and reprehensible conduct – Samaroo v. Canada Revenue Agency, 2018 BCSC 324
NICK MCCALL: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and Leading Dueling Lawyer Personality Types.
Monumental Hypocrisy Current Affairs
Enjoy the honeymoon, it will outlast the marriage
Five projects that are harnessing big data for good
The first "bottom-up" history of the worldresides in an Austrian salt mine. "It's a global project — and its history is written by everyone" Bottom UP
CNet – Traffic got rerouted Monday through ISPs in countries known for internet surveillance. “Google suffered a brief outage and slowdown on Monday, with some of its traffic being rerouted through networks in Russia, China and Nigeria. Incorrect routing instructions sent some of the search giant’s traffic to Russian network operator TransTelekom, China Telecom and Nigerian provider MainOne between 1:00 p.m. and 2:23 p.m. PT, according to ThousandEyes, an internet research group.
When the Berlin Wall came down...
Making a hundred friends is not a miracle. The miracle is to make a single friend who will stand by your side even when hundreds are against you.
NICK MCCALL: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and Leading Dueling Lawyer Personality Types.
Monumental Hypocrisy Current Affairs
Enjoy the honeymoon, it will outlast the marriage
Five projects that are harnessing big data for good
The first "bottom-up" history of the worldresides in an Austrian salt mine. "It's a global project — and its history is written by everyone" Bottom UP
CNet – Traffic got rerouted Monday through ISPs in countries known for internet surveillance. “Google suffered a brief outage and slowdown on Monday, with some of its traffic being rerouted through networks in Russia, China and Nigeria. Incorrect routing instructions sent some of the search giant’s traffic to Russian network operator TransTelekom, China Telecom and Nigerian provider MainOne between 1:00 p.m. and 2:23 p.m. PT, according to ThousandEyes, an internet research group.
Nicholas W. Allard (Former Dean, Brooklyn) & Heidi K. Brown (Brooklyn), The Future of Training Powerful Legal Communicators, NYSBA J., Sept. 2018, p. 10:
Twenty
years ago, lawyers communicated through lengthy client opinion letters
or settlement demand letters transmitted via fax or FedEx, briefs filed
with the court (often hand-delivered by couriers), and perhaps the
occasional press release carefully crafted for high profile cases.
Today, in our fast-paced, media-saturated, and tech-driven world, we see
lawyers like Michael Avenatti advocating for his clients through
Twitter soundbites. Pleadings and briefs – once buried in dusty court
filing cabinets – are electronically accessible for the world’s review
and “Monday-morning quarterback” scrutiny. Attorneys conduct
negotiations, conferences, and depositions with their national or even
international counterparts over Skype, GoToMeeting, or Zoom. Lawyers
establish permanent digital footprints through LinkedIn, Facebook, and
Instagram. Legal communication is rapidly changing because of
technological advances, disruptive business models, and globalism –
forces that are transforming the 21st century world of law. The legal
profession and legal educators – famously slow and often resistant to
adaptation – must evolve with the times. Standing still, clinging to the
“business as usual” status quo is not a luxury we can afford. ...
2016 vs. 2018, misinformation edition
Two
years after a presidential campaign defined by the explosion of viral fakes on
social media, one question loomed over the misinformation beat ahead of the
U.S. midterms: How bad would it be this time?
If
we define the problem in the tightest possible manner — entirely fabricated
viral stories published for economic gain — things seem to have gotten better.
Serial offender YourNewsWire seems to have lost some of its reach on Facebook, Bloomberg
reported, and its delisting by a sponcon provider seems to have led the
website to relocate to a new domain. As the BBC reported,
social media companies sighed a collective breath of relief.
That’s
not to say that a circus of hoaxes didn’t surface during
the campaign or on election
day, which reporters at BuzzFeed News and The New York Times (among others)
diligently tracked. We’re going to need to return to the question with data at
hand, but at least qualitatively, this time felt different.
Facebook
was more aggressive
about removing voter fraud hoaxes. And so was Twitter, with more than 40
far-right trolls commenting in private chats that they struggled to get
misinformation about the voting day off the ground, Ben
Collins reported for NBC News.
One
of the most-discussed, problematic viral videos of the night, which
showed a malfunctioning voting machine, wasn’t fake, but rather
miscaptioned and weaponized for political purposes.
This
silver lining points to the remaining challenges. The blatantly bonkers and
spammy fakes might be gone, but propaganda and partisan misinformation are alive
and well, BuzzFeed News' Charlie Warzel wrote
this week. There’s still plenty of work for fact-checkers, journalists and
the platforms.
(AP
Photo/Ben Margot, File)This is how we do it
- Chequeado published a report on how the past two month’s of its partnership with Facebook have gone.
- Two startups are building apps that could help journalists verify manipulated images and videos faster.
- A new fact-checking site has launched in Portugal.
This is bad
- LinkedIn is now the home of false memes and hyperpartisan content, BuzzFeed News’ Craig Silverman reported. Nowhere is safe.
- Snapchat, which has largely avoided the misinformation problems that have plagued other tech platforms, might serve as an accessory to fakery elsewhere online.
- According to Aos Fatos, misinformation was shared at least 3.84 million times on Twitter and Facebook in the lead-up to Brazil's election.
(Screenshot from CNN)This is fun
- A CNN anchor used jars of candy to display how many falsehoods President Donald Trump has said since he was elected, according to The Washington Post Fact Checker.
- Factcheck.org highlighted some “unique and unusual” U.S. midterm campaign ads in its 2018 FactCheck Awards.
- Snopes’ website went down for some scheduled maintenance on Election Day in the U.S. It now has a new site design.
A closer look
- Ahead of the U.S. midterms, Facebook removed 30 Facebook accounts and 85 Instagram accounts that may have been engaging in inauthentic behavior. MediaWise posted a short video explaining the move and the Tow Center’s Jonathan Albright wrote an in-depth blog post about the long-term gaming of Facebook’s engagement numbers.
- Both NBC News and Wired published stories about why misinformation on WhatsApp is hard to stop in two of its largest markets: India and Brazil.
- Who believes in online misinformation? Delusion-prone individuals, according to this new study.
(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)If you read one more thing
Freedom
House released
a report on how authoritarian governments around the world are hiding
behind anti-fake news laws in an effort to suppress free speech.
9 quick fact-checking links
- The Chinese government is now labeling Weibo posts that it deems to be rumors.
- Please, no more of these headlines. We’re begging you.
- Remember those deceptive news sites launched by American politicians over the summer? Daniel found that almost all of them stopped posting before the midterm election, and MediaWise explained how voters can avoid falling for them in the future.
- Nieman Lab reported that there was no big spike in misinformation during the U.S. midterms. But that’s not the whole story.
- After Snopes reached out to Breitbart about one of its stories, the latter published yet another story about the interaction.
- Facebook was referred to a European Union watchdog over the existence of false advertisements on the platform.
- Venezuela has launched a task force aimed at coming up with responses to “fake news.”
- It’s almost the end of the year, which means you should send us your favorite media corrections (especially from outside America!)
- The New York Times has a new documentary on disinformation.