Future fact-Czechers

Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.      

Tony Benn

'YouTube going off as a news source': Australians among world's most likely to share dodgy articles

Report finds Australia is the country with the lightest news consumers in the world, but we are above average when it comes to concern about fake news.

Number of fact-checking outlets surges to 188 in more than 60 countries

Poynter – Strong growth in Asia and Latin America helps fuel global increase – “The number of fact-checking outlets around the world has grown to 188 in more than 60 countries amid global concerns about the spread of misinformation, according to the latest tally by the Duke Reporters’ Lab. Since the last annual fact-checking census in February 2018, we’ve added 39 more outlets that actively assess claims from politicians and social media, a 26% increase. The new total is also more than four times the 44 fact-checkers we counted when we launched our global database and map in 2014.

The economics of privacy

Huawei selling its undersea cable business (but to whom exactly?)

'Self-serving evidence': Key witness trying to minimise role, court

 

  Deepfake propaganda is maybe not such a big problem after all.

 

Future fact-checkers of America

Hey y’all, it’s Daniel. In this newsletter, we spend a lot of time reporting on and analyzing some of the internet’s biggest problems — and how fact-checkers do (or don’t) help solve them.

But this week, I have some good news for you: The kids are alright. 

On Monday, I traveled to Detroit to teach middle and high school students how to fact-check misinformation online. The trip was part of MediaWise, a relatively new media literacy initiative hosted by Poynter. It launched last spring with support from Google’s philanthropic arm and aims to teach 1 million teenagers fact-checking skills by 2020.

This week, MedaWise multimedia reporter Hiwot Hailu and I taught more than 2,000 students across metropolitan Detroit. Several hundred miles away in Boston, editor Katy Byron and Poynter marketing writer Mel Grau taught several thousand more.

In total, we reached at least 5,600 students at 13 events over four days in two states. Among the lessons: how misinformation is created and spread, what impact it has on society and how anyone can use tools like lateral reading and reverse image searches to debunk hoaxes.

That’s a lot of kids trying to learn tools that professional fact-checkers use worldwide. And the problem of misinformation is huge.

Just this week, the Pew Research Center published a survey that found about 70% of Americans think false information online negatively affects their confidence in the government. Approximately half said that misinformation is among the biggest problems for the U.S. — more than terrorism and illegal immigration.

Also in Pew’s study: Most Americans (56%) think that misinformation will only get worse over the next five years. And on a normal day, I’d be apt to agree with them.

But interacting with teenagers this week (hello again, high school anxiety!) made me optimistic. A significant portion of the students we taught already knew how to spot and debunk hoaxes; almost no one was fooled by this admittedly easy-to-spot fake article, for example. And, when presented with more samples of hoaxes, they already knew to pull out their phones and Google what they were seeing.

Pew’s survey found that about 53% of Americans think the onus is on news organizations to reduce the amount of misinformation online. And while obviously I agree that journalists play a crucial role in fact-checking bogus content, I also think that we can’t solve this problem at scale without having a more educated electorate. There just aren’t enough fact-checkers to go around.

The next generation of news consumers will be the ones to determine the quality of our online news ecosystem. If we want a healthier internet, we have to recognize the agency that Generation Z has to fix it. We have to meet them on their level and give them the tools they need to fight misinformation.

Again: It’s a huge task. But based on what I saw this week, there may be some hope just yet.

. . . technology

·        Twitter acquired a London-based startup that’s trying to develop technology that automatically detects misinformation. Until it went after anti-vaccine conspiracies last month, the platform hadn’t done anything to combat the spread of misinformation.

·        A lot has happened since we wrote last week about the video slowed down to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem impaired. The biggest development was The Daily Beast’s report that it found the originator of the video — and named him. The story generated an avalanche of criticism that it had doxed the poster, and that some leaker at Facebook had violated the user’s privacy. Mathew Ingram, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, asked a lot of the right questions. Daniel found that fact checks didn’t get as much engagement as the original video — but Lead Stories found that the video’s engagement was drastically reduced after fact checks appeared alongside it.

·        Tom Van de Weghe, a Dutch journalist and Knight fellow, shared on Medium what he has learned about deepfakes while studying them in his fellowship at Stanford.

. . . politics

·        Marking the 30-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, Ryan Krull writes in The Atlantic that “Beijing’s refusal to acknowledge the events of June 4, 1989, has created a vacuum into which misinformation, ignorance, and revisionism have been allowed to flow."

·        President Donald Trump’s interview with The Sun, in which he expressed surprise that  Princess Meghan Markle was “nasty” about him, then denied saying she was nasty, prompted a number of takes about whether he is gaslighting or merely Orwellian. Writing in The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan noted that some have questioned whether fact-checking is merely a distraction when it comes to Trump, then said “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

·        BuzzFeed News wrote about how anti-dog signs aimed at generating anti-Muslim sentiment in the Vancouver area are resurfacing nearly two years after the mainstream media first covered them. That’s part of a larger pattern of misinformers taking real news content and posting it with new, hateful context. (Our fact check of the week is about a similar Islamophobic conspiracy.)

. . . the future of news

·        “What’s Crap on WhatsApp?,” a voice note show created by Africa Check in partnership with Volume to fight mis/disinformation on WhatsApp is the 2019 winner of the IFCN’s Fact Forward Innovation Fund.

·        Writing in Wired, Renee DiResta, director of research at New Knowledge, suggested that in the search for a solution to the “fake news” problem, there are lessons in how technology treats spam.

• The fact-checking site Snopes is still locked in a legal battle against what The Seattle Times called “a much larger and more existential adversary.” Here is Daniel’s prior reporting on that — with more to come.

Fact checks by the Associated Press, Factcheck.org and Truthorfiction.com share this week’s recognition for calling out an assertion on Facebook by the hard rock musician Ted Nugent that a decades-old video of a Muslim scholar who referred to a “long-range process of making America Muslim” was that of a Michigan congresswoman.

The scholar, Sharifa Alkhateeb, died in 2004, the fact checks pointed out, and the video is from 1989, where she was addressing a Muslim American Political Awareness Conference. The video, the fact checks noted, has often been shown online and been misrepresented.

Nugent, a conservative activist and Trump supporter who is from Michigan, didn’t provide a name, but the caption said: “Listen very closely to the new congresswoman from Michigan what the enemies of America believe especially on Memorial Day so we don't let them continue to destroy the wonderful American system of individual freedom that so many died for. Dear God in heaven!”

The fact-checkers noted that he was likely referring to Rep. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who was elected last year and who is Muslim. She is from Detroit; Nugent is sometimes called “the Motor City Madman.”

This is not Nugent’s first set on the fact-checking stage. He’s already got a short file on PolitiFact, which has twice found his pants to be on fire.

What we liked: This was no deepfake, or even a shallowfake or a dumbfake. It was a real video, but presented with a false caption. But its reach, and the smear of a sitting congresswoman, meant it needed to be debunked. According to Factcheck.org, it got almost 100,000 shares and 2.8 million views. The post is still there, but viewers on Facebook can see the fact checks next to it, and an “additional reporting” label pops up when people try to share it.

1.      The IFCN has a new summer intern! Meet Daniela Flamini, a recent graduate of Duke University — and a Reporters’ Lab and Chequeado alumna.

2.      The Indian state of Kerala is fighting misinformation about the Nipah virus as well as the virus itself, which has been confirmed in the region. Officials have flagged an increase in alarmist propaganda about the illness, the Hindu reported.

3.      PolitiFact turned a fact check correction into a story about why it’s still hard to verify visuals online.

4.      Politico’s Tim Starks wrote that a report from cybersecurity firm Symantec concluded that Russia’s 2016 manipulation efforts were “larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known.”

5.      The Toronto Star’s star fact-checker, Daniel Dale, is going to CNN.

6.      Peter Cunliffe-Jones wrote a parting note when he stepped down as executive director of Africa Check this week. And the project is hiring a new deputy director.

7.      The Trust Project, which works with dozens of newsrooms on “trust indicators,” raised an additional $2.25 million from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook and the Democracy Fund, Axios reported.

8.      The House Intelligence Committee plans to delve into fake videos next week, chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told Politico.

9.      Autistic people say anti-vaccination misinformation is adding to stigmas they already face every day, BuzzFeed wrote.

10.   Ending on a fun note: It seemed like “Jeopardy!” contestant James Holzhauer was good enough to keep winning forever. So his loss in an episode that aired this week resulted in a number of conspiracy theories, which he promptly shot down.

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via Daniel and Susan