German schools should not use Office 365 says Privacy Commissioner Office Watch
SIR DARROCH WAS A LEAKER: And now the rest of the story is told
on why Sir Kim Darroch is leaving as Britain’s Ambassador to the U.S.
According to the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan, Sir Darroch leaked
U.S. intelligence like a sieve. Betcha there’s more to come, too.
Matt Potter, via The
Washington Post
Anyone can be blunt.
Ambassador Darroch should have mastered the English art of elusive meaning.
AFP raid on ABC reveals investigative journalism being put in same category as criminality
Politicians co-opt fact-checking
Fact-checkers
are used to spin from politicians. But now, some politicians around the world
have started to mimic fact-checkers’ work to score points with voters.
On
Tuesday, the IFCN’s Cristina Tardáguila published
a story about how the government of Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador has created its own fact-checking operation. Launched
by Notimex, a daily newswire service run by López Obrador’s staff, the
project “is designed to debunk false news on social media as well as to
fact-check dubious content published by traditional media outlets.”
The
new service’s name: “Verificado Notimex.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because
that’s the same name several fact-checking initiatives have used in Mexico.
In
March 2018, more than 60 journalists and tech companies teamed
up for a collaborative fact-checking project called Verificad, which aimed
to tackle misinformation about Mexico’s general election. Its name was based on
a previous effort, Verificado 19S, that tried
to crowdsource real-time information about the earthquake that hit Mexico
City in 2017.
Then
there’s VerificadoMX, a regional fact-checking initiative that launched in the
state of Monterey in July 2017. Its founder told
Tardáguila that the project is ready to go to court against the López
Obrador administration to protect its registered brand.
While
a blatant ripoff of Verificado’s name recognition, the situation in Mexico
isn’t the first time that a government has co-opted the popularity of
fact-checking to format their talking points.
In
fall 2017, a Czech prime ministerial candidate created
his own fact-checking site, Můj Demagog, aimed at addressing allegations
made against him by his opponents. The site also used the same name as a
fact-checking organization, in this case Demagog.cz, to piggyback off its brand
recognition.
“It’s
basically like fact-checking (in appearance), but he’s just talking about his
opinions,” Ivana Procházková, an expert at Demagog, told Poynter at the time.
More
recently, the Press Information Bureau, a communication arm of the Indian
government, announced
its plans to set up a fact-checking unit to “identify and counter any fake
news about the government and its policies circulating on social media platforms,”
the Hindustan Times reported last Wednesday. Details, including how the
fact-checking service will work and when it will launch, aren’t yet clear.
Meanwhile,
in the United States, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) launched
her own fact-checking project this spring as part of her campaign for
president. Called “Fact Squad,” the special section of her website has
published just a handful of debunks about allegations made against Warren.
It’s
tempting to view the trend of politicians and governments co-opting
fact-checking — and sometimes even fact-checkers’ own names — as
business as usual for political campaigns. But it threatens to normalize other
efforts that more explicitly aim to undermine the credibility of fact-checkers.
In
October, we
reported in this newsletter that there’s a growing crop of imposter
fact-checking sites worldwide. These fake outlets impersonate legitimate
fact-checking sites in an effort to either directly combat their work or make a
political point about a topical issue. And their creators span from scorned
satirists and conspiracy theorists to political operatives and anonymous social
media users.
On
an individual basis, these imposter fact-checking projects may be somewhat
harmless. But taken together, they comprise a potential threat to fact-checkers’
future credibility online. Because if readers think they’re getting fact checks
directly from politicians, they may be less inclined to actually do their
homework.
. . . technology
·
The
sexiest explanation for a disinformation campaign (namely Russia) is usually
not true, according to Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at
Facebook and current director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, in an
interview with First
Draft. Here’s a counter-take, though: Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff wrote
that Russian intelligence planted
and fanned a conspiracy theory that a Democratic National Committee
staffer, Seth Rich, was killed by assassins working for Hillary Clinton.
(Police believe Rich was killed in a botched robbery.)
·
Writing
for Bloomberg, Mark Bergen and Kurt Wagner reported that Facebook used
polling data and special software to track hoaxes about, well, Facebook. In
some cases, the company “took active steps to snuff them out.” Meanwhile, the
groups on the company’s platform continue
to be safe harbors for misinformation and hate speech.
·
Remember
that
Facebook outage last week that affected posts on Instagram and WhatsApp,
too? In India, Boom
Live reported that several viral hoaxes claiming that the platforms had
shut down or were starting to charge users made the rounds during the outage.
. . . politics
·
Europe
has struggled with its efforts to head off Russian meddling in elections, The
New York Times reported. Its rapid alert system didn’t live up to its name,
the Times wrote, offering lessons for the United States as it heads into the
2020 election.
·
There’s
been plenty of talk about how misinformation could potentially affect domestic
politics and elections. But this
piece from Politico asks: Could false information potentially cause a war?
·
A
fake Ronald Reagan quote has been making the rounds on the internet for a long
time. Snopes debunked
it in 2016 and PolitiFact
did so in February. But a retweet
by Trump this week gave it new life, prompting a number of fact-checkers to
revisit
it — and again declare it untrue.
. . . the future of news
·
DeepNude,
software that uses artificial intelligence to create fake nude images of women,
was
pulled from the web by its creator last week after a
report about it in Motherboard. But numerous copies of the app are still
available, The
Verge reported.
·
Meanwhile,
The
Guardian wrote about a fake text generator that uses AI to automatically
write paragraphs in a specific style based on only one sample sentence. That
has some people concerned that the tool could be used to produce false or
misleading content at scale.
·
Le
Monde published
an investigation about the tactics that supporters of President Emmanuel
Macron have used to radicalize online. Among the most pervasive strategies:
Using fake social media accounts to recruit more En Marche party members and
communicate with opponents.
Nearly
two months ago, an altered video of Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives, went viral on Facebook.
The
video was slowed down to make it look like the speaker was drunk or intoxicated
when, in fact, she wasn’t. It got more than 2 million views despite
the publication of several fact checks, and the
mainstream media pounced on the incident to report on the potential threat
of (unrelated, but similar) deepfake videos.
This
week, Argentine fact-checkers dealt with their own version of that debacle.
On
Thursday, Chequeado debunked
a video that was edited to make it look like Minister of Security Patricia
Bullrich was intoxicated. The hoax circulated on Facebook, WhatsApp and
Twitter, racking up thousands of engagements.
What we liked: Having just seen this kind of misinformation
tactic used in the U.S., Chequeado was quick to debunk the bogus Bullrich
video. The fact-checker pointed out that it was slowed to make the minister
appear intoxicated, tracked down the exact press conference the video came from
to compare the two videos and used tools like CrowdTangle to track where the
hoax had been shared. Chequeado also succinctly explained the important
differences between a manipulated and a deepfake video.
1.
IFCN’s
Daniela Flamini this week wrote
about cases in which misinformation has posed a real threat to public
health and safety.
2.
The
CBC is
doing a multi-part series on misinformation leading up to the Canadian
election this fall.
3.
A
number of media observers this week noted a move by Fox News’ Shepard Smith to
fact-check President Trump’s claims about environmental protection. Here’s
HuffPost’s take on how the normally Trump-friendly network challenged him
on the facts. It’s not
the first time.
4.
There’s
a
new academic book out about detecting misinformation on social media.
5.
Twitter’s
data dumps, which detail activity and accounts involved in online
disinformation attempts, are helpful — but only to a point, Sara Harrison wrote
in Wired.
6.
Slate
dissected
an #ADOS, or American descendants of slaves, hashtag in light of recent
social media smears questioning the identity of Sen. Kamala Harris
(D-Calif.). It’s hard, the author wrote, to separate real rank-and-file
followers of this movement “from trolls capitalizing on racial divisions to
hurt Democrats.”
7.
One
of the players in the Harris trolling, meanwhile, was invited to a White House
social media summit scheduled for today. Mother
Jones reported that right-wing provocateur Ali Alexander said he will be
there. Social media companies were not
invited.
8.
The
Colorado Springs Independent profiled
fact-checker Lead Stories, founded in 2015 by a local attorney and
restaurateur and a former CNN reporter.
9.
The
Agence France-Presse is
hiring an English-speaking editor to join its Hong Kong-based fact-checking
team.
10. The United Kingdom and Canada are
together giving more than $4 million to a new global media defense fund, CNN
reported.
via Daniel
and Susan