Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.— Paul Tillich, born in 1886
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
Remembering Charles Bukowski: A working poet for the ages
THE HALLS OF ACADEME: Comprised 50% from
the uni sector and 50% from government agencies, partnered with Canberra’s
‘frank advice’.
 |
Commissioner Chris Jordan delivers the opening remarks as
part of a regulatory panel at the Council of Small Business Organisations
Australia National Small Business Summit 2019.
I was reading the Mirrlees Review of taxation, published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in 2011 this morning (such things are my day job)
Can warnings from fact-checkers reduce sharing?
The
misinformation expert Claire Wardle, writing
in the current issue of Scientific American, poses (then expertly answers)
a key question for people concerned about the current state of the online
information ecosystem: Why do people share misinformation, conspiracies and
other kinds of misleading content on social media?
(The
article is part of a larger
package dedicated to “Truth, Lies and Uncertainty.”)
Wardle,
who is the U.S. director of First Draft, a nonprofit focused on ways to address
misinformation, cites several reasons people create this stuff, many of which
will be familiar to readers of this newsletter. People may want political
influence, or they are just causing trouble. Some of them do it for
money.
As
for sharing, one of Wardle’s points is that people’s willingness to “share
without thinking” is precisely what the creators of disinformation want. “The
goal is that users will use their own social capital to reinforce and give
credibility to that original message,” she wrote.
So
when it comes to sharing, what can be done to give people pause?
One answer came recently from Paul Mena, a professor of journalism and news writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He released new research that provides some affirming news for fact-checkers. Mena concluded that people were less likely to share content on Facebook that includes a fact-checking warning label than stories that are not flagged.
One answer came recently from Paul Mena, a professor of journalism and news writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He released new research that provides some affirming news for fact-checkers. Mena concluded that people were less likely to share content on Facebook that includes a fact-checking warning label than stories that are not flagged.
In the experimental design, some posts were labeled as
"disputed," similar to the way Facebook used to tagged posts rated as
false by fact-checkers who are part of Facebook’s
fact-checking partnership. The platform tweaked
its flags in late 2017; now they show fact checks as related articles and a
flag also appears as a user is about to share it. Facebook then also limits the
content's reach in the News Feed. (Disclosure: Being a signatory of the
IFCN’s code of principles is a necessary condition for joining the
project.)
Mena’s
study was based on a sample of 501 participants from across the political
spectrum who were asked about whether they would share certain kinds of
content on Facebook.
”The
study showed that respondents who saw a fabricated Facebook post with a warning
label had lower intentions to share that content than those who did not see the
flag,” his report said. The effect of these sharing intentions, notably,
remained the same even after Mena controlled for the participants’ political
leaning.
Mena,
asked in a phone interview about potential practical applications for his
research beyond Facebook, said that the conclusions could possibly be tested on
other platforms.
In
fact, such flags are about to get a real-world test on a new platform.
Instagram announced last week that it, like its owner Facebook, would be using
the third-party fact-checking program to check posts on the photo and
video-sharing platform, which is brimming
with misleading memes and other false information.
The
Instagram effort could provide researchers with important data on the
effectiveness of flagging memes, which Mena and other researchers say is needed
given that memes spread differently than text articles. As Wardle noted in her
Scientific American piece, “memes have not been acknowledged by much of the
research and policy community as influential vehicles for disinformation,
conspiracy or hate” but their shareability is what helps them spread — and
contributes to their effectiveness.
Many
of the details of how Instagram will work with fact-checkers are still being
worked out, as Cristina wrote
last week when the news came out.
One big question is how the project will scale. As Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab told Wired’s Sara Harrison, the effort will add 100 million new users to the fact-checking effort, and “fact-checkers have to sleep.”
One big question is how the project will scale. As Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab told Wired’s Sara Harrison, the effort will add 100 million new users to the fact-checking effort, and “fact-checkers have to sleep.”
. . . technology
·
Twitter
and Facebook suspended
hundreds of accounts the companies say were part of a Chinese effort to
undermine pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The accounts amplified
content that portrayed the protesters as violent in an effort to sow
political discord. Twitter said it will no longer allow state-supported media
outlets to promote tweets.
·
In
a tweet, U.S. President Donald Trump aired a popular conservative talking
point: that Google is biased in favor of liberals. Both PolitiFact
and The
New York Times debunked the tweet, which claimed a report found that the
tech giant manipulated millions of votes in favor of former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton in 2016.
·
Have
you ever seen those pages on Instagram that claim to post interesting facts? Writing
for Poynter.org, MediaWise reporters Alex Mahadevan and Madelyn Knight
reported that “most of these pages are full of suspect, out-of-context or
downright false claims and have millions of combined followers.”
. . . politics
·
After
publishing a story about a pro-Russia politician, fact-checkers in Ukraine were
attacked by several websites and TV stations. Vox Ukraine wrote that such
attacks attempted to discredit the outlet’s reporting, which found several
factual errors in a speech by Viktor Medvedchuk.
·
A
social scientist in Germany has warned that conspiracy theorists have hijacked
some climate-related terms to spread misinformation on YouTube, Science
News reported. Joachim Allgaier of RWTH Aachen University found that common
search terms like “climate change” and “global warming” typically led to
accurate videos. But newer terms like “geoengineering” and “climate
modification” led to conspiratorial videos.
·
The
U.S. Food and Drug Administration has
issued an advisory that warns people against drinking bleach to treat
autism or cancer. That warning comes amid a
flurry of online misinformation that falsely markets bleach as a medical
cure. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the government is
calling for social media companies to more seriously combat anti-vaccine
misinformation.
. . . the future of news
·
A
new study from the Global
Disinformation Index, reported
by CNN ahead of its September release, concludes that at least $235 million
in revenue is generated annually from ads running on extremist and
disinformation websites. Big brand names could unwittingly have their ads next
to the people running sites propagate hate or false information, the report
said.
·
There
are certain linguistic characteristics to fake news that could be used by
machines to detect misinformation, linguist and software engineer Fatemeh
Torabi Asr wrote in Nieman Lab this week. On average, she said, “fake news
articles use more expressions that are common in hate speech, as well as words
related to sex, death, and anxiety.”
·
Snopes
has
been embroiled in a very public feud with the Babylon Bee for debunking the
Christian satire site’s articles. But despite the criticism, researchers
writing for Nieman Lab have found that a lot of people still don’t know how
to identify satire — and that fact-checking could provide some much-needed
clarity.
When
Norway decided to follow Germany’s decision to suspend
its donations to the Brazilian government’s Amazon Fund, the Oslo government
became a clear target for President Jair Bolsonaro’s attacks.
In
a recent interview about the Norwegian cut of $33 million — amid a dispute
around deforestation — the right-wing politician asked: “Isn’t Norway that
country that kills whales up there in the North Pole?” Some hours later,
Bolsonaro posted on his Twitter
account a video showing a whale hunt with captions that said it was recorded in
Norway.
The
fact-checking outlet Agência Lupa, however, debunked
that. The video shared by Bolsonaro had gone viral on the internet before and
fact-checkers had already covered it. It was actually shot in Denmark, during
an annual festival called Grindadráp. There is no connection at all between
those images and Norway.
But
Lupa went even deeper. It reached the International Whale Commission and
obtained the most recent data on whale hunting. In 2017, Norway killed 432
whales, the lowest number since 1996.
What we liked: This fact check was picked up by all
major media outlets in Brazil, like Folha
de S.Paulo, and also reached foreign media, like Deutsche
Welle. It not only debunked the video but presented data on a controversial
subject (whale hunting). Twitter users went back to Bolsonaro’s account to
demand a correction — which he hasn’t done.
1.
Africa
Check is
now fact-checking Facebook posts in 11 African languages.
2.
Pagella
Politica, in Italy, and Newtral, in Spain, have been debunking false images and
videos about Open
Arms, a vessel with more than 100 migrants stranded off the coast of Italy.
Even the U.S actor Richard Gere got involved.
3.
A
new study
found that summary fact-checking (think speaker
files) had more of an effect on how politicians are viewed than individual
fact checks.
4.
PolitiFact
looked
into the longstanding theory that psychiatric drugs influence mass
shooters. It found that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that’s true
— and the theory has connections to the Church of Scientology.
5.
In
India, the
Economic Times reported on how a propaganda arm of the Pakistani government
used fake Twitter accounts to spread disinformation about the situation in Kashmir.
6.
Facebook
is
hiring journalists to curate its new News Tab, a section that will surface
relevant news content for users.
7.
Twitter
has
invested in a social media network that’s been accused of facilitating the
spread of misinformation in India.
8.
A
new privacy hoax is going around Instagram, as Atlantic (soon
to be New York Times) writer Taylor Lorenz flagged
on Twitter.
9.
The
ownership of The Epoch Times is closely associated with the Chinese spiritual
community Falun Gong, NBC
revealed this week. The publication is a big supporter of Donald Trump and
also “a powerful conduit for the internet’s fringier conspiracy theories,”
wrote Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny.
10. IFCN’s fellows will be announced this
Friday! The IFCN received 12 applications and interviewed 5 finalists. Two of
them will spend some time embedded in another fact-checking organization this
semester. Follow @factchecknet.