Opportunity may knock only once but temptation leans on the door bell ...
… CNN Attacks Babylon Bee: 'The Internet Is Only Big Enough For One Fake News Site' | The Babylon Bee.
Just in case anyone may think otherwise, this is a joke.
CBP Expands Facial Recognition for Global Entry Travelers Nextgov
Clearview app lets strangers find your name, info with snap of a photo, report says cnet
Ubiquitous Surveillance Cameras Are Changing Our Understanding of Human Behavior Vice
What is the cost of fake news?
HBO will delve into the topic with the help of CNN media
reporter Brian Stelter. He is executive producer on an Andrew Rossi documentary
titled “After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News,” which is
scheduled to debut in March.
HBO describes the doc as examining, “the rising phenomenon of
‘fake news’ in the U.S. and the impact that disinformation, conspiracy theories
and false news stories have on the average citizen.”
The film will focus on several cases, including the 2016
presidential election, “Pizzagate,”
and the Jade
Helm conspiracy.
This is not the first time Rossi and Stelter have crossed paths
in a film about the news business. Rossi directed the 2011 film, “Page One:
Inside the New York Times.” At the time, Stelter was a Times media reporter and
was featured in Rossi’s film.
The spread of true and false news online Science
… CNN Attacks Babylon Bee: 'The Internet Is Only Big Enough For One Fake News Site' | The Babylon Bee.
Just in case anyone may think otherwise, this is a joke. CBP Expands Facial Recognition for Global Entry Travelers NextgovClearview app lets strangers find your name, info with snap of a photo, report says cnet
Ubiquitous Surveillance Cameras Are Changing Our Understanding of Human Behavior Vice
What is the cost of fake news?
Was Soleimani an ‘imminent’ threat?
Those who are following the tension between the United States
and Iran saw that President Donald Trump and the national security team have
offered shifting explanations for the airstrike that killed top Iranian
military leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Obviously, U.S.-based fact-checkers have
been following this topic very closely, trying to determine whether the Iranian
general represented an imminent threat.
On Monday, Poynter-owned PolitiFact
wrote that Trump’s team has been “inconsistent in describing what the
intelligence agencies knew.” The fact-checkers explained: while the U.S.
president keeps repeating that Soleimani was preparing an imminent
terrorist attack against America — specifically against four embassies — on
Sunday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on TV
that he "didn’t see" any specific evidence of Soleimani planning
attacks against the United States.
PolitiFact reached out to The White House but, as of Tuesday,
the government had not responded.
Meanwhile, Instagram (the Facebook-owned social media platform)
has decided to remove
posts and profiles that support Soleimani. The platform has informed it is
complying with the sanctions imposed by the U.S. against Iran and, at the same
time, obeying its own community guidelines.
In April 2019, Trump designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist
group. Instagram (and Facebook) are open about their willingness to ban
users who share content that promotes terrorism. Since Soleimani was one of the
most important people in the Revolutionary Guard, defending him could fit into
the description of promoting terrorism.
According to The
Washington Post, so far at least 15 media outlets and journalists in Iran
have lost their Instagram accounts. This inspired the Association of Iranian
Journalists to send a letter questioning Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri about
censorship.
The International Journalists Federation also put out a
statement:
“At a time when Iranian citizens need access to information it
is unacceptable that Instagram should choose to censor Iranian media and
individual journalists and users,” said Anthony Bellanger, the general
secretary of the IFJ.
One final note on Iran: We think fact-checking fans around the
world should celebrate the great work done by Bellingcat’s
team around the crash of Ukraine Airlines flight PS752.
By working collaboratively, the group managed to identify the
location of a video showing an Iranian missile hitting the plane and other
details about the crash. Wired
had a great review about the importance of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
tools.
. . . technology
- Google announced on Twitter that there was a 500% spike in searches for fact-checking during this week’s Democratic presidential debate in the U.S.
- Users who like Google
Trends will love to see the weekly “horse
race” that shows searches done with candidates’ names since the
beginning of the year and other maps about what people what to know about
about them. Pete
Buttigieg, for example, is the most searched one for "how tall
is..."
- American journalists should “take stock” of what happened in recent elections in India and Brazil, where misinformation flooded WhatsApp, wrote Sharon Moshavi of the International Center for Journalists in a CJR op-ed this week.
- That’s because news, she said, is “heading to a place that presents a whole new set of challenges: the private, hidden spaces of instant messaging apps.”
. . . politics
- Sara Fischer from Axios this week spoke with several campaign strategists and social intelligence experts who listed a number of “rules of the road” they expect to take hold for the 2020 campaign cycle in the United States.
- “Digital platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter
are important because they allow campaigns to gather extremely detailed
data about voters that they can leverage to boost other campaign efforts
later down the line,” she wrote.
- Media Matters for America, a liberal nonprofit organization, tallied how many supporters of the conspiracy theory QAnon are running for U.S. Congress in 2020. The results of the count are disheartening.
- “There are now at least EIGHTEEN current or former congressional candidates for 2020 who have embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory,” researcher Alex Kaplan wrote on Twitter. “One of them, in Oklahoma, has run multiple Facebook ads with the QAnon slogan, getting thousands of impressions.”
. . . the future of news
- The Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School has launched a “Misinformation Review.” It says the journal is a new format for peer-reviewed, scholarly work in which “content is produced and ‘fast-reviewed’ by misinformation scientists and scholars, released under open access, and geared towards emphasizing real-world implications.”
- Its lead piece on Wednesday’s launch was a study
concluding that “many claims about the effects of exposure to false news
may be overstated, or, at the very least, misunderstood.” On a related
note, check out Nieman
Lab’s recent round-up of the best misinformation and fact-checking
research of 2019.
- Last week, TikTok announced that it was banning misinformation about elections or other civic processes. (Here is the official policy.) Then Reddit said it would prohibit impersonation and deepfakes on its platform — a policy that could include false news websites, which played a central role in misinforming American voters in the 2016 election.
- “This not only includes using a Reddit account to impersonate someone, but also encompasses things such as domains that mimic others, as well as deepfakes or other manipulated content presented to mislead, or falsely attributed to an individual or entity,” Reddit’s policy reads.
On
Jan. 12, The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology alerted the
world that Taal Volcano, located on Luzon island, was highly active and would
spew ashes on many cities in the region. On the same afternoon, the Philippines
saw not only flights being cancelled and schools being shut, but also dozens of
hoaxes going viral on social media.
In
48 hours, Rappler’s fact-checking team debunked at least six falsehoods, some
of them capable of causing panic. One of them, for example, consisted of
Facebook posts claiming that the National Disaster Risk Reduction and
Management Council had
raised the level of alert related to the Taal Volcano from four to five —
meaning it had reached the most dangerous level in the scale.
In
an official statement, released Monday, however, the government denied it as
the fact-checkers spread the news.
Rappler
also debunked a hoax that claimed the weather anchor from ABS-CBN and
journalists from BBC said people should turn off their cell phones because they
could emit strong
radiation due to cosmic rays. This falsehood has been circulating online
for a long time.
Some
Facebook posts also claimed that the “Pacific
Ring of Fire is active" by gathering photos showing recent volcanic
activity of Mt. Shintake in Japan, Popocatepetl Volcano in Mexico and Taal
Volcano in the Philippines. According to the Smithsonian Institution's Global
Volcanism Program, however, there are generally around 20 volcanoes actively
erupting at any given time in the region.
For
the head of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, posts like
these are "alarmist." Rappler’s team was fast to spread factual
information and calm down some people.
Some
good explanatory pieces of content were also written. Here is an example: “What
you should know about Taal Volcano.”
What we liked: Rappler’s fact-checking unit worked fast
and in three different formats at the same time. It attacked false information
that could cause panic. It debunked images and published explanatory articles
with facts that could be useful for those who were looking for good
information. In times like these, taking just one step to debunk misinformation
isn’t enough.
1. Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador
to Russia, warned in a
Washington Post op-ed that a Senate impeachment trial against President
Trump would bring a new wave of Kremlin-style disinformation.
2. The Washington Post wrote
about how doctored images have become one of the most time-tested forms of
misinformation for political campaigns.
3. Misinformation in the current election
cycle means not just fact-checking, but trying to find out who’s behind the
misinformation, Associated
Press Executive Editor Sally Buzbee told CNN’s Brian Stelter on his Sunday
show “Reliable Sources.”
4. Vaccine confidence has declined,
according to a new
Gallup poll. “Misinformation has a powerful half-life,” wrote Vice’s Anna Merlan.
5. Bellingcat wasn’t the only outlet to
debunk misinformation about the Ukrainian airliner that Iran shot down
last week. BuzzFeed
News reported that Russian propagandists falsely claimed the crash was
actually Ukraine’s fault, and Storyful
debunked a variety of unsubstantiated claims about the crash on
Twitter.
6. EU DisinfoLab dug
into a media outlet called “France Libre 24” and found Polish right-wing
activists at its source.
7. “What’s
Crap on WhatsApp?”, the voice note show created by Africa Check to fight
misinformation on the private message app, has new challenges ahead, such as
finding ways to know how many people actually heard it.
8. After Iran’s missile strike on two air
bases in Iraq last week, a New York Post reporter’s identity was
stolen on Twitter to spread pro-Iran propaganda.
9. The
Washington Post reported on how hoaxers used the Australia wildfires to
spread online misinformation for profit.
10. Friday is the last day to apply
to Global Fact 7 in Oslo, Norway. The IFCN has already received more than
400 applications — and this will be the largest fact-checking summit in
history.