Should we still be going to visit our older family members?
www.bitlog.com Jake Voytko’s personal log of bits – DuckDuckGo is good enough for regular use – “…I don’t personally miss most of Google’s result panels. Especially the panels that highlight information snippets. It’s easy to find these. Searching microsoft word justify text provides me a snippet from Microsoft’s Office’s support page explaining what to click or type to justify text. I’ve learned not to trust information in these panels without reading the source they came from. Google seems to cite this information uncritically. I’ve found enough oversimplified knowledge panel answers that I’ve stopped reading most of them. Recently, I was chatting with a Googler who works on these. I asked them if I was wrong to feel this way. And they replied, “I trust them, but I’ve read enough bug reports and user feedback that I don’t blame you.” So my position is wrong, but not very wrong. I’ll take that…[I have been using DuckDuckGo for many years – I do not miss Google – at – all.]
MIKE SCRAFTON. Shades of herd immunity stalk COVID-19 government responses.
Seeping faintly through the pronouncements and policies of some government responses to the coronavirus pandemic are the vapours of older belief systems; a whiff of utilitarianism, the scent of social Darwinism, and the fetid reek of eugenics. Continue reading
Chinese Tycoon Who Criticized Xi’s Response to Coronavirus Has Vanished.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? ISIS advises terrorists to steer clear of Europe during coronavirus outbreak. “ISIS also said terrorists should wash their hands regularly and ‘cover their mouths when yawning and sneezing.’”
Decision-making in quarantine is mainly guess-based
On Tuesday, at 9 p.m., those who attended the latest NICAR
conference — the annual data journalism summit held in New Orleans — received
an email
from the Investigative Reporters & Editors group with an alert that one of
the participants had tested positive for the 2019 coronavirus.
From that moment on, I and about 1,000
other data journalists from many parts of the world were advised to be in
quarantine.
Here is what happens when you are in this situation: A million
questions pop up in your head and you just can’t find reliable sources with
answers for them. So you start making decisions based on guesses — not on
facts. That’s asking a lot of a fact-checker.
Should my family quarantine too? Should my daughter avoid
school? Those were my first two questions and I couldn’t find answers for them
late at night. In a call, early in the morning, my physician said the
following: “If your husband and daughter don't show any symptoms, if you are
all OK, they can live normal lives.” So they left home. But was it the right
decision? Would other doctors react the same way?
As a fact-checker, I convinced myself I did my best. I reached
out to the most reliable source I had and followed the data. But as I found
contradictory or misleading information — the very thing I write about every
day — I realized how tempting it might be for others to just visit social media
channels or WhatsApp groups to grab "information” from family and friends
and accept it as “true content.”
No fact-checking measures would be applied to those pieces of
“information” passed on by others and some real damage could happen. This is
how falsehoods and misunderstandings spread. This is how hoaxes can threaten lives
and lead to deaths in times like these.
Waiting to hear from a doctor about whether I need to sleep in a
separate room, for example, is much harder than just typing the same question
on Facebook. And I, of all people, know the odds of getting bad information on
social media. It’s suddenly clearer how the lack of good information means more
room for the bad.
Mathias Felipe, a researcher at University of Navarra, attended
NICAR, too. As soon as his director heard about IRE's email, Felipe received a
message asking him to go back to Spain immediately. But could he jump on a
flight?
“There is a lack of information regarding repatriation if you
are under quarantine. I found many articles about trips but nothing about
official repatriation,” he told me in a quick interview.
On Wednesday morning, Felipe wasn’t sure, for example, if he
must tell the airline and/or the airport that he has been requested to
quarantine, or if it was OK to just board and land in Navarra.
Reinaldo Chaves, project coordinator at the Brazilian
Association of Investigative Journalism, on the other hand, drove to a public
hospital in São Paulo on Wednesday morning. He carried with him a list of eight
questions for which he couldn't find definite answers online.
“How long should I stay home? Should I adopt self-isolation
measures only if I touched someone who’s infected? Should I self-isolate just
because I traveled to a country with many COVID-19 cases? How should I clean my
house? What products should I use? How long should I worry that the virus in a
place can contaminate people? How often do I need to take my temperature? When
should I take the test?”
He spent 40 minutes at the hospital (30 waiting and 10 with the
doctors).
Writing in The Atlantic
about the response to the virus, James Hamblin, a doctor and lecturer at Yale
University’s School of Public Health, noted that “the source of most panic is
uncertainty." And, from the perspective of those who haven’t completed
even their first day in quarantine yet, I can say it sounds about right. I am
just wondering how it must be for those who have tested positive. The lack of
reliable sources and definite answers looks like a black hole.
By the way, I’m feeling fine, as are the others quoted here.
Thanks!
— Cristina Tardáguila, IFCN
. . . technology
·
The
New York Times said the proliferation of misinformation about the coronavirus
has “stumped”
social media companies. The Verge’s Casey Newton, however, said the virus had
put tech platforms into a “newly
interventionist mindset.”
- On Facebook, a search for the virus produces a list of credible sources, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
o
Twitter
searches for COVID-19 direct users to mainstream news sources.
o
Searches
for coronavirus on Google lead to a red “SOS” alert,
with links to credible sources displayed most prominently.
. . . politics
·
In
two instances this week, major social media platforms took action against posts
aimed at helping President Donald Trump’s re-election.
o
In
the first, Facebook removed
Trump campaign ads that suggested they were about the 2020 census but were
fundraisers in disguise. The site redirected users to a Trump campaign site.
“After filling out the form, users are asked to make a donation to the Trump
campaign,” wrote
Popular Information’s Judd Legum, who first reported the ad.
o
A
few days later, Twitter said it was flagging
as “manipulated media” a video that was cut off to make it appear as if
former Vice President Joe Biden inadvertently endorsed the president for
re-election. In fact, the full video proves otherwise.
·
On
the Democratic side, Biden’s colleagues are worried that he isn’t prepared for
the onslaught of disinformation that’s about to hit him, the
Daily Beast reported.
. . . science and health
·
The
U.S. State Department blamed Russia for “swarms of online, false personas” that
sought to spread misinformation about coronavirus on social media sites, The
Washington Post reported.
o
The
national security news site Defense
One reported that Iranian, Russian and Chinese propaganda media outlets are
trying to convince people, without evidence, that the emerging public health
crisis comes from U.S. biological weapons.
·
Misleading
portrayals of the safety of tobacco use are widespread on YouTube, where the
viewership of popular pro-tobacco videos has soared over the past half-dozen
years, according to University of Pennsylvania research
reported in the Misinformation Review.
President
Trump recently announced that the government would expand the number of
laboratories that could test for the coronavirus, a move many said was late in
coming. Perhaps to deflect the criticism, Trump on March 4 claimed that an
Obama administration decision on medical testing “turned out to be very
detrimental to what we’re doing.”
But
that wasn’t the case, as two fact-checkers showed. Both PolitiFact’s
Jon Greenberg and The
Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler took readers on methodical journeys through
Food and Drug Administration policies governing medical tests. Contrary to
Trump’s assertion, there were actually no big changes to the policies during
the previous administration.
There
was plenty of debate during those years about whether tests developed in
certain labs should be more tightly regulated. But eventually that idea was
scrapped and the Obama administration deferred to Congress, the fact-checkers
explained.
What we liked: This is the kind of story that
fact-checkers are made for. Had a reporter writing about the FDA’s move to
expand the testing tried to squeeze in a debunking of Trump’s claim, the story
would have devolved into a history lesson. The fact-check format allowed these
reporters to stay focused on the claim, and precisely why it was wrong.
–
Susan Benkelman, API
1. Coronavirus hoaxes have played into
panic buying and fed the frenzy, wrote
Andy J. Yap, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD.
He said consumers “compensate for a perceived loss of control” by buying
products designed to fill a basic need, solve a problem or accomplish a task.
2. Russia engaged in a textbook campaign of
disinformation as it tried to thwart the probe of the downing of a Malaysian
airliner in 2014, prosecutors
told a Dutch court.
3. First Draft has published tips
for journalists covering coronavirus.
4. A fake
screenshot about a Trump tweet and the stock market caught a lot of people
off guard.
5. Tensions are
growing between Singapore officials and tech platforms over the country’s
“fake news” law.
6. No, Daniel Radcliffe does
not have coronavirus.
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