Bring on your own Joes, regardless of whether it's your regular Joes or your Trader Joes.
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In this edition you will find:
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Misunderstandings lead to animosity
and threats
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Dubawa swats a claim about mosquitos
offering male enhancement
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A look at increasingly violent threats
against fact-checkers
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AP Photo/Seth Wenig
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Former U.S. President Donald Trump is
suing Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, claiming he was “censored” by those
companies for not extending him the courtesy of consequence-free
posting on their platforms. The complaint,
filed Wednesday, alleges the companies used “unconstitutional authority
delegated to them by Congress” to deny both Trump and four additional
plaintiffs their First Amendment rights.
A suit that made similar allegations against PolitiFact, Science Feedback,
the Poynter Institute, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg was thrown
out last week.
Both seem to stem from a misunderstanding of the First Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution’s protection of freedom of speech. The amendment grants
citizens freedom from restrictions on speech that come from the government,
not private entities. And as anyone who’s taken a media law class can tell
you, there’s a whole host of caveats to that freedom that have been shaped
by over 250 years of American jurisprudence.
Looking at the complaint,
it’s also clear there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how Facebook
makes content moderation decisions. Trump cited the Facebook
Oversight Board’s review of his suspension that criticized the
seemingly arbitrary nature by which the company removed him from the
platform. Another complainant who was temporarily suspended for sharing
anti-mask misinformation said her misunderstanding of the rules prevented
her from engaging her network on the platform to find her missing brother.
Fact-checkers working with Facebook similarly suffer from a user
misunderstanding of how Facebook moderates content. Many Facebook users see
any kind of labeling of their content as censorship. Some take it a step
further and say fact-checkers are deliberately censoring their content and
limiting their speech.
That’s not how the Third-Party
Fact-Checking program works. Justine Isola, Facebook’s head of
misinformation policy, explained on a United
Facts of America panel that fact-checkers use a portal set up by
Facebook to attach their fact checks to posts that have been flagged by
either Facebook users or Facebook’s artificial intelligence. (Full
Disclosure: Fact-checking organizations are required to be signatories to
the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code
of Principles to be eligible to partner with Facebook).
Facebook uses the work of its fact-checking partners to train its AI how to
recognize similar posts independently. Facebook also uses this work to
decide, independent of its fact-checking partners, which posts to remove
and which posts to limit distribution.
This isn’t a flawless process. Machine learning technology is only as good
as its inputs, and there simply aren’t enough fact checks or fact-checkers
to help perfect Facebook’s AI.
The resulting animosity over users having their posts labeled or their
distribution limited is putting some fact-checkers at risk, with some
facing protests outside their offices and others facing increasingly
violent threats.
IFCN director Baybars Örsek announced
Wednesday the fact-checking community will band together to address the
recent spate of harassment against fact-checkers. But the truth is that
much of it stems from a misunderstanding of who has the power to do what to
whom.
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By mycteria/ Shutterstock
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A forwarded WhatsApp message
circulating widely in Sierra Leone used the recent reexamination of the
Wuhan lab leak theory to claim a cadre of escaped mosquitos were
offering male enhancement to those they were coming in contact with.
Dubawa traced the origin of the claim to a satire website advertising
itself as a place “where facts don’t matter.”
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A post containing an edited “Peanuts”
cartoon falsely claimed that the wider social acceptance of varied
gender identities will limit some Americans’ right to vote. Lead
Stories spoke to legal scholars who asserted the 19th Amendment, which
gave women the right to vote, bars any discrimination against voting on
the basis sex.
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By Muhd Imran Ismail/ Shutterstock
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"Shut Up in the Name of Free Speech," from Transitions Magazine. Tijana
Cvjetićanin, co-creator of two Bosnia-Herzegovina based fact-checking
projects (Istinomjer and Raskrinkavanje), addresses the recent spate of
abuse and harassment faced by fact-checkers.
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"Federal judge dismisses lawsuit involving
PolitiFact," from PolitiFact. A judge threw out a case against
PolitiFact, Science Feedback, the Poynter Institute, Facebook, and its
founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg that claimed the group had “censored a
truthful public health statement about vaccines through its
fact-checking relationship with Facebook.” The judge found the
plaintiffs, Children’s Health Defense, had not “plausibly alleged that
defendants engaged in federal action, and thus CHD may not seek
injunctive relief based on alleged First Amendment violations.”
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"QAnon's new 'plan'? Run for school board," from NBC News. Adherents of the
debunked conspiracy movement QAnon are shedding its now toxic branding
while continuing to preach its ideology as they run for (and in some
cases win) seats on local school boards.
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