Friday, September 28, 2018

Measuring Facebook’s fact-checking effort





Big day in Washington; Tucker Carlson's gaffe; The City rises in NYC; Is Siri a racist?



Today, Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Newsrooms such as NPR are trying to stay nimble on special coverage plans, as well as contingencies should the status of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein change after his meeting with President Trump — also today.


"At least we have warning," said Beth Donovan, NPR's Washington Desk head, "unlike so many other days when we're juggling two massive stories."


NPR plans gavel-to-gavel coverage of the judiciary committee and a special 8 p.m. EST wrap-up. Its annotation desk, putting in context to transcripts, will also be operating full-tilt.


For everybody else, here are a few resources for the day's coverage: 


— Network coverage of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. (TV Newser)


— 'Seared into my memory:' Christine Blasey Ford's prepared opening remarks. (The Atlantic)


— Her four sworn affidavits. (Mother Jones)


— The facts on sexual assault: Why so few report, according to prosecutors and victim's advocates. (Salem Reporter)


— The third woman with a sexual misconduct allegation: Who is Julie Swetnick? (Washington Post)


— Ronald Brownstein: A vote won't end the Kavanaugh controversy. (The Atlantic)


Quick hits



BLAMING THE VICTIMS: Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson is coming under fire after blaming sexual assault victims for the prevalence of rape and attempted rape. To sexual assault survivors too frightened or shocked or demeaned to report, he said Tuesday night, "You're part of the problem." The remark, coming amid the sentencing of Bill Cosby and accusations that Kavanaugh committed sexual assault, prompted widespread denunciation.


TUCKER UNDER FIRE, PART II: The group Sleeping Giants, which has led successful ad boycotts, questioned how any brand reliant on women like Honda, Nutrisystem, Bayer or Jenny Craig, could continue to advertise on the network. I wondered if Carlson would be disciplined by new Fox News head Suzanne Scott, who has sought to reduce racist and misogynistic commentary.

This reader offered a helpful chart for Carlson:


ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER JOURNALISM INVESTMENT: Welcome to The City, a nonprofit site being set up in New York, working in conjunction with New York magazine, the NYT’s Jaclyn Peiser reports. The idea: Replace some of that lost local accountability and investigative journalism with dwindling local sections and news outlets. Its editor is Jere Hester, a former New York Daily News city editor. The City’s $8.5 million in initial funding includes $2.5 million chunks from Craig Newmark, the Leon Levy Foundation and the Charles H. Revson Foundation.


REACTION FROM THE BOROUGHS: Bklyner editor Liena Zagare greeted the creation of The City on her local website, saying “There’s a new kid in town and they’re hiring.” For Zagare, the kid is not so new: The City's board chair is her husband, Ben Smith of BuzzFeed. (Earlier: Zagare and The Atlantic’s Scott Nover on Brooklyn’s vanishing local news voices.)


LIFE AND DEATH: Why didn’t Orlando paramedics move faster to help victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting? The city’s fire department had a mass-shooting plan, but bureaucratic delays prevented it from being implemented, ProPublica reports. A peer-reviewed study estimates 16 of the 49 victims could have been saved. (h/t Doris Truong)


NEW THIS MORNNG: Three years ago, a conference and festival began to highlight the work of the relatively few women then in podcasting. Now, both it and the role of women in podcasting is huge. Work It 2018, this year’s conference, will be at Knockdown Center in Queens on Nov. 13-14, coupled with live events and podcast tapings in venues across New York, such as the Apollo Theater, Hunter College and The Greene Space at WNYC.


RUSSIAN MISCHIEF: Beware of a Moscow-based and funded site called USAReally, started by a Russian with little journalism experience. The NYT’s Kevin Roose makes the case for it being another Trojan Horse from the Kremlin to influence Americans.


WHY A WHATSAPP CO-FOUNDER LEFT FACEBOOK: FB wanted Brian Acton to monetize his invention and open it up to commercial messaging, he tells Forbes’ Parmy Olson. In March, with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal brewing, Acton got tired of fighting Facebook leaders and walked out the door, tweeting to the world to #deletefacebook. Yeah, he left a final tranche of $850 million on the table from his sale of the world’s biggest messaging service to Facebook. But hey, he’s worth $3.6 billion, enough to tip $20 for a cup of coffee on one recent morning.


THINK BEFORE YOU QUOTE: Define American, which advocates for DREAMers and immigration reform, says four leading American dailies have sharply increased their sourcing from three migration “think-tanks” that have been characterized as anti-immigrant hate groups. The Trump administration has borrowed ideas and personnel from the groups as it developed the disastrous “family separation” policy, expanded private detention centers, sought to limit legal migration and attempted to strip citizenship retroactively from naturalized residents.


SIRI, DON’T GIVE ME A RACIST: The “Siri Suggested” recommended feature has led Apple users to Pizzagate conspiracies and debunked articles on bogus race “science” and Holocaust denial, BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel found. Apple removed the search results Warzel supplied, but the exercise raised new questions about relying on algorithms to police the internet.


WANT A GRANT FOR STORY COVERAGE?: Two organizations have opportunities. The Solutions Journalism Network has grants for 13 newsrooms on projects related to the midterm elections and their effects. Each grant is $2,500. Apply here. Also, The Fund for Investigative Journalism has four diversity fellowships available, in partnership with Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, InsideClimate News and the Marshall Project. Apply here by Oct. 4.


BETTER CALIFORNIA COVERAGE: Could that be the play of the Los Angeles Times' new owner in backing a bid by Sacramento-based McClatchy  for Tronc, publishers of the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News? Via the New York Post.


MOVES: Charo Henríquez has been promoted to senior editor of digital strategy at The New York Times, Media Moves reported. Henríquez, formerly senior editor of digital storytelling and training, previously was executive digital editor of People en Español. ... The Chronicle of Higher Education’s editor, Liz McMillen, is changing roles and will be the new executive editor of Chronicle Intelligence, a new initiative. The Chronicle will be conducting a search for McMillen's successor. 


QUIT: The chair of Australia's independent national broadcaster, after reports that he wanted to fire two journalists just because the government said it disliked them. 


SOCIAL HELP: The Local Media Association is setting up a news resource center to help members with social media questions. The center is being funded by the Facebook Journalism Project and will focus on training, case studies and best practices.






Measuring Facebook’s fact-checking effort



Many have tried to figure out how exactly Facebook’s effort to cut down on misinformation is going.


BuzzFeed News does an annual roundup of the top-performing hoaxes on the social network. Newswhip regularly measures how well fake news stories perform on Facebook. And other publishers have gotten more anecdotal evidence on how the company’s efforts are going.


Last week, those ad hoc measurements got some academic backup (which Slate’s Will Oremus covers well here.)


In a working paper, researchers at Stanford University, New York University and Microsoft Research analyzed 570 sites between January 2015 and July 2018 that were identified by at least one credible source as being consistent purveyors of false news. They found that interactions with those sites rose on both Facebook and Twitter during 2016, but fell sharply for the former in the beginning of 2017 while the latter’s continued to rise. They found no similar patterns for other news sites.


At least one reason for the fall in interactions with fake news sites could be Facebook’s partnership with independent fact-checking projects, which debunk false news stories, images and videos on the platform, decreasing their reach in News Feed. The project launched in December 2016 (and is partly facilitated by the IFCN).


The partnership isn’t perfect. Daniel found in July that many stories Facebook’s fact-checking partners rate as false aren’t flagged in the platform’s system.


Facebook has worked to improve its flagging mechanism — which fact-checkers told the company was hard to use — by incorporating the Schema.org ClaimReview markup, which Facebook announced it was incorporating at the Global Fact-Checking Summit in June. That should cut down on the amount of time it takes to get a fact check into Facebook’s system.


Beyond Facebook, the study’s results also highlight the need for a more robust approach to misinformation on Twitter. Daniel pointed out in August that the platform doesn’t have a similar initiative like Facebook’s fact-checking product — in spite of fact-checkers repeatedly asking for one. It’s taken smaller steps to cut down on misinformation, such as deleting bot accounts, but the working paper suggests that they don't seem to be working.


The study’s authors concede that their findings are “far from definitive.” As Alexios noted, the definition of "fake news" at the domain level — and which domains made the cut — makes a big difference on the results. The researchers also concentrated only on the United States.


With these caveats, the study provides helpful additional information to what journalists have spent months trying to figure out.


(Shutterstock)


This is how we do it





This is bad








This is fun





Coming up





(Shutterstock)


A closer look



  • The New York Times took a look inside Facebook’s election War Room, where dashboards show spikes in the circulation of false stories or the creation of automated accounts in specific locations.
  • At the Online News Association conference, danah boyd of Data & Society gave a keynote about how the media can avoid amplifying conspiratorial messages. Read a summary of her remarks on Medium.
  • Agência Lupa boss Cris Tardáguila co-authored "Você foi enganado," a book fact-checking claims by Brazilian presidents all the way back to 1921. Political lying has a long history, turns out.


12 quick fact-checking links



  1. Three members of Congress have asked the intelligence community to assess the potential security threat posted by deepfake videos.
  2. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being sued for sharing a fake news story about George Soros.
  3. Stop. With. The. Post-Truth. Headlines.
  4. Still relevant, from our archives: Journalism can’t afford for corrections to be the next victim of the “fake news” frenzy.
  5. A modest proposal: Maybe Sweden should run Twitter.
  6. Do you know the difference between a goatee and a Van Dyke? If not, you’re in good company.
  7. Sometimes saying there’s no evidence is as important as saying what evidence there is.
  8. Polygraphs are in the news this week. Evidence suggests they aren’t actually any good at detecting lies.
  9. Google is still featuring results from dubious sources. This time, on celebrities’ wealth.
  10. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a photo of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper in waist-high floodwaters, claiming he faked the scene to make it look like Hurricane Florence was worse than it was. But Cooper debunked that on his show — the photo was actually from Hurricane Ike.
  11. A fact-checking training event in Kazakhstan was interrupted when police arrested a journalist visiting from Ukraine.
  12. The New York Times issued an editor’s note after a story about expensive curtains at the home of the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. It focused too much on current ambassador Nikki Haley, even though the curtains were ordered under the Obama administration.


via Daniel and Alexios

Posted by at