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One Year In, J5 Making a Difference |
Australian Taxation Office
Australian officials tackle international
cyber crime | The Mandarin (User Friendly)
ATO reveals J5 tax enforcement body is
probing global bank over role ... (Behind Paywall)
Who are the "Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement"? | NGM Lawyers
Chess piece bought for £5 then left in drawer turns out to be medieval treasure worth £1m Independent
ProPublica, It’s Getting Worse: The IRS Now Audits Poor Americans at About the Same Rate as the Top 1%:
But poor taxpayers continue to bear the brunt of the IRS’ remaining force. As we reported last year,
Americans who receive the earned income tax credit, one of the
country’s largest anti-poverty programs, are audited at a higher rate
than all but the richest taxpayers. The new data shows that the trend
has only grown stronger.
Audits
of the rich continue to plunge while those of the poor hold steady, and
the two audit rates are converging. Last year, the top 1% of taxpayers
by income were audited at a rate of 1.56%. EITC recipients, who
typically have annual income under $20,000, were audited at 1.41%. ...
The Version Museum “is devoted to showcasing the visual history of popular websites, games, apps, and operating systems that have shaped our lives. Merriam-Webster defines the word museum as: An institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value. Certainly the technology we use everyday is both interesting and highly valuable! Much like walking through a real-life museum, Version Museum aims to illustrate the visual, tangible elements of various versions of technology, rather than just the written history behind it. Wikipedia and other sites already do a fantastic job of detailing the story behind websites, apps, and everything else.
The Pelosi fake: Some basic facts
Fact-checkers and other players in the truth-telling business
have been preoccupied in the past week by an altered video of Nancy Pelosi.
The story, originally covered in The Washington Post, involves a slowed-down video designed to make Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, appear to slur her words and struggle to speak.The implication is that she was either drunk or somehow otherwise impaired.
The story, originally covered in The Washington Post, involves a slowed-down video designed to make Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, appear to slur her words and struggle to speak.The implication is that she was either drunk or somehow otherwise impaired.
The manipulated video, a smear posted on a Facebook group called
Politics WatchDog, was spread around the platform millions of times and even
tweeted by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. He later
deleted it but appeared in a successive tweet to defend
his original.
The effect of such fakes is hard to quantify. Pelosi is a
powerful politician who can probably shrug it off, although, as BuzzFeed News
noted, these fakes will
likely never go away. Officials like her are used to these kinds of fakes,
which frequently
get posted online worldwide. Moreover, its most receptive audience will be
people who want to believe it’s real, don’t care and just spread it anyway — or
don’t know any better.
The level of acrimony over the video, however, suggested this
one was different. Why?
The video fed into a cauldron of issues already bubbling away at
the intersection of politics, social media and misinformation: The virality of
the meanest kinds of content, Facebook’s unsatisfying (to many) response, the
video’s amplification in Trump world and the fact that it was so easy to make —
and spread.
In other words, it’s a complex brew which is itself subject to
misinformation. As such, we’re providing here some answers to basic questions
about the episode.
Facebook has a partnership with fact-checkers to check stuff
like this. Didn’t it work?
Actually, the system worked as it is supposed to. According
to Facebook’s relationship with independent fact-checking sites, once a
post is rated as false, its future distribution in News Feed is decreased, a
fact is appended below it and users who try to share it are warned that it it
has been debunked.
After five fact-checking sites confirmed that the video was
manipulated, the post was labeled with a warning that there was “additional
reporting” from fact-checkers, and links to them.
One question is whether that happened quickly enough, and
whether this video manipulation was so blatant that Facebook even needed to
rely on the fact-checking community, whose processes necessarily take time, to
make its warning. One potential way to address that, suggested
by our former colleague Alexios Mantzarlis, would be a rapid-response team
at Facebook that takes action quickly when posts reach a certain engagement
velocity.
“Additional reporting” seems like pretty vague language for such
a blatant fake. What’s up with that? Why not just take it down?
Facebook’s answer to that came from Monika Bickert, vice
president for product policy and counterterrorism, in questioning
from CNN’s Anderson Cooper. She said the company’s way of dealing with
misinformation is primarily through its partnership with fact-checkers.
“We think it's important for people to make their own informed
choice about what to believe,” she said.
Bickert made a distinction between this kind of content and a
“riot or threat of violence” that would require immediate removal of such
content. She also noted that the conversation on social media had turned to the
fact that the video was manipulated — not what it says about Pelosi. Others see
it differently. As The New York Times’ Charlie
Warzel wrote this week, “the dominant political narrative of the past two
days has focused squarely on Speaker Pelosi’s health.”
Pelosi,
for her part, said Wednesday that the company was “lying
to the public” by not taking down the video.
Regardless, there’s clearly a question here of whether Facebook
should change the language it uses to label posts rated as false by
fact-checkers. As Casey Newton wrote
in his newsletter for The Verge on Tuesday, the company could have written
a warning about the Pelosi fake in plain English: “This video has been
distorted to change its meaning.”
Why is this even the platforms’ problem? If users post stuff
that then goes viral, is that the platform’s responsibility?
There is an emerging debate now about the degree to which social
media platforms should be regulated for content posted by third-party users.
This is not likely to result in changes any time soon, given the divided
government and wide disagreement over regulation. And, as
Daniel wrote yesterday, any solutions should involve multiple stakeholders
— not just media companies and Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s efforts to remove fake accounts, and its
relationship with fact-checkers, are all part of actions the company has
voluntarily taken to curb the spread of misinformation.
Is there a larger lesson in this whole episode for journalists
and media companies? For example, should they replay the doctored video, even
if it's just for comparison purposes?
The “amplification” question is a good one, and we think this
episode will be closely studied as an example of the tough questions the press
faces in bringing attention to this kind of misinformation. The original Post
story on the video may have broadened its reach, but at the same time, it
heightened public awareness of the kinds of misinformation millions of people
are exposed to.
The question is whether sunlight in cases like this is a disinfectant — or a propellant. At least on Twitter, early data points to the latter in this case.
. . . technology
·
Last
week, Facebook published
an update on how well it has been enforcing its community standards. In it,
the tech company reported that it had removed more than 2 billion fake accounts
between January and March. But BuzzFeed
News wrote that there are still more active fake accounts on the platform
than ever before.
·
Speaking
of which, CNN
reported on how an influence campaign used fake Facebook and Twitter
accounts to push pro-Iranian talking points in the U.S. They even successfully
had letters published in several major newspapers.
·
Wired
took
stock of the current state of deepfake videos and why they’re still
relatively easy to spot. But recent developments in the technology that powers
deepfakes could make it easier to create them — and fact-checking is the
solution (or
perhaps smarter cameras?)
. . . politics
- Last month, we
wrote in this newsletter that Sri Lanka’s shutdown of social media
channels in an attempt to cut down on misinformation didn’t actually work.
This week, the Agence France-Presse wrote
a story confirming that. But Indonesia made
a similar move last week amid post-election unrest.
- Parliamentary elections were held in the European Union
last week — and it
wasn’t as rife with misinformation as some predicted. But the BBC still
found numerous examples of false or misleading videos that got a wide
reach on social media.
- Also on the election front: 2020 U.S. presidential candidates don’t really know what to do about misinformation, Mother Jones reported. Candidates are now “forced to make a lightning-fast decision of whether or not to respond to a political smear,” it wrote.
. . . the future of news
·
In
a comprehensive piece about how widespread internet access is changing
the African continent, CNET’s Daniel Van Boom writes that there are also
problems, including misinformation. Africa Check said it increasingly spends
its time debunking false health information.
·
The
BBC
interviewed a Macedonian woman who says she was hired to create
semi-plagiarized copies of articles originally published in right-wing
publications in the U.S. “When I got the call and Marco explained what kind of
news site it is, that’s the moment I realized I was going to work for fake
news,” she told the network.
·
Turkish
fact-checking site Teyit launched
a WhatsApp sticker pack for their readers to use when calling out
misinformation in their messaging groups. The idea is that stickers make it a
little less combative to tell someone that they’re sharing bogus content. In
Spain, Maldito Bulo has been using a
similar sticker pack.
Each week, we analyze five of the top-performing fact checks on
Facebook to see how their reach compared to the hoaxes they debunked. Read more
about this week’s numbers, and how fact-checkers’ work stacked up to that
altered Pelosi video, on Poynter.org.
- Teyit.org: "Photo allegedly shows Ekrem İmamoğlu drinking water during the month of Ramadan" (Fact: 29.9K engagements // Fake: 1.1K engagements)
- Factcheck.org: "Photo Shows Woodstock, Not a Trump Rally" (Fact: 23.7K engagements // Fake: 2.8K engagements)
- Full Fact: "There is no evidence to suggest Nigel Farage was a member of the National Front." (Fact: 1.3K engagements // Fake: 2.1K engagements)
- Agence France-Presse: "No, journalist Nicholas Casey of the NYT does not appear in this image" (Fact: 899 engagements // Fake: 1.6K engagements)
- PolitiFact: "Viral video of Nancy Pelosi slowed down her speech" (Fact: 577 engagements // Fake: 88K engagements)
Last
week, elections wrapped up in India. Misinformation has plagued the world’s
largest democracy for the past year, including hoaxes
about a terrorist attack, bogus
voter fraud claims and even public
lynch mobs.
But
not all of it has been doom and gloom.
Boom
Live debunked
a video of a man throwing dollars down onto a street full of people,
purportedly to celebrate the growth of markets as a result of Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s reelection. According to the accompanying Facebook posts, the
video was shot in Canada and the man in question was Gujarati, an ethnic group
from western India.
But
that’s false, Boom reported — the video actually depicts a Detroit-based
musician making it rain in Manhattan earlier this month.
What we liked: Election-related misinformation can seem
really serious (and it is!), but there is also a lot of junk social media posts
out there that play on lighter emotions. Boom debunked this one masterfully by
doing a reverse image search on screenshots of the video and analyzing comments
on Instagram posts to track down its origin.
- The Australian profiled
Jessikka Aro, the Finnish journalist who has documented “fake news”
coming out of a Russian troll factory in St. Petersburg, Russia. The
trolls, it wrote, “were not pleased.” She regularly receives death
threats, she told the paper.
- Twitter has started showing users more ads. And Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed News found that “one malicious campaign used false articles about Drake and the Weeknd to promote casinos.”
3.
Media
Matters, which monitors misinformation from the American right, said
this week that conservative and conspiracy sources have dominated
abortion-related coverage on Facebook.
4.
Full
Fact is
hiring a head of product to help oversee the British fact-checker’s growing
automated fact-checking team.
5.
Radio-Canada
has
launched a team focused on debunking misinformation.
6.
After
a political scientist made
up a Trump quote on Twitter to make a joke, several journalists fell for
it. And the president himself noticed.
7.
A
Washington Post columnist made
a succinct argument for why the platforms need to do more to combat
anti-vaccine misinformation: “The outbreak of misinformation online is
facilitating literal outbreaks of disease.”
8.
Deutsche
Welle profiled
Congo Check and the work it’s doing to combat misinformation on social
media.
9.
The
Los Angeles Times has a fun
Q-and-A with Daniel Dale, the Toronto Star fact-checker who’s been counting
Donald Trump’s falsehoods.
10. The International Grand Committee on Big
Data, Privacy and Democracy had subpoenaed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO
Sheryl Sandberg to come to Ottawa to talk about the spread of disinformation
and hate on their platforms. They didn’t show, prompting
tough questions for the representatives who showed up instead.
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