“The old adage tells us that “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” but the math tells us why: the unknown has a chance of being better, even if we actually expect it to be no different, or if it’s just as likely to be worse.”
― Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
Gladys Liu confirms being on China Overseas Exchange Association council
Gladys Liu confirms being on China Overseas Exchange Association council
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The Liberal backbencher admits to previous membership of an organisation linked to China's foreign interference operations, less than 24 hours after saying she could not recall being a part of it.
CNN’s Bombshell Russian Spy Story Looks More Like a Dud.
Mr Inbetween star Brooke Satchwell says Foxtel show’s popularity is “extraordinary” - NEWS.com
Ex-spy boss Dennis Richardson fears China Cold War
Federal employee information was hacked – DOJ claims cyberattack victims not due compensation: Washington Post: “The Trump administration has asked a federal court to reconsider a ruling that opened the door for potential payments to millions of federal employees and others due to the cybertheft of their personal information. The Justice Department request, filed last week, involves what it calls “massive litigation” stemming from hacks of two government databases revealed in June 2015 but which occurred months earlier. One breach involved records on about 21.5 million federal, military and contractor personnel and others who had undergone background checks since about 2000, commonly to gain or renew security clearances. The other involved personnel records of about 4.2 million current and former federal employees. Overlap between the two brought the total affected to about 22.1 million. The American Federation of Government Employees is seeking a monetary award to victims under the Privacy Act, which provides for awards of at least $1,000 per individual if the government willfully fails to protect information on them that it holds…”
“That's the thing about risks, it's impossible to know which ones are worth it until it's too late.”
As a gulag survivor, Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression. Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought. In his foreword to The Socialist Phenomenon—an extraordinary book by his friend Igor Shafarevich—Solzhenitsyn noted “the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism,” and stressed that
via
Daniel, Susan and Cristina
Socialism up close and personal …
The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct, [these contradictions] do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, of communal ownership, and justice . . .
3 questions about a military anti-disinformation project
Last month, we asked
who was going to lead the U.S. government's war on disinformation. Now, an
effort in one obscure corner of the federal bureaucracy appears to be taking
shape.
At the end of August, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Department of Defense, announced
that it was working on a project to detect and counter online disinformation.
The initiative, called Semantic Forensics or “SemaFor,” is aimed at developing
“technologies to automatically detect, attribute, and characterize falsified
multi-modal media assets.”
In short: DARPA wants to use custom software to fight
misinformation. And, for us, that raises three big questions, rooted in
reporting 101: What, how and why?
1. What?
As
Gizmodo noted in its piece on SemaFor, DARPA is an agency that has become
known for its out-there technology. It once made a
vacuum the size of a penny just because it could.
DARPA has essentially said it wants to develop three different
algorithms. The first would identify manipulated media, the second would
determine where the media came from and the third would somehow figure out
whether the media were “generated or manipulated for malicious purposes.”
The pursuit of a one-size-fits-all approach to countering online
falsehoods is hardly unique. A cottage industry has sprung up around the idea
that artificial intelligence and machine learning models can somehow be
implemented to both identify and counter the spread of misinformation. Because,
as academics and media critics are wont to observe, there just aren’t enough
fact-checkers.
2. How?
The idea of an automated system that could somehow
single-handedly deal with online misinformation sounds like a tantalizing
proposition. But is it even possible?
As Gizmodo noted, many existing automated models aimed at
limiting the spread of falsehoods are flawed. Startups like Factmata have
raised millions of dollars in seed funding to pursue AI verification, but
humans are still writing those programs, allowing bias to creep in — and
misinformation is rarely black and white. Will Oremus covered
this problem well in a piece about credibility scores for Slate in January.
Finally, the big platforms are the elephant in the room.
Without buy-in from Facebook, Twitter or YouTube — where a
lot of misinformation is spread — how would DARPA even implement its
three-pronged algorithm program? Sure, Twitter has a relatively open API
(that’s why there is so much misinformation research about the platform), but
Facebook’s is notoriously closed off. And it’s hard to imagine a world in which
these companies would willingly give the Defense Department the keys to their
products.
3. Why?
This is perhaps the most important question to ask about DARPA’s
anti-disinformation project.
Spurred by increasing interest in online falsehoods, governments
around the world have
taken a variety of actions against misinformation. These actions range from
bills outlawing the spread of hoaxes online to initiatives to bolster media
literacy efforts.
From the outside, these efforts seem rooted in a genuine desire
to promote more facts online. But critics of government anti-misinformation
attempts often suspect censorship as an ulterior motive, and anecdotal evidence
suggests they’re right in at least some cases. Take
Egypt, for example, where mainstream journalists are regularly imprisoned
on charges of violating a law that’s supposedly aimed at criminalizing the
spread of “fake news.”
Despite its strong tradition of press freedom, the U.S. isn’t
exempt from these discussions of media censorship. And journalists would do
well to ask hard questions about how DARPA’s proposed systems could be
weaponized as the agency continues to develop them.
. . . technology
·
A
report about disinformation from New York University is calling on tech
companies to remove “provably false” information from their platforms. “They
have to take responsibility for the way their sites are misused,” Paul M.
Barrett, the professor who wrote the report, told
The Washington Post. Here’s the
report itself.
·
Facebook
and Instagram are rolling out a new feature to halt the spread of
misinformation about vaccines. Users in the United States will get a pop-up
window connecting them to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CNN
reported, while non-U.S. users will be connected to the World Health
Organization.
·
Speaking
of vaccines, Pinterest has received a lot of praise for its handling of the
issue. The Washington Post’s editorial page added
its endorsement to the mix this week. The Verge’s Casey
Newton wrote that the platform’s smaller size and lower profile has helped
facilitate these decisions.
. . . politics
·
The
Washington Post Fact Checker has launched
a guide to verify campaign ads. In a way, this is a full-circle
moment for fact-checking, which has roots in Brooks Jackson’s “ad police”
checks for CNN in the 1990s.
·
Thailand
wants to launch a Fake News Center to combat online scams in November.
According to the Bangkok
Post, its government is “working to iron out a framework for fake news
detection that is compatible with the practices upheld by the International
Fact-Checking Network.” Thailand, however, hasn’t reached the IFCN yet.
·
Fact-checkers
in Indonesia had a tough August. Cristina
talked to Ika Ningtyas, from Tempo, to understand how they can debunk
stories about separatist protests and a new capital under a huge internet
shutdown.
. . . the future of news
·
Data
& Society is out
with a new report by Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg. Called “Source
Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice,” the report explains in detail how
online manipulators often use specific techniques to hide the source of the
false and problematic information they circulate, typically during breaking
news events.
·
In
a Q&A, The New York Times’ Matthew
Rosenberg described the tools and strategies he uses on his beat covering
disinformation in politics.
·
A
new book by Richard Stengel, “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle
Against Disinformation & What We Can Do About It” ought to be a wake-up
call, wrote
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “In the end, people will get the
news media they deserve: If they consume false information, they’re certain to
get more of it,” he said.
Early this week, while debunking another celebrity death hoax,
Lead Stories noticed the use of two sophisticated tricks to fool people and
spread misinformation online in a faster and uncontrolled way. Here is what
happened.
On Monday, Lead Stories saw a YouTube video about Clint
Eastwood’s death. It was obviously false. The U.S. actor and director is
alive and fine. So fact-checkers started debunking it.
But, while working on this topic, Lead Story’s team noticed the
scammers had also embedded the video in a webpage with a fake view count in the
description that would appear when the page was shared on Facebook. Instead of
showing the actual view count, it raised the number to “10M views” to make
people believe the video had indeed racked up that many views.
Besides that, once users clicked on it on Facebook, they didn’t
see a video, but rather an image linking to a site full of banners and an
embedded video player. If users tried to watch the video by clicking on it,
they would get a graphic warning after a few seconds and see an “uncover now”
button. By hitting it, they would then be “invited” to share content on
Facebook.
But,
instead of sharing the URL of the page, they would share one of several dozen
identical pages promoting the false death hoax about Eastwood.
What we liked: It is just amazing what scammers can do to get people’s
attention (and their clicks) — and it is just great to see how fact-checkers
around the world are able to reveal it. On Tuesday morning, Lead Story had
already flagged this post as false 120 times on Facebook. And while looking for
new copies to flag on the original site, they stumbled on a second hoax (this
time about actor Tom Cruise) that hadn't even been promoted yet but which they
were able to pre-emptively flag 44 copies of.
1.
Info
Finder, from Africa Check, now has a dedicated editor. The site provides
factual answers (based on publicly available sources) to some of the most
frequently asked questions sent by users on 14 topics including agriculture,
crime, economy, education, health and migration, covering Kenya, Nigeria and
South Africa. For now, it is available only in English. Soon, in French, too.
2.
Agência
Lupa has launched “Verifica,” the first fact-checking podcast in
Portuguese. It is a 20-minute-long production available every Wednesday on
Apple Podcasts, Breaker, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts,
RadioPublic, Spotify and Stitcher. Here is episode
one.
3.
With
Hurricane Dorian slamming the Bahamas and the U.S. east coast, the IFCN has
created a quick
guide for dispelling myths or hoaxes surrounding it. The
Associated Press did one, too.
4.
Condé
Nast’s New
Yorker magazine will hire its subcontracted fact-checkers and editors as
direct employees. Editorial staff said their subcontractor status encouraged
them to work more and complain less in hopes of becoming full-fledged
employees.
5.
For
combining journalists and researchers, and for having published more than 110
fact checks in two years across multiple platforms, the RMIT
ABC Fact Check team won the Business of Higher Education Round Table Award
in Brisbane, Australia.
6.
Canada
is planning a coordinated attack on disinformation in an effort to protect this
fall’s elections, according
to Politico.
7.
Also
from Politico: The head of the U.S. Federal Election Commission will hold a
symposium Sept. 17 with officials from Google, Facebook and Twitter to talk
about election disinformation.
8.
Writing
in
The Nation, Joan Walsh wondered whether, “in the post-Trump world, factual
details don’t matter as much as gut feelings.” She was referring to former Vice
President Joe Biden’s recent
mistakes in recounting a story about a soldier in Afghanistan.
9.
IFCN
has launched an Instagram
channel. Come join us there too.
10. Not tired of reading about
misinformation? The Guardian offered
a list of 10 books on the topic.
