While vowing to police COVID-19 misinformation on its platform, Facebook let advertisers target users interested in“pseudoscience” ...The Markup paid to advertise a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience... ad was approved by Facebook. ... boosted a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience on Instagram... ad was approved in min…

The EU’s main task force for fighting Russian disinformation is in danger of becoming a source for disinformation itself, and so of skewing policy decisions... public discourse throughout Europe... EUvsDisinfo’s misrepresentation of Russian COVID-19 media coverage ... analysed is troubling. Two ... methods are particularly problematic....From omis…

some of the main types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation seen so far... the number of English-language fact-checks rose more than 900% from January to March... coronavirus misinformation has almost certainly grown even faster...most (59%)... various forms of reconfiguration... true information is spun, twisted, recontextualised, or r…

we needed to take investigative journalism and combine it with technology to build communities of action... I went from managing 1,000 journalists to 12 people...Our information ecosystem has already been destroyed. We’ve been poisoned... We were the third [news outlet] attacked... we stood up because we have no other business interests...In the o…

McNamee has mentored many of the people who have transformed Silicon Valley... advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s offer... a billion dollars... encouraged Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg...Ten days before the Presidential election... “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,”... I was expecting them to take it seriously... t…

big tech companies have spent the past three years working to avoid a repeat of 2016... struggling to handle the new challenges of 2020...foreign governments ... are now using ... bots that are nearly impossible to distinguish from hyperpartisan Americans... partisan groups in the United States have borrowed Russia’s 2016 playbook ... tough calls …

The Cranky Uncle smartphone game is currently being developed... teach you to throw the arguments of even your crankiest climate-misinformed uncle back at him... let’s learn the arguments of denial to defeat them...cartoons and gameplay to interactively explain the denial techniques used to cast doubt on climate science... ‘active inoculation’ — l…

under Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network... more than 100 fact-checkers in 45 countries publishing in 15 languages. In less than two months, they have published 1,000 fact checks, articles and nine weekly reports pointing out misinformation trends and ways to combat it...journalists not only can but should drop competing with each other…

step-by-step guide to collect and analyse data from Twitter, about anything from coronavirus rumours to anti-vax claims... understanding how certain hashtags, links or claims are travelling on Twitter could prove crucial to limiting the spread of damaging misinformation... First Draft has prepared a sample script ...

When only some news is labeled as fact-checked and disputed, people believe stories that haven’t been marked as fact-checked more—even when they are completely false... the “implied truth effect.”... warning labels did work to flag fictitious content... when no true or false labels were used, people considered sharing 29.8% of all false stories—ye…

tweets posted by bots created the impression there was a high level of climate change denial... 6.5 million tweets from ... Trump's June 2017 announcement that he was removing the United States from the Paris climate accord... Posts in support of action to protect the environment were far less likely to come from bots... only 5%...the number …

is that true?... first thing ... is click the link... most students don’t ... second ... see whether the article actually supports that summary... How? ... zero people are going to [fully read the article] ... too long ... [so] ... the Yeats Effect (“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”). The reckless p…

focusing exclusively on ad hoc solutions — suspending the harassing account, deplatforming the white supremacist group... won’t address the reasons the waste got there in the first place... if we don’t begin to shift our mindset to ... an ethics of responsibility... we cannot begin to act differently...challenging the assumptions ... enshrined wit…

for manipulating public opinion... automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”...If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers... Russian trolls... 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations .…

It was 2010 and techno-optimism was surging... Pew Research Center ... asking 895 leading technologists, researchers, and critics for predictions of what the internet-connected world of 2020 would look like... 85 percent of respondents agreed that the “social benefits of internet use will far outweigh the negatives over the next decade,”...Flaws e…

recent UK election was a quarrel about the character of politics...Labour Party argued that it can be used for good... Conservative Party claimed that politics is bad... promised to... ‘get Brexit done’, so that we can all forget about it ...wage war on the political process, on trust, and on truth. Ensure the whole experience is miserable, bewild…

the creation of partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations... distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories... focusing attention on issues such as voter fraud and energy pricing, providing the appearance of neutrality for partisan issues, or to gather data from users that can …

despite this being an election defined by Brexit, there is no substantive discussion of Brexit...Labour have failed to fill out what their ‘sensible Brexit’ would look like... the Conservatives have said little beyond their ‘get Brexit done’ slogan...the real and difficult choices ... Johnson would immediately face over Brexit... from one of the c…

In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all. More than five hundred radio stations sprang up in less than a decade to explore the possibilities... 40 percent were noncommercial... network of interlinked stations playing local and national content supported by local and national advertising, became dominant players...Soviet Union... ideolo…

Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry... We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact...to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns... Profes…

AI-powered software ... could soon be weaponized for online disinformation... Although the output can be nonsensical... has also shown moments of unnerving clarity... far better-written than right-wing text we have analyzed as scholars... reliably generate tweets on political topics favored by the disinformation group, complete with hashtags... Mu…

Information operations are rarely about changing the things people believe, but changing the way they feel. Anger and fear are not things we can correct with better facts... accounts run by ... Internet Research Agency, or IRA... shared [news from] some of the biggest, most reputable news organisations in the world... rhythmic, regular sharing o…

How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it... to understand why it gets into our mind... by examining how memory works and how memories become distorted.... Fake news often relies on misattribution ... we retrieve things from memory but can’t remember their source... one of the reasons advertising is so effective... Repe…

many activists working to create positive change ... seem to think that if they just get their ideas to “go viral” they will ... dominate the discourse. The great lie of this approach is that no singular discourse exists! Each community is now capable of building consensus with itself, where the like-minded talk to others like themselves while fo…

In the case of vaccines, the fact that scientists and doctors are not producing a steady stream of new digital content about settled science has left a void for conspiracy theorists and fraudsters to fill ... Data voids may be relatively easy to diagnose, but they are very difficult to fix... cannot be achieved by removing problematic content... W…

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee... final report on Disinformation and ‘fake news’.... in its evidence to the Committee Facebook has often deliberately sought to frustrate our work, by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions.

many of the initial conclusions ...about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans …

Take the Pro-Truth Pledge to encourage politicians – and everyone else – to commit to truth-oriented behaviors and protect facts and civility. ... Pledge-takers are held accountable through crowd-sourcing the truth.. volunteers who evaluate whether public figures violate the pledge by sharing misinformation.... this peer-reviewed article... Publ…

societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries... So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? In this Twitter map... of the US political landscape, accounts that follow one another are clustered together, and they are color-coded by the kinds of content they commonly…

the next iteration of technology applied to politics will be a huge leap forward with a greater ability to target people... address each of the 156 million of registered voters on the US with personalized messages.... a falsehood delivered in a personalized way is likely to be more efficient but less visible than a blatant lie put on Twitter; it w…