What if “persuadability” isn’t the right metric to look at? ... Information warfare expert Molly McKew, who specializes in U.S.–Russia relations... "There aren’t good tools to evaluate the impact of shadow campaigns... Information and psychological operations ... are not just about information, but about changing behavior... of more than 36,000 …

most forms of political persuasion seem to have little effect at all... Field experiments testing the effects of online ads on political candidates and issues have also found null effects... Here’s what you should look for in evaluating claims about vast persuasion effects from dubious online content: How many people actually saw the questionable…

the solution to both crises facing journalism may come from the same technological root: blockchain... An ecosystem of micropayments... as the holy grail for online journalism... Blockchain technology can create both chains of authenticity and a level of security... Sludge is one of the “first fleet” of around 20 newsrooms ... on a new blockchai…

“We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine... And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.”... a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality... They’re running war game–style disaster scenarios based on technologies that have begun …

Blockchain ... creating alternatives to the current corporation owned second layer of the internet... to make quality content truly democratic... Medium ... made itself decentralized... a blockchain with a dedicated token underlying all of the content ... reward content creators... governed only by the rules... But this token would also create an…

aimed to find new ways to help verified facts reach the widest possible audience. The competition sought creative solutions that newsrooms can adopt to take fact-checking beyond long-form explanations and bullet points.... selected teams from Argentina, Italy, Georgia and Mexico as the winners. ·

So tackling fake news can mean doing something you should not do in the first place about something you cannot define. And this is a very slippery road to follow.

The vote marked the culmination of a targeted, 11-day information operation that was amplified by computational propaganda techniques and aimed to change both public perceptions and the behavior of American lawmakers...Computational propaganda... the use of [ICTs] to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior”... #releaset…

Americans believe that the media have an important role to play in our democracy — yet they don’t see that role being fulfilled... Here are 10 findings that stood out to us:

If using a beautiful content management system doesn’t miraculously solve a media company’s cash flow problems, what will? If short videos, or elaborate commenting systems, or mobile storytelling, or interactive graphics, or Snapchat Stories, or Instagram hashtags, or Instant Articles, or Google AMP, or programmatic advertising, or native advertis…

it just felt like the conversations that we were having subsequently were actually pretty shallow and actually pretty useless, because we were talking over each other because everybody meant different things... we can only really start talking about interventions if we understand what we’re talking about... I say, “Please don’t use the term.” “Yea…

We made a fake news detector with above a 95% accuracy (on a validation set) that uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing that you can download here. In the real world, the accuracy might be lower... we decided to just try and scrape domains that were known fake, real, satire, etc. and see if we could build a data set quickly... Th…

The News Quality Scoring (NQS) will combine quality journalism content with new machine learning algorithms... as batch of stories enter the platform, they are scored on a 1-5 scale ... quality ... automatically and in real time.... Quantifiable Signals ... look at structure and patterns of the HTML page, advertising density, use of visual eleme…

Facebook will rely on users to rate how trustworthy groups, organizations and media outlets are... Leaving trustworthiness ratings to users without addressing online political polarization risks making civic discourse even more divided and extreme... Facebook needs to take responsibility for the content it publishes and republishes. It can combine…

a new pathway that can lead away from the abstract depiction of objects and toward a more visceral sense of real-life scale and physicality

One of the applications of The News Quality Scoring platform I’m currently working at the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford is to foster curation processes, using a feature I call “Smart Curation.”... relies on current machine learning techniques... like Word2vec or, GloVe ... used in the development of the News Quality Scoring Project

it will rank news organizations by credibility based on user feedback... trust rankings will emerge from surveys ... Google announced it would cancel a two-month-old experiment, called Knowledge Panel, that informed its users that a news article had been disputed by independent fact-checking organizations... Facebook learned the wrong lesson fro…

Wales wants to bring the power of the Wiki community and the wisdom of crowds to bear on the media business by creating a hybrid model... local community members can help direct the work of WikiTribune journalists when such events occur, suggesting avenues to explore and co-creating a more permanent news resource that will serve a longer-term comm…

How do we convert users playing the game into users who would complete the survey?... take our readers on a visual journey around the world so they could explore where a news story happened. As a payoff, for every correct answer, the user would collect a stamp in their virtual passport... opted to follow an interesting take on the minimal viable p…

In 2018, we will prioritize News from publications that the community rates as trustworthy... that people find informative... relevant to people’s local community... We surveyed ... people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources ...

The European Commission is discussing with platforms, news media, research and civil society organisations in order to design solutions to address the spread of fake news. The aim is to define the actors' responsibilities, while respecting the freedom of expression, media pluralism, and the right of citizens to diverse and reliable information.

The answer is different from person to person, and influenced by any number of muddy variables.... real News Feed samples from, 402 people ... half [news-related posts] were shared by someone other than the original publisher... Most of the obviously partisan stuff appeared not in news posts, but in the statuses of friends and family... journalis…

a report published with the Council of Europe... offers better categorizations for the tangle of bad information ... more specific than “fake news” ... [for] The U.S. midterms ... build out a hub ... monitoring disinformation, connecting with newsrooms around the country... we can start scaling it globally in 2019... The benefit of having centrali…

an ecosystem that rewards publishers in a new kind of way... to disrupt the current financial norms of online publishing... reward users for browsing the web... make advertising less intrusive and more relevant... let readers ... ‘tip’ websites that they visit based on time spent on the site.

Even in a world where people increasingly get news from social media, the professional news media is still seen as largely to blame for low trust... Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism examines the underlying reasons for trust and distrust ...Bias, spin and hidden agendas come across as the main reasons...perceived decline in journalisti…

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

“fake news”... is grossly inadequate to explain the nature and scale of the problem... is being used by politicians... against the fourth estate and an excuse to censor free speech... There are four distinct motivations ... political, financial, psychological (for personal satisfaction) and social (to reinforce our belonging to communities or “tr…

There are 17 people on the task force, including diplomats, journalists and computer experts, and it has a mandate to combat misinformation coming out of Russia. One of its tools is a website called EUvsDisinfo.eu, which hosts a database with a selection of the most common lies disseminated by Russian outlets

small experiments aimed at customizing that story selection to the individual reader, based on a variety of signals... where readers are located... the last time a reader visits the site. If,... publishes a particularly enterprising story on a Monday, but a reader doesn’t visit ... after that story has left the homepage ... personalize the user’s…

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…