we found that there were four ways the original disputed flags experience could be improved... Disputed flags buried critical information ... could sometimes backfire... Requiring two false ratings slowed down our ability to provide additional context and often meant that we weren’t able to do so at all.... We only applied Disputed flags to “fa…

Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent.... In 2015, we learned ... Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passing data from an app that was using Facebook Login to SCL/Cambridge Analytica... Approximately 270,000 …

Wylie ... the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.... In 2014 Steve Bannon ... was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer... Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor... to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then t…

A library, organised by topic

Facebook and Twitter... algorithms ... are off limits ... almost impossible to monitor... make millions of what amount to editorial decisions, pumping out content without anyone fully understanding what is happening... opaque and slow to be discovered... government should require social media platforms ... open application programming interface.…

the capacity to spread ideas ... no longer limited by access to expensive... infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured... by just a few digital platforms:... tincreasingly stand in for the public sphere itself... at their core... They’re …

a similar kind of rumor kept showing up... after each of the man-made crisis events — a conspiracy theory or 'alternative narrative' ... claimed it either didn't happen or that it was perpetrated by someone other than the current suspects... the role that botnets play in disseminating alternative narratives ... What's different about the Parkland …

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 response from the platforms is the equivalent of politicians’ “hopes and prayers” after a school shooting... irrefutable proof that these actors are leveraging social media ... to force divisive and often false narratives into our public discourse... Twitter, Facebook, and Google have not taken a more ambitious approach to stopping abuse of…

“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…

Countering Disinformation Online is a tool for civil society organisations, active citizens and any curious individuals who want to know more about helping free societies from the pressure of disinformation and false news.

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…

in some cases Facebook itself is earning revenue from their false stories... The design of Instant Articles ... obscuring information about a news source that could be used to help evaluate the content... additional false stories are promoted to a reader once they load a single Instant Article from a fake news site... company also specifically fo…

crowdsourced trustworthiness ratings are actually much less effective if they exclude the ratings from people who are unfamiliar with a given site. Which is what Facebook plans to do.. “a lack of familiarity is an important cue for untrustworthiness... Excluding ratings from participants who aren’t familiar with a given news source ... “dramatical…

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…

Google is suspending a search feature that displayed fact checks associated to publishers after receiving criticism from conservative news outlets.... Reviewed Claims column that matched outlets’ disputed claims with fact checks contributed by independent fact-checking organizations to the Schema.org ClaimReview markup... The Daily Caller publishe…

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…

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…

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…

Fake News is suddenly on the boil in the Brussels Bubble. Here are some ideas I brainstormed earlier this week. Comments welcome.

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…

it is more important than ever to define what “fake news” actually is, and what it is not... BBC Media Editor Amol Rajan has identified three sorts ... Huffington Post blogger ... five sorts... First Draft and ... Shorenstein Center... seven sorts... @DFRLab... fake news is “deliberately presenting false information as news.”... disinformation...…

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.

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…

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…

to protect U.S. power ... more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military expansionism.... The “hyper-connectivity and weaponization of information, disinformation, and dis­affection”... the uncontrolled spread of information... the “inevitable elimination of secrecy and operational …