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…
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 …
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…
Technology has altered the foundations of news and media, and as trust in media continues to decline, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms have come to play a critical role not only as threats to the integrity and quality of media, but also as a source of potential solutions. The core threats to information quality associated …
A library, organised by topic
“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 …
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…
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…
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..…
Financial incentive is key to Silverman’s understanding of fake news, which he defines as online misinformation that is completely false, created to deceive and economically motivated. If online misinformation is being created for ideological reasons it’s propaganda... delegitimising legitimate journalism... through delegitimising organisations t…
exposing agents to the possibility of fake news can be an effective way to curtail the spread of fake news in social networks. Our results also highlight that information about the users' private beliefs and their social network structure can be extremely valuable to adversaries and should be well protected.
Alan Sokal attempted to prove that the influence of postmodern ways of thinking in the humanities had reached the point where academic nonsense was indistinguishable from academic sense. As a physicist, Sokal found writing about science to be particularly offensive... Sokal was conducting an experiment to see if “a leading North American journal o…
"Internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas..." plus a lot more: it's a 100+page report
For every man-made crisis event... we found evidence of alternative narratives, often shared by some of the same accounts and connected to some of the same online sites. These rumors had different “signatures” from other types of rumors... rose more slowly, and then they lingered, ebbing and flowing ... sustained participation by a set group of Tw…
The websites Liberal Society and Conservative 101 appear to be total opposites... published stories that were almost exactly the same, save for a few notable word changes... These for-the-cause sites that appeal to hardcore partisans are in fact owned by the same Florida company... all it takes to turn a liberal partisan story into a conservative…
pro-active warnings designed to contextualize and pre-expose web users to related but fake information in order to debunk factual distortion in advance... the more detailed warning was about twice as effective as the general warning at shifting opinion towards acceptance of climate science consensus despite exposure to fake news. Warnings were pre…
Anxious about... propaganda and fake news ... progressives are calling for an increased commitment to media literacy ... Others ... focus on expert fact-checking and labeling. ... fail to take into consideration the cultural context ... Understanding what sources to trust is a basic tenet of media literacy education... underlying assumption ... N…
... no one has direct access to reality. The real world is nearly impossible to see in this maelstrom ... because human minds need to “construct” their own version of reality — and each of us does this within a community of shared experiences and beliefs... there are many social worlds and each is built on its own version of what is real and true.…
Broadsides against fake news amount to a rearguard action from an industry fending off competitors who don’t play by the same rules... an independent, powerful, widely respected news media establishment is an historical anomaly... Fake news is but one symptom of that shift back to historical norms... Just as Watergate gave the media a bright stor…
A work in progress from an upcoming eponymous post. Another experiment with the enewsletter format: some initial thoughts on this seemingly intractable problem, with some of the source materials I’m studying.
For a term that is suddenly everywhere, “fake news” is fairly slippery... government propaganda designed to look like independent journalism... any old made-up bullshit ... a hoax meant to make a larger point... only ... when it shows up on a platform like Facebook as legitimate news? What about conspiracy theorists ... satire intended to entertai…
psychological science suggests that exposure to false news would have an impact on people’s opinions and beliefs... repeated exposure to false information can change people’s beliefs ... phenomenon is called the “illusory truth effect.”... simply repeating false information makes it seem more true... prior knowledge does not protect people from …
There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…
Propaganda warfare is increasingly shaping narratives, policies and lives around the world.
Do we really want to set up Facebook or Google as censors ... to decide what is real and fake, true and false?
The Five Star Movement controls ... sprawling network of websites and social media accounts that are spreading fake news, conspiracy theories, and pro-Kremlin stories to millions... profitable sites that describe themselves as “independent news” outlets but are actually controlled by the party leadership... crossposted scores of fake stories... o…
these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy... We’ve monitored more than 7,000 social media accounts over the last 30 months and at times engaged directly with them. Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking …
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