Overview: Media

foreign pro-Trump troll farm was based in Romania... Facebook... didn’t see “clear evidence of financial motivation” or “clear links to known commercial actors...separate troll operation, tied to pro-Trump media organization Epoch Media Group, featured 303 Facebook accounts, 181 pages, 44 Facebook groups and 31 Instagram accounts... followed by mo…

Facebook employees collected evidence company giving right-wing pages preferential treatment when it comes to misinformation... worried how the company will handle the president’s falsehoods in an election year... Facebook is going to be used to aggressively undermine the legitimacy of the US elections... senior engineer collected internal evidenc…

This is a piece for people who have been part of the Q Anon movement... beginning to get tired ... starting to get skeptical... Q mostly stopped making specific predictions after a series of embarrassing failures... demanding that we all Trust the Plan and stop asking why Q is always wrong... There’s a reason you got scammed... why did you keep be…

The president’s reelection campaign ... multimillion-dollar ad blitz ... shaping Americans’ understanding of ... impeachment ... micro-targeted ads ... portraying Trump as a heroic reformer ... while Democrats plotted a coup... An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape ... I wanted to see it from the inside...I was surprised by the effec…

critical theory... reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s... changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy...Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning... postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture...…

my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost... The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem... A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me ... orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in …

marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

For the 6th episode of his Futurized podcast, Trond Undheim asked me why surveillance capitalism inevitably leads to polarised, undemocratic and dysfunctional societies, and what we must do about it...If we don’t change course, in the future we will be less will informed, more polarised, massively manipulated, living in more corrupt and less democ…

That fake news shifted copies had been known since the earliest days of printing... So what if they weren’t true? Printers argued, as internet giants do today, that they were merely providing a means of distribution ... But newspapers were different... had reputations to maintain... As the 19th century progressed, impartiality and objectivity were…

Newspaper newsrooms lost 45 percent of their employees between 2008 and 2017... growing number of “news deserts”: communities where there are no longer media outlets sending reporters to city-council meetings... Can a healthier news ecosystem be built? ... a role for government in ensuring citizen access to reliable information... “There was alw…

We are asking all businesses ... not advertise on Facebook's services in July.What would you do with $70 billion? We know what Facebook did. They  allowed  incitement  to  violence  against  protesters  fighting  for racial justice... named Breitbart News a “trusted news source” ... turned  a  blind  eye  to  blatant  voter  suppression ...…

online “fake news” game, Bad News, can confer psychological resistance against common online misinformation strategies across different cultures... “prebunking,” ... can help cultivate “mental antibodies” against fake news... players “walk a mile” in the shoes of a fake news creator... significant and meaningful reductions in the perceived reliab…

data on the U.S. media ecosystem suggests that women journalists make up a disproportionately high number of the most credible journalists... about Covid-19... dominate ... top 100 most credible journalists ... 19 of the top 25 journalists and 58 of the top 100algorithm analyzes individual articles for credibility based on the author’s topical exp…

active information avoidance... keeping our senses away from information that might be useful, that we know is out there, that would cost us nothing to obtain, but that we’d still rather not learn...

make every minute you spend consuming information much, much more valuable... much ... online content ... awful. Driven by clickbait, optimized for maximum distraction... lowest common denominator, it only added to people’s confusion ... in ... productivity, performance, and personal effectiveness... lots of gems ... buried beneath an avalanche of…

Tracking states as they make progress towards a new normal

the vast majority of our panel of 200 participants could easily spot fake news... many instead referenced ... government or media misinformation ... less aware ... how the pandemic is being handled ... underestimated the UK’s death toll...many believed a greater emphasis on fact-checking would enhance rather than undermine public trust in journali…

I put together my own cheat sheet to keep in my back pocket for heated conversations to come

Facebook is wary of being drawn further into a political argument ahead ... divisive presidential election ... ... steer clear of fact-checking political advertisements... keen not to antagonise Mr Trump ... claiming that social media platforms are biased against Republican ... purely a business decision ... ubiquitous... it must always align with…

In 7 minutes you'll learn how to get your password, edit your about page and use the bookmarklet to start curating content to your Hub.

for most any sophisticated research project, you need additional sites at your disposal — along with a lot of creativity... This guide will walk through detailed strategies to use reverse image search ... Google reverse image search isn’t very good ... the undisputed leader ... Yandex... runners-up Bing and Google ... Yandex's strengths l…

"We believe in Facebook’s mission that giving people tools to make the world more open is a better way to combat ignorance or deception than censorship.” It turns out that I was wrong... There are more options than just being “open” and “censorship”... The more successful Facebook is ... the more ignorance, deception ...in the world...Facebo…

Twitter account claiming to belong to a national “antifa” organization and pushing violent rhetoric related to ongoing protests has been linked to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa... hashtags that trended worldwide ... to insinuate that protesters have been silenced ... "coordinated attempts to disrupt the public conversation"…

This month sees the first generation of Hubs (other than mine) go live, so it’s time to imagine what comes next: AI integration? Filter-bubble Piercers? HubBots? Factcheck-driven credibility scores?

the level of bot involvement in discussions about things like US elections or natural disasters is typically 10% to 20%... among tweets about "reopening America," 66% came from accounts that were possibly humans using bot assistants... 34% came from bots...

Twitter added information to refute the inaccuracies in President Trump’s tweets for the first time... urged people to “get the facts”... a CNN story ... and ... bullet points that Twitter had compiled rebutting the inaccuracies... Twitter determined that those unsubstantiated assertions could lead to voter confusion and that they merited a correc…

For a handful of disinformation researchers, the information crisis that has unfolded around the coronavirus pandemic seemed inevitable... get a sense of what we should be watching for and what the internet might look like after the virus has passed...Joan Donovan... coined "strategic silence," editorial discretion ... notion that users…

coronavirus i... global rallying cry for ... white supremacists and anti-vaxxers in the U.S. to fascist and anti-refugee groups across Europe ... far-right populists on both continents ... using the outbreak to push their political agenda ...barrage of false messages [risk] ... feeding ... “infodemic” that makes it hard to separate fact from ficti…

why Wikipedia has been a more successful news source than Wikinews... Wikipedia’s formulaic style and continuous format are more conducive to collaborative writing projects ... writing a news story with a lead, a coherent narrative, and a deadline is very different than writing an encyclopedia article...tension between the Wikipedia community... …

The Syllabus collects the best articles, podcasts and videos about the political, economic and social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on a daily basis...world’s foremost technology critic... scans 100 pages per minute, 12 books in an hour, 100 in one day... can determine the relevance of every book in the world... all information and know…