- The Liar’s Dividend: Mollie Bryant of the fact-checking site Big If True writes about what some researchers have called “The Liar’s Dividend.” That’s the principle that says even if a fake news report is debunked, doing so helps bring an air of legitimacy to it, and also suggests to readers that the facts about an issue are up for debate, even when they aren’t. The tobacco industry and the oil industry have both made use of this tactic in the past, Bryant notes.
- Facebook was right: Some experts in misinformation argue that Facebook was right not to remove the doctored Nancy Pelosi videos, according to a report by MIT’s Technology Review. Alexios Mantzarlis, a misinformation researcher at TED who previously ran the International Fact-Checking Network, said removing the videoâwhich was not fake, just manipulatedâcould create a dangerous precedent and give governments ammunition to argue for broader takedowns.
- Works as intended: New York Times writer Charlie Warzel says the Pelosi video was just the latest example of a viral social-media “fake” that hijacked all the attention in the media sphere for a certain period. This is exactly what the creators of such videos and memes are looking for, Warzel says, and what platforms like Facebook were designed to do. “The swift spread of agitation propaganda and the creep of hyper-partisanship across social media isn’t a bug, it is a feature.”
- Inauthentic behavior: As if to show that it is still on the job fighting disinformation on its platform, Facebook announced this week that it has removed 51 Facebook accounts, 36 Pages, seven Groups and three Instagram accounts that it says were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran.” In some cases, the pages and accounts impersonated legitimate news organizations in the Middle East, Facebook said, and represented themselves as journalists.
- Robert Mueller, the special counsel who has been looking into Russian involvement in the 2016 election and has not spoken publicly since he began that process, took the unusual step of holding a press conference Wednesday. He noted that “if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” which manyâincluding presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harrisâtook to mean that Mueller was recommending impeachment.
- Patt Morrison at the LA Times has an interview with Daniel Dale, the Toronto Star reporter who has built a reputation for himself in Washington and across the country by cataloging Trump’s lies. If Dale was a mythological Greek hero, Morrison, says “he might be Sisyphus, the man who kept rolling a rock uphill, only to have it roll back down again.”
- The Intercept on Wednesday released another batch of articles from SIDToday, the internal newsletter for the National Security Agency’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, part of a trove of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It says the latest release reveals that US officials drew up a new intelligence-sharing framework in response to pressure from Israel, and that Norway knew about the sinking of the Russian Kursk submarine much sooner it previously admitted. The Intercept’s parent, First Look Media, recently decided to shut down the Snowden Archive, a decision that led to criticism from First Look co-founder Laura Poitras.
- After four years of funding journalism outside North America through its Digital News Innovation Fund, Google is going to start funding projects in the US and Canada. The search giant announced the new initiative on Tuesday, asking for submissions that demonstrate innovation in local news and audience engagement. Successful projects will get up to $300,000 in financing for up to 70 percent of the total project cost. Some media observers believe that taking funding from the tech giants is problematic.
- The BBC spoke to a woman in northern Macedonia who says she worked for a fake news site, aggregating and rewriting stories from other publications in order to make them as viral as possible, something Macedonia has become known for. In most cases, Tamara says, she didn’t actually invent news, but created misinformation based on real events, written in such a way as to provoke fear and/or anger among readers about Muslims and other groups. “It was propaganda and brainwashing in the way of telling the story,â she said.
- As the Trump 2020 campaign continues to pour money into Facebook advertising in preparation for the election, researchers say that the social network has weakened or disabled certain tools they use to track election advertising, according to a report from Vice News. “The reality is that Facebook has bent over backward to make it hard to study how the platform works,” Gennie Gebhart, associate director of research at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Vice’s David Uberti.
- Antitrust scholar Dina Srinivasan writes in The New York Times that Facebook’s mis-handling of privacy and user data could provide ammunition for antitrust authorities to go after the company. Srinivasan says there is some evidence that Facebook is using its monopoly power to degrade the quality of its service. Companies like Facebook lock in users with promises to protect their data and privacy, she argues, only to break those promises “once competitors in the marketplace have been eliminated.”
- Daniel Kretinsky, a Czechoslovakian-born billionaire who made his fortune in the oil and gas industry, recently acquired a stake in Le Monde, a leading newspaper based in Paris. Kretinsky bought 45 percent of a holding company that owns the paper and several other assets, giving him a 13 percent stake in Le Monde. He also bought an alternative French newsweekly called Marianne last year. Kretinsky said he fell in love with France when he was growing up in Czechoslovakia.
- Becca Schuh writes for CJR about whether the term “viral book” should be an oxymoron. Leigh Stein, whose 2014 BuzzFeed article âPiecing Together My Abusive Ex-Boyfriendâs Final Summerâ was the basis for her book “The Land of Enchantment,” says that just because a book is based on a viral hit, that doesn’t mean the book itself will also be a big seller. âItâs definitely a launchpad and not something you can translate into book sales,â Stein told Schuh.
- The Twitter account for the Associated Press Stylebook clarified in a series of tweets how the newswire thinks about using the term “racism.” Deciding whether to use the term “is not clear-cut” and should include discussion with colleagues from diverse backgrounds, AP said, but using the term is preferable to euphemisms such as “racially charged,” which the newswire said should not be used. In most cases, AP said the term racist should be used to describe specific acts as opposed to being used to describe people.
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