From Argentina to Nigeria, fact-checks limited false beliefs.
“We lose so many lives because of misinformation”
The negative effects of disinformation and misinformation around the globe have been clear and disturbing. In response, Stanford University’s History Education Group has put together a free curriculum with lesson plans and assessments for teachers and …
Reddit’s teach-the-controversy stance on COVID vaccines sparks wider protest
PokemonGo, Futurology among big subreddits going private until Reddit takes action.
Facebook will reportedly launch its own advisory group for election policy decisions
Facebook is looking to create a standalone advisory committee for election-related policy decisions, according to a new report from The New York Times. The company has reportedly approached a number of policy experts and academics it is interested in recruiting for the group, which could give the company cover for some of its most consequential […]
YouTube has removed 1 million videos for dangerous COVID-19 misinformation
YouTube has removed 1 million videos for dangerous COVID-19 misinformation since February 2020, according to YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mahon in a new blog post.
A mathematician walks into a bar (of disinformation)
Disinformation, misinformation, infotainment, algowars — if the debates over the future of media the past few decades have meant anything, they’ve at least left a pungent imprint on the English language. There’s been a lot of invective and fear over what social media is doing to us, from our individual psychologies and neurologies to wider […]
Facebook releases a glimpse of its most popular posts, but we don’t learn much
Facebook is out with a new report collecting the most popular posts on the platform, responding to critics who believe the company is deliberately opaque about its top-performing content. Facebook’s new “widely viewed content reports” will come out quarterly, reflecting most viewed top News Feed posts in the U.S. every three months — not exactly […]
Twitter asks users to flag COVID-19 and election misinformation
Twitter introduced a new test feature Tuesday that allows users to report misinformation they run into on the platform, flagging it to the company as “misleading.” The test will roll out starting today to most users in the U.S., Australia and South Korea. In the new test, Twitter users will be able to expand the […]
Senators press Facebook for answers about why it cut off misinformation researchers
Facebook’s decision to close accounts connected to a misinformation research project last week prompted a broad outcry from the company’s critics — and now Congress is getting involved. A handful of lawmakers criticized the decision at the time, slamming Facebook for being hostile toward efforts to make the platform’s opaque algorithms and ad targeting methods […]
Tagged “Truthiness”
IMG_6734 by dvdmnk (cc by)In AskMetafilter, soylent00FF00 says, “I’ve learned that I was wrong (dead wrong!) about a couple of scientific “facts” that I had assumed were kind of “general knowledge” (for a certain nerdy sciencey kind of person), and ask…