Business Insider: Elon Musk’s biggest fans on X love Community Notes — until it comes for them. “Some may argue that the fact that no X user, including Musk himself, is immune to a correction from Community Notes is a testament to the feature’s capability, but critics have repeatedly pointed out the flaws of the system behind the feature.”
Cornell Chronicle: Crowdsourced fact-checking fights misinformation in Taiwan. “In a new study, Andy Zhao, a doctoral candidate in information science based at Cornell Tech, compared professional fact-checking articles to posts on Cofacts, a community-sourced fact-checking platform in Taiwan. He found that the crowdsourced site often responded to queries more rapidly than professionals and handled a different range of issues across platforms.”
Poynter: International Fact-Checking Network awards $1 million to 20 groups to expand fact-checking operations. “Twenty groups have been awarded a total of $1 million in grants to help grow the capacity and sustainability of fact-checkers to fight misinformation around the world, the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute announced Monday.”
The Conversation: People dig deeper to fact-check social media posts when paired with someone who doesn’t share their perspective – new research. “People fact-checked social media posts more carefully and were more willing to revise their initial beliefs when they were paired with someone from a different cultural background than their own, according to a study my collaborators Michael Baker and Françoise Détienne and I recently published in Frontiers in Psychology.”
Poynter: This year’s United Facts of America will feature top-flight voices on elections, AI, vaccines. “The three-day virtual festival of fact-checking, running Nov. 6 to Nov. 8, will cover the Republican presidential field, GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump’s trials, Israel-Hamas war misinformation and Spanish fact-checking. The event coincides with big political events, including the Nov. 7 general election in Kentucky and the Nov. 8 Republican presidential primary debate in Miami, which NBC and Rumble will broadcast and PolitiFact will cover.” The event is free.
Bellingcat: Separating Fact from Fiction on Social Media in Times of Conflict. “At Bellingcat, we pride ourselves on providing tools and resources for our audience to think critically about sources they find online. In this short guide, we give a few tips on what to consider when confronted with an abundance of footage and claims. Here’s how to separate fact from fiction with real, recent examples of misinformation.”
Taipei Times: Task force to combat false reports . “The Mainland Affairs Council has reached out to temples across Taiwan to promote awareness of Chinese misinformation campaigns, after national security agencies reported a ‘high occurrence’ of election disinformation being spread among the religious community, a senior government official said.”
Poynter: Fact-checkers and the social media misinformation tsunami: A Q&A with Lucas Graves. “Not so many years ago, fact-checking went hand-in-hand with elections reporting and political journalism. With the rise of social media, though, fact-checkers have spent more and more time debunking online misinformation, viral memes and other hoax content. That shift has raised an important question for those who analyze and follow the work of fact-checkers: Has online misinformation reduced the amount of attention from fact-checkers to elections fact-checking and the fact-checking of government?”
Bellingcat: X’s Community Notes is Spreading False Information About Taylor Swift’s Bodyguard. “Social media platform X’s Community Notes is spreading false information about Taylor Swift’s Bodyguard. On Tuesday October 17, Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom reported that an Israeli bodyguard who worked for Swift returned to his home country to volunteer as a reservist in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as it prepares for a ground invasion of Gaza.”
WIRED: Elon Musk’s Main Tool for Fighting Disinformation on X Is Making the Problem Worse, Insiders Claim. “… a WIRED investigation found that Community Notes appears to be not functioning as designed, may be vulnerable to coordinated manipulation by outside groups, and lacks transparency about how notes are approved. Sources also claim that it is filled with in-fighting and disinformation, and there appears to be no real oversight from the company itself.”
Romania Insider: European Commission in Romania launches anti-disinformation platform. “The platform, named ‘trUE – The Naked Truth’ (trUE – Adevărul gol-goluț), aims to support the general public with useful tools for identifying fake news and information distributed online with the intent to misinform. It brings together articles, case studies, and video materials produced in collaboration with influencers, as well as educational materials that can be used in classroom settings.”
Truth or Fiction: So Long, and Thanks for All the Facts. “Visibility and visits are the lifeblood of digital publishing, and the absence of fact checks to an audience is the absence of sustaining revenue to a site or project; this is how efforts like ours are slowly starved into silence. It’s not just counterdisinformation that is under attack. Related services and fields have been chronically starved away for decades and replaced with distortions and outright lies.” Yup.
Africa Check: Work on police brutality, inauthentic online campaigns and workers’ rights the big winners at 2023 African Fact-Checking Awards. “Moussa Ngom of La Maison Des Reporters and Laureline Savoye of Le Monde Afrique were this year’s winners in the ‘Fact Check of the Year by a Working Journalist’ category at the African Fact-Checking Awards ceremony held in Mauritius on 6 October. The two Senegalese journalists were recognised for their work on the infiltration of security forces during political demonstrations in March 2021 and June 2023.”
Defense One: Taiwan is using generative AI to fight Chinese disinfo. “As Taiwan approaches a pivotal presidential election in January, Tang said that both the government and a wide network of volunteers are preparing for China to increase efforts to manipulate Taiwanese civilians. Taiwanese civil society has developed new organizations to combat it. A group called Cofacts allows users to forward dubious messages to a chatbot. Human editors check the messages, enter them into a database, and get back to the user with a verdict.”
New York Times: Fact Checkers Take Stock of Their Efforts: ‘It’s Not Getting Better’. “The number of fact-checking operations at news organizations and elsewhere has stagnated, and perhaps even fallen, after a booming expansion in response to a rise in unsubstantiated claims about elections and the pandemic. The social networking companies that once trumpeted efforts to combat misinformation are showing signs of waning interest. And those who write about falsehoods around the world are facing worsening harassment and personal threats.”
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