Fast Company: Inside Snopes: the rise, fall, and rebirth of an internet icon. “In the early ’90s, shortly before he helped think up Snopes, the first (and favorite) website for fact-checks, and way before he was banished from the very thing he’d helped build, David Mikkelson was quite a character on message boards. He wasn’t looking for love necessarily, but it found him nonetheless.”
Mirage News: Social Media Trust/Distrust Buttons May Curb Misinformation. “The addition of ‘trust’ and ‘distrust’ buttons on social media, alongside standard ‘like’ buttons, could help to reduce the spread of misinformation, finds a new experimental study led by UCL researchers.”
University of Washington Information School: MLIS Students Correct The Record On Black Panthers. “‘Education is liberation.’ Elmer Dixon, a Seattle Black Panther co-founder, shared these words of wisdom with Master of Library and Information Science students (pictured, left to right) Mei’lani Eyre and Dev Wilder as they worked to create a digital archive combating disinformation about the Black Panther Party.”
The Verge: Twitter is adding crowdsourced fact checks to images. “Twitter is expanding its crowdsourced fact-checking program to include images, shortly after a fake image went viral claiming to show an ‘explosion’ near the Pentagon.”
Hindustan Times Tech: Internet firms to lose safe harbour on not removing content flagged by govt notified fact checker. “Internet firms like Google, Facebook and Twitter may lose protection under safe harbour if they fail to remove content identified by the government-notified fact-checker as false or misleading information, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Thursday.”
AFP: Kenya police misleadingly use old protest photos in online hunt for March 2023 rally participants. “After violent anti-government protests in Nairobi, Kenyan police took to social media to announce they were looking for suspects who partook in the rallies organised by the opposition on March 20, 2023. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) posted a series of images on Twitter purporting to show individuals suspected of causing mayhem during the demonstrations. But AFP Fact Check found that some of the photos were old and unrelated.”
German Press Agency: “Facts against fakes”: New website tackles internet disinformation. “Under the title ‘Facts against Fakes,’ fact-checking organizations from Germany and Austria offer up-to-date articles on false information currently being circulated on the internet. This creates the largest freely-accessible archive of fact checks in the German language. In addition, the site provides learning opportunities to promote media literacy among citizens, as well as many research articles.”
TechCrunch: Twitter will send a notification when a tweet you replied to or retweeted gets a Community Note . “Blindingly amplifying views or posts on social media is one of the key reasons for the rapid spread of misinformation. Over the years, prominent figures have posted or retweeted false information on Twitter. The social network is now giving a chance to withdraw a retweet for such instances through a new Community Notes — its crowdsourced fact-checking program — feature.”
American Medical Association Update: Challenging racial bias and medical myth-busting on Tiktok, Twitter and Instagram with Joel Bervell. “In today’s AMA Update, Joel Bervell, a social media educator and fourth-year medical student in Baltimore, shares how he is using his social media platform to address health disparities, racial bias and misinformation in health care. Joel is the former AMA medical student digital fellow. AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger hosts.”
Associated Press: Google to expand misinformation “prebunking” in Europe. “After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will initiate a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation. The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims.” Now do Nigeria!
Ohio State News: True stories can win out on social media, study finds. “Some past research has suggested that falsehoods travel more quickly online than the truth and are more popular with the public, but a new study gives a more hopeful view. Researchers found that posts on the social media site Reddit that included news articles fact-checked as true received more engagement and positive reaction than posts with news labeled as false.”
Inside AFP: Fighting disinformation: AFP shares tools in videos. “From finding the origin of a video online to using archives to identify old versions of web pages, reading foreign languages with a smartphone or using mapping tools, these videos demonstrate tools used by AFP journalists around the world in their investigations. A dozen videos are already available in English and French on AFP’s YouTube channels and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, sharing key tips for online verification.” Every video I looked at was thoroughly capitioned.
Daily Post (Nigeria): 2023 elections: Group trains 108 fact checkers to curb fake news. “Food Basket Foundation International, FBFI, has said that it has concluded plans to train and deploy no fewer than 108 fact checkers ahead of the 2023 general elections. FBFI noted that the decision was taken to curb the menace of misinformation and disinformation before, during and after the elections.”
International Journalists’ Network: How to track digital mercenaries behind disinformation. “t is just as important to identify the actors who perpetuate disinformation as it is the false facts themselves: if a journalist is able to target the source of false information, they can expose and neutralize it. During an ICFJ Disarming Disinformation masterclass, held in partnership with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, award-winning data journalist and director of Columbia University’s Master of Science Data Journalism Program, Giannina Segnini, discussed these ‘digital mercenaries’ and how to stop them.”
Politifact: No, blogs weren’t created day of Pelosi attack to smear conservatives. “Both blogs — called Frenly Frens and The Loving God — are no longer online, but parts of the sites were archived after the Pelosi attack and some media outlets reviewed them before they went dark. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library that saves billions of web pages over time, has files showing the blogs were not created the day of the attack. And there’s no evidence to support the claim that they were created to smear conservatives.”
