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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Associated Press: Invisible military aircraft not captured on Google Maps. “A video said to show an invisible military aircraft at an Air Force base just outside Abilene, a city 150 miles (241 kilometers) west of Fort Worth, Texas, has spread widely on social media in recent days.”
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.”
New-to-me, from Poynter: Repustar debuts a tip line tool for US fact-checking organizations. “Repustar, a fact-checking organization that crowdsources fact checks, is partnering with journalism and fact-checking outlets in the US to provide both fact checks to the public and verifiable claims to fact-checkers. It aims to rollout the service globally in 2023. The remotely operated startup is also responsible for FactSparrow, a Twitter bot that users can tag under tweets with claims they would like to be checked, and The Gigafact Project, a fact-checking editorial platform.”
Poynter: How ‘War on Fakes’ uses fact-checking to spread pro-Russia propaganda. “War on Fakes claims to be a fact-checking service…. But a review by PolitiFact shows that its ‘fact-checks’ are actually pieces of disinformation that use well-known techniques of Russian propaganda — incoherence, a high volume of claims, repetition and the statement of obvious falsehoods— to confuse readers trying to understand what is happening in Ukraine.”
Poynter: Fact-checkers extend their global reach with 391 outlets, but growth has slowed. “Since last year’s census, we have added 51 sites to our global fact-checking map and database. In that same 12 months, another seven fact-checkers closed down. While this vital journalism now appears in at least 69 languages on six continents, the pace of growth in the international fact-checking community has slowed over the past several years.”
Poynter: No, CNN did not fake Ukrainian war footage. “Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine beginning Feb. 24, misinformation about the situation has spread rapidly. For example, this tweet claims that CNN was faking war footage in Ukraine.”
NiemanLab: Factchequeado launches to combat misinformation in Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S.. “Factchequeado, a team of five, is a service journalism project and its model is based on collaboration. It partners with English- and Spanish-language publications in the U.S. that want to republish its fact-checks and explainers. In return, Factchequeado asks that the organizations help them reach broader audiences and learn more about their news and information consumption habits by sharing its WhatsApp chatbot number.”
Poynter: What a database of fact checks about the war in Ukraine can teach us about misinformation. “Ukraine Facts, an initiative that gathered fact checks about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, gave researchers access to a repository of data on the war. A study out of Kosovo has done just that, gleaning valuable insights into the sphere of mis- and disinformation. The study, conducted by International Fact-Checking Network verified signatory hibrid.info in partnership with Hasan Prishtina University, uses Ukraine Fact’s database to examine data related to false information spread, both in Kosovo and the rest of the world.”
