Motherboard: Hundreds of Researchers From Harvard, Yale and Stanford Were Published in Fake Academic Journals. “In the so-called ‘post-truth era,’ science seems like one of the last bastions of objective knowledge, but what if science itself were to succumb to fake news? Over the past year, German journalist Svea Eckert and a small team of journalists went undercover to investigate a massive underground network of fake science journals and conferences.”
fraud
BuzzFeed: Meet The People Who Spend Their Free Time Removing Fake Accounts From Facebook
BuzzFeed: Meet The People Who Spend Their Free Time Removing Fake Accounts From Facebook. “Kathy Kostrub-Waters and Bryan Denny estimate they’ve spent more than 5,000 hours over the past two years monitoring Facebook to track down and report scammers who steal photos from members of the US military, create fake accounts using their identities, and swindle unsuspecting people out of money. During that time they reported roughly 2,000 fake military accounts, submitted three quarterly reports summarizing their findings to Facebook, and even met with Federal Trade Commission, Pentagon, and Facebook employees to talk about their work.”
TechCrunch: Facebook now deletes posts that financially endanger/trick people
TechCrunch: Facebook now deletes posts that financially endanger/trick people . “It’s not just inciting violence, threats and hate speech that will get Facebook to remove posts by you or your least favorite troll. Endangering someone financially, not just physically, or tricking them to earn a profit are now also strictly prohibited.”
MIT Technology Review: The Defense Department has produced the first tools for catching deepfakes
MIT Technology Review: The Defense Department has produced the first tools for catching deepfakes. “The tools for catching deepfakes were developed through a program—run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—called Media Forensics. The program was created to automate existing forensics tools, but has recently turned its attention to AI-made forgery.”
TechCrunch: Duo Security researchers’ Twitter ‘bot or not’ study unearths crypto botnet
TechCrunch: Duo Security researchers’ Twitter ‘bot or not’ study unearths crypto botnet. “A team of researchers at Duo Security has unearthed a sophisticated botnet operating on Twitter — and being used to spread a cryptocurrency scam. The botnet was discovered during the course of a wider research project to create and publish a methodology for identifying Twitter account automation — to help support further research into bots and how they operate.”
Ars Technica: Dark Patterns are designed to trick you (and they’re all over the Web)
Ars Technica: Dark Patterns are designed to trick you (and they’re all over the Web). “It happens to the best of us. After looking closely at a bank statement or cable bill, suddenly a small, unrecognizable charge appears. Fine print sleuthing soon provides the answer—somehow, you accidentally signed up for a service. Whether it was an unnoticed pre-marked checkbox or an offhanded verbal agreement at the end of a long phone call, now a charge arrives each month because naturally the promotion has ended. If the possibility of a refund exists, it’ll be found at the end of 45 minutes of holding music or a week’s worth of angry e-mails.”
Meet the next misinformation format: Fake audio messages (Poynter)
Poynter: Meet the next misinformation format: Fake audio messages. “Over the past year, fake audio messages have been slowly making the rounds on WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging platform with more than 1 billion users in more than 180 countries. Gisela Pérez de Acha first noticed them in the aftermath of an earthquake in Mexico City in September, when she helped run the collaborative verification project Verificado 19S.”
