The director general of UNESCO last week addressed a gathering of lawmakers, journalists and civil societies from around the world to discuss ways to regulate social media platforms such as Twitter and others to help make the internet a safer, fact-based space. Nobel laureate Maria Ressa (shown) also addressed the assembly.
The Associated Press
Democracy in America relies on an independent press to inform citizens with accurate information. Yet today, two forces pose significant challenges to this function: the growing struggle of news organizations to maintain financial independence and the growing distrust of news among the public.
Gallup/Knight Foundation
The scale and speed by which disinformation travels impacts the lives of ordinary people in profound and damaging ways. Americans are being misled, manipulated, and driven apart, and the most marginalized communities—immigrants, communities of color, people with limited incomes in rural areas, and LGBTQ+ people—suffer the severest consequences as a result.
MacArthur Foundation
Michael Martinez, managing editor of the Suncoast Sentinel, is a foodie who loves jazz, volunteers at local homeless shelters and spends his days hiking in Florida’s state parks. One problem: Neither Martinez, nor the Suncoast Sentinel, exist.
MediaWise at Poynter Institute
Last November, Twitter announced it will no longer enforce “the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” The platform also allowed previously banned users to rejoin the site. Since then, anti-vaccination messaging has gained renewed energy, distressing scientists and researchers who have been combatting misinformation and disinformation on social media.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
In the era of social media, antisemitism and Holocaust denial are no longer hidden in the margins, spewed by fringe hate groups. From Ye – formerly known as Kanye West – and NBA player Kyrie Irving to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, well-recognized personalities have echoed antisemitic ideas, often online.
The Conversation
A Jan. 22 Instagram post features several black and white photos that appear to show people being sprayed with white fumes. “Polio wasnt (sic) some single strain virus eradicated by a miracle vax,” the post reads. “It was pesticides like Lead Arsenate and its more lethal replacement DDT that lead to lower spine lesions through the gut.” The post received more than 10,000 likes in five days.
USA Today
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, videos about how to perform at-home abortions using herbs like pennyroyal and mugwort went viral on TikTok. Doctors grew concerned, warning that herbal abortions are actually quite dangerous, despite what TikTok videos claimed. But the videos continued to spread…
The Grid
The bombast with which the so-called Twitter Files have been released is incongruous with the mundanity of their content. Even so, as the circus folds up the big top and the barkers return to their Substacks, it is worth a thorough retrospective to put these breathlessly delivered, revelation-flavored products in context.
TechCrunch
Deepfake technology — software that allows people to swap faces, voices and other characteristics to create digital forgeries — has been used in recent years to make a synthetic substitute of Elon Musk that shilled a cryptocurrency scam, to digitally “undress” more than 100,000 women on Telegram and to steal millions of dollars from companies by mimicking their executives’ voices on the phone.
New York Times
It’s writing podcast scripts, finishing students’ homework and correcting mistakes in computer code: ChatGPT, the A.I. chatbot from OpenAI, is suddenly everywhere. Who should decide how it’s built? What could go wrong? And what could go right?
New York Times
The Jan. 6 committee spent months gathering stunning new details on how social media companies failed to address the online extremism and calls for violence that preceded the Capitol riot.
The Washington Post
The European Commission has selected Agence France-Presse, a global leader in digital investigation, to be part of five new hubs dedicated to the fight against disinformation in 10 European countries. The decision following a tender offer cements AFP’s position as a major player in the fight against disinformation in Europe.
Agence France-Presse
Earlier this year Facebook parent Meta quietly formed a team to deal with an uncomfortable reality: the most popular posts on its platform were trash. WSJ tech reporter Jeff Horwitz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss the war room Meta convened to deal with the problem and why fixing it was so critical to the platform's future plans.
Wall Street Journal
A typical lesson that Saara Martikka, a teacher in Hameenlinna, Finland, gives her students goes like this: She presents her eighth graders with news articles. Together, they discuss: What’s the purpose of the article? How and when was it written? What are the author’s central claims?
New York Times
In this post you'll find Maria Ressa’s keynote speech at the 2022 APAC Trusted Media Summit. Ressa is a Filipino-American journalist, author, and co-founder and CEO of Rappler, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
Google News Initiative
In the summer of 2015 Governor Greg Abbott gave the Texas State Guard an unusual order: keep an eye on the Jade Helm 15 exercise, just in case the online rumors are true. In reality, Jade Helm 15 was a routine eight-week military exercise conducted in Texas and six other states. In the online echo chamber, however, it was something more sinister: the beginning of a coup ordered by President Barack Obama.
Scientific American
On Monday, the Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed from cardiac arrest during an NFL game. Nearly right away—with little information about Hamlin’s condition publicly available—vaccine-disinformation purveyors hopped onto Twitter to promote the myth that athletes are dying because of the coronavirus shot.
The Atlantic
It was 2018, and the world as we knew it—or rather, how we knew it—teetered on a precipice. Against a rising drone of misinformation, The New York Times, the BBC, Good Morning America, and just about everyone else sounded the alarm over a new strain of fake but highly realistic videos.
The Atlantic
Since the passage of Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, the majority of federal circuits have interpreted the CDA to establish broad federal immunity to causes of action that would treat service providers as publishers of content provided by third parties.
National Law Review
