The United Facts of America festival is for everyone interested in fact-based expression, civic engagement and facts’ function in a free society. There is no cost to attend online.
Poynter Institute/PolitiFact
Kids of all ages are getting news from a variety of places. Whether it's from friends, TikTok, YouTube, or home, they can be inundated with information, different perspectives, and even graphic images and videos of breaking news.
Common Sense Media
Creators whose posts on X, formerly called Twitter, have been corrected or amended by the platform's “community notes” feature won’t be able to make money off of them, X owner Elon Musk said Sunday, in a change he says is meant to prioritize "accuracy over sensationalism."
Forbes
In the three weeks since war began between Israel and Hamas, social media has been taken over with images and stories of attacks, many of which proved false.
The Conversation
The Government of Canada has announced a large step in combating the spread of misinformation and disinformation online, allocating funding under the Digital Citizen Initiative.
IT World Canada
Google is starting to roll out its new “About this image” tool, which aims to provide essential background information and context about images in Google Search. The feature was first announced at Google’s I/O developer conference in May, and now it’s rolling out to English users globally.
The Verge
A bipartisan group of 42 attorneys general is suing Meta, alleging that features on its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms are addictive and are aimed at kids and teens, the group announced Tuesday. The support from so many state attorneys general of different political backgrounds indicates a significant legal challenge to Meta’s business.
CNBC
Since the first news of the attack on Israel by Hamas, we have seen anecdotal reports from users of X (formerly Twitter) that the platform has become less useful for surfacing verified news and more generally disorienting.
Center For An Informed Public
How should journalists responsibly engage political actors during an era of democratic backsliding? That question was the basis for a conversation last week at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit.
University of Cambridge
A recent crowdsourced fact check — from X’s Community Notes — claimed a graphic image from the Israel-Hamas war was generated with artificial intelligence. It wasn’t.
Poynter
The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear a second major case on social media and will decide whether the Biden White House violated the 1st Amendment when it urged platforms to take down "misinformation and disinformation" about COVID-19.
Los Angeles Times
TikTok has said it has assigned more people to combat disinformation on its platform after the attack on Israel by Hamas after the European Union chastised the social media company.
The Guardian
Shayan Sardarizadeh is a senior journalist covering disinformation, extremism and conspiracy theories for BBC Monitoring’s disinformation team as part of BBC Verify. Since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, he’s debunked dozens of misleading visuals on social media and published his findings on widely read threads on Twitter, now known as X.
Reuters Institute
Social media has, once again, become the window through which the world is witnessing unspeakable violence and cruelty in an active war zone. Thousands of people, including children and the elderly, have been killed or injured in Israel and the Gaza Strip since Hamas launched its surprise attack on Saturday—you have probably seen the carnage yourself on X, TikTok, or Instagram.
The Atlantic
Social media is flooded with out-of-context videos and images users claim are coming from Israel or Gaza. Finding the original source is key.
Poynter
Text-based tools like ChatGPT can create convincing-sounding academic articles on a subject, complete with citations that can fool people without a background in the topic of the article. Video-, audio- and image-based AI can successfully spoof people’s faces, voices and even mannerisms, to create apparent evidence of behaviour or conversations that never took place at all.
The Conversation
One viral video claims to show a Hamas fighter shooting down an Israeli helicopter — but it's a clip from the video game Arma 3. A video purporting to show an Israeli woman being attacked in Gaza was filmed in 2015 in Guatemala.
National Public Radio
My University of Washington colleagues and I study online rumors, conspiracy theories, and disinformation. In the past year, research like ours has come under fire — often by some of the same individuals and organizations that benefit from the spread of falsehoods.
Kate Starbird/The Seattle Times
Misinformation researchers and authors of The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall of the University of California Irvine spent an evening with The Integrity Project last week.
The Integrity Project
Brent Lee struggles to explain why he used to believe that a cabal of evil satanic paedophiles was working to establish a new world order. He pauses, looks sheepish, and says: “I cringe at all this now.”
The Guardian