Commentary: It’s Facebook’s algorithm vs. democracy, and so far the algorithm is winning — NOVA Next Over the last several years, Facebook has been participating—unintentionally—in the erosion of democracy. The social network may feel like a modern town square, but thanks to its tangle of algorithms, it’s nothing like the public forums of the past. The company determines, according to its interests and those of its shareholders, what we see and learn on its social network. The result has been a loss of focus on critical national issues, an erosion of civil disagreement, and a threat to democracy itself. Facebook is just one part—though a large part—of the Big Data economy, one built on math-powered applications that are based on choices made by fallible human beings. Facebook's algorithm—driven in part by likes and shares—has upended civil discourse. In 2008, when the economy crashed, I witnessed the power of these “Weapons of Math Destruction” firsthand from my desk at a hedge fund in New York City. In many cases, WMDs define their own reality to justify their results.
Students Reject 'Fake News' To Write Footnoted, Neutral Wikipedia Entries : NPR Ed Fake news has been, well, in the news a lot lately. But for the world's largest crowdsourced encyclopedia, it's nothing new. "Wikipedia has been dealing with fake news since it started 16 years ago," notes LiAnna Davis, deputy director of the Wiki Education Foundation. To combat misinformation, Wikipedia has developed a robust corps of volunteer editors. Anyone can write new entries and scrutinize existing ones for adherence to Wikipedia's rules on sourcing and neutrality. While it's not free of errors or pranks, what results is a resource that 50 million people turn to daily on hundreds of thousands of topics in a few dozen languages. Today, educators are among those more concerned than ever with standards of truth and evidence and with the lightning-fast spread of misinformation online. This spring, 7,500 students are expected to participate. Since the program began six years ago, Davis says, students have collectively added more than 25 million words of content to Wikipedia.
for Schools | AllSides Preparing students to participate thoughtfully in democracy - and in life. Students need to learn how to sort through mass media and social networks, think critically about the issues, and engage with each other in a healthy and positive way, even when there are differences in opinions and backgrounds. AllSides for Schools helps educators teach these valuable lessons and skills. Let's teach the next generation how to see diverse perspectives, value differences and benefit from everyone’s best ideas. Contact Us to Sign-Up See Overview of School Program Elections and Relationships The climate for elections and political issues is so divisive, how can classrooms discuss hot-button issues effectively and with mutual understanding? Relationships First Introduces students to civil dialog and appreciating others even when we disagree Dictionary Term Lesson Plan 1 or multiple day program that uses the Dictionary term of your choosing to teach about differences in opinion and perspective Election Issues
Blue Feed, Red Feed What is this? Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned “very liberal” (blue, on the left) and “very conservative” (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study. In 2015, the journal Science published a research paper by Facebook scientists (Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, “Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”, Harvard Dataverse, V2) which looked at how a subset of the social network’s users reacted to the news appearing in their feeds. For six months, Facebook tracked and analyzed the content shared by 10.1 million of its users (who were anonymized). For a site appearing in the Journal’s red feed, a majority of the articles shared from it were classified in the study as “very conservatively aligned.” To appear in the Journal’s blue and red feeds, posts must have at least 100 shares, and come from sources with at least 100,000 followers. No. No. No.
Fake Facebook News Sites to Avoid As Facebook and now Google face scrutiny for promoting fake news stories, Melissa Zimdars, a communication and media professor from Merrimack College in Massachusetts, has compiled a handy list of websites you should think twice about trusting. “Below is a list of fake, false, regularly misleading, and otherwise questionable ‘news’ organizations that are commonly shared on Facebook and other social media sites,” Zimdars explains. “Many of these websites rely on ‘outrage’ by using distorted headlines and decontextualized or dubious information in order to generate likes, shares, and profits.” (Click here to see the list.) Be warned: Zimdars’s list is expansive in scope, and stretches beyond the bootleg sites (many of them headquartered in Macedonia) that write fake news for the sole reason of selling advertisements. She also includes some helpful tips for spotting fake news: • Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story.
A Fragile Trust | Jayson Blair Plagiarism Scandal | Independent Lens Film Credits A Film by Samantha Grant Co-Produced by Brittney Shepherd Edited by Richard Levien Music by Justin Melland Director/Producer/Editor Samantha Grant Associate Producer Jessica Jones Cinematography by Singeli Agnew Jason Blalock Charlotte Buchen Julie Caine Joshua Fisher Joelle Jaffe Stephanie Johnes Mark Rublee Austin De Besche Additional Camera Todd Dayton Brian Pollack Winnie Wong Alexandra Cummings Title Design and Motion Graphics Mike Nicholson Hand Drawn Animations by Stuart Langfield Assistant Editor Jason Sussberg Additional Graphics Ryan Padgett Jake Mendez Color Finishing by Gary Coates Sound Edit and Mix Philip Perkins Online Editor Heather Weaver Production Assistants Savanna Salter Creative Advisors Jon Else Deborah Hoffman Story Consultants Karen Everett New Doc Editing Ezra Edelman Suze Allen Jean-Philippe Boucicaut Adam Keker Jamie Meltzer Actor Sinclair Swan Transcribers Sophia Emigh Jayesh Parmar Legal Justine Jacob Richard J. Bookkeeping Juliet Mason Carol Wallace
Fake News, Misinformation, and Propaganda Skip to main content Fake News, Misinformation, and Propaganda This page provides background information, links, and tools from outside organizations to help guide users in navigating potential fake news A Visual Take Library Resources Using library databases is a near-foolproof way to find credible information. News databases: U.S. government information and background: Background Reports from Harvard and other universities: Fake news and the spread of misinformation From the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, links to peer-reviewed articles. NiemanReports: Election '16: Lessons for Journalism From the Nieman Foundation at Harvard; several articles on fake news and news literacy Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning Stanford University study on high school and college students (lack of) news literacy Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content: How News Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims and Misinformation Selected News Articles: Poynter
Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. It is up to the reader or viewer to negotiate truth. News literacy is complicated. Professional journalists themselves face new practical and ethical challenges relating to anonymity, privacy and safety, as well as reliability in their attempts to verify sources of breaking news from social media and user-generated content in all media formats. Even news that is vetted by editors and publishers sometimes emerges from that process a bit processed, perhaps leaning in a particular direction. And word choice itself is connected to truth. On news literacy Our kids need new types of filters. s disciplines. What’s going on? Fake news
10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog For many of us, 2016 is going down as a year to forget. Election upsets, Zika, the Syrian crisis, and unfortunately tons of fake news about all of the above and everything in between. Denzel Washington was recently quoted as saying, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” So what should you do? 1. Links and citations allow us to easily access, read, and explore more about the information found in the article. Many big name news sites, such as CNN, do not include links or citations, but other sites do. 2. An article without an author’s name is another red flag. 3. Do a Google search on the author’s name to find their occupation and locate other articles that the author has composed. 4. On the top or bottom of most websites, you should see a section titled “About Us.” 5. Authors tend to read and re-read their articles numerous times prior to posting. 6. Copy and paste a quote from the article into Google’s search bar. 7. 8.
Stanford Study Finds Most Students Vulnerable To Fake News NPR's Kelly McEvers talks to Professor Sam Wineburg about his study that tested over 7,800 teenagers about their ability to differentiate fake from real news and sponsored ads from news articles. How do kids and teenagers perceive what they read online? Can they tell real news apart from fake news or ads? A new study from Stanford University asked more than 7,800 students to evaluate online articles and news sources. And the results, says lead author Sam Wineburg, are bleak. Large portions of the students - at times as much as 80 or 90 percent - had trouble judging the credibility of the news they read. SAM WINEBURG: We showed them a picture of daisies that looked like they were deformed. And we asked students, is - does this photograph provide proof that the kind of nuclear disaster caused these aberrations in nature? MCEVERS: So what do you think can be done about this? But what happens when they leave school and they take out their phone and they look at their Twitter feed?