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.
We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned : All Tech Considered "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right." Fanatic Studio/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Fanatic Studio/Getty Images "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right." A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. By day, John Jansen is head of engineering at Master-McNeil Inc., a tech company in Berkeley, Calif. Jansen started by looking at the site's history. Jansen is kind of like an archaeologist. The "Denver Guardian" was built and designed using a pretty common platform — WordPress. "That was sort of the thread that started to unravel everything," Jansen says. The sites include NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co. Interview Highlights Yes. Can I ask who?
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
Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is... | Oxford Dictionaries post-truth adjective Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. 16 November 2016, Oxford, UK: Today, Oxford Dictionaries announces post-truth as its 2016 international Word of the Year. The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a word or expression chosen to reflect the passing year in language. Every year, the Oxford Dictionaries team reviews candidates for word of the year and then debates their merits, choosing one that captures the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year. Language research conducted by Oxford Dictionaries editors reveals that use of the word post-truth has increased by approximately 2,000% over its usage in 2015. The compound word post-truth exemplifies an expansion in the meaning of the prefix post- that has become increasingly prominent in recent years. The Word of the Year need not have been coined within the past twelve months.
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.
Head Transplant Patient Will Use VR - Real or Fake? Last year, Italian neuroscientist Dr. Sergio Canavero shocked the medical establishment when he announced that he would be able to transplant a human head onto a new body by 2017. He even gave a high-energy Tedx talk about the surgery. The other big problem—besides the almost insurmountable technical details and the $10 to $100 million price tag—is that transplanting a head onto a new body could be a recipe for confusion and madness. Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Centre, who is a vocal Canavero critic, tells Christoper Hooten at The Independent that head transplant patients “would end up being overwhelmed with different pathways and chemistry than they are used to and they’d go crazy.” The VR system, Canavero believes, would help overcome some of those difficulties. Despite doubts and protests, the transplantation project has moved ahead rapidly.
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. With its unique focus on maintaining healthy relationships and revealing multiple points of view across the political spectrum, it also avoids the potential problems around bias or disrespecting individual beliefs. 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 Dictionary Term Lesson Plan
researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online When it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search, young and otherwise digital-savvy students can easily be duped, finds a new report from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education. The report, released this week by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said. Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from. "Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there," said Professor Sam Wineburg, the lead author of the report and founder of SHEG. "Our work shows the opposite to be true." The researchers began their work in January 2015, well before the most recent debates over fake news and its influence on the presidential election.
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.