Posts Tagged ‘fake news #FakeNews’

bots and disinformation

Computer-generated humans and disinformation campaigns could soon take over political debate. Last year, researchers found that 70 countries had political disinformation campaigns over two years from r/Futurology

Bots will dominate political debate, experts warn

 

 

Last year, researchers at Oxford University found that 70 countries had political disinformation campaigns over two years.
Perhaps the most notable of such campaigns was that initiated by a Russian propaganda group to influence the 2016 US election result.

he US Federal Communications Commission hosted a period in 2017 where the public could comment on its plans to repeal net neutrality. Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Bruce Schneier notes that while the agency received 22 million comments, many of them were made by fake identities.
Schneier argues that the escalating prevalence of computer-generated personas could “starve” people of democracy

 

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more on deepfake in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=deepfake

deepfake facebook

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/07/794171662/facebook-issues-new-rules-on-deepfake-videos-targeting-manipulation

Facebook’s new ban targets videos that are manipulated to make it appear someone said words they didn’t actually say.

 

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more on deep fake in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=deep+fake
more on facebook in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=facebook

K12 media literacy

Report: Florida, Ohio called ‘advanced leaders’ in K-12 media literacy efforts

Advocacy group Media Literacy Now says 14 states have laws with “some media-literacy language” and others will consider bills this year, but some say progress “is too slow.”

https://www.educationdive.com/news/report-florida-ohio-called-advanced-leaders-in-k-12-media-literacy-effo/569879/

Erin McNeill, president and board member of Media Literacy Now

Media Literacy Now considers digital citizenship as part of media literacy — not the other way around

nine states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Utah — are identified as “emerging leaders” for “beginning the conversation” and consulting with experts and others.

Calls for increased attention to media literacy skills and demand from educators for training in this area increased following an outbreak of “fake news” reports associated with the 2016 presidential election. Studies and assessments showing students are easily misled by digital information have also contributed to a sense of urgency.

because the topic can fit into multiple content areas, it can also be overlooked because of other pressures on teachers. Media literacy, the group notes, also “encompasses the foundational skills of digital citizenship and internet safety including the norms of appropriate, responsible, ethical, and healthy behavior, and cyberbullying prevention.”

Lawmakers in Missouri and South Carolina have also pre-filed versions of Media Literacy Now’s model bill, the report noted, and legislation is expected in Hawaii and Arizona.

the News Literacy Project and the Center for New Literacy’s summer academy.

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more on media literacy in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=media+literacy

tik tok censorship

 

TikTok says it doesn’t censor content, but a user was just locked out after a viral post criticizing China

TikTok says it doesn’t censor content, but a user was just locked out after a viral post criticizing China from technology

Families of missing Uighurs use Tiktok video app to publicise China detentions

/https://uighurtimes.com/index.php/families-of-missing-uighurs-use-tiktok-video-app-to-publicise-china-detentions/


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Nov. 28, 2019

TikTok sorry for blocking teenager who disguised Xinjiang video as make-up tutorial

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/28/tiktok-says-sorry-to-us-teenager-blocked-after-sharing-xinjiang-videos

A spokesman for the platform on Thursday blamed a “human moderation error” for the removal of a video by 17-year-old Feroza Aziz disguised as a makeup tutorial to avoid being censored.

Owned by the Beijing-based technology company ByteDance, TikTok is one of few Chinese apps that have gained popularity outside of China. TikTok has said that it does not apply Chinese censorship rules on the international version of its app.

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more on tik tok in this iMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=tik+tokhttps://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=tik+tok

information gerrymandering

Information gerrymandering in social networks skews collective decision-making

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02562-z

https://www.facebook.com/mariana.damova/posts/10221298893368558

An analysis shows that information flow between individuals in a social network can be ‘gerrymandered’ to skew perceptions of how others in the community will vote — which can alter the outcomes of elections.

The Internet has erased geographical barriers and allowed people across the globe to interact in real time around their common interests. But social media is starting to compete with, or even replace, nationally visible conversations in print and on broadcast media with ad libitum, personalized discourse on virtual social networks3. Instead of broadening their spheres of association, people gravitate towards interactions with ideologically aligned content and similarly minded individuals.

n information gerrymandering, the way in which voters are concentrated into districts is not what matters; rather, it is the way in which the connections between them are arranged (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, like geographical gerrymandering, information gerrymandering threatens ideas about proportional representation in a democracy.

Figure 1 | Social-network structure affects voters’ perceptions. In these social networks, ten individuals favour orange and eight favour blue. Each individual has four reciprocal social connections. a, In this random network, eight individuals correctly infer from their contacts’ preferences that orange is more popular, eight infer a draw and only two incorrectly infer that blue is more popular. b, When individuals largely interact with like-minded individuals, filter bubbles arise in which all individuals believe that their party is the most popular. Voting gridlock is more likely in such situations, because no one recognizes a need to compromise. c, Stewart et al.1 describe ‘information gerrymandering’, in which the network structure skews voters’ perceptions about others’ preferences. Here, two-thirds of voters mistakenly infer that blue is more popular. This is because blue proponents strategically influence a small number of orange-preferring individuals, whereas orange proponents squander their influence on like-minded individuals who have exclusively orane-preferring contacts, or on blue-preferring individuals who have enough blue-preferring contacts to remain unswayed.

high trust vs low trust societies

https://twitter.com/math_rachel/status/1175895568385658880

illusory truth effect

When False Claims Are Repeated, We Start To Believe They Are True

When False Claims Are Repeated, We Start To Believe They Are True — Here’s How Behaving Like A Fact-Checker Can Help

September 12, 2019

This phenomenon, known as the “illusory truth effect”, is exploited by politicians and advertisers — and if you think you are immune to it, you’re probably wrong. In fact, earlier this year we reported on a study that found people are prone to the effect regardless of their particular cognitive profile.

study in Cognition has found that using our own knowledge to fact-check a false claim can prevent us from believing it is true when it is later repeated. But we might need a bit of a nudge to get there.

The researchers found that participants who had focussed on how interesting the statements were in the first part of the study showed the illusory truth effect

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