Monday 24 April 2017 19.01 EDT Alex Hern Technology reporter
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors.
Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign.
The ideas behind Wikitribune are similar to other experiments with sustainable community journalism.
Dutch news website De Correspondent, for instance, was launched in 2013 after a €1m (£850,000) crowdfunding campaign, with a goal of focusing on reporter-led in-depth coverage of a select few topics backed up by strong involvement from a community of financial backers.
Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.
There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com.
It isn’t a traditional left-right political axis, she found. There are right-wing sites like Danger & Play and left-wing sensationalizers such as The Free Thought Project. Some appear to be just trying to make money, while others are aggressively pushing political agendas.
The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism — deep suspicion of free trade, multinational business and global institutions.
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The News Literacy Project
A Stanford studyfound that the majority of middle school students can’t tell the difference between real news and fake news. In fact, 82 percent couldn’t distinguish between a real news story on a website and a “sponsored content” post.
The WSJ: Of the 8,704 students studied (ranging in age from middle school to college level), four in ten high-school students believed that the region near Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was toxic after seeing an unsourced photo of deformed daisies coupled with a headline about the Japanese area. The photo, keep in mind, had no source or location attribution. Meanwhile, two out of every three middle-schoolers were fooled by an article on financial preparedness penned by a bank executive.
Students will be introduced to exercises, experiences, and assignments, which focus on developing student’s classroom engagement, empowerment, critical awareness of media, civic engagement, and adoption of a social justice agenda. The guide enables students to work with faculty to produce GCMLP Webpage content, which can be consumed by the public to help expand citizen’s understanding of key events and processes in the global society. Furthermore, participating students will be granted academic and employment opportunities through the GCMLP, so they can be equitable participants in the 21st century economy.
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more on fake news in this IMS blog https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
Sheryl Sandberg has visited German government officials in Germany in an effort to smooth relations after the country threatened to fine the social network for publishing fake news. Mrs Sandberg met with officials in Berlin at the weekend, when Facebook announced a partnership with German third-party fact-checking organization Correctiv in an effort to tackle the proliferation of fake news shared on its platform.
Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education assessed middle, high school and college students on the their civic online reasoning skills, or “the ability to judge the credibility of information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets and computers.”
The Stanford History Education Group recently released a report that analyzes 7,804 responses collected from students across 12 states and varying economic lines, including well-resourced, under-resourced and inner-city schools.
when it comes to evaluating information that flows on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, students “are easily duped” and have trouble discerning advertisements from news articles.
Many people assume that today’s students – growing up as “digital natives” – are intuitively perceptive online. The Stanford researchers found the opposite to be true and urge teachers to create curricula focused on developing students’ civil reasoning skills. They plan to produce “a series of high-quality web videos to showcase the depth of the problem” that will “demonstrate the link between digital literacy and citizenship,” according to the report.
The report, “Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning,” can be found here.
+++++ thank you for covering this information at home. Pls don’t forget to bring your q/s and ideas to class +++++
Why we are here today? We need to look deeper in the current 21stcentury state of information and disinformation and determine how such awareness can help policy analysis. How do we make up our mind about news and information; where from we get our info; who do we believe, who do we mistrust.
how do these three items assist a better analysis of policies?
Class assignment:
Share a topic which is very much to your heart.
Please feel welcome to use the following resources and/or contribute with your own resources to determine the sources and potential bias
Feel free also to use the following guidelines when establishing the veracity of information:
Here is a short (4 min) video introducing you to the well-known basics for evaluation of academic literature: https://youtu.be/qUd_gf2ypk4
ACCURACY
Does the author cite reliable sources?
How does the information compare with that in other works on the topic?
Can you determine if the information has gone through peer-review?
Are there factual, spelling, typographical, or grammatical errors?
AUDIENCE
Who do you think the authors are trying to reach?
Is the language, vocabulary, style and tone appropriate for intended audience?
What are the audience demographics? (age, educational level, etc.)
Are the authors targeting a particular group or segment of society?
AUTHORITY
Who wrote the information found in the article or on the site?
What are the author’s credentials/qualifications for this particular topic?
Is the author affiliated with a particular organization or institution?
What does that affiliation suggest about the author?
CURRENCY
Is the content current?
Does the date of the information directly affect the accuracy or usefulness of the information?
OBJECTIVITY/BIAS
What is the author’s or website’s point of view?
Is the point of view subtle or explicit?
Is the information presented as fact or opinion?
If opinion, is the opinion supported by credible data or informed argument?
Is the information one-sided?
Are alternate views represented?
Does the point of view affect how you view the information?
PURPOSE
What is the author’s purpose or objective, to explain, provide new information or news, entertain, persuade or sell?
Does the purpose affect how you view the information presented?
In 2021, however, all suggestions above may not be sufficient to distinguish a reliable source of information, even if the article made it through the peer-reviewed process. In time, you should learn to evaluate the research methods of the authors and decide if they are reliable. Same applies for the research findings and conclusions.
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Aditional topics and ideas for exploring at home:
civil disobedience
From
Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers
(https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/)
Fact-Checking Organizations
There are many fact-checking sites outside the U.S. Here is a small sample.