fake news
WhatsApp hits India’s Jio feature phones amidst fake news violence
False rumors forwarded on WhatsApp have led angry mobs to murder strangers in India, but the Facebook-owned chat app is still racing to add users in the country. Today it…
Highlights from the Senate Intelligence hearing with Facebook and Twitter
Another day, another political grilling for social media platform giants. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s fourth hearing took place this morning, with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey…
Civil, the blockchain journalism startup, has partnered with one of the oldest names in media
Civil, the two-year-old crypto startup that wants to save the journalism industry by leveraging the blockchain and cryptoeconomics, has partnered with the 172-year-old Associated Press to help the wire service…
While several tech giants have found themselves in President Trump’s crosshairs since he took office, he has just unleashed what looks to be his most sustained attack on Google to…
Facebook assigns you a fake-news-flagging trustworthiness score
A new way to attack Facebook is to fraudulently report a news story as false in hopes of reducing its visibility, either because someone wants to censor it or just…
Twitter puts Infowars’ Alex Jones in the ‘read-only’ sin bin for 7 days
Twitter has finally taken action against Infowars creator Alex Jones, but it isn’t what you might think. While Apple, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Spotify and many others have removed Jones and his…
MailChimp bans Alex Jones for hateful conduct
Another tech platform has closed the door on Infowars’ Alex Jones. Mail messaging platform MailChimp first confirmed the move in a statement to U.S. media watchdog Media Matters which said the accounts…
Here’s Twitter’s position on Alex Jones (and hate-peddling anti-truthers) — hint: It’s a fudge
The number of tech platforms taking action against Alex Jones, the far right InfoWars conspiracy theorist and hate speech preacher, has been rising in recent weeks — with bans or…
The removal of conspiracy enthusiast content by InfoWars brings us to an interesting and important point in the history of online discourse. The current form of Internet content distribution has made…
Featured Article
Is it time to remove Zuckerberg from (his) office?
A colleague, who shall remain nameless (because privacy is not dead), gave a thumbs down to a recent column in the NYT. The complaint was that the writer had attacked tech companies (mostly but not exclusively Facebook) without offering any solutions for these all-powerful techbro CEOs’ orchestral failures to grasp the messy complexities of humanity…
Facebook has removed 4 Infowars pages — but not because of fake news
There’s yet more Alex Jones/Infowars news. Facebook yanked four of the conspiracy theorist’s videos from its platform last week, and now it has finally taken more stringent action after it removed…
Apple has followed the lead of Google and Facebook after it removed Infowars, the conspiracy theorist organization helmed by Alex Jones, from its iTunes and podcasts apps. Unlike Google and…
Fake news inquiry calls for social media levy to defend democracy
A UK parliamentary committee which has been running a multi-month investigation into the impact of online disinformation on political campaigning — and on democracy itself — has published a preliminary…
Dodged questions from Facebook’s press call on misinformation
Facebook avoided some of the toughest inquiries from reporters yesterday during a conference call about its efforts to fight election interference and fake news. The company did provide additional transparency…
Dems and GOP unite, slamming Facebook for allowing violent Pages
In a rare moment of agreement, members of the House Judiciary Committee from both major political parties agreed that Facebook needed to take down Pages that bullied shooting survivors or…
Featured Article
Facebook would make a martyr by banning Infowars
Alex Jones’ Infowars is a fake-news peddler. But Facebook deleting its Page could ignite a fire that consumes the network. Still, some critics are asking why it hasn’t done so already. This week Facebook held an event with journalists to discuss how it combats fake news. The company’s recently appointed head of News Feed John Hegeman…
WhatsApp now marks forwarded messages to curb the spread of deadly misinformation
WhatsApp just introduced a new feature designed to help its users identify the origin of information that they receive in the messaging app. For the first time, a forwarded WhatsApp…
Facebook buys ads in Indian newspapers to warn about WhatsApp fakes
As Twitter finally gets serious about purging fake accounts, and YouTube says it will try to firefight conspiracy theories and fake news flaming across its platform with $25M to fund…
YouTube is fighting fake news with $25M to promote journalism and more context in search results
YouTube announced new measures today to stem the spread of conspiracy theory videos and fake news on its platform, including inserting context from trustworthy sources into search results about hot…
Twitter has announced a range of actions intended to bolster efforts to fight spam and “malicious automation” (aka bad bots) on its platform — including increased security measures around account…
Digital campaigning vs democracy: UK election regulator calls for urgent law changes
A report by the UK’s Electoral Commission has called for urgent changes in the law to increase transparency about how digital tools are being used for political campaigning, warning that…
Apple News has a new old mission: Curating political news and analysis by paying a team of experienced human editors to quality-assess journalism, rather than letting unchecked algorithms run wild…
As the AI revolution continues to accelerate, new technology is being developed to solve key problems faced by consumers, businesses and the world at large. Our reliance on AI will deepen, inevitably causing many…
Featured Article
Facebook expands fact-checking program, adopts new technology for fighting fake news
Facebook this morning announced an expansion of its fact-checking program and other actions it’s taking to combat the scourge of fake news on its social network. The company, which was found to be compromised by Russian trolls whose disinformation campaigns around the November 2016 presidential election reached 150 million Americans, has been increasing its efforts…
You aren’t alone; US adults broadly think around 40 percent of the news is misinformation
New findings underscore what you already know. People don’t trust traditional media as they once did. They trust social media even less. And certain groups in particular, including Republicans and…
eyeo, the company behind the popular browser-based ad block product Adblock Plus, is no stranger to controversy. Which is just as well given its new “passion project”: A browser add-on…
Cambridge Analytica’s Nix said it licensed ‘millions of data points’ from Acxiom, Experian, Infogroup to target US voters
The repeat grilling by the U.K. parliament’s DCMS committee today of Alexander Nix, the former CEO of the now ex company Cambridge Analytica — aka the controversial political and commercial ad…
Facebook really doesn’t want to be a media company. The social network announced this morning it’s removing its often controversial “Trending” section from its site next week, in order to…
UK parliament’s call for Zuckerberg to testify goes next level
The UK parliament has issued an impressive ultimatum to Facebook in a last-ditch attempt to get Mark Zuckerberg to take its questions: Come and give evidence voluntarily or next time…
Europe eyeing bot IDs, ad transparency and blockchain to fight fakes
European Union lawmakers want online platforms to come up with their own systems to identify bot accounts. This is as part of a voluntary Code of Practice the European Commission…
