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 Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts : All Tech Considered Guido Rosa/Getty Images/Ikon Images Fake news stories can have real-life consequences. On Sunday, police said a man with a rifle who claimed to be "self-investigating" a baseless online conspiracy theory entered a Washington, D.C., pizzeria and fired the weapon inside the restaurant. So, yes, fake news is a big problem. These stories have gotten a lot of attention, with headlines claiming Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump in November's election and sites like American News sharing misleading stories or taking quotes out of context. Stopping the proliferation of fake news isn't just the responsibility of the platforms used to spread it. The idea is that people should have a fundamental sense of media literacy. Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford and the lead author of the study, said a solution is for all readers to read like fact checkers. That's the framework for professionals, but there are ways for everyone to do a bit of fact checking themselves.
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.
Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus Help Save The ENDANGERED From EXTINCTION! The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus Rare photo of the elusive tree octopus The Pacific Northwest tree octopus (Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. An intelligent and inquisitive being (it has the largest brain-to-body ratio for any mollusk), the tree octopus explores its arboreal world by both touch and sight. Reaching out with one of her eight arms, each covered in sensitive suckers, a tree octopus might grab a branch to pull herself along in a form of locomotion called tentaculation; or she might be preparing to strike at an insect or small vertebrate, such as a frog or rodent, or steal an egg from a bird's nest; or she might even be examining some object that caught her fancy, instinctively desiring to manipulate it with her dexterous limbs (really deserving the title "sensory organs" more than mere "limbs",) in order to better know it. Why It's Endangered
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.
RationalWiki 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
How To Spot Fake News Critical thinking is a key skill in media and information literacy, and the mission of libraries is to educate and advocate its importance. Discussions about fake news has led to a new focus on media literacy more broadly, and the role of libraries and other education institutions in providing this. When Oxford Dictionaries announced post-truth was Word of the Year 2016, we as librarians realise action is needed to educate and advocate for critical thinking – a crucial skill when navigating the information society. IFLA has made this infographic with eight simple steps (based on FactCheck.org’s 2016 article How to Spot Fake News) to discover the verifiability of a given news-piece in front of you. Download, print, translate, and share – at home, at your library, in your local community, and on social media networks. The more we crowdsource our wisdom, the wiser the world becomes. Download the infographic Translations
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.
factitious Test Yourself! 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. Today, educators are among those more concerned than ever with standards of truth and evidence and with the lightning-fast spread of misinformation online. The foundation gives professors the technical assistance they need to assign students, instead of writing a research paper, to write a brand-new Wikipedia entry, or expand an existing entry, on any topic in virtually any discipline. 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. There's another learning opportunity too.
A Guide to Fake News Websites Satire is a venerable form of social commentary that uses humor to ridicule human vices and follies. The Internet is rife with it, especially news satire, or fake news, in which fictionalized accounts of current events are presented in mock-journalistic style to lampoon politicians, celebrities, and social mores. Satire is only effective if people recognize it as such, however, and therein lies a major pitfall of publishing fake news on the Internet. Users tend to skim texts instead of reading them, missing important clues and disclaimers. The mechanics of social sharing obscure the origin and aim of viral content, increasing the likelihood that fiction will be mistaken for, or purposely misrepresented as, fact. Below is a checklist of the most popular fake news sites on the web. Andy Borowitz is a genuinely funny humorist and best-selling author whose satirical news column, The Borowitz Report, debuted in 2001 and is currently hosted by NewYorker.com. About The Daily Currant:Q.