Data & Society — Deepfakes and Cheap Fakes “New media technologies do not inherently change how evidence works in society. What they do is provide new opportunities for the negotiation of expertise, and therefore power.” — Britt Paris and Joan Donovan Coining the term “cheap fakes,” Paris and Donovan demonstrate that the creation of successfully deceptive media has never necessarily required advanced processing technologies, such as today’s machine learning tools. Fake News: Recommendations - Media Literacy Clearinghouse If you read any news story about “fake news” in the past two years, you no doubt came across the phrase “media literacy.” From the various news stories and blog posts, I have compiled the following recommendations and advice. (NOTE: lesson plans, handouts and related videos are posted near the bottom of this list) Newest materials are posted last. Do you have suggestions for content that could be added here?
Information disorder: The essential glossary Trying to follow the national conversation about “fake news” and the spread of bad information online can be confusing because not everybody is using the same vocabulary. Claire Wardle, a research fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, has created a glossary to help everyone understand certain words and phrases and how terms that may seem quite similar actually have very different meanings. For example, disinformation is false information meant to cause harm while misinformation is false information that might cause harm, although not deliberately.
How biased is your news source? You probably won’t agree with this chart Are we even aware of our biases anymore? If you look at this chart and are convinced your “extreme” source belongs in the middle, you just might be part of the problem plaguing America today. “In the past, national evening news programs, local evening news programs, and the front pages of print newspapers were dominated by fact-reporting stories,” says the chart’s creator, patent attorney Vanessa Otero. “Now, however, many sources people consider to be ‘news sources’ are actually dominated by analysis and opinion pieces.” She released the first version of the chart back in 2016, and she’s updated it several times since. Over the past year, it’s gone viral, with thousands of educators at both the high school and college levels using the compelling visual.
The (almost) complete history of 'fake news' Image copyright Alamy In record time, the phrase morphed from a description of a social media phenomenon into a journalistic cliche and an angry political slur. How did the term "fake news" evolve - and what's next in the world of disinformation? It was mid-2016, and Buzzfeed's media editor, Craig Silverman, noticed a funny stream of completely made-up stories that seemed to originate from one small Eastern European town. How to tell if you’re talking to a bot Twitter recently took drastic action as part of an effort to slow the spread of misinformation through its platform, shutting down more than two million automated accounts, or bots. But Twitter shuttered only the most egregious, and obvious, offenders. You can expect the tricksters to up their game when it comes to disguising fake users as real ones. It’s important not to be swayed by fake accounts or waste your time arguing with them, and identifying bots in a Twitter thread has become a strange version of the Turing test. Accusing posters of being bots has even become an oddly satisfying way to insult their intelligence. Advances in machine learning hint at how bots could become more humanlike.
Fake News: Recommendations - Media Literacy Clearinghouse If you read any news story about “fake news” in the past 18 months, you no doubt came across the phrase “media literacy.” From the various news stories and blog posts, I have compiled the following recommendations and advice. (NOTE: lesson plans, handouts and related videos are posted near the bottom of this list) Newest materials are posted last. Do you have suggestions for content that could be added here?
Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Fake News Edition - On The Media BROOKE GLADSTONE: Drawing a distinction between fake and real news is going to be hard for those Facebook and Google employees tasked with bird dogging offending sites, but it shouldn’t be so hard for you, the consumer. Melissa Zimdars, professor of communication and media at Merrimack College, has made a list of more than a hundred problematic news sites, along with tips for sorting out the truthful from the troublesome. She got into the fake news sorting racket after a hot tip. MELISSA ZIMDARS: Someone alerted me to the fact that when you searched for the popular vote on Google, the first Google news item that came up was a fake news website saying that Hillary Clinton lost the popular vote. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
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.
Fake News - Resources from Harvard Skip to main content Fake News, Misinformation, and Propaganda This page provides background information, links, and tools from outside organizations to help guide users in navigating potential fake news A Visual Take Library Resources Using library databases is a near-foolproof way to find credible information.