CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan describes how he and a colleague were able to discover, and then prove, that the largest Black Lives Matter Facebook page in 2018 was an Australia-based scam. O’Sullivan also provides insights into the value of good archive sites and domain registration tools in investigating suspicious social media pages, in conjunction with traditional reporting methods.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes a recent algorithm change on Facebook’s News Feed that will boost original news stories, lessons learned on an academic and investigative journalism collaboration, and European media’s race problem.
This week’s Friday 5, where we round up our favorite reads from around the online world in English, includes a report from The Guardian and GIJN member Forbidden Stories about a Moroccan journalist targeted by Pegasus spyware, five books on cybersecurity that you should be reading, and, in the midst of the global Black Lives Matter movement, AP Stylebook’s decision to capitalize Black.
Once confined to bands of protesters, the Black Lives Matter movement has spread across America. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 15 to 21 finds The New York Times mapping the protests in more than 2,000 US cities and towns over a two week period. On the coronavirus front, The Telegraph analyzed the widening racial wealth gap caused by the pandemic, the Guardian and Liberty Investigates looked into police enforcing lockdown measures disproportionately against Blacks, Asians, and other minorities, while Important Stories and Holod Media examined the fines issued by Russian courts for lockdown violations during the pandemic.
The death of African American George Floyd in police custody has resulted in a major uproar against structural racism in the United States. Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from June 1 to 7 finds The New York Times examining police use of force in Minneapolis, the city in which Floyd died after being pinned down by a police officer. The Washington Post also dug into data of every fatal shooting in the US by police officers since 2015.
