It’s been an exciting year of great content and record traffic on GIJN. What follows is a curated list we’ve put together of the top pieces published on gijn.org in 2018 — from the deep web and deep fakes to design thinking and dataviz. See you next year!
Over the past two years, words like “bots,” “botnets” and “trolls” have entered mainstream conversations about social networks and their impact on democracies. Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab laid out some of the working definitions and their methodologies to help identify, expose and explain disinformation online.
Safety, fake news and collaboration dominated Brazil’s 13th Abraji Congress, where more than 750 journalists gathered in São Paulo for 70 panels and 22 courses and workshops on investigative journalism.
As Mexico prepares for national elections this summer, social media is filled with misinformation and disinformation. To combat this, a group of news organizations and civil society groups came together earlier this year to launch Verificado 2018, a collaborative fact-checking and debunking effort.
The recently published paper, Bridging the Gap, Rebuilding Citizen Trust in Media, probably offers the most complete list of the current projects around media and trust. But those interviewed for the project viewed trust — and the way publications can gain and sustain it — differently. However, all initiatives seem to rely on two principles to optimize trust: transparency and participation.
Where I live, it’s common to hear people say that the U.S. government destroyed the World Trade Center. What looks to me and my reporter colleagues like a Russian invasion of Ukraine looks to them like a murky situation where no one is right or wrong. But when someone said to me over dinner that a Polish fighter plane had shot down MH17 over Ukraine, citing yet another obscure Internet “news” site, something snapped. I turned away, but the problem is still there.
