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.
Deep fakes — videos which feature one person’s face on another’s body — are rapidly becoming more sophisticated. Samantha Sunne talked to some of the world’s experts on the techniques which can help you learn the weaknesses of this new phenomenon that’s got everyone talking.
The reason we know so much about Russian disinformation operations targeting the United States is that some Russian journalists are very good at their jobs. What the world learned about these trolls, it turns out, came not from social media firms, governments or Western media, but from enterprising Russian journalists. Here’s how they first uncovered the Russian troll factory.
What’s the global data journalism community tweeting about this week? Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from January 8 to 14 finds free font-for-numbers by @InVisionApp, a William Playfair biography book review for @WSJBookReviews and @PublicDataLab’s just-released full version of its fake news field guide.
There is power in a crowd, and harnessing crowd contributions have become increasingly useful in investigative journalism. New York-based ProPublica shows how newsrooms are integrating crowdsourcing as a routine reporting tool, using it for data collection and to connect with and gather personal stories from readers.
Trying to make social media monitoring more manageable? First Draft News has some tactics and tools to help journalists sort through the mire on Twitter and Facebook as well as the more edgy 4chan and wildly popular Reddit.
The Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as the Word of the Year 2016. It is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This attitude of readers choosing their own beliefs over facts has been a huge problem that beset journalism in the past year, with media outlets trying to regain readers’ trusts and debunking false news from dubious digital sites. Here is a list of initiatives to combat fake news that have popped up in response to this challenge.
In a post-truth future, it can be frustratingly hard to fight fake news and rumors beyond one’s immediate reach. In a system where no source is deemed fully trustworthy, research and citations are diminished to just another set of opinions. This has been China’s story for decades. In 2016, it is starting to be the U.S.’ story as well.
