Have you heard the famous Winston Churchill quote that “the fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists”? Well, it’s a fake quote. Churchill never said it. But that didn’t stop Texas Governor Greg Abbott from tweeting the fake quote late last night. And while Abbott is rightly being taken to task, the…
After a rough week of criticism over Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s shoddy explanation for why he won’t ban conspiracy site Infowars—including a very awkward tangent into apparently believing Holocaust deniers are not “intentionally getting it wrong”—the social media giant has announced it will begin removing…
A bill just passed in Egypt that will empower the government to block users on social media for spreading “fake news” if they have over 5,000 followers.
In addition to flooding social media with false news stories, propaganda-spreading bots, and all sorts of online chicanery during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Russian trolls also reportedly attempted to erode Americans’ trust in local news by posing as city newspapers.
Still reeling (at least in reputation, but certainly not in financial success) from the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook is launching its own slate of news shows produced and funded by the social network in partnership with “trustworthy” news organizations. The lineup, which launches next week, features a whole…
Facebook has been under fire in India following a string of lynchings that appeared to have been prompted by false news spread on WhatsApp. It’s become such an epidemic that the Indian government has demanded something be done. For now, Facebook’s solution involves running ads in local newspapers explaining how to…
Facebook, in attempts to crack down on fake news and other content, has somehow made news organizations its enemy. Just one day after Facebook was criticized for rejecting a promoted post from the nonprofit investigative journalism outlet Reveal, Instagram has now reportedly removed a video from ProPublica’s account.
Facebook debuted a host of new efforts Thursday in its fight against fake news.
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible.
Years ago, Facebook fired its Trending News team and replaced them with algorithms after a Gizmodo article featured former workers claiming the site discriminated against conservative news. Then, Facebook tried and failed to suppress hoax news sites and propaganda with a series of methods designed to avoid the ire of…
The old adage about a lie traveling halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on has been made true thanks to Twitter. According to a new study, the vast majority of people using the platform during disasters and breaking news events spread false information without ever getting it a second thought.
Facebook’s consistent lack of transparency has helped fuel the pernicious notion that the company deliberately censors conservative views, and the problem has reached a boiling point. Now, the company is reportedly launching an internal probe of potential conservative bias and it will be led by a man who’s spread fake…
The first person charged under Malaysia’s Anti-Fake News Act has been found guilty after posting a YouTube video in which he said police took nearly an hour to respond to the shooting of a Palestinian lecturer—a claim the police refute.
For what feels like the umpteenth time, Facebook is introducing another new plan to fight against the scourge of fake news that populates the platform, this time by making shrinking the size of links to bogus claims and hoaxes. It probably won’t work because people are just the worst.
A couple years ago, Andrew Oleck wondered if he could make a viral video. The Los Angeles-based filmmaker had been freelancing and doing commercial work for a decade and wanted to branch out. It took a while, but on April 1, he released his first attempt at internet stardom: a three-minute satire, where Mark…
As our descent into national madness continues, some have been sounding warning bells about a possible “fake news apocalypse”—the idea that technology is making it easier than ever to generate disinformation and propaganda and quickly disseminate it to legions of people online, with little checks on the process.…
Rodrigo Duterte rode to the presidency of the Philippines through a wave of social media promotion. But the homicidal world leader, who has overseen the murder of over 20,000 people in a brutal crackdown on alleged drug dealers and users, isn’t too happy with Facebook these days. Duterte claims that Facebook’s newest…
The BBC admitted in a statement on Thursday that scenes from its 2011 documentary series, Human Planet, were staged by the doc’s creators. An episode dedicated to the indigenous Korowai people of Papua, New Guinea featured tribe members building a new residence in a tree house. Cut to 2018, when a member of the same…
At the end of 2016, Facebook delegated its misinformation problem to outside experts, but it looks like fact-checkers tasked with weeding out bullshit are largely dissatisfied with how things are going down.
Over the last year, “fake news” has gone from being a niche concern that charlatans exploited for profit, to a code red existential threat to the fabric of society—or something in between. But our scientific understanding of how and why false stories spread is still limited. Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab are diving…
