Tag: misinformation

Want to learn about junk news? Here’s all our award-winning reporting.

12.20.18.

UPDATE 6/13/19: This series won a 2019 Mirror Award for Best Story on Social Media in the Crosshairs, tied with a BuzzFeed News series focusing on the same topic. After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it became clear to a lot of people, including me, that the issue of fake news on the internet merited…
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The Software We Wrote to Understand Junk News – with Producer Cameron Hickey

05.29.18.

In the final episode in our series on Junk News, some wisdom from one of the leading experts in the murky world of online misinformation. He also happens to be the producer of the series that we aired on the PBS NewsHour. Now he’s taking the software he wrote to Harvard, where they hope to…
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Inside Facebook – with Tessa Lyons, Head of News Feed Integrity

05.21.18.

Facebook was created for people to share family photos and memories. But as ads entered the mix, the platform was refined to hold our attention for as long as possible. Quality was not a consideration – until recently. But how to fix the junk news mess without editing it? Maybe Facebook needs a newsroom. I…
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Inside Facebook’s race to separate news from junk

05.17.18.

At Facebook, there are two competing goals: keep the platform free and open to a broad spectrum of ideas and opinions, while reducing the spread of misinformation. The company says it’s not in the business of making editorial judgments, so they use fact-checkers, artificial intelligence and their users. Can they stop junk news from adapting?…
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Inside the Filter Bubble – with Eli Pariser, the man who coined the phrase.

05.15.18.

The Internet was supposed to provide a utopian virtual world where all of us could come together in peace, love and harmony to better understand each other and our differing viewpoints… But we got derailed on the road to utopia, didn’t we? Eli Pariser, the man who coined the phrase “filter bubble”, knows as much…
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A Junk News Pioneer – with Cyrus Massoumi, Part 2

05.03.18.

Russian actors may have run an online disinformation campaign during the 2016 US presidential elections, but they likely learned their tactics from Americans. As part of our investigation, PBS NewsHour series producer Cameron Hickey tracked down one of these junk news pioneers, Cyrus Massoumi. He runs liberal and conservative junk news sites, which have millions…
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