Top US intelligence agencies agree that Russia meddled in the 2016 US Presidential election using an organized campaign of online trolling and misinformation. The details of exactly how are harder to uncover. Jonathan Albright, data journalist and Research Director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, studies information flow in networks. Recently, he has […]
Bots are still a major issue in the spread of junk news. But how do you track them?
One of the most difficult aspects of the battle against misinformation on the web is the pernicious prevalence of bots. These bots are lines of code hiding behind veneers of legitimate social media profiles, programmed to sow chaos through misinformation. Fake news, or what we call “junk news” here at the office, has exploded over […]
Just the Facts – an interview with Brooke Binkowski of Snopes.com
Long before Facebook, Twitter or even Google existed, the fact checking website Snopes.com was running down the half-truths, misinformation, and outright lies that ricochet across the Internet. Today it remains a widely respected clearinghouse of all things factual and not. As part of my series for the PBS NewsHour on the rise and role […]
Misinformation on the Internet – Untangling the Web, an interview with danah boyd.
How did the internet become a tangled web of misinformation? Miles speaks to danah boyd, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, founder of Data & Society, and Visiting Professor at New York University. boyd offers insight into the history of misinformation on the internet and the role of social media plays in the proliferation of […]