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? […]
Inside the Filter Bubble – with Eli Pariser, the man who coined the phrase.
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 […]
Online anger is gold to this junk news pioneer
Meet one of the Internet’s most prolific distributors of hyper-partisan fare. From California, Cyrus Massoumi caters to both liberals and conservatives, serving up political grist through various Facebook pages. Science correspondent Miles O’Brien profiles a leading purveyor of junk news who has hit the jackpot exploiting the trend toward tribalism. This is the second of […]
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 […]