Amazon said it was using automated technology to weed out false reviews.It said it invested "significant resources" to protect its review system "because we know customers value the insights and experiences shared by fellow shoppers". /**/ (function() { if (window.bbcdotcom && bbcdotcom.adverts && bbcdotcom.adverts.slotAsync) { bbcdotcom.adverts.slotAsync('mpu', [1,2,3]); } })(); /**/ "Even one inauthentic review is one too many," it added.But Which?'s probe suggested fake reviews were commonplace.

students don’t need to learn skepticism as much as they need to learn when to trust.

As deepfakes make their way into social media, their spread will likely follow the same pattern as other fake news stories. In a MIT study investigating the diffusion of false content on Twitter published between 2006 and 2017, researchers found that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth in all categories of information.” False stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth and reached 1,500 people six times more quickly than accurate articles.

If there is a recent date in the very title of the video, and that particular video has been uploaded to YouTube multiple times over a short span of time, then there is high probability that the video is a fake

Some (36%) said they agreed that the threat of “‘fake news’ had made them distrust the credibility of any news.” Almost half (45%) lacked confidence with discerning “real news” from “fake news,” and only 14% said they were “very confident” that they could detect “fake news.”

Fifteen minutes into the program, listeners began to call the station in terror, believing that the earth was really being invaded by Martians.

But in the digital age, when speech can exist mostly unfettered, the big threat to truth looks very different. It’s not just censorship, but an avalanche of undistinguished speech—some true, some false, some fake, some important, some trivial, much of it out-of-context, all burying us.

Half of Americans say news and current events matter a lot to their daily lives, while 30 percent say the news doesn’t have much to do with them. The rest aren’t sure. A quarter of Americans say they paid a lot of attention to the news on Tuesday, with 32 percent paying just some attention, 26 percent paying not very much attention and 18 percent paying no attention at all. Forty-seven percent thought the news was at least a little busier than average. Of those who paid any attention to the news on Tuesday, 32 percent spent an hour or more reading, watching or listening. About 23 percent spent 30 minutes to an hour, 18 percent spent 15 minutes to half an hour, and 21 percent spent less than 15 minutes. Just 15 percent of those who paid any attention to the news Tuesday have a great deal of trust in the media to state the facts fully, accurately and fairly. Thirty-eight percent have a fair amount of trust, 28 percent don’t have much trust in the media, and 11 percent have none at all. Those who followed the news on Tuesday were most likely to say they had gotten their news from an online news source (42 percent) or local TV (37 percent), followed by national cable TV (33 percent), social media (28 percent), national network news (23 percent), radio (19 percent) and conversations with other people (19 percent). The least popular source was print newspapers and magazines (10 percent).

By contrast, Jeong’s tweets were, at best, mean to some white people

that she had openly supported the notorious neo-Nazi weev

The screencapped tweets also circulated among fringe alt-right sites like the Daily Caller

in at least two instances dropped the n-word.

To begin to develop a grammar of fake news, I collected six types of false information we’ve seen this election season.

By now we’ve all agreed the term “fake news” is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we’re left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase. The reason we’re struggling with a replacement is because this is about more than news, it’s about the entire information ecosystem. And the term fake doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false).

For one, much of the new research centers on U.S. politics and, specifically, elections. But social networks drive conversations about many other topics such as business, education, health, and personal relationships. To battle bad online information, it would be helpful to know whether people respond to these sorts of topics differently than they respond to information about political candidates and elections. It also would be useful to know whether myths about certain subjects — for instance, a business product or education trend — are trickier to correct than others.

Scholars have known for decades that people tend to search for and believe information that confirms what they already think is true. The new elements are social media and the global networks of friends who use it. People let their guard down on online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where friends, family members, and coworkers share photos, gossip, and a wide variety of other information. That’s one reason why people may fall for false news, as S. Shyam Sundar, a Pennsylvania State University communication professor, explains in The Conversation. Another reason: People are less skeptical of information they encounter on platforms they have personalized — through friend requests and “liked” pages, for instance — to reflect their interests and identity.

Another key, potentially surprising, takeaway from that study: “In general, fake news consumption seems to be a complement to, rather than a substitute for, hard news — visits to fake news websites are highest among people who consume the most hard news and do not measurably decrease among the most politically knowledgeable individuals.”

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford released a report showing that false news sites appear to have a limited reach in Europe. For instance, in France, where Russians are accused of trying to interfere with the most recent presidential election, most of the false news sites studied reached 1% or less of the country’s online population each month in 2017. However, when researchers looked at how people interacted with false news on Facebook — via shares and comments, for example — “a handful of false news outlets in [the] sample generated more or as many interactions as established news brands.”

As false news has become a global phenomenon, scholars have responded. They’ve ramped up their efforts to understand how and why bad information spreads online — and how to stop it. In the past 18 months, they’ve flooded academic journals with new research and have raised the level of urgency. In a March 2018 article, titled “The Science of Fake News,” in the prestigious journal Science, 16 high-profile academics came together to issue a call to action, urging internet and social media platforms to work with scholars to evaluate the problem and find solutions.

Here’s the message it sent to the people on Reddit, according to one commenter:

“Nobody at Arenanet is safe from the hand of Reddit. We’re literally running the company now, they’re in fear of the very users they seek to consort with ... The moment a dev steps out of line or try to talk back to a player, guess what, they’ll know we got their hands on their throat and we can squeeze any time we like.”

series of videos showing students basic web techniques for source verification and contextualization

Who is Jordan Peterson, favorite figure of the alt-right

77 percent of adults in a recent Monmouth poll said they think that TV news and newspapers at least occasionally regularly report fake stories. That number included 31 percent who said the news outlets report fake news “regularly” and 46 percent think they occasionally do. When asked to define the term “fake news,” 65 percent said it also applies to how news outlets make editorial decisions about what they chose to report, not just stories where the facts are wrong.

you’ve got to explain to me why these putative ability differences aren’t handicapping women

Racism

No such income gap exists between black and white women raised in similar households.

People come to Google looking for information they can trust, and that information often comes from the reporting of journalists and news organizations around the world.

Most people are rather confident oftheir ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So thephenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted muchsustained inquir

What kinds of social mediausers readjunk news? We examine the distribution of the most significant sources of junk news in the three months before PresidentDonaldTrump’sfirstState of the Union Address. Drawing ona list of sources that consistently publish political news and information that isextremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked commentary, fake news and other forms of junk news, we find that the distribution of such content is unevenlyspread across the ideological spectrum. We demonstrate that (1) onTwitter, a network of Trumpsupporters sharesthe widest range of knownjunk newssources and circulatesmore junk news than all the other groups put together;(2)on Facebook,extreme hard right pages—distinct from Republican pages—sharethe widest range of known junk news sourcesand circulate more junk news than all the other audiences put together;(3)on average, the audiences for junk news on Twitter share a wider range of known junk news sources than audiences on Facebook’s public pages

We now have influential partisan media outlets that help people believe what they want to believe, irrespective of factual accuracy. Inconvenient facts are labeled “fake news” and disregarded. In a nutshell, we no longer inhabit a shared reality, and as a result, major problems are going unaddressed because a segment of Americans rejects inconvenient truths

the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time.

“I think the biggest challenge [with] higher education today is the growing economic and racial segregation,” Pasquerella said.

scan all blocks of your partitions

4 Tools to Test and Detect Fake or Counterfeit USB Flash Drives

Did the writer engage with anyone who disagrees? Did they call a senator whose legislation bugs them? Did they try to grasp what the president-elect was doing, or merely repeat one of his more outrageous statements? If it's a broadcast interview, was the guest presented with genuine opposing views and challenged to answer? Those who wrestle with opposing arguments do you a service and often improve their own arguments.

Stephanie Busari: How fake news does real harm

packaged the basic science of climate change into fake newspaper articles bearing two very different headlines

The furore over Fake News is really about the seizures caused by overactivity in these synapses - confabulation and hallucination in the global brain of mutual media. With popularity always following a power law, runaway memetic outbreaks can become endemic, especially when the platform is doing what it can to accelerate them without any sense of their context or meaning.

designed to help students fact-check and trace the circulation of online information—helps to answer both of these questions.

1) No one can even agree on a definition of “fake news,” even though a ridiculous number of words are being spent trying to define it.2) Folks don’t seem to understand the evolving nature of the problem, the way that manipulation evolves, or how the approaches they propose can be misused by those with whom they fundamentally disagree.3) No amount of “fixing” Facebook or Google will address the underlying factors shaping the culture and information wars in which America is currently enmeshed.

Banning Baby Jesus

Check for previous fact-checking work Go upstream to the source Read laterally

Teaching students to separate fact from fiction has become a priority after an election in which false "news" played a large role.

“fausse nouvelle.”

Here is what we are supposed to do: rebut every single lie. Insist moreover that each lie is retracted — and journalists in press conferences should back up their colleagues with repeated follow-ups if Spicer tries to duck the plain truth. Do not allow them to move on to another question.

Rumors are undeniably resilient, but they are far easier to trace, track, and debunk now than they were when Franklin Roosevelt or Al Smith was running for president.

Switzerland has had the fourth-highest number of headlines relating to fake news since October, putting it behind the U.K., the Netherlands and Canada, respectively.

appearances

Another 23 percent showed signs of accepting the story to some degree, the researchers said.

a new set of ways to report and share news could arise: a social network where the sources of articles were highlighted rather than the users sharing them. A platform that makes it easier to read a full story than to share one unread. A news feed that provides alternative sources and analysis beneath every shared article.