Study: most students can’t spot fake news
If you thought fake online news was a problem for impressionable adults, it’s even worse for the younger crowd. A Stanford study of 7,804 middle school, high school and college students has found that most of them couldn’t identify fake news on their own. Their susceptibility varied with age, but even a large number of the older students fell prey to bogus reports. Over two thirds of middle school kids didn’t see why they shouldn’t trust a bank executive’s post claiming that young adults need financial help, while nearly 40 percent of high schoolers didn’t question the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it.
Why did many of the students misjudge the authenticity of a story? They were fixated on the appearance of legitimacy, rather than the quality of information. A large photo or a lot of detail was enough to make a Twitter post seem credible, even if the actual content was incomplete or wrong. There are plenty of adults who respond this way, we’d add, but students are more vulnerable than most.
As the Wall Street Journal explains, part of the solution is simply better education: teach students to verify sources, question motivations and otherwise think critically. That’s happening in some schools. However, the data also illustrates the responsibilities that internet companies and parents share in keeping a lid on fake news. Facebook and Google can help by taking down these stories or depriving their creators of ad money, but parents also need to talk about accuracy and prevent younger kids from accessing sites with significant accuracy problems.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Facebook drone failure prompts a US investigation
Facebook may have been beaming with pride when it completed the first full test of its Aquila internet drone on June 28th, but that “structural failure” near the end? US officials aren’t so happy about that. The National Transportation Safety Board has revealed that it’s investigating the incident, which it considers “substantial” enough to be treated as an accident. The exact circumstances aren’t available, but there wasn’t any damage on the ground.
In a statement to Bloomberg, Facebook reiterates that it was “happy” with the test flight, which checked everything from basic aerodynamics to controls. There were “no major unexpected results,” the social network says. It likely wasn’t catastrophic, then, but the NTSB’s involvement still raises eyebrows. Is it investigating just to be cautious, or is this more than a small snag?
Whatever the situation, it’s only going to add to Facebook’s headaches as it tries to offer free, far-reaching internet access. On top of the imperfect drone flight, it lost a satellite to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 explosion on September 1st. Both ventures are inherently risky — Aquila is effectively a barebones solar-powered wing — but we suspect that Facebook wasn’t expecting to run into that much trouble in a relatively short time.
Source: Bloomberg
Instagram adds live video broadcasts and disappearing photos
Instagram has been taking quite a bit of inspiration from Snapchat lately, and that trend continues today. The app’s latest update brings two new features: “disappearing” photos for Instagram Direct and live video broadcasting in your Instagram stories. The latter feature is probably a bigger deal, and something Snapchat isn’t doing yet — but given how popular Periscope and then Facebook Live video has become, it’s not surprising to see the feature make its way to Instagram.
Instagram’s live video feature is built into the existing “stories” feature — when you swipe over to add a picture or video to your story, you’ll get the option to go live instead. If you start broadcasting live video, your followers will see a little “live” badge on your story icon so they can tune in. Naturally, the interface allows for live comments to flow in, and users can “heart” your broadcast as well. Instagram is also pushing live stories into the app’s “explore” tab so you can see people going live that you don’t follow who might be sharing things you’re interested in.
As for disappearing photos and videos, those can be sent through the Instagram Direct feature to either a single user or a group that you may be a part of. You can only send disappearing photos and videos to people who follow you, and you’ll be alerted if someone takes a screenshot of your image or if they replay the video. Of course, you can draw on the images and add text, just like you can to things you post in Instagram Stories.
The disappearing messages are set to roll out today to all Instagram users, but you’ll need to be patient if you want to try live video — the company says it’ll be rolling out “in the coming weeks.”
Via: The Verge
Source: Instagram
Kanye West says Facebook and Google ‘lied to you’
You’re not the only one upset that the internet might have misled you. Kanye West cut short a Sacramento concert with an epic 15-minute speech where he railed against the state of the music industry, politics, and… the internet. The superstar says that people feel like they lost (due to the election, among other issues) because Facebook and Google “lied to you.” He even calls out Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg by name around the 12-minute mark. Supposedly, the internet mogul reneged on a promise that he “would help” Kanye and then decided to “look for aliens.” We’re not sure where that last part comes from, since Facebook’s out-there projects are largely limited to Earthly concerns like solar-powered internet drones.
He also tells people to only put their iPhones in the air, since he wants “only originals.” Guess we know where he stands on smartphones, then (although he recently got rid of his phone to focus on creativity).
Is Kanye presenting a complex, nuanced take on the problems of internet accuracy and corporate responsibility in Silicon Valley? Hell no. This is a shoot-from-the-hip diatribe. However, it shows that concerns over online authenticity are bubbling to the surface. If Kanye sees it as a problem as serious to him as unfairness to Obama and alleged corruption at the MTV Video Music Awards, you know it’s in the mainstream consciousness. In that sense, efforts to fight fake news are overdue — Kanye’s speech is a reflection of frustration that, in some ways, has been simmering for months or even years.
Lost in all of this: ‘If you ain’t got an iPhone, don’t put it up. Only originals.’ He’s in Ye mode now. https://t.co/0LYyxhz1Rz
— Edgar Alvarez (@abcdedgar) November 20, 2016
Source: Fader (1), (2)
Recommended Reading: Fake news writer takes blame for Trump’s win
Facebook Fake-news
Writer: ‘I Think Donald
Trump Is in the White
House Because of Me’
Caitlin Dewey,
The Washington Post
Facebook’s struggle with fake news has been widely reported and the issue is still a hot topic in the days following the US presidential election. The Washington Post caught up with Paul Horner, a man who has made a living off of news hoaxes over the last few years, some of which got picked up by the media and the Trump campaign as legit stories.
“His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything,” Horner said. “His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.”
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Mark Zuckerberg explains how Facebook is fighting fake news
Ever since the end of the presidential election, the spread of rumors, misinformation and outright fake news on social media has been in the spotlight. With even President Obama speaking out about social media’s role in pushing propaganda, and some coders taking matters into their own hands with browser extensions, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted tonight about what his company is doing. According to Zuckerberg, “We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties.”
Developing…
Source: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
Can we put the fake news genie back in the bottle?
The 2016 presidential campaign has definitively shown us that you shouldn’t rely on Facebook for all of your news. Even at its best, you’re likely to be exposed primarily to viewpoints and stories you already agree with. Being ensconced in a internet belief bubble takes away a lot of the nuance that exists in the real world — while that lack of nuance likely helped Donald Trump become the next President of the United States.
But beyond the narrow viewpoint that comes from getting news through Facebook is a bigger problem: Fake news has been proliferating on the site at a rapid pace. In August, Facebook made some changes to its “trending news” section, removing human editors and replacing them with an algorithm. Ironically, the move seemed like a response to reports that those human editors were biased against conservative news. Without those editors patrolling the trending section, it became much easier for false stories to slip through. Indeed, a false report about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly being fired spread like wildfire just days after the change was announced.
Things have gotten worse since then — over the last week and a half, fake news on Facebook has been widely cited as a potential difference-maker in the elections results. And Facebook continues to duck its responsibility even as reports circle about the company’s dysfunctional process for flagging and removing false news stories. It’s a topic that’s inescapable right now — Google Trends shows searches for “fake news” spiking in the last month.
And now President Obama has addressed the issue, speaking out against it in a press conference with German chancellor Angela Merkel as well as in an excellent, wide-ranging interview just published by the New Yorker. “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not,” he said yesterday, “and particularly in an age of social media when so many people are getting their information in sound bites and off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”
The fake news genie is most definitely out of the bottle — so what do we do next? Alexios Mantzarlis, the head of Poynter’s international fact-checking network, admits it’s a big problem but thinks the first place to start is by distinguishing between fake news and misleading news and pushing back against the complete fabrications. “I’ve seen lists of fake news sites going that [incorrectly] included some alt-right sites,” he says “I’m not suggesting that those sites are 100 percent accurate — but there’s a difference between a story that is misleading and a story that is outright fake. The battle that we can win is against 100 percent fake stories, so let’s start there.”
Read this by @snopes founder David Mikkelson, who knows something or other about fake news on the internet https://t.co/bkk1YzqyQk pic.twitter.com/1zD9zCTkSc
— Alexios (@Mantzarlis) November 17, 2016
Mantzarlis mostly focused on what Facebook can do to stem the tide, a reasonable position given that about a quarter of the world’s population uses the platform. “If there are humans at Facebook, they can fact check — at least let’s keep fake news out of trending,” he says. “And if the team sees fake news, tag it so everyone knows. The Megyn Kelly hoax is shocking to me — it kept getting engaged with after Facebook itself apologized for it being a hoax!” While Facebook says it got rid of the team working on trending news, the company still has humans reviewing posts that get flagged, as NPR reports.
While it sounds like coming up with standards that Facebook can quickly and consistently apply presents a major challenge, it’s clearly something the company needs to get serious about. “[Mark] Zuckerberg has said that determining what is true is hard, and I agree with that,” says Mantzarlis. “But when you have fake stories that have been yanked out of trending, they should clearly flagged [as fake]. If you don’t want to delete content, at least annotate it — don’t let it go on more News Feeds afterwards!”
The challenge facing Facebook is walking the line between letting people share whatever they want with their friends — what the platform was originally built for — and cracking down on misinformation. “I’m aware of a strong backlash that is ready to surge as soon as Facebook pushes back too hard… they are walking a tightrope, and I wouldn’t want to be them,” Mantzarlis says. “They make decisions about how to curate the News Feed all the time — if quality of the News Feed is important, I don’t see why they can’t be more particular about this stuff.”
Unfortunately, with the ball so firmly in Facebook’s court, we’re going to be dependent on them to put the genie back in the bottle, and the question remains how interested the company will be in taking this challenge on. Zuckerberg is clearly irked by the suggestion that fake news shared on Facebook influenced the election. He claims that over 99 percent of content on the site is authentic. But despite his skepticism, the company has gone on record saying it would fight fake news — though it didn’t say how. Some aren’t waiting to find out, as reports indicate dozens of employees are privately investigating how the company deals with such matters.
While Facebook bears a significant burden here, the problem extends beyond what it can control — all the way to the White House, in fact. President-elect Donald Trump himself has long played fast and loose with the truth (to put it lightly), and some in the media are noting that they’re essentially competing against his Twitter feed in an effort to tell the truth. It’s a tendency that fake news maven Paul Horner successfully exploited throughout the campaign. “[Trump] just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it,” Horner told The Washington Post. “His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything.”
1. New reality for the press: the president-elect’s Twitter account is a competing media outlet spreading fake news. https://t.co/VPvjKnW5PI
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 18, 2016
Trump can crow about keeping a Ford planet from moving to Mexico, the media can investigate those claims and prove them false — but at this point, the truth can quickly become secondary to the narrative Trump has created. His statements are out there, and his army of supporters won’t accept an alternate viewpoint as the truth. It’s no wonder the horrible phrase “post-truth” was the Oxford dictionary’s word of the year.
So the war on fake news has really just begun — but anyone using Facebook or otherwise reading the internet can do their part to hold sources accountable. Reporting bad stories on Facebook isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s what we can for now. Venturing far outside of Facebook directly to reliable outlets that aren’t algorithmically served to you is a smart idea, as well. If you’re wondering what’s real and what isn’t, this document is a great place to start. Perhaps the most important thing you can do is read as many sources on a particular bit of news as you can: if one site claims Trump won the popular vote and 50 others say otherwise, common sense will tell you which one is lying.
The Engadget Podcast Ep 15: Everything But the Truth
Senior editor Devindra Hardawar and reviews editor Cherlynn Low join host Terrence O’Brien to dig through the week’s biggest news. First they’ll talk about two of the biggest new products on the market: the Macbook Pro and the Surface Studio. Then they’ll try to figure out what posses a Ubisoft employee to hide a rather graphic image of a vagina in Watch Dogs 2. Lastly the panel will talk about the growing problem of fake news on the internet and what giants like Facebook can do to combat it.
Wins
Loses
Winning %
Christopher Trout
5
1
.833
Mona Lalwani
3
1
.750
Dana Wollman
10
6
.625
Devindra Hardawar
12
10
.545
Chris Velazco
3
3
.500
Cherlynn Low
7
9
.437
Nathan Ingraham
4
6
.400
Michael Gorman
1
5
.167
Relevant links:
- MacBook Pro review (2016): A step forward and a step back
- Sony suspends player who found a sex organ in ‘Watch Dogs 2’
- Microsoft’s Surface Studio proves desktops can still be cool
- Google is restricting AdSense ads on fake-news sites
- Google search for ‘final election numbers’ offers up fake news
- Facebook will also cut off fake news sites from ad money
- Facebook didn’t stop fake news because it’s afraid of conservatives
- Mark Zuckerberg: over 99 percent of Facebook content is authentic
- Facebook employees are unofficially trying to defeat fake news
- False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources
You can check out every episode on The Engadget Podcast page in audio, video and text form for the hearing impaired.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on Facebook
Subscribe on Google Play Music
Subscribe on iTunes
Subscribe on Stitcher
Subscribe on Pocket Casts
Obama: We have to get serious about facts
After a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Obama tackled the topic of fake news following a number of reports detailing Facebook activity during the 2016 election. He explained at a time when so many people are getting their news via sound bites on social media, we have to get serious about facts.
“If we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” Obama explained.
Before speaking on the need to get the facts right “in the age of social media,” Obama explained that if 43 percent of eligible voters in the US don’t cast a ballot, “democracy is weakened.” He went on to say that if people, both conservatives and liberals, are unwilling to participate in the democratic process, democracy will cease to function as it’s intended.
“My most important advice is to understand what are the foundations of a healthy democracy and how we have to engage in citizenship continuously, not just when something upsets us,” he said. “It’s hard work.”
President Obama’s made the comments during a stop in Germany during a European trip where he’s also scheduled to meet with British Prime Minister Theresa May, French President Francois Hollande, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
The president’s statements follow Facebook’s continued issues with fake news stories trending on its social network weeks after backlash began. The company has vowed to take care of the problem, but hasn’t announced many details on how it plans to do so. Earlier this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that 99 percent of content on the site is authentic. BuzzFeed News reported Wednesday that the amount of fake news soared on Facebook in the days leading up to the election. That report found that 17 of the top 20 hoaxes were openly pro-Trump or anti-Clinton in nature, the most popular of which was the fake news that the Pope endorsed the President-elect.
Source: The Washington Post
Facebook is adding donate buttons to charity Live videos
After spending a week battling a fake news epidemic, getting to grips with privacy regulators in Europe and dealing with another admission of misreporting ad data, Facebook finally has some good news to share. In a bid to do more “social good,” Mark Zuckerberg and his team have announced a new round of updates to community tools aimed at keeping users safe and allowing them to help others.
First is an update to Facebook’s Safety Check feature, a tool that lets users tell their friends and family they are safe during a natural disaster or a potentially dangerous event. As we reported last week, Facebook has confirmed it’s in the process of creating always-on Safety Check hubs called Community Help, which will let people mark themselves safe, but also offer or request things like shelter, food and supplies. Facebook will also put Safety Check activations in the hands of users, so when a lot of people share news of an incident in a particular area, they may be asked to confirm they are out of harm’s way.
Next is a way for non-profit organizations to do more of what they’re good at: raising donations. Facebook says it’s in the process of expanding its Fundraisers tool to more than 750,000 non-profits, which includes the option to add a donate button to Live buttons and posts. If someone is broadcasting their charitable event via Facebook Live, you’ll now be able to donate instead of spreading goodwill via Likes and Heart Reactions.
For Movember, the charity drive that gives hairy dudes a valid reason to get hairier, US users will be able to collect donations directly via Facebook. To further promote #GivingTuesday, the company has teamed up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to contribute up to $1 million to Facebook fundraisers. “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will provide $500,000 in matching funds, up to $1,000 per Facebook fundraiser, and Facebook will waive up to $500,000 of fees on all donations,” says Naomi Gleit, VP of Social Good.
Source: Facebook
AIVAnet 