The Zuckerberg Files
Not new but recently upgraded, time to revisit The Zuckerberg Files maintained by UW-Milwaukee Center for Information Policy Research. It provides free access to over 900 statements, transcripts of speeches and videos from Facebook’s founder covering the period 2004-2018. Free registration required. Includes materials on Russian elections and privacy.
1.1 million abusive tweets sent to women in 2017
…according to large-scale research undertaken by Amnesty International and Element AI, a global artificial intelligence software product company. They surveyed millions of tweets mentioning 778 journalists and politicians from the UK and US during 2017. Women of colour were more than 34% likely to receive abuse than white women. The research also looks at the […]
What should we do about Fake News?
This week the LSE Truth, Trust and Technology Commission launched its report. They argued that big tech companies should fund an independent platform agency to police fake news. Find out more by downloading the report and getting the facts on the composition of the commission from the official website.
Junk News Aggregator
A new resource which aims to track the spread of junk news on Facebook. It has been devised by the Computational Propaganda group (COMPROP) of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford. The full methodology is displayed on the website. See the latest top 10 junk news stories posted in the last […]
US Mid-Term Elections
Lots of links on this subject. New York Times collected examples of misinformation over 4,000 were sent from social media. Other sources of fact checking and overviews of political accuracy include: Politfact has been checking claims made about the election by the President and other commentators Washington Post fact-checker Media Matters for America News coverage […]
Advertising on Social Media
As a move to greater transparency Facebook has launched this searchable database about political adverts appearing on Facebook and who is funding them. It covers US election spending. There are also statistical snapshots taken every week. Google transparency report also has a political ads section and Twitter has a list of political campaign advertisers.
Twitter release data on state-backed propaganda from Iran and Russia
https://about.twitter.com/en_us/values/elections-integrity.html#data As part of it openness and transparency policy, Twitter have released information and datasets indicating that thousands of sources from Russia were used during the USA election campaign to manipulate news sources. TechCrunch discusses and gives links to the datasets.
How students engage with the news
A report from the US based Project information literacy which has implications for librarians and educators concerned with information literacy and the fight against fake news. During 2017/18 a sample of 5,844 respondents returned an online survey administered at 11 U.S. colleges, universities, and community colleges. Topics discussed include competency in evaluating sources and use of […]
Open Observatory of Network Interference: Tor Project
A free software, Global Observation Network, for detecting censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation on the internet. You can look at a map to see measurements of censorship, interference and blocking of social media Its blog has a series of links to recent reports and discussion on use of blocking in specific countries and during individual election […]
How many times a day do you check your phone?
According to the latest Ofcom communications report people in the UK now check their smartphones, on average, every 12 minutes of the waking day. Their press release also has a fascinating infographic comparing usage and consumption of media from 2008 and 2018 which shows startling changes over the last ten years. The full report covers […]
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