Why James Madison Would Say Our Real Problem Is Not Misinformation
By Danielle Allen and Justin Pottle
1 April 2018
It was a time when elites were worried about a public manipulated into nationalist fervor by divisive populist figures. Students were not being taught how to tell propaganda from facts, was the concern. So in the 1930s, department store magnate Edward Filene and a small group of educational reformers founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) in hopes of teaching young people to identify and resist information manipulation.
That ‘Fake News’ Term
By Shane Greenup
20 March 2018
I have found myself using the term Fake News more than any other word or phrase to describe what I, and many others, are fighting against in this war against untruth, despite the fact that I agree with everyone who says we need to do away with the term.
Europe’s Chance to Fight ‘Fake News’ With Soft Power
By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
18 March 2018
In many countries over the past few years, the political process – and social cohesion – have been threatened by various forms of disinformation, sometimes misleadingly and inadequately called “fake news”. Politically-motivated and for-profit disinformation is blamed, among other things, for the UK’s decision to vote to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump as US president.
Reducing the Spread of Misinformation in Africa
By Ory Okolloh
10 March 2018
We live in a growing environment of public mistrust, especially when it comes to the media, and the explosion of the number of sources of information makes deciphering what is factual, what is misinformation, and what is propaganda increasingly difficult. An absence of credible information prevents citizens from participating in public decision-making, particularly on key issues of concern such as education, health, and governance.
You Think Media Deserves Lack of Trust
By Nancy Watzman
24 February 2018
Since launching this site in mid-November, we’ve been asking you for your ideas on how to improve trust in the media and strengthen our democracy. We’ve summarized and submitted what you’ve told us to the members of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy ahead of their meeting last week in Miami, Florida. Here is what we told them.
Why Selective Exposure to Like-Minded Congenial Political News Is Less Prevalent Than You Think
By Andrew Guess, Benjamin Lyons, Brendan Nyhan & Jason Reifler
14 February 2018
With critics decrying the “echo chambers,” “filter bubbles,” and “information cocoons” created by the rise of online news and social media, you’d think that the entire American public was consuming a near-exclusive diet of politically pleasing news.
Voters do increasingly face an information glut that requires them to make choices about what news to consume. In these polarized times, it may therefore seem intuitive that people will overwhelmingly select into or be directed toward media and information flows that confirm their pre-existing biases, further reinforcing those views.
More Than 600 Global Brands Still Feed the Fake News Ecosystem
By Frederic Filloux
11 February 2018
French startup Storyzy spotted six hundred forty-four brands on questionable sites ranging from hard core fake news sites, hyper-partisan ones, to clickbait venues hosting bogus content with no particular agenda, except making a quick buck.
10 Reasons Why Americans Don’t Trust the Media
17 January 2018
Public trust in the media is at an all-time low. Results from a major new Knight-Gallup report can help us understand why.
As the debates over trust in media, misinformation and control over information rage, a new Knight-Gallup survey of more than 19,000 U.S. adults shows that Americans believe that the media have an important role to play in our democracy — yet they don’t see that role being fulfilled.
I Trained Fake News Detection AI With >95% Accuracy
By Aaron Edell
14 January 2018
We made a fake news detector with above a 95% accuracy on (a validation set) that uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing that you can download here. In the real world, the accuracy might be lower, especially as time goes on and the way articles are written changes.
With so many advances in Natural Language Processing and machine learning, I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make a model that could flag news content as fake, and perhaps take a bite out of the devastating consequences of the proliferation of fake news. See Edell’s story on Medium.
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