Monthly Archives: March 2022

The rise of fake news in the American popular consciousness is one of the remarkable growth stories in recent yearsa dizzying climb to make any Silicon Valley unicorn jealous. Just a few years ago, the phrase was meaningless. Today, according to a new Pew Research Center study, Americans rate it as a larger problem than racism, climate change, or terrorism.

But remarkable though that may seem, its not actually whats most interesting about the study. Pew finds that Americans have deeply divergent views about fake news and different responses to it, which suggest that the emphasis on misinformation might actually run the risk of making people, especially conservatives, less well informed. More than making people believe false things, the rise of fake news is making it harder for people to see the truth.

Pew doesnt define what it calls made-up news, which is a reasonable choice in the context of a poll, but matters a great deal in interpreting it. The term has come to mean different things to different people. It was coined to describe deliberately false articles created by Potemkin news sites and spread on social media. But in a deliberate effort to muddy the waters, President Donald Trump began labeling news coverage that was unfavorable to him fake news. (Indeed, Pew finds that Americans blame politicians and their aides, more than the press, activist groups, or foreign actors, for the problem of made-up news.) Now when Trumps supporters refer to fake news, they often seem to mean mainstream news they dislike, whereas when others do so, they mean bogus information spread by fringe actors.

Read: Why bogus news stories are so hard to stop

If Pews data are taken to mean that people find this latter category more dangerous than climate change, that is almost certainly an overreaction. As the political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote in February, summarizing the state of research in the field:

Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election.

Pew finds a significant gap between Democrats and Republicans views on the seriousness of the problem with made-up news, though:

This looks a lot like a split over the definition of fake news, rather than the actual problem. Put differently, Republicans may well be responding not to out-and-out fakery, but to biasreal or perceivedin news coverage. It would make sense that conservatives would be primed to accept the idea of widespread bias in the press after a decades-long campaign against the credibility of the mainstream press. Indeed, Republicans are about three times more likely than Democrats (58 percent versus 20 percent) to say that journalists create a lot of fake news, though they still assign more blame to both politicians and activist groups.

How do people respond when they sense fake news? Here again, the partisan splits are notable:

Its a positive sign that people are trying to fact-check stories themselves, though its an open question whether theyre any good at it. (Respondents thought little of their peers ability to find bad information, but believe that they, like the children in Lake Wobegon, are all above average: Survey respondents also put a good deal more faith in their own ability to recognize potentially inaccurate or misleading information than they do in the broader publics ability to discern it.)

Some of the other choices are more troubling. One of the biggest risks often imputed to the current media environment, in which audiences can pick and choose news outlets that agree with them, is that people will become more and more siloed, cutting themselves off from information that they dont like or that contradicts their prior assumptions.

The Pew study suggests that fake-news panic, rather than driving people to abandon ideological outlets and the fringe, may actually be accelerating the process of polarization: Its driving consumers to drop some outlets, to simply consume less information overall, and even to cut out social relationships.

Read: How the left lost its mind

If people stop reading a website, because its peddling conspiracy theories, thats good news. If they stop consuming any coverage from mainstream outlets like CNN or The Washington Post, because they believe a story is biased, or because the president has labeled it fake news, thats less positive. While nearly six in 10 Democrats have dropped an outlet over perceived fake news, a full 70 percent of Republicans have. A much larger portion of Republicans has also reduced their overall consumption of news. The less politically aware are also 20 percent more likely to have reduced their overall consumption of news than the more politically awaremeaning that people who were already acquiring the least information are now acquiring even less.

Fully half of respondents said they had avoided talking with someone, because they thought that person might bring made-up news and information into the conversation. The numbers are roughly equivalent across parties48 percent of Republicans, 51 percent of Democrats. Its another example of an action that might seem rational under certain circumstances; no one should feel obliged to listen to an Alex Joneslistening relatives Sandy Hook trutherism or a neighbors Louise Menschderived Trump conspiracy theories. But given the relatively small actual prevalence of true fake news, this figure is probably just another sign of people siloing themselves from information that challenges their assumptions.

Nor does Pews study offer much reason for optimism that these problems will fade anytime soon. The publics solutions are fraught with contradictions. More than half of respondents said that journalists bear the most responsibility for fixing the problem (53 percent, versus 20 percent for the public, 12 percent for the government, and 9 percent for tech companies), and yet eight in 10 say limitations on made-up news and informationrestrictions on free speech, in other wordsare needed. Moreover, almost two-thirds of people said that political divisions are a big challenge to addressing made-up news. Yet the steps that they report taking themselves seem likely to only exacerbate those political divisions.

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The Real Problem With Fake News - The Atlantic

But the prevailing medical wisdom, I soon learned, was that my left-eye odds were more like 20 percent. Other doctors thought that oxygen was unnecessary. And the two airlines that I asked about giving it to me said that they didnt do that doctors note or no doctors note. Id have to contact a separate company and pay a whole lot of money.

As I went through two clinical trials of experimental treatments for my condition, I interacted with, by my rough estimate, more than a dozen medical professionals. Not one asked me if, faced with the specter of blindness, I was struggling emotionally and might want a referral to a counselor of some kind.

I recount all of that without grievance or grudge: I had excellent care, including, for the most part, from Dr. Oxygen-on-the-Plane. I recount it because its an important lesson. As I write in The Beauty of Dusk, which casts my medical odyssey as representative of the struggles that all people encounter, especially as we age:

Doctors are flawed. Theyre human. We want them to be gods, because we want that certainty, that salvation. We want clear roles: The doctor commands; the patient obeys. But, at times, in their imperfection and arrogance and haste, they make assumptions and mistakes. So its crucial to approach a relationship with a doctor, any doctor, as a partnership and to consider yourself an equal partner, respectful but not obsequious, receptive but skeptical.

Im most definitely not advocating the kind of disregard for expertise thats all too prevalent in this digital age, when too many people click their way to outright cynicism or kooky conspiracy theories because theyre after a certain emotional experience or psychological validation, not the truth. Im calling for nuance, for holding two slightly contradictory thoughts at once.

Its what the pandemic should have taught us. Experts proved their invaluable mastery by speeding us to lifesaving vaccines. But they also made some inaccurate guesses thats a necessary part of the scientific process and are still sorting through many Covid mysteries.

Similarly, your doctor knows more than you but not everything, and you can best take advantage of his or her considerable education by educating yourself by asking better questions, by providing the most comprehensive and relevant details about what youre going through, by pressing (within reason) and prodding (within courtesy). Again, from the book:

It became clear to me that most medical professionals, no matter how conscientious, are managing the task at hand, by which I mean the specific affliction that you present with, the pain or discomfort that youre trying to rid yourself of, the immediate juncture that you have to move past. Theyre not managing you certainly not all of you. That larger, longer, more panoramic task can be outsourced to exactly no one.

For as long as your mind remains intact and your energy endures, you are your own best case manager. You hold the levers for your moods, the switches for your feelings. You alone have all the information. You alone can update it by the second. You alone have no priority more urgent. You alone live fully with the consequences. Others may want or mean to come to the rescue and, in discrete instances, may try to. But theyre the guests, not the homeowner. They dont stay forever or know how to work the thermostat.

Published last week, The Beauty of Dusk made The Times Hardcover Nonfiction and Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction Best Seller lists this week. I talked about the book with David Axelrod for this episode of The Axe Files podcast, and Ill appear on HBOs Real Time With Bill Maher tomorrow night.

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Opinion | Russia, Where All the News Is Fake - The New York Times

The collective West continues to support the Kiev regime in fabricating facts about the Russian special operation in Ukraine. Humanity must know the truth, went a post on the official Twitter account of the Russian Embassy of Egypt, which was published on March 3rd.

The tweet included a video showing what appears to be lines of dead bodies covered by tarpaulins. The bodies are being filmed by someone in a yellow jacket. In the foreground, a reporter is talking on camera, when suddenly one of the bodies starts moving, and another person runs over to recover them.

The message to the viewer is clear: if the collective West is paying actors to pretend to be victims of the so-called Russian special military operation, can you trust anything they say?

Only, it isnt clear at all because the video which was also shared by the official account of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has nothing to do with the invasion of Ukraine. It is news footage of a climate change protest in Austria, which was broadcast by OE24.TV last February. For many observers, the fact that it was shared by an official, verified embassy account is a sign of how far-reaching, organised and unscrupulous the information war over Ukraine has become.

Razan Ibraheem, a senior editorial analyst with Kinzen, the Irish-based firm which uses humans and technology to track harmful content online as it emerges, cites this example when asked about the role misinformation and propaganda are playing in the war on Ukraine. She spotted the video for a fake immediately because shed seen it before: it was also recently used by anti-vaxxers to claim that the Covid-19 pandemic was a hoax.

Ibraheem, who has been involved in verifying footage from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen since 2015, is stunned by the scale of this information war. I cant believe the amount of misinformation on social media across all platforms. The videos are being watched millions of times, and being shared thousands of times on social media. It is across all social media, including TikTok.

If you dont want to be an unwitting part of disseminating Russian propaganda, there are a number of steps all social media users and news consumers can follow.

1. Pause before you share. Ibraheem points out the pro-Kremlin accounts are taking examples of (often well-meaning) misinformation in support of Ukraine and using it to back claims that the war is fake news. She cites the example of a video which claimed to show Ukrainian soldiers saying goodbye to their partners and wives and which is still being shared. It was on social media today. Its an emotional video that tells a story and fits perfectly with what is happening in Ukraine right now. But the video is from 2017, and it is taken from a trailer for a Ukrainian documentary.

Thats why, she adds, it is so important to pause. You dont want to be part of the disinformation phenomenon.

2. Look for the location, the date and the source of the video. Go back to the username or the Twitter handle. If you cant find the original source, dont share it, she says. Determining the location requires more patience, but it is possible, as a community of volunteers using Google Maps and open source technology to document the war in real time have shown. We do an exact match on Google Maps of what we can see in the video. But thats a complex process, says Ibraheem.

3. Pay close attention to the details in what youre looking at. Make sure this video is representing what it says and the caption matches what is happening in the video, she suggests. Are there street signs? Distinctive buildings? Shop names? Some videos are easily debunked just by looking at them she cites the example of videos supposedly coming from Ukraine in which people are dressed in short sleeves.

4. Do a reverse image search. You can do this with a video by taking multiple screenshots. You upload the images, and it will trawl the internet looking to see if it has appeared before. Ibraheem likes Tineye.com. Other tools include Googles own reverse image tool and the browser extension RevEye.

5. Trust your senses. Believe in yourself, believe in your ability to try to do your own research, says Ibraheem. Another clue may be videos that are extremely low resolution, which may mean they have been screengrabbed multiple times. Look for the hashtags associated with misinformation accounts #RussianTroopsForTruth

6. Know your sources. Share information coming from reliable news outlets, particularly those with journalists on the ground in Ukraine. Imposter accounts are common, so make sure the one youre retweeting or reposting is who they say they are. And if youre not, dont post it.

7. Check if someone else has already verified or debunked the post youre tempted to share. Associated Press and Reuters run highly regarded fact checking services. Ibraheem mentions voluntary groups such as Bellingcat.com who have become trusted sources for sorting the news from the noise. Another such group is the UK-based Centre for Information Resilience.

There are different kinds of false or misleading information, and not all is shared with malicious intent. Ibraheem makes a distinction between misinformation and the kind of disinformation being systematically perpetuated by pro-Kremlin forces. Misinformation, she says, is when people share content without realising that this content is misleading or false. They may share, she says, because they want to be part of a community or to show their support for the people of Ukraine. But while their intentions are good, it is misinformation. They are part of the phenomenon.

She gives another example of a viral image that purported to be of a Ukrainian girl injured in the Russian invasion. In reality, it was actually a Syrian girl. People share these videos because they have an emotional response to them or because they want to find more followers. They want to be part of a community experiencing collective emotional support for Ukraine.

Disinformation, by contrast, is the creation or sharing of fabricated content with the intention of having political influence, changing the political narrative, or spreading propaganda. Much of it is coming from pro-Kremlin forces, and while there is disinformation from the Ukrainian side too, in her experience it is not generally being shared by authorities or even people in Ukraine.

Both sides are not equal. What you see on the Ukrainian side is people sharing old content, but these people are not generally Ukrainians, they are often supporters in other countries What we are seeing from the Russian side is an orchestrated campaign, trying to downplay the Russian invasion, change the language around it, suppress information and manipulate their audience.

Despite all the negatives of the information war, social media and the internet has simultaneously been playing a crucial positive role in this invasion. A loose, global network of groups and individuals are using technology in real time to locate, analyse and verify acts of aggression and atrocities.

This is known as OSINT, or open-source intelligence. The work the OSINT community during the Russian war on Ukraine possible because it is being uploaded online almost as it happens rivals massive operations involving huge networks of spies in the past, observers say. It involves trawling social media posts and images to geolocate, analyse and classify them where it took place; when; who was involved; what kind of weapons were used. This information is stored online in maps and other resources where, many hope, it will be used in the future as a historical resource and to investigate war crimes.

The Centre for Information Resilience is mapping OSINT reports of military movements, gunfire, missile attacks, civilian casualties, and destroyed equipment at: maphub.net/Cen4infoRes/russian-ukraine-monitor

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Fake news from Ukraine: 7 steps to identify misinformation and disinformation - The Irish Times

JUAN DAZ-FAES

After a poor nights sleep, which saw him have a few nightmares and wake several times, Ramn starts the day by looking at the headlines on his cellphone. Two years ago, he would seek out the latest data on the coronavirus pandemic, but now he is consumed by the war in Ukraine. He surfs another two or three media outlets, to see if he has missed any details about the catastrophe.

While he is eating his breakfast, his mind is filled with images of bodies covered with blankets, death tolls, the wounded and refugees. Disheartened, he asks himself what else could possibly happen. Later he checks his phone again, this time to look at whats happening with his pension plan. His savings have fallen more than 5% due to the instability.

Ramn is under a black cloud for the rest of the day. He cant see the light in a world thats dominated by chaos and cruelty. Throughout the day, he checks the news five or six more times, only to feel helpless on seeing that things in Ukraine are the same or worse. He has one last look at his cellphone before going to bed, something that will not help him sleep well.

This is the routine that millions of people follow every day, and that was dubbed doomscrolling or doomsurfing during the pandemic. It could be defined as an addiction to bad news. While knowing what is happening in the world can be an act of empathy and compassion, if checking the news becomes an obsession, psychological distress can take root.

Tali Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, explains that overloading ourselves with negative news raises stress levels and leads us to make rash decisions. In the words of the author of The Influential Mind, that mental state sees us cancel trips, even though the terrorist attack took place in another part of the world; shares are sold, even when holding onto them is the best option; and reckless political campaigns attract followers, even if they bear no relation to reality.

But everybody can seek a balance between so-called infoxication and the voluntary ignorance of a hermit. Here are three measures that help with a healthy mind, without having to live in the dark.

1. Stop doomscrolling. If your regular reading of the newspaper in print or online is within a certain timetable, our minds will find it easier to assimilate the latest developments and separate what we have seen from our activities during the rest of the day. The habit of looking at the news when we have a free moment can be substituted with reading the less-alarming sections of a daily, such as sport and culture, or an e-book for relaxation. Looking at shocking news just before bed should be discouraged.

2. Protect yourself against fake news. On social media and messaging apps, there are all kinds of dubious information and videos. In the early stages of the invasion of Ukraine, many people thought that images of Russian troop movements that came from the videogame ARMA 3 were real.

3. Measure the effect that bad news has on us. Everyone has a different sensitivity to images or news with a high emotional impact. There are those who can disconnect from the content they have just consumed and move on to another activity, and then there are those who are more emotional and can end up in a state of anxiety and sadness for the rest of the day.

Here, each person needs to be their own doctor and decide on the dose of bad news that they can take on without coming apart at the seams. If necessary, conversations that only serve to raise our alarms and make us feel worse should be avoided. All things considered, we need to be as together as possible to compensate for the disasters in the world, each doing our bit in daily life for peace.

As well as choosing and rationing the information we consume, we can counterbalance the bad news with small initiatives that promote understanding and solidarity.

A century ago, psychiatrist and educator Maria Montessori warned that the seed of violence is planted when there is lack of education. Everyone talks about peace but no one educates for peace. In this world, they educate for competition, and competition is the beginning of any war, she said.

This work is not just limited to the classroom. It can be fomented in our day-to-day lives via the topics of conversation that we choose and the way we treat others.

English version by Simon Hunter.

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From cutting back on doomscrolling to avoiding fake news: How to protect your mental health in times of war - EL PAS in English

FACEBOOK is rolling out new features to counter misinformation and enhance user safety.

The social media giant on Wednesday said that it would launch new features aimed at bettering the user experience of Group admins, according to a new press release.

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The new features are meant to identify and reduce the spread of false information, lessen admin workload, and help users to manage and grow their groups.

One of the most notable tools rolling out this week is the ability to automatically reject incoming posts that contain misinformation, using Admin Assist.

"Incoming posts that contain content rated by third-party fact-checkers as false are declined before they are seen in the group, which helps reduce the visibility of misinformation," Maria Smith, VP of Communities, Facebook App, said.

A second important feature includes an improvement of the mute functionality, which has evolved to suspend, so admins and moderators can temporarily prohibit group members from engaging within the forum this includes posting, commenting, reacting, participating in group chats, and creating or entering a Room in the group.

"Communities can only thrive as places to connect when they are safe. These new tools will help admins prevent the spread of misinformation and manage interactions in their group," Smith said.

Another new tool within Admin Assist helps admins automatically decline or approve group members based on specific criteria and even group questionnaires.

As a way to help admins better manage their groups, there are also new updates to Admin Home, including an overview page on desktop for a quicker reviewal process, and a more organized layout.

On mobile, users can find a new insights summary that displays and assesses the group's growth and engagement.

Facebook further revealed new features for admins "who want to grow their communities by reaching the relevant people."

One of these tools includes new QR codes to streamline the process of sharing their group's About page.

Admins can access the QR codes from the Share dropdown menu, where they can either download or copy and paste them.

A second feature includes giving admins the ability to send group invites to people via email.

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Facebook launches new fake news tool that TOTALLY changes the app... - The US Sun

Royal correspondent Richard Palmer who covered Prince William and Kate Middleton's visit to Ukrainian Cultural Centre has apologized for incorrect remarks attributed to the Duke of Cambridge.

Prince William is currently under fire after a purported video of his remarks about the war in Ukraine surfaced.

Royal correspondent Richard Palmer said William doesnt appear to have compared it to conflicts in Africa and Asia.

The journalist associated with UK's Daily Express said the remarks made by Duke were misheard and ended up starting a social media storm.

Earlier it was reported that during a visit to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre William said: Everyone is horrified by what they are seeing. The news every day, its almost unfathomable. For our generation, its very alien to see this in Europe. Were all right behind you.

Meanwhile, a statement said Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton will visit the 1st Battalion Irish Guards at the St Patrick's Day Parade, Mons Barracks in Aldershot on March 17.

The visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be their first time at the parade since the start of the pandemic.

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Prince William criticised over fake news - The News International