An ethical double standard for Trump — and the GOP?; Washington Post, 11/27/16

E.J. Dionne, Washington Post; An ethical double standard for Trump — and the GOP? :

"Republicans did an extraordinary job raising doubts about Clinton — helped, we learned courtesy of The Post, by a Russian disinformation campaign. Does the GOP want to cast itself as a band of hypocrites who cared not at all about ethics and were simply trying to win an election?...

If Trump wasn’t ready to put his business life behind him, he should not have run for president. And if Republicans — after all of their ethical sermons about Clinton — do not now demand that the incoming president unequivocally cut all of his and his family’s ties to his companies, they will be fully implicated in any Trump scandal that results from a shameful and partisan double standard."

Before ‘fake news,’ there was Soviet ‘disinformation’; Washington Post, 11/26/16

Adam Taylor, Washington Post; Before ‘fake news,’ there was Soviet ‘disinformation’ :

"In the parlance of 2016, we would probably refer to the Patriot's front page story as “fake news.” It's not so dissimilar to the flimsy or outright false stories that spread online in the United States this year. There may be a shared Russian link too: This week, a number of groups alleged that a Russian propaganda effort had helped spread these “fake news” stories to hurt Democrat Hillary Clinton's chances in the 2016 presidential election.

But during the height of the Cold War, these false stories were referred to as something else: “disinformation.”

That term came into use in the early 1960s, and came into widespread use in the 1980s. It is based upon a Russian word: Dezinformatsiya. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, a high-ranking official in Romania's secret police who defected in 1978, the French-sounding word was invented by Joseph Stalin after World War II. A definition from the 1952 Great Soviet Encyclopedia called it the “dissemination (in the press, on the radio, etc.) of false reports intended to mislead public opinion” and suggested that the Soviet Union was the target of such tactics from the West."

Facebook doesn't need to ban fake news to fight it; Guardian,11/25/16

Alex Hern, Guardian; Facebook doesn't need to ban fake news to fight it:

"Those examples are the obvious extreme of Facebook’s problem: straightforward hoaxes, mendaciously claiming to be sites that they aren’t. Dealing with them should be possible, and may even be something the social network can tackle algorithmically, as it prefers to do.

But they exist at the far end of a sliding scale, and there’s little agreement on where to draw the line. Open questions like this explain why many are wary of pushing Facebook to “take action” against fake news. “Do we really want Facebook exercising this sort of top-down power to determine what is true or false?” asks Politico’s Jack Shafer. “Wouldn’t we be revolted if one company owned all the newsstands and decided what was proper and improper reading fare?”

The thing is, Facebook isn’t like the newsstands. And it’s the differences between the two that are causing many of the problems we see today."

Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds; NPR, 11/23/16

Camila Domonoske, NPR; Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds:

"Middle school, high school and college students in 12 states were asked to evaluate the information presented in tweets, comments and articles. More than 7,800 student responses were collected.

In exercise after exercise, the researchers were "shocked" — their word, not ours — by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information.

The students displayed a "stunning and dismaying consistency" in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren't looking for high-level analysis of data but just a "reasonable bar" of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles...

The solution, they write, is to teach students — or, really, all Internet users — to read like fact checkers.

That means not just reading "vertically," on a single page or source, but looking for other sources — as well as not taking "About" pages as evidence of neutrality, and not assuming Google ranks results by reliability.

"The kinds of duties that used to be the responsibility of editors, of librarians now fall on the shoulders of anyone who uses a screen to become informed about the world," Wineburg told NPR. "And so the response is not to take away these rights from ordinary citizens but to teach them how to thoughtfully engage in information seeking and evaluating in a cacophonous democracy.""

Here’s How to Fix Facebook’s Fake News; Daily Beast, 11/19/16

Michael Casey, Oliver Luckett, Daily Beast; Here’s How to Fix Facebook’s Fake News:

"[...W]e must demand transparency in the algorithms with which Facebook and other companies curate our newsfeeds. The software should be open to scrutiny and stripped of the secretive distortions with which it creates captive pools of like-minded users. The way Facebook’s software has evolved, it is now relentlessly, iteratively steering human beings into ideology camps, reinforcing groupthink and building an uncompromising liberal-versus-conservative divide.

Let’s be clear: This is no accident; this is a business model. Algorithmic curating allows social media platforms to deliver clearly defined, niche markets—Facebook’s ad marketers call them “look-alike audiences”—to advertisers who pay a “boost” fee to gain prominent placement with those targeted feeds."

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Must Defend the Truth; New York Times, 11/20/16

Jim Rutenberg, New York Times; Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Must Defend the Truth:

"Today’s fake news is limited only by the imaginations of its inventors and the number of shares it can garner on Facebook or Twitter.

(To wit: The one million shares of the preposterous notion that Mrs. Clinton secretly sold weapons to ISIS. BuzzFeed News — which has excelled at illuminating the fake news problem — highlighted that example in its alarming analysis showing that during the campaign cycle fake news was shared among Facebook users more often than real news was.)

That’s why people who care about the truth — citizens, journalists and, let’s hope, social media giants like Facebook, too — will have to come up with a solution to this informational nihilism, fast.

It’s easier said than done. The combination of attacks seeking to delegitimize serious news organizations and a drop in overall trust in the news media has made many people wary of legitimate fact-checking."

"Fake News"; robrogers.com, 11/20/16

Rob Rogers, robrogers.com; "Fake News"

Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting; New York Times, 11/18/16

John Herrman, New York Times; Fixation on Fake News Overshadows Waning Trust in Real Reporting:

"Media companies have spent years looking to Facebook, waiting for the company to present a solution to their mounting business concerns despite, or perhaps because of, its being credited with causing those concerns. Some have come to the realization that this was mistaken, even absurd. Those who expect the operator of the dominant media ecosystem of our time, in response to getting caught promoting lies, to suddenly return authority to the companies it has superseded are in for a similar surprise."

From Hate Speech To Fake News: The Content Crisis Facing Mark Zuckerberg; NPR, 11/17/16

Aarti Shahani, NPR; From Hate Speech To Fake News: The Content Crisis Facing Mark Zuckerberg:

"Some in Silicon Valley dismiss the criticisms against Facebook as schadenfreude: Just like taxi drivers don't like Uber, legacy media envies the success of the social platform and enjoys seeing its leadership on the hot seat.

A former employee is not so dismissive and says there is a cultural problem, a stubborn blindness at Facebook and other leading Internet companies like Twitter. The source says: "The hardest problems these companies face aren't technological. They are ethical, and there's not as much rigor in how it's done."

At a values level, some experts point out, Facebook has to decide if its solution is free speech (the more people post, the more the truth rises), or clear restrictions."

Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News; New York Times, 11/17/16

Gardiner Harris and Melissa Eddy, New York Times; Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News:

"...[I]t was on the subject of false information coursing through social media and television that Mr. Obama was most impassioned, so much so that at one stage he lost track of the question he was answering...

“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, 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.””

Lies in the Guise of News in the Trump Era; New York Times, 11/12/16

Nicholas Kristof, New York Times; Lies in the Guise of News in the Trump Era:

"...[O]one takeaway from this astonishing presidential election is that fake news is gaining ground, empowering nuts and undermining our democracy.

As I’ve argued for most of this year, I think we in the mainstream media — especially cable television — sometimes bungled coverage of Trump. There was too much uncritical television coverage of Trump because he was good for ratings; then there was not enough investigation of his business dealings, racism and history of sexual assaults, and too much false equivalency that equated the two candidates as equally flawed...

When Americans come to believe lies such as that the pope endorsed Trump, or that Barack and Michelle Obama unendorsed Clinton, those are assaults on our political system and we should challenge them.

The landscape ahead looks grim to me. While the business model for mainstream journalism is in crisis, these alt-right websites expand as they monetize false “news” that promotes racism and undermines democracy. Worse, they have the imprimatur of the soon-to-be most powerful person in the world."