This is the scariest comics panel I’ve seen in ages; Polygon, November 9, 2018

Susana Polo, Polygon; This is the scariest comics panel I’ve seen in ages

"Tom Taylor’s X-Men Red is one of the best comics of 2018, and this week, in its penultimate issue, it delivered the most unsettling comic book moment I’ve read in a while...

[Spoilers for X-Men Red #10]

The Jean Grey video is a deepfake.

A lot of the technology we see in comic books is science fiction, or so cutting edge as to not be readily available, all to make our heroes seem like they’re cut out to do what normal people can’t. But videos that convincingly make a person look like they’ve done or said something they never did aren’t tomorrow’s technology.

Deepfaked video, and audio, is a reality that online spaces are scrambling to confront even now. The potential uses of deepfakes are spooky enough. What’s spookier is the connection that X-Men Red #10 makes in this scene.

There is a commonly available real-world technology that can do what comics books used to have to invent clones, evil twins and shapeshifters for.

Trinary points out that the video of Jean is not a perfect fake, and can be disproven. But the damage is already done.

“There will still be people who want this to be reality so much they will reject any proof,” Storm replies. “They want the worst. This supports their narrative. No amount of truth will sway them.”

White House shares doctored video to support punishment of journalist Jim Acosta; The Washington Post, November 8, 2018

Drew Harwell, The Washington Post; White House shares doctored video to support punishment of journalist Jim Acosta

"The video has quickly become a flashpoint in the battle over viral misinformation, turning a live interaction watched by thousands in real time into just another ideological tug-of-war. But it has also highlighted how video content — long seen as an unassailable verification tool for truth and confirmation — has become as vulnerable to political distortion as anything else."

Once again, Putin gives us a lesson on the usefulness of the blatant lie; The Washington Post, September 14, 2018

Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post; Once again, Putin gives us a lesson on the usefulness of the blatant lie

"Why did she bother? Or, more accurately: Why was she told to bother? Because the production of blatant lies is useful."

Russia is better at propaganda than we are; CNN, September 14, 2018

James Ball, CNN; Russia is better at propaganda than we are

"It's a playbook NATO is so aware of that it's produced a handbook setting out the Russian model -- "dismiss, distort, distract, dismay" -- in detail.

It's a playbook that prospers by using the tools of a democracy -- open disagreement, tolerance of fringe groups and crucially mainstream and social media -- against us. And there is so far no sign that its efficacy is diminishing.

Simply put, Russia is better at misinformation than its opponents. It understands better how information -- good or bad -- is spread. Everyone else needs to get better at dealing with it."

The Complexity of Simply Searching for Medical Advice; Wired, July 3, 2018

Renee Diresta, Wired; The Complexity of Simply Searching for Medical Advice

"As we increasingly rely on search and on social to answer questions that have a profound impact on both individuals and society, especially where health is concerned, this difficulty in discerning, and surfacing, sound science from pseudo-science has alarming consequences."

The Shape of Mis- and Disinformation; Slate, July 26, 2018

[Podcast] April Glaser and Will Oremus, Slate; The Shape of Mis- and Disinformation

"In recent weeks, Facebook and YouTube have strained to explain why they won’t ban Alex Jones’ Infowars, which has used its verified accounts to spread false news and dangerous conspiracy theories on the platforms. Meanwhile, the midterms are approaching, and Facebook won’t say definitively whether the company has found any efforts by foreign actors to disrupt the elections. Facebook did recently say that it will start to remove misinformation if it may lead to violence, a response to worrisome trends in Myanmar, India, other countries. The social media platforms are being called on to explain how they deal with information that is wrong—a question made even more complicated because the problem takes so many forms.

To understand the many forms of misinformation and disinformation on social media, we recently spoke with Claire Wardle, the executive director of First Draft, a nonprofit news-literacy and fact-checking outfit based at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, for Slate’s tech podcast If Then. We discussed how fake news spreads on different platforms, where it’s coming from, and how journalists might think—or rethink—their role in covering it"

Facebook's pledge to eliminate misinformation is itself fake news ; The Guardian, July 20, 2018

Judd Legum, The Guardian; Facebook's pledge to eliminate misinformation is itself fake news

"The production values are high and the message is compelling. In an 11-minute mini-documentary, Facebook acknowledges its mistakes and pledges to “fight against misinformation”.

“With connecting people, particularly at our scale, comes an immense amount of responsibility,” an unidentified Facebook executive in the film solemnly tells a nodding audience of new company employees.

An outdoor ad campaign by Facebook strikes a similar note, plastering slogans like “Fake news is not your friend” at bus stops around the country.

But the reality of what’s happening on the Facebook platform belies its gauzy public relations campaign."

Computational Propaganda: Bots, Targeting And The Future; NPR, February 9, 2018

Adam Frank, NPR; Computational Propaganda: Bots, Targeting And The Future

"Combine the superfast calculational capacities of Big Compute with the oceans of specific personal information comprising Big Data — and the fertile ground for computational propaganda emerges. That's how the small AI programs called bots can be unleashed into cyberspace to target and deliver misinformation exactly to the people who will be most vulnerable to it. These messages can be refined over and over again based on how well they perform (again in terms of clicks, likes and so on). Worst of all, all this can be done semiautonomously, allowing the targeted propaganda (like fake news stories or faked images) to spread like viruses through communities most vulnerable to their misinformation.

As someone who has worked at the hairy edges of computational science my entire career I am, frankly, terrified by the possibilities of computational propaganda. My fear comes exactly because I have seen how rapidly the power and the capacities of digital technologies have grown. From my perspective, no matter what your political inclinations may be, if you value a healthy functioning democracy, then something needs to be done to get ahead of computational propaganda's curve."

Facebook Gets Slap on the Wrist from 2 European Privacy Regulators; New York Times, May 16, 2017

Mark Scott, New York Times; 

Facebook Gets Slap on the Wrist from 2 European Privacy Regulators

"Facebook suffered a setback on Tuesday over how it uses the reams of information it collects about users worldwide, after two European privacy watchdogs said that the social network’s practices broke their countries’ data protection rules.

The announcement by Dutch and French authorities was part of a growing pushback across the European Union about how Facebook collects data on the bloc’s roughly 500 million residents. Some European governments, notably in Germany, are considering hefty fines against the company and other social media giants if they fail to crack down on hate speech and misinformation on their networks.

As part of their separate announcements on Tuesday, the Dutch and French officials said that Facebook had not provided people in their countries with sufficient control over how their details are used. They said that the social network had collected digital information on Facebook users as well as nonusers on third-party websites without their knowledge."

The ‘alternative facts’ epidemic goes way beyond politics; Washington Post, April 5, 2017

George F. Will, Washington Post; The ‘alternative facts’ epidemic goes way beyond politics

"The consequences of what Stewart calls “our growing intolerance of an unedited reality” are enumerated in Tom Nichols’s new book, “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.” Our devices and social media are, he says, producing people who confuse “Internet grazing” with research and this faux research with higher education, defined by a wit as “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.” Years when students demand to run institutions that the students insist should treat them as fragile children.

“It is,” Nichols writes, “a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”"

Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic; Washington Post, 1/11/17

Daniel Summers, Washington Post; Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic

"People will understandably look for their own answers. Unfortunately, when no less than the president-elect is among those promulgating dangerous misinformation about vaccines, medical providers have to deal with a lot of false, misleading stuff their patients may find.

One way I deal with this is to give patients a list of resources that generally provide good, evidence-based advice. Though I can’t vet every single article they may publish, knowing a few sites that typically give clear, sound information is a valuable resource when patients ask.

Sadly, no matter how glowing its reputation or how superlative the care it routinely provides, I can’t include the Cleveland Clinic on that list. Knowing it promotes treatments that have no grounding in science, or that a patient could stumble upon a fearmongering article that makes baseless claims about the unspecified dangers of environmental toxins on its website, I can’t direct patients there in good faith. Considering its prominence as a renowned medical establishment, that’s a terrible shame.

How to Teach High-School Students to Spot Fake News; Slate, 12/21/16

Chris Berdik, Slate; How to Teach High-School Students to Spot Fake News:

"The exercise was part of “Civic Online Reasoning,” a series of news-literacy lessons being developed by Stanford University researchers and piloted by teachers at a few dozen schools. The Stanford initiative launched in 2015, joining a handful of recent efforts to help students contend with misinformation and fake news online—a problem as old as dial-up modems but now supercharged by social media and partisan news bubbles. The backers of these efforts warn that despite young people’s reputation as “digital natives,” they are woefully unprepared to sort online fact from fiction, and the danger isn’t just to scholarship but to citizenship...

Kahne plans to study news-literacy efforts to discover what specific strategies get young people to value facts, whether they bolster their existing beliefs or contradict them. For now, one popular suggestion by news-literacy educators is to tap teenagers’ instinctive aversion to people telling them what to think.

“One of the messages we’ve tried to stress more and more lately with the rise of fake news is this: Do you want to be fooled?” said Jonathan Anzalone, assistant director of the Center for News Literacy. “Wouldn’t you rather make up your own mind?”"

Reading Fake News, Pakistani Minister Directs Nuclear Threat at Israel; New York Times, 12/24/16

Russell Goldman, New York Times; Reading Fake News, Pakistani Minister Directs Nuclear Threat at Israel:

"A fake news article led to gunfire at a Washington pizzeria three weeks ago. Now it seems that another fake news story has prompted the defense minister of Pakistan to threaten to go nuclear.

The defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, wrote a saber-rattling Twitter post directed at Israel on Friday after a false report — which the minister apparently believed — that Israel had threatened Pakistan with nuclear weapons. Both countries have nuclear arsenals.

“Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh,” the minister wrote on his official Twitter account, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too.”...

That story, with the typo-laden headline “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack,” appeared on the website on Dec. 20, alongside articles with headlines like “Clinton is staging a military coup against Trump.”

The fake story about Israel even misidentified the country’s defense minister, attributing quotations to a former minister, Moshe Yaalon. Israel’s current minister of defense is Avigdor Lieberman."

Did Facebook Just Kickstart the Real Infowar?; Daily Beast, 12/16/16

Gideon Resnick, Ben Collins, Daily Beast; Did Facebook Just Kickstart the Real Infowar? :

"Should Facebook’s fact-check initiative take off and result in censorship of propagandist sites, editors at websites like Infowars and alt-right leaders insist it will only reinforce the belief that certain ideas are being suppressed in favor of facts from mainstream outlets. One editor told The Daily Beast the Facebook plan proves that now the “‘Infowar’ isn’t a cliché, it’s perfectly apt.”"

SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF FAKE NEWS; New Yorker, 11/30/16

Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker; SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF FAKE NEWS:

"What we are now calling fake news—misinformation that people fall for—is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, in the Republic, Plato offered up a hellish vision of people who mistake shadows cast on a wall for reality. In the Iliad, the Trojans fell for a fake horse. Shakespeare loved misinformation: in “Twelfth Night,” Viola disguises herself as a man and wins the love of another woman; in “The Tempest,” Caliban mistakes Stephano for a god. And, in recent years, the Nobel committee has awarded several economics prizes to work on “information asymmetry,” “cognitive bias,” and other ways in which the human propensity toward misperception distorts the workings of the world.

What is new is the premise of the conversation about fake news that has blossomed since Election Day: that it’s realistic to expect our country to be a genuine mass democracy, in which people vote on the basis of facts and truth, as provided to them by the press."

A short history of fake news: Conservatives believed all sorts of crap long before Facebook; Salon, 11/25/16

Matthew Sheffield, Salon; A short history of fake news: Conservatives believed all sorts of crap long before Facebook:

"Conspiracy theories have long been popular in book form among conservatives as well. Since the 1950s literally scores of books have been published that promoting the theory that former president Dwight Eisenhower was a secret communist or revealing the liberal plan to force all children to become gay and they managed to sell millions of copies over the years.

Most famous of these were probably John A. Stormer’s “None Dare Call It Treason” and Gary Allen and Larry Abraham’s “None Dare Call It Conspiracy,” which spread the John Birch Society’s paranoid message about a worldwide conspiratorial elite of bankers, socialists and Jews. (One could hear strong echoes of the Birch message in Donald Trump’s campaign.)

“These books circulated far more widely than traditional conservative media — there were millions of copies,” said historian Nicole Hemmer, author of the new book “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”

Like the fake news sites of today, the conspiracy-theory literature that was so popular in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, Hemmer said, adopted many of the trappings of more credible publications.

“People saw things as having validity if they had footnotes,” she told Salon, noting “there was a validity in things that were presented as news that’s different from other sources of opinion or entertainment.”"

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."

How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study; New York Times, 11/20/16

Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times; How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study:

"While some fake news is produced purposefully by teenagers in the Balkans or entrepreneurs in the United States seeking to make money from advertising, false information can also arise from misinformed social media posts by regular people that are seized on and spread through a hyperpartisan blogosphere.

Here, The New York Times deconstructs how Mr. Tucker’s now-deleted declaration on Twitter the night after the election turned into a fake-news phenomenon. It is an example of how, in an ever-connected world where speed often takes precedence over truth, an observation by a private citizen can quickly become a talking point, even as it is being proved false."

Fake News in U.S. Election? Elsewhere, That’s Nothing New; New York Times, 11/17/16

Paul Mozur and Mark Scott, New York Times; Fake News in U.S. Election? Elsewhere, That’s Nothing New:

"Well before last week’s American election threw Facebook’s status as a digital-era news source into the spotlight, leaders, advocacy groups and minorities worldwide have contended with an onslaught of online misinformation and abuse that has had real-world political repercussions. And for years, the social network did little to clamp down on the false news...

Some governments are pushing back, sometimes with undemocratic consequences. Ms. Merkel has said she is considering plans to force social networks to make public how they rank news online. Some African countries have banned the use of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter before elections. Indonesia’s government has closed sites that it says promote fake news, though experts say some portals were also targeted for political reasons.

Facebook said on Thursday that the social network was a place for people to stay informed and that what people saw in their news feed was overwhelmingly authentic. The Silicon Valley company previously denied that it failed to deal with misinformation and said it continues to monitor the social network so that it meets existing standards."

Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News; New York Times, 11/6/16

Jim Rutenberg, New York Times; Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News:

"It could be Pollyannaish to think so, but maybe this year’s explosion in fake news will serve to raise the value of real news. If so, it will be great journalism that saves journalism.

“People will ultimately gravitate toward sources of information that are truly reliable, and have an allegiance to telling the truth,” Mr. Baron said. “People will pay for that because they’ll realize they’ll need to have that in our society.”

As The Times’s national political correspondent Jonathan Martin wrote on Twitter last week, “Folks, subscribe to a paper. Democracy demands it.”

Or don’t. You’ll get what you pay for."