"Africa's top anti-fake news digital platform, FactCheckAfrica, has announced the launch of an AI-infused platform to assist journalists and ordinary citizens in verifying the accuracy of information."
Here is the natural consequence of #Semrush inspiring all that #misinformation: people attacking me on #Reddit. This is one reason I fought to get this crap off the web.
#Journalism#Media#News#Denmark#Objectivity#FakeNews#Disinformation#Misinformation: "In this article, we examine how journalists try to uphold ideals of objectivity, clarity, and epistemic authority when using four overlapping terms: fake news, junk news, misinformation, and disinformation. Drawing on 16 qualitative interviews with journalists in Denmark, our study finds that journalists struggle to convert the ideals of clarity and objectivity into a coherent conceptual practice. Across interviews, journalists disagree on which concepts to use and how to define them, accusing academics of producing too technical definitions, politicians of diluting meaning, and journalistic peers of being insufficiently objective. Drawing on insights from journalism scholarship and rhetorical argumentation theory, we highlight how such disagreements reveal a fundamental tension in journalistic claims to epistemic authority, causing a continuous search for unambiguous terms, which in turn produces the very ambiguity that journalists seek to avoid."
Forcing a Chinese company to sell TikTok won’t solve the biggest problem with #TikTok: the fact that so people get their “#news” from platforms that are designed to hijack attention for commercial gain, not to deliver reliable information.
If China wants information on Americans, it can buy data from companies since there are no effective #privacy laws.
And American-owned Facebook and X have shown themselves to be as bad or worse as TikTok at spreading #misinformation.
artificial intelligence-generated content is now widely being used to spread misinformation, as well as to confuse and entertain voters. Throughout 2024, Rest of World is tracking the most noteworthy incidents of AI-generated election content globally.
Crazy to me that TFG (a.k.a. he who will not be named here) and others at top of the Republican Party have convinced so many working class followers that they are the low tax party. They're not — unless you're either wealthy or a corporation: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-era-tax-cuts-set-160750197.html
I was thinking about the present conditions of #India when I suddenly thought of revisiting this #movie by #SatyajitRay. "Hirak Rajar Deshe" (In the Land of the Diamond-King). Its portrayal of moving to dictatorial rule is dangerously accurate.
I really wanted to share this#song from the #film. It is in #bengali so I shall provide a translation.
I see such funny things in the world.
Everywhere I look, I am confused beyond words.
I can't make sense of this world.
Oh brother!
Look at the good fellows stuck in their dilapidated homes.
The evil one ascends the throne.
The wheat farmer can't manage two square meals.
The diamond mine's labours are living in poverty.
Oh Brother, how funny is our world!
as a child I loved this #movie as a comedy. the lively humour is extremely well delivered by every actor.
as an adult I feel the pain and fear shown on the faces of the farmer, the mining labour and the teacher. I can appreciate the political satire that it is.
watching it today was almost like #SatyajitRay talking to the current population of #India, before the #LokSabhaElections2024, through this 1980 movie. he is telling us to be extremely careful of the ruler who is willing to #brainwash the public using targeted #misinformation.
@Teri_Kanefield@shoq@roo_44 The discussion here is interesting and needs to be happening in more places. Although I also miss Teri’s take on news as it’s happening, her new approach seems sane & efficient.
A lot of us can work with individuals to pull them out of the flood of #misinformation, while she seems particularly suited for going upstream to figure out the source of the problem & to describe it. Not everyone has the perspective for that.
'There is no evidence that mRNA Covid vaccines cause fatal cardiac arrest or other deadly heart problems in teens and young adults, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report published Thursday shows.
Ever since the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were authorized in late 2020, anti-vaccination groups in the U.S. have blamed the shots for fatal heart problems in young athletes.'
Hope for the news: CBS intends to COMBAT MISINFORMATION with a new streaming program:
The idea is to broaden the reach for news while keeping costs down, & much of that is being made possible by marrying national news divisions with local newsrooms in place at various stations the media conglomerates own.
Execs see the new “whip-around” format – which takes viewers to whatever seems most pressing or important – as the backbone of the service.
The short-circuiting of societal feedback mechanisms
By Kurt Cobb, originally published by Resource Insights April 7, 2024
"...Collectively, most of us are “drivers” of our civilization who have bags over our heads without understanding that we have bags over our heads. At least a lone driver...quickly realizes [they are] in trouble... Collectively, as actors in our broader civilization, we are getting feedback that all is well, or at least well enough, that we don’t need to make any drastic changes in our way of life. It’s as if someone is beaming a false virtual reality to us inside the bag. And that is a good metaphor for what’s actually happening... Perhaps the most important trick to managing what we see, read & hear is to make sure we either cannot get information that contradicts the dominate narrative (ie, that everything is basically fine) or we cannot understand that information & its implications..."
#SocialMedia#Misinformation#ConspiracyTheories#Disinformation#Anonymity: "The incident sheds light on how social media accounts that shield the identities of the people or groups behind them through clever slogans and cartoon avatars have come to dominate right-wing political discussion online even as they spread false information.
The accounts enjoy a massive reach that is boosted by engagement algorithms, by social media companies greatly reducing or eliminating efforts to remove phony or harmful material, and by endorsements from high-profile figures such as Musk. They also can generate substantial financial rewards from X and other platforms by ginning up outrage against Democrats.
Many such internet personalities identify as patriotic citizen journalists uncovering real corruption. Yet their demonstrated ability to spread misinformation unchecked while disguising their true motives worries experts with the United States in a presidential election year.
They are exploiting a long history of trust in American whistleblowers and anonymous sources, said Samuel Woolley, director of the Propaganda Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
“With these types of accounts, there’s an allure of covertness, there’s this idea that they somehow might know something that other people don’t,” he said. “They’re co-opting the language of genuine whistleblowing or democratically inclined leaking. In fact what they’re doing is antithetical to democracy.”"
A. Journalists should stop speaking about AI models as if they have personalities, and they are sentient. That is really harmful because it changes the conversation from something that we as humans control to a peer-to-peer relationship. We built these tools and we can make them do what we want.
Another thing I would recommend is talking about AI specifically. Which AI model are we talking about? And how does that compare to the other AI models? Because they are not all the same. We also need to talk about AI in a way that’s domain-specific. There’s a lot of talk about what AI will do to jobs. But that is too big a question. We have to talk about this in each field.