It’s writing podcast scripts, finishing students’ homework and correcting mistakes in computer code: ChatGPT, the A.I. chatbot from OpenAI, is suddenly everywhere. Who should decide how it’s built? What could go wrong? And what could go right?
New York Times
The Jan. 6 committee spent months gathering stunning new details on how social media companies failed to address the online extremism and calls for violence that preceded the Capitol riot.
The Washington Post
The European Commission has selected Agence France-Presse, a global leader in digital investigation, to be part of five new hubs dedicated to the fight against disinformation in 10 European countries. The decision following a tender offer cements AFP’s position as a major player in the fight against disinformation in Europe.
Agence France-Presse
Earlier this year Facebook parent Meta quietly formed a team to deal with an uncomfortable reality: the most popular posts on its platform were trash. WSJ tech reporter Jeff Horwitz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss the war room Meta convened to deal with the problem and why fixing it was so critical to the platform's future plans.
Wall Street Journal
A typical lesson that Saara Martikka, a teacher in Hameenlinna, Finland, gives her students goes like this: She presents her eighth graders with news articles. Together, they discuss: What’s the purpose of the article? How and when was it written? What are the author’s central claims?
New York Times
In this post you'll find Maria Ressa’s keynote speech at the 2022 APAC Trusted Media Summit. Ressa is a Filipino-American journalist, author, and co-founder and CEO of Rappler, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
Google News Initiative
In the summer of 2015 Governor Greg Abbott gave the Texas State Guard an unusual order: keep an eye on the Jade Helm 15 exercise, just in case the online rumors are true. In reality, Jade Helm 15 was a routine eight-week military exercise conducted in Texas and six other states. In the online echo chamber, however, it was something more sinister: the beginning of a coup ordered by President Barack Obama.
Scientific American
On Monday, the Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed from cardiac arrest during an NFL game. Nearly right away—with little information about Hamlin’s condition publicly available—vaccine-disinformation purveyors hopped onto Twitter to promote the myth that athletes are dying because of the coronavirus shot.
The Atlantic
It was 2018, and the world as we knew it—or rather, how we knew it—teetered on a precipice. Against a rising drone of misinformation, The New York Times, the BBC, Good Morning America, and just about everyone else sounded the alarm over a new strain of fake but highly realistic videos.
The Atlantic
Since the passage of Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, the majority of federal circuits have interpreted the CDA to establish broad federal immunity to causes of action that would treat service providers as publishers of content provided by third parties.
National Law Review
Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman earned a Nobel Prize for their research into how we create subjective realities. They identified unconscious patterns of thinking — they called them “cognitive biases.”
No Mercy/No Malice
A false claim that Iran plans to execute thousands of people has gone viral in the wake of the first death sentence for a protester tied to the demonstrations against the country’s clerical rulers over women’s rights.
NBC News
A rapidly growing measles outbreak in Columbus, Ohio — largely involving unvaccinated children — is fueling concerns among health officials that more parent resistance to routine childhood immunizations will intensify a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases. Misinformation does not help.
The Washington Post
Nearly three-quarters of people across 19 countries believe that the spread of false information online is a “major threat,” according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
New York Times
Digital disinformation is now a well-documented problem, but extensive documentation could actually be the downfall of the counter-disinformation movement. Data means nothing if you don’t do anything effective with it.
WIRED
Fox Corp chairperson Rupert Murdoch is set to be questioned under oath today in a defamation lawsuit over his network’s coverage of unfounded vote-rigging claims during the 2020 US presidential election.
The Guardian
New Jersey is set to become the first state in the nation to mandate teaching media literacy to students of all ages as a bill with the requirement heads to Gov. Phil Murphy’s desk for a signature.
The Hechinger Report
Common Sense Media, a California-based organization that reviews and provides ratings for media and technology with the goal of providing information on their suitability for children, filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States December 6.
Common Sense Media
The Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week is the longest-running cable television series in history, filling screens with sharky content every summer since 1988. Unfortunately, Shark Week is also a missed opportunity.
The Conversation
Among the mass layoffs at the company formerly known as Facebook last week are several roles that have served as a bridge between the news industry and the sprawling tech company.
Nieman Labs
