Chris Morris, who left the BBC to lead fact-checking nonprofit, Full Fact, tells Josiah Mortimer that critical thinking skills are crucial amid a surge in false narratives and risky AI tools.
Byline Supplement
Days after New Hampshire voters received a robocall with an artificially generated voice that resembled President Joe Biden’s, the Federal Communications Commission banned using AI-generated voices in robocalls.
Poynter Institute
The Russian disinformation network Matryoshka has launched a new campaign on the Bluesky social network. Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, has been one of the first researchers to detect its activity. So far, four Russian-made fake videos have been identified on the platform.
The Insider
While separated by the Atlantic Ocean, the use of modern media, in addition to economic pressure and geopolitical relationships, has narrowed the distance between Latin America and the Caribbean and the Russia-Ukraine war.
Center for Strategic and International Studies
President-elect Donald Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk played a key role this week in killing a bipartisan funding proposal that would have prevented a government shutdown, railing against the plan in a torrent of more than 100 X posts that included multiple false claims.
Associated Press
Experts on cybersecurity and online foreign influence campaigns are urging social media company Bluesky, whose app has exploded in popularity in recent weeks, to step up moderation to counter potential state-sponsored influence efforts.
Voice of America
The spread of fake news online has been called one of the greatest threats to democracy, with fabricated stories regularly racking up hundreds of thousands of views on social media. Some say that the onslaught of misinformation is fueling political polarization and dysfunction, since these materials are often designed to inflame partisan passions.
Columbia Magazine
Absent definitive answers from the government about mysterious drone sightings in New Jersey and elsewhere in the Northeast, many social media users really want to believe aliens are to blame.
PolitiFact
As soon as President-elect Donald J. Trump won the presidential race, influencers on Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, flooded the platform with a simple catchphrase: ‘We are the media now.’
The New York Times
For 12 years Sophie had been experiencing painful periods, weight gain, depression and fatigue. She had been diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal condition that affects about one in 10 women, but she struggled to get medical help.
BBC
Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett is amplifying harmful health misinformation on his number-one ranked podcast, a recent BBC investigation has found.
BBC
The world is ending. The No. 7 does not exist. Rain is a myth. If I gave dates and images and “sources” that support these statements, would they be believable? If I gave these statements with full confidence, would you change your thinking, change what you have always known, seen, and felt, based on a published article?
People Newspapers
The United States launched a broad effort, including sanctions and indictments, to fight Russian influence and disinformation campaigns related to the 2024 election.
The New York Times
Vikram Bhaskaran was leading creator partnerships at Pinterest when his father started showing early symptoms of ALS, a rare, terminal neurodegenerative disease.
TechCrunch
Europe’s efforts to contain a resurgence of nationalism and Russian interference entered dangerous new territory on Friday when Romania canceled a high-stakes presidential election, just two days before a runoff vote that an ultranationalist candidate had been well positioned to win.
The New York Times
In an era when artificial intelligence floods our social media feeds with content that makes the fake seem real, how are people supposed to discern what is true? Creative advertising student Brooke Hirsch ’24 came up with a solution to this problem.
Syracuse University News
Within hours of the deadly shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York this week, the surveillance video that captured the brazen crime spread across social media. On X, Reddit and Facebook, the short video was likely analyzed as closely as the footage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy over 61 years ago.
Forbes
Talk of election falsehoods died down after President-elect Donald Trump won, thanks in part to Vice President Kamala Harris’s relatively prompt concession. It was Trump’s side that had been prepared to mount claims of fraud if he had lost, and that proved unnecessary.
The Washington Post
It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections.
The Conversation
Stanford Communication professor Jeff Hancock, an expert on technology and misinformation, has been accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) to craft a court statement.
The Stanford Daily