Facebook and Instagram-owner Meta Platforms last week said its independent fact-checking program in Australia would help detect and remove false content and deepfakes, as it aims to curb misinformation ahead of a national election due by May.
Reuters
The billionaire leaders of social media giants have long been under pressure to quell the spread of mis- and disinformation. No system to date, from human fact-checkers to automation, has satisfied critics on the left or the right.
Bloomberg
For years, some commentators have called for K-12 teachers to take on fake news, media literacy, or online misinformation by doubling down on critical thinking. This push for schools to do a better job preparing young people to differentiate between low- and high-quality information often focuses on social studies classes.
The Conversation
Utah is poised to abolish its practice of automatically mailing ballots to all voters, handing a victory to President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans who have vilified voting by mail since his 2020 election defeat.
The Washington Post
Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative legal advocacy group, is investigating IU for what it deems participation in the “censorship-industrial complex” by requesting 10 types of records from the university.
Indiana Daily Student
Tara Haelle, Health Beat Leader for Infectious Diseases at the Association of Health Care Journalists, discusses medical misinformation with Stephan Lewandowsky, Ph.D., Chief of Cognitive Science at the University of Bristol.
Association of Health Care Journalists
In a significant move to address the growing threat of AI-generated disinformation, China has joined the ranks of the European Union and the United States by implementing new regulations requiring the labeling of synthetic content on the internet.
Disinformation Social Media Alliance
National Public Radio 'Embedded' host Zach Mack describes his family's own struggles with conspiracy theories for a series, 'Alternate Realities,' reviewing predictions his father made for 2024 that did not come to fruition, and the fallout false narratives can have on close relationships.
Embedded by NPR
A Moscow-based disinformation network named “Pravda” — the Russian word for "truth" — is pursuing an ambitious strategy by deliberately infiltrating the retrieved data of artificial intelligence chatbots, publishing false claims and propaganda for the purpose of affecting the responses of AI models on topics in the news rather than by targeting human readers, NewsGuard has confirmed.
NewsGuard
In 2020, as COVID-19 began to spread around the globe, theories surrounding the pandemic also started to circulate. One such supposition—as absurd as it might seem—was the idea that there was a correlation between 5G cellular telephone towers and the increased number of infections.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s focus on vitamin A use to combat a growing measles outbreak in Texas is raising concerns among public health experts, who fear he is sending the wrong message about preventing the highly contagious disease and distracting from the critical importance of vaccination.
The Washington Post
Social media companies have defended their content moderation practices to a Parliamentary committee investigating online misinformation, arguing that they already have effective processes and systems in place to deal with the spread of false information on their platforms.
ComputerWeekly.com
Free speech is in permanent crisis – or so some would have you believe. Complaints that freedom of speech is under attack come mostly from the political right; public figures who appear to the naked eye to be extremely free to say and do what they like, and see no irony in doing so via platforms with vast audiences.
The Guardian
HPV, or human papillomavirus, is the most common sexually transmitted infection, but it's also preventable thanks to the vaccine Gardasil-9. Yet online, misinformation runs rampant about the vaccine, which is also known for historic drops in cancer.
USA Today
As billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency scours federal agencies for cost savings, Musk and his team have repeatedly made baseless or false claims about government spending—or exaggerated the level of fraud and waste uncovered at some agencies.
Forbes
A White House official said Friday that the Associated Press – an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting since 1846 – will be prevented from having reporters attend events, a prohibition that could severely limit the news organization’s ability to cover the administration.
The Washington Post
Meta’s recent decision to end its third-party fact-checking program has reignited fears about misinformation’s growing influence. The move reflects a broader trend among social media giants: stepping away from content moderation in favor of engagement-driven algorithms.
Forbes
Activist groups have sued Elon Musk's social media platform X in a Berlin court, accusing it of breaking European law by not giving them the information they need to track disinformation online ahead of Germany's Feb. 23 national election.
Reuters
Vaccination rates among schoolchildren in Arizona have steadily declined since 2012, but the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the drop across the state. The trend is unlikely to reverse any time soon, which could result in serious health consequences for Arizonans in the future, experts fear.
Cronkite News
Andrea Rivera remembers when a friend told her that the state of California was planning to become its own country. She quickly searched through state government web sites, finding clarification for the post her friend had seen.
Stocktonia
