Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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FEATURE FEATURE December 20, 2016 by Ijeoma Oluo 2016 was the year that everything failed. A massively garbage year on the trash heap of history. This was the year that we took all of our society’s weaknesses, mixed them all together, put them in the oven, and ended up with a…
Throughout the ‘Fake News’ uproar of the post-election cycle I kept thinking back to this line that I wrote in The Boy Kings about the launch of News Feed in 2006. The story concerns a moment when a Facebook coworker tested a News Feed story by putting the two of us ‘in a relationship’ on…
Information literacy, wrote Dr. Carol Kulthau in her 1987 paper “Information Skills for an Information Society,” is “the ability to read and to use information essential for everyday life”—that is, to effectively navigate a world built on “complex masses of information generated by computers and mass media.” Nearly thirty years later, those “complex masses of…
With fake news a hot topic following the election, The New Yorker has taken steps to make sure people aren’t fooled by The Borowitz Report it runs on its web site. Last week, the magazine changed the tagline of Andy Borowitz’s popular online satirical humor column, which consistently tops The New Yorker’s trending chart, from…
In early July, a website made to look like a real news organization published what would prove to be one of the biggest fake news hits of the US election. WTOE5News.com was barely two weeks old when it published the hoax story, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement.” It improbably…
In the wake of the 2016 election, everyone from President Obama to Pope Francis has raised concerns about fake news and the potential impact on both political life and innocent individuals. Some fake news has been widely shared, and so-called “pizzagate” stories led a North Carolina man to bring a gun into a popular Washington,…
Earlier this week, Facebook said that it would be partnering with fact-checking sites like Snopes to help weed out the fake news that has been plaguing the site in recent years. But it seems that Germany is not confident that self-regulation will be enough. The chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Thomas Oppermann, has suggested…
So now that we’re about to be in Donald Trump’s America, a few people have explained how GamerGate was the canary in the coal mine for the rise of the “alt-right”. (If you’re not familiar with this stuff, go read those articles. I’ll wait.) GamerGate did a lot of obvious damage — the chilling effect on free speech that…
James Dowson, a far-right political activist, ran a constellation of websites out of the United Kingdom. Credit Rex Features, via Associated Press The Patriot News Agency website popped up in July, soon after it became clear that Donald J. Trump would win the Republican presidential nomination, bearing a logo of a red, white and blue…
Facebook is partnering with fact checking organizations to eliminate the scourge of fake news from your feed, only it doesn’t seem like partnering. Aren’t partners supposed to treat each other like equals? Many of the common objections* to journalism by the alt-right center around news being click-bait and rather uninformed discussions of impression-based advertising. The…