Truth Decay Digitally Lit #205 – 7/13/2019 Hi all, my name is Ian O’Byrne and welcome to issue #205 of Digitally Literate. In this newsletter I distill the news of the week in technology into an easy-to-read resource. Thank you for reading. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. This week I worked on the following:…
The politically aware, digitally savvy and those more trusting of the news media fare better in differentiating factual statements from opinions.
From the Pew Research Center: A new poll by the Pew Research Center suggests people are having difficulty telling the difference between fact and opinion. Pew Director of Journalism Research Amy Mitchell said the study “raises caution” around news consumers’ ability “to sort news quickly.” “At this point, the U.S. does not seem to have become completely…
As the country was reacting to the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, concerns soared about the problems of misinformation or so-called “Fake News” spreading across social media. To understand the scale and shape of a problem that was incredibly opaque, we began intensive research to collect and analyze the sources of this misinformation.
First developed by PBS for internal use, NewsTracker is a tool that identifies Facebook pages that traffic in misinformation and tracks how often the content there is liked, shared, and on commented on. Reporters use this tool to find patterns and trends that may merit reporting. The tool will have a new home soon: the Shorenstein Center…