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T. Mills Kelly encourages his students to deceive thousands of people on the Web. This has angered many, but the experiment helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on the Internet.
That’s why Dan Schultz, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab (and newly named Knight-Mozilla fellow for 2012), is devoting his thesis to automatic bullshit detection. Schultz is building what he calls truth goggles — not actual magical eyewear, alas, but software that flags suspicious claims in news articles and helps readers determine their truthiness. It’s possible because of a novel arrangement: Schultz struck a deal with fact-checker PolitiFact for access to its private APIs.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to collect every good piece of writing and advice about verifying social media content and other types of information that flow across networks.
This form of verification involves some new tools and techniques, and requires a basic understanding of the way networks operate and how people use them. It also requires many of the so-called old school values and techniques that have been around for a while: being skeptical, asking questions, tracking down high quality sources, exercising restraint, collaborating and communicating with team members.
Tips for understanding medical/health studies
This paper criticizes the checklist model approach (authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, coverage) to teaching undergraduates how to evaluate Web sites. The checklist model rests on faulty assumptions about the nature of information available through the Web, mistaken beliefs about student evaluation skills, and an exaggerated sense of librarian expertise in evaluating information. The checklist model is difficult to implement in practice and encourages a mechanistic way of evaluating that is at odds with critical thinking. A contextual approach is offered as an alternative. A contextual approach uses three techniques: promoting peer- and editorially-reviewed resources, comparison, and corroboration. The contextual approach promotes library resources, teaches information literacy, and encourages reasoned judgments of information quality.
A digital news organization has to differentiate itself from the mass of online competitors vying for people's attention. The best way is to be credible, reliable and trustworthy.
Credibility is the most valuable asset of a news organization. It attracts a community whose members can collectively support the site with their resources as fans, recommenders, subscribers, advertisers, event attendees or customers.
Credibility is also harder to find online. You have to sift through a lot of garbage to find the nuggets of gold. Howard Rheingold describes this journalistic practice as crap detection and devotes a chapter to it in his book "Net Smart."
he rise of social media presents many exciting opportunities to nourish the networked public sphere through shared news and information and engaged discussion and debate. The constantly changing digital media tools we enjoy also present a stream of new affordances for creating and sharing misinformation, whether by adding new twists to age-old propaganda techniques or through native approaches that draw on the power and vulnerabilities of social media. The ability to misrepresent the provenance of an organization or information, to simulate deep or widespread support, to obfuscate through information overload, and to conjure new voices from whole cloth present substantial new challenges to media organizations trying to cover related issues, to people seeking to understand those issues, and to policymakers tasked with both regulating the issues and responding to resulting distortions. With the terrifically competitive media environment and the accelerated pace, interactivity, and reach of media and political processes globally, questions about the mechanisms and flow of misinformation online are increasingly pressing, and made more urgent still by the US 2012 election cycle, perhaps the first truly digital one.
Any automated corroboration method would rely on a corpus of information that acts as the basis for corroboration. Previous work like DisputeFinder has looked at scraping known repositories such as Politifact or Snopes to jump-start a claims database, and other work like Videolyzer has tried to leverage engaged people to provide structured annotations of claims, though it’s difficult to get enough coverage and scale through manual efforts. Others have proceeded by using the internet as a massive corpus. But there could also be an opportunity here for news organizations, who already produce and have archives of lots of credible and trustworthy text, to provide a corroboration service based on all of the claims embedded in those texts. A browser plugin could detect and highlight claims that are not corroborated by e.g. the NYT or Washington Post corpora.
Building upon a process- and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality — primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies — reveals patterns in youth’s information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure.
This course is designed to teach students how to take skillful possession of their power as citizens by becoming perceptive news consumers. Armed with critical-thinking skills, a firm grasp of relevant history, plus practical knowledge about the news media, students learn how to find the reliable information they need to make decisions, take action or make judgments. At a time when the digital revolution is spawning an unprecedented flood of information and disinformation each day, the course will seek to help students recognize the differences between news and propaganda, news and opinion, bias and fairness, assertion and verification, and evidence and inference.
This useful Firefox addon will automatically display some of the most known citation indices (h-index, g-index, e-index) for any author, when querying on Google Scholar.
Researchers need the skills to explore all sides of their research topic. Young researchers often search exclusively for material that confirms their pre-existing notions of their topic. This creates results knows as confirmation bias.
Even experienced researchers can fall prey to this bias.
Try using comparison searching as a tool to helps your students become aware of comparison bias
This article investigates the impact of social dynamics on online credibility. Empirical studies by Pettingill (2006) and Hargittai, et al. (2010) suggest that social validation and online trustees play increasingly important roles when evaluating credibility online. This dynamic puts pressure on the dominant theory of online credibility presented by Fogg and Tseng (1999). To remedy this problem we present a new theory we call “aggregated trustworthiness” based on social dynamics and online navigational practices.
As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit.
Lucas Graves, a doctoral student at Columbia and a research fellow at the New America Foundation, frames a discussion on fact checking by offering a detailed landscape of the fact checking movement. (That discussion is under Chatham House rules, but Lucas has been kind enough to allow me to post notes on his presentation.) He suggests we consider three groups of fact checkers:
– Reporters at organizations like the Associated Press or New York Times who conduct occasional fact checking after a debate. We can consider these people professional journalists engaged, part-time, in fact checking.
– Full-time, dedicated fact checkers like Politifact, Dactcheck.org, and the Washintgon Post’s fact check columns, which Lucas calls “the elite fact checkers”.
– Political and partisan fact checkers, like Media Matters and Newsbusters. They’re engaged, in part as media critics. But they also do work that can be very high quality fact checking.
All three types of fact checking appear to be on the rise. So Graves suggests we consider the origins of the movement.
When I wrote "before I can graduate from MIT" earlier in this post I wasn't lying; I have decided to pursue Truth Goggles for my thesis. I'm definitely not the first person to explore this problem space but there is a lot of room to contribute. New technology has opened up new possibilities, needs have become clearer, and there is a wide variety of possible solutions and unanswered questions just sitting around waiting to be explored.
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