Category Archives: Fake News

James Gunn is always active on Twitter, addressing questions from fans and firing off hot takes on just about everything in his universe. This includes DC, Marvel, his films, and everything in between. Recently Gunn answered a fans question, and it involves Guardians of The Galaxy star Vin Diesel, who has recently been trying to revive his Riddick franchise. Gunn addressed some fake news surrounding the Guardians franchise and one of its main stars Vin Diesel.

The director answered a question on Twitter that asked the director to address a news story or rumor about the franchise that is absolutely not true. Of course, Gunn answered, and it surprisingly has to do with some facts surrounding Vin Diesel playing voicing Groot. Here is James Gunns response from his Twitter:

Gunns biggest dispute with the rumor mill surrounding Guardians of the Galaxy is the rumored salary of Diesel for playing Groot. The director calls the numbers that have been floated around regarding the stars salary to be ludicrous. This might be a case of being too active on Twitter since thats where Gunn gets all of these crazy rumors. MCU fans are passionate, and rumors can take hold of the fanbase and spread like wildfire. So hopefully Gunn's property doesnt get caught up with any other ludicrous stories.

James Gunn clarifies that its not that Diesel is not worth the numbers because he is in the directors eyes. Its just kind of silly. Diesel is surely being compensated quite handsomely for what can only be described as probably the most straightforward job he has had in movies. The hulking actor is prepping to say goodbye to his own mega-franchise as the last two Fast and Furious films will mark the end of the road for Dom Torreto.

Gunn also recently addressed some casting shenanigans in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, shooting down some casting rumors in an A+ way. He also responded to fans fears about the possibility of the film being delayed, saying they were on schedule. The Suicide Squad director isnt afraid to take risks and apparently isnt scared of the reaction killing off characters can cause, as he explained on Twitter, so it will be wise to expect the unexpected going into Guardians 3 when it finally releases in theaters.

Sylvester Stallone has been confirmed to be reprising his role as Stakar Ogord in Vol. 3, and Will Poulter has been cast as Adam Warlock, who was teased all the way back in Vol. 2. The film might be the last of the franchise for this iteration of the team we have come to love as the MCU continues to change and develop in phase 4. We cant wait to see it. We will keep you updated on everything James Gunn reveals on his Twitter.

Read the original here:

James Gunn Reveals The Weirdest Guardians Of The Galaxy Fake News He's Seen, And It Involves Vin Diesel - CinemaBlend

Rupert Murdoch's daughter-in-law Kathryn described how she plans to spend $100 million on projects battling misinformation and partisanship in the US.

The project may raise eyebrows given the widespread accusations that Murdoch outlets, especially Fox News, have championed those two ills.

Kathryn Murdoch is a former communications executive who married Murdoch's second son James. She told the Financial Times that the couple had invested a total of $100 million dollars into their family foundation Quadrivium.

The investment is indicative of how the couple has forged a markedly different path to other members of their family, championing environmental and progressive causes.

Quadrivium has already made multi-million dollar investments into pro-democracy projects and describes its mission as "working to restore the health of our US democracy at a time of increasing polarization and dysfunction within the system."

Kathryn Murdoch this year issued a multimillion-dollar grant to the Associated Press to fund climate change reporting, as well as giving $5 million to local newsrooms, and working on a report about combating disinformation, the FT said.

The money came from James's $2 billion payouts when Disney bought the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox, which James previously ran, per the FT.

Democratic lawmakers have long accused networks including Rupert Murdoch's Fox News of being responsible for the kind of misinformation Quadrivium appears to have in mind.

Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney in February this year wrote to streaming companies questioning their decision to host networks including Fox, citing coverage aimed at some channels to the January 6 Capitol riot.

"Misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices," said the letter, cited by The Hill, which drew widespread backlash from House Republicans.

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney singled out Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticism more recently, saying his suggestion that the January 6 riot may have been a "false flag" attack was "un-American" and accusing him of lying.

"We have an obligation that goes beyond partisanship and an obligation that we share, Democrats and Republicans together, to make sure that we understand every single piece of the facts about what happened that day and to make sure that the people who did it are held accountable," Rep. Cheney said.

James Murdoch himself last year singled out his father's companies News Corporation and Fox News which is run by James's brother Lachlan for their outlets' coverage of global warming.

"Kathryn and James' views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known," a spokesperson for the couple told The Daily Beast in January last year, while bushfires were destroying properties across Australia.

"They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary."

Insider contacted Fox News for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

View original post here:

Rupert Murdoch's daughter-in-law is spending $100 million fighting fake news and partisanship, a problem criti - Business Insider India

With reports emerging this morning over talks being held about the cancellation of the Africa Cup of Nations, only confusion has resulted with clubs still none the wiser.

It was reported that the Confederation of African Football [CAF] had opened talks over cancelling the 2022 Africa Cup of Nations [AFCON] tournament in Cameroon next month due to concerns over player welfare.

Following on from the report about talks opening, Egyptian football journalist Ismael Mahmoud broke the news that the tournament would be cancelled 'indefinitely'.

However, more confusion was added to the situation when CAF Head of Media Relations and Operations, Lux September describes the reports as "fake news".

READ MORE: Klopp speaks out on Champions League redraw and Liverpool opponents Inter Milan

READ MORE: FSG partner who could be 'future owner' of Liverpool reveals bold transfer strategy

In a further development, it has been reported that the CAF are holding talks with the new president of the Cameroon FA, Samuel Eto'o, over whether the tournament can take place.

It is reported that the tournament is most likely to be postponed or take place at the scheduled time but without players who play their club football in Europe.

Get all the latest Liverpool breaking news, team news, transfer rumours, injury updates plus analysis of what's next for the Reds.

You'll also get the latest transfer talk and analysis straight to your inbox every day with our FREE email newsletter.

Sign up here - it only takes a few seconds!

Jurgen Klopp would welcome the chance to keep hold of Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Naby Keita as the Reds look to bring the Premier League title back to Anfield.

With the tournament due to start on January 9, Liverpool were hopeful of keeping the trio for the Premier League match at Stamford Bridge against Chelsea on January 2 - a decision on this not yet being made by the Egyptian and Senegalese FA's.

Stay tuned for any further developments on the AFCON.

Here is the original post:

'Fake news' - CAF respond to Africa Cup of Nations report as Liverpool wait for clarification - Liverpool Echo

In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.

During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.

Within the same time period, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. (This analysis focused on the top performing link posts for both groups of publishers, and not on total site engagement on Facebook. For details on how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of this post. View our data here.)

Up until those last three months of the campaign, the top election content from major outlets had easily outpaced that of fake election news on Facebook. Then, as the election drew closer, engagement for fake content on Facebook skyrocketed and surpassed that of the content from major news outlets.

"Im troubled that Facebook is doing so little to combat fake news," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College who researches political misinformation and fact-checking. "Even if they did not swing the election, the evidence is clear that bogus stories have incredible reach on the network. Facebook should be fighting misinformation, not amplifying it."

A Facebook spokesman told BuzzFeed News that the top stories don't reflect overall engagement on the platform.

"There is a long tail of stories on Facebook," the spokesman said. "It may seem like the top stories get a lot of traction, but they represent a tiny fraction of the total."

He also said that native video, live content, and image posts from major news outlets saw significant engagement on Facebook.

Of the 20 top-performing false election stories identified in the analysis, all but three were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton. Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump's interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American "refugees" fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump.

This new data illustrates the power of fake election news on Facebook, and comes as the social network deals with criticism that it allowed false content to run rampant during the 2016 presidential campaign. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said recently it was "a pretty crazy idea" to suggest that fake news on Facebook helped sway the election. He later published a post saying, "We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here."

This week BuzzFeed News reported that a group of Facebook employees have formed a task force to tackle the issue, with one saying that "fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season." The Wall Street Journal also reported that Google would begin barring fake news websites from its AdSense advertising program. Facebook soon followed suit.

These developments follow a study by BuzzFeed News that revealed hyperpartisan Facebook pages and their websites were publishing false or misleading content at an alarming rate and generating significant Facebook engagement in the process. The same was true for the more than 100 US politics websites BuzzFeed News found being run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

This new analysis of election content found two false election stories from a Macedonian sites that made the top-10 list in terms of Facebook engagement int he final three months. Conservative State published a story that falsely quoted Hillary Clinton as saying, I would like to see people like Donald Trump run for office; theyre honest and cant be bought. The story generated over 481,000 engagements on Facebook. A second false story from a Macedonia site falsely claimed that Clinton was about to be indicted. It received 149,000 engagements on Facebook.

All the false news stories identified in BuzzFeed News' analysis came from either fake news websites that only publish hoaxes or from hyperpartisan websites that present themselves as publishing real news. The research turned up only one viral false election story from a hyperpartisan left-wing site. The story from Winning Democrats claimed Ireland was accepting anti-Trump "refugees" from the US. It received over 810,000 Facebook engagements, and was debunked by an Irish publication. (There was also one post from an LGBTQ site that used a false quote from Trump in its headline.)

The other false viral election stories from hyperpartisan sites came from right-wing publishers, according to the analysis.

One example is the remarkably successful, utterly untrustworthy site Ending the Fed. It was responsible for four of the top 10 false election stories identified in the analysis: Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton selling weapons to ISIS, Hillary Clinton being disqualified from holding federal office, and the FBI director receiving millions from the Clinton Foundation. These four stories racked up a total of roughly 2,953,000 Facebook engagements in the three months leading up to Election Day.

Ending the Fed gained notoriety in August when Facebook promoted its story about Megyn Kelly being fired by Fox News as a top trending item. The strong engagement the site has seen on Facebook may help explain how one of its stories was featured in the Trending box.

The site, which does not publicly list an owner or editor, did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

Like several other hyperpartisan right-wing sites that scored big Facebook hits this election season, Ending the Fed is a relatively new website. The domain endingthefed.com was only registered in in March. Yet according to BuzzFeed News' analysis, its top election content received more Facebook engagement than stories from the Washington Post and New York Times. For example, the top four election stories from the Post generated roughly 2,774,000 Facebook engagements nearly 180,000 fewer than Ending the Fed's top four false posts.

A look at Ending the Fed's traffic ranking chart from Alexa also gives an indication of the massive growth it experienced as the election drew close:

A similar spike occurred for Conservative State, a site that was only registered in September. It saw its traffic rank on Alexa spike almost instantly:

Alexa estimates that nearly 30% of Conservative State's traffic comes from Facebook, with 10% coming from Google.

Along with unreliable hyperpartisan blogs, fake news sites also received a big election traffic bump in line with their Facebook success. The Burrard Street Journal scored nearly 380,000 Facebook engagements for a fake story about Obama saying he will not leave office if Trump is elected. It was published in September, right around the time Alexa notched a noticeable uptick in its traffic ranking:

That site was only registered in April of this year. Its publisher disputes the idea that its content is aimed at misleading readers. "The BS Journal is a satire news publication and makes absolutely no secret of that or any attempt to purposely mislead our readers," he told BuzzFeed News.

Large news sites also generated strong Facebook engagement for links to their election stories. But to truly find the biggest election hits from these 19 major sites, it's necessary to go back to early 2016.

The three biggest election hits for these outlets came back in February, led by a contributor post on the Huffington Post's blog about Donald Trump that received 2,200,000 engagements on Facebook. The top-performing election news story on Facebook for the 19 outlets analyzed was also published that month by CBS News. It generated an impressive 1.7 million shares, engagements, and comments on Facebook. Overall, a significant number of the top-performing posts on Facebook from major outlets were opinion pieces, rather than news stories.

The biggest mainstream hit in the three months prior to the election came from the Washington Post and had 876,000 engagements. Yet somehow Ending the Fed a site launched just months earlier with no history on Facebook and likely a very small group of people running it managed to get more engagement for a false story during that same period.

People know there are concerned employees who are seeing something here which they consider a big problem, a Facebook manager told BuzzFeed News this week. And it doesnt feel like the people making decisions are taking the concerns seriously.

How We Gathered the Data

BuzzFeed News used the content analysis tool BuzzSumo, which enables users to search for content by keyword, URL, time range, and social share counts. BuzzFeed News searched in BuzzSumo using keywords such as "Hillary Clinton" and "Donald Trump," as well as combinations such as "Trump and election" or "Clinton and emails" to see the top stories about these topics according to Facebook engagement. We also searched for known viral lies such as "Soros and voting machine."

In addition, created lists of the URLs of known fake news websites, of hyperpartisan sites on the right and on the left, and of the more than 100 pro-Trump sites run from Macedonia that were previously identified in BuzzFeed News reporting. We then looked for the top performing content on Facebook across all of these sites to find false stories about the election.

We conducted our searches in three-month segments beginning 9 months from election day. This broke down as February to April, May to July, and August to election day.

Even with the above approaches, it's entirely possible that we missed other big hits from fake news websites and hyperpartisan blogs.

To examine the performance of election content from mainstream sites, we created a list that included the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, USA Today, Politico, CNN, Wall Street Journal, CBS News, ABC News, New York Daily News, New York Post, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Times, NPR, The Guardian, Vox, Business Insider, Huffington Post, and Fox News. We then searched for their top-performing election content in the same three-month segments as above.

It's important to note that Facebook engagement does not necessarily translate into traffic. This analysis was focused on how the best-performing fake news about the election compared with real news from major outlets on Facebook. It's entirely possible and likely that the mainstream sites received more traffic to their top-performing Facebook content than the fake news sites did. As as the Facebook spokesman noted, large news sites overall see more engagement on Facebook than fake news sites.

Read more here:

This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories ...

We live in an online world blighted by fake news and misinformation. Back in 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that false news spreads much faster on social than real news does something like six times faster.

Given everything weve been through in the last couple of years, 2018 feels like a lifetime ago doesnt it, but what has changed? Has the volume and pace of fake news slowed in any way?

Well, it would appear not. The issue of fake news has not gone away or slowed. In fact, it has got worse, become more pervasive and less easy to control.

Last year the World Health Organisation cautioned that fake news around Covid spreads faster and more easily than this virus.

But its not just the speed with which fake news can spread that should concern us. Theres money to be made a lot of money. Fake news is clearly big business.

According to NewsGuard and ComScore, advertisers unwittingly spend about 2bn a year advertising on misinformation sites.

In the UK alone, that figure is estimated to be about 110m. Thats an eye-watering amount going to organisations and individuals who purposefully spread fake news and profit from it.

This has real-life consequences across all manner of world issues from climate to racism, migration and covid, with the most vulnerable in society often the most impacted.

If we take the issue of climate change, an issue that I know the advertising industry is taking incredibly seriously, two recent independent studies from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate and The Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that climate denial is spreading unchecked on social media.

But the good news is that more and more people are waking up to this. There are more conversations about the need for more responsible media investment and advertisers and agencies are now more aware of where their advertising pounds are going, and the impact that they can have on society.

Last month the Conscious Advertising Network, supported by hundreds of signatories,published an open lettercalling out social media companies around climate change misinformation, highlighting the advertising revenue this can generate.

At Newsworks, our own research shows that more than half the people in the UK are concerned about the levels of misinformation around climate change on social media, and 69% said that they are looking to news brands to tackle climate misinformation.

Quality, trusted journalism is more important than ever, and it is important in helping to tackle issues like climate change.

Over the past 10 years, news brands have seen an impressive rise in readership, with a huge spike last year as millions more people than ever before sought out trusted information about coronavirus that they knew they could rely on.

Every day, millions of people trust news brands to represent them, inform them, entertain them, inspire them, campaign for them and raise the issues that matter.

The magic of advertising happens when brands appear in places where there are real people, who are engaged in trusted and professionally crafted content. Seeing an ad in a quality environment drives greater engagement and better brand response.

Context has always been fundamental to advertising but in todays world, the medium in which you advertise is as much the message as the actual message itself.

Claire Blunt fromThe Guardiansummed it up best when she wrote recently inCampaign: People notice where brands advertise and the media they choose to support. First and foremost, it should prove its effectiveness to deliver advertiser objectives, but a secondary consideration should surely be to think about its impact on the world.

So, I am going to leave you with one thought: why isnt the advertising industry investing more heavily in trusted environments like news brands?

Jo Allan is chief executive of Newsworks. This is an edited version of a speech that she gave at Mindshares Huddle event in London.

Continued here:

Advertisers continue to fund fake news and climate misinformation and they must stop | Advertising - Campaign Asia

After reports emerged on Wednesday that the Africa Cup Of Nations (AFCON) could be postponed, the rumours have now been shot down and described as Fake News.

The report from sports journalist Saddick Adamsclaims that Lux September who is CAF Head of Media Relations and Operations has described the rumours as 'Fake News'.

The tournament is due to start on Sunday, 9th January 2022 but concerns have been raised due to the covid-19 pandemic and in particular the new omicron variant.

Liverpool will lose Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Naby Keita during the tournament and they are trying desperately to ensure they do not depart until after the crucial Premier League match with Chelsea on the 2nd January.

There has also been another suggestion made on Wednesday morning that AFCON may proceed but without the players from Europe.

Read More

Liverpool will be interested onlookers as to how this pans out but there are conflicting claims today with no official word as of yet.

Read More Liverpool Coverage

Follow LFC Transfer Room on: Twitter | YouTube | Instagram | Facebook

Go here to read the rest:

'Fake News' - Rumours AFCON To Be Cancelled Dismissed - Liverpool Watching Closely Due To Involvement Of Salah, Mane And Keita - Sports Illustrated

Weve not yet gotten to Friday, but lets do a quick review of the week in Congressional Budget Office (CBO) news. This past Friday, CBO released a letter responding to a budgetary inquiry from the Ranking Members of the House (Jason Smith) and Senate (Lindsey Graham) Budget Committees. (More on the substance later).

Graham immediately went on Fox News Sunday and asserted The CBO says its not paid for. Its $3 trillion of deficit spending. Its not $1.75 trillion over 10 years, its $4.9 trillion. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki fired back, I mean, this is not a CBO score. This is a fake CBO score. The Wall Street Journal added a bit of conspiracy theory with an editorial headlined, CBO comes clean on the price tag if the programs are made permanent. And Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer returned to the fake theme, releasing a statement saying this is a fake CBO report because, they argue, any extensions of the programs would be fully offset.

Holy take a deep breath, Washington. What is going on here?

First and foremost, the CBO does not do fake. It does not conceal or come clean on anything. It does not opine on any piece of legislation. It works for the Congress the whole Congress, and by law is non-partisan in nature and does not make policy recommendations of any kind.

What CBO does do is (repeatedly) answer the question: What are the federal budget implications of x? In every case, x is the proposal written on the paper not what someone says about the proposal, not what someone wants from the proposal, and not what the proposal might turn into. Congress gives CBO x; CBO gives back the budgetary implications of x.

When x is the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) as passed by the House of Representatives, the answer was that it would raise revenue by roughly $1.3 trillion, raise spending by nearly $1.7 trillion, and raise the deficit (over 10 years) by $365 billion. Absolutely real. Absolutely their best judgment.

In the case of Smith and Graham, x is the BBBA with 18 specific changes (in Table 1) itemized by Smith and Graham. The answer was the same taxes, an additional $3.0 trillion in spending, and deficits higher by the corresponding $3.0 trillion. Absolutely real. Absolutely their best judgment. (And if Pelosi and Schumer were to send a letter specifying $3.0 trillion in policies to offset the higher spending, CBO would conclude that x did not raise the 10-year deficits at all. Absolutely real. Absolutely their best judgment.)

In each instance, CBO did not play politics, did not pass judgment, and did not leave anyone guessing what was going on. In each instance, CBO did its job. (Which is, of course, unusual in D.C. and confusing to official Washington.)

Stepping back, it is important to recognize that there is nothing new going on here. As CBO Director, I answered many a letter from then-Ranking Member John Spratt on the budgetary implications of alternative futures for the Iraq war. Other Directors had similar experience.

Ranking members write letters because they want to highlight policy differences with the majority. (Eakinomics walked through the policy implications here.) The majority wants to undercut the legitimacy of these differences. And both sides criticize, undercut, and hide behind CBO because it is easier than doing their job and taking the heat for defending their policy position on the merits.

Fake is blaming CBO for revealing something uncomfortable about your policy position.

Read the original here:

Fake News About the Congressional Budget Office - AAF - American Action Forum

Expressing concern on Monday that the departure of veteran anchor Chris Wallace would further radicalize Fox News, the hosts of The View asked if the channel is now just the Tucker Carlson Fake News Network.

Noting that many in the news media world were surprised to see Wallace jump from Fox to CNNs new streaming service this week, moderator Whoopi Goldberg asked her View colleagues how they thought the consummate newsmans exit would impact Fox News.

You mean QAnon News? co-host Joy Behar quipped. We can now call it Trump News. Just call it Trump News.After the liberal firebrand said that Wallaces 18-year tenure at Fox News almost gave the channel some legitimacy, co-host Sara Haines mentioned that it was a big win for CNN to pull Wallace away from Fox.

Guest host and CNN contributor Amanda Carpenter, serving as the token conservative at the table, asserted that Wallace was in a very difficult position at Fox News due to many of the networks opinion hosts and commentators downplaying the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and amplifying former president Donald Trumps election fraud lies.

But everyone in the media after we saw what happened on January 6 should seriously question who they should choose to elevate them to their platforms, the Never-Trump pundit declared. Because anyone that enabled the big election lie that led to destruction and the breach of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 for the explicit purpose of interfering with the peaceful power of transfer should seriously rethink what they're doing!

Behar, meanwhile, said Carpenter should tell that to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox News owners who are complicit in destroying America.

Eventually, co-host Sunny Hostin weighed in, praising Wallace as talented and a straight news guy who has always been very measured. At the same time, Hostin said these traits likely meant that Wallace was not well received by a lot of Fox News viewers.

Wondering aloud where the right-wing networks audience will get its actual news from going forward, Hostin pointed out that other hard news journalists such as Shepard Smith and Kristin Fisher have left the network in recent years. Additionally, she noted that two longtime contributors recently ditched Fox News over objections to Tucker Carlsons revisionist Jan. 6 docu-series Patriot Purge, which pushes the baseless theory that the Capitol riots were a false flag operation orchestrated by the federal government.

So to your question, Whoopi, what does it become now? Is it the Tucker Carlson Fake News Network? Hostin asked, echoing the sentiments of other media observers.

The rest of the panel would then question whether anyone else at Fox News would be able to push back against the networks increasingly extremist direction, adding that it can be very uncomfortable if youre a more measured person at the network.

They will find another person who will fill in the spot who will take millions and millions of dollars and go against his own real-truth politics, Behar concluded. Youll see. People can be bought, left and right.

Go here to read the rest:

'The View' Asks: Is Fox Now the 'Tucker Carlson Fake News Network' After Wallace Exit? - The Daily Beast

As Meta, formerly known as Facebook, receives backlash over its practices, an executive said that "individual humans" are blamed for spreading misinformation.

(Photo : LOIC VENANCE/AFP via Getty Images)

Earlier this year, US media outletAxios interviewed Andrew Bosworth, Meta's Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality and its future Chief Technology Officer, about fake news and the platform's role in spreading it.

"If we took every single dollar and human that we had, it wouldn't eliminate people seeing speech that they didn't like on the platform. It wouldn't eliminate every opportunity that somebody had to use the platform maliciously," he said.

The future Chief Technology Officer of Facebook was asked what Facebook could do more to reduce those negative effects of misinformation. However, the future CTO's response to all platforms' technology is resoundingly contradictory.

Bosworth told Axios that individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing, and they are also responsible for choosing what to share or not to share.

Furthermore, Bosworth, who currently oversees augmented and virtual reality at Meta, is aware that some words can have negative ramifications, but ultimately, it is people and society who must accept the responsibility for what is said.

He said that he's uncomfortable in saying that despite his disagreement with what they said, he does not feel comfortable saying they don't have a voice because they do, and they used to spread misinformation.

Moreover, Bosworth shared that he and the rest of his Meta team are elated with the tools they have built to improve Facebook.

The truth is that Facebook users spread false news and media companies who create it. However, denying that Facebook or its algorithm is liable for spreading false info is at best untrue and at worst dangerous.

Also Read:Facebook Misinformation Generates More Clicks Than Factual News [STUDY]

In recent months, Facebook has received major criticism for false or harmful content shared on its platform, especially in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.

In September,Tech Times reported a studyconcluding that posts on Facebook containing misinformation sources gain six times more engagement than those from reputable news sources. The same month, another report found troll farms spreading misinformation reached 140 million Americans a month before the 2020 election.

Ina Fried, the host of Axios on HBO, asked Bosworth whether Facebook has contributed to vaccine hesitancy. Bosworth cited Facebook's efforts to spread accurate information about vaccines.

Meta executive said that people can follow less trustworthy information they see shared by others on Facebook if they choose to do so.

"They are allowed to do that. You have an issue with those people. You don't have an issue with Facebook. You can't put that on me," he said.

Rather than being the result of social media misinformation, Bosworth characterized the spread of misinformation as a demand problem.

Related Article:Facebook Allegedly Enabled Ads Promoting Anti-Vaccine Posts And Comparing Vaccine Mandates To Holocaust

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Thea Felicity

2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Visit link:

Meta Executive Blames Users for the Spread of Fake News in Facebook - Tech Times

Fake news is rampant in the media now-a-days, but can you tell fact from fiction?

Below you will find three news stories, one of which is true and the other two are fake. Read the three news stories and guess which one is real.

Numerous arguments had reportedly broken out in the concession areas Wednesday among Lakers fans frustrated with the volatile concession prices in the newly christened Crypto.com Arena. As part of the naming rights deal for the Crypto.com arena, several concession stands are only accepting crypto currency as payments, leading to constantly changing prices. One fan said This is stupid, I was here 30 minutes ago and bought an $8.12 hot dog, and now Im back and a single hot dog costs $10.73.

Berlin's public transport operator BVG has introduced an edible "hemp ticket" which it jokes can help alleviate the stress of travel at Christmas and take the edge off Berliners' infamous crabbiness. The BVG says its ticket contains no forbidden substances and is made of edible paper drizzled with hemp oil which comes from the seeds of the cannabis plant, and "is said to have a relaxing effect".

A new study conducted by the University of Iowa found that employees who speak with a foreign accent are more likely to get raises and promotions. The study also found that people imitating foreign accents during interviews were more likely to get hired than candidates without an accent. It might be advantageous to use a fake accent to get hired, but it could prove detrimental in the long run when you have to keep up your fake accent after starting the job said study co-author Melissa Chamberlin.

Which story do you think is real? Click here to find out.

The rest is here:

Fake News - Guess Which Story is Real and Which are Fake - Mix 95.7FM - Today's Variety