Category Archives: Fake News

As Israel draws international attention as a COVID vaccine success story, and as the countrys ability to document inoculation with vaccine passports has allowed for something resembling a return to normal life, anti-vaccine activists have taken notice.

While they do battle in their own countries against COVID mitigation measures, inoculation campaigns and, most recently, the implementation of vaccine passports in their own countries, activists from both sides of the political spectrum have turned to the modern weapon of fake news to distort perceptions of Israels experience.

One new strategy is to pepper the internet with false information regarding the results of Israels vaccine campaign and the rollout of the Green Pass, as the vaccine passport program launched on February 21 is known. The green passport allows vaccinated Israelis to access indoor dining, cultural and sporting events, nightclubs, gyms and more.

Israel is also increasingly being incorporated into existing COVID conspiracy theories. Some implicate the country in a global vaccine conspiracy designed to exaggerate efficacy and cover up vaccine injury and death. While the attacks are mainly limited to online activity, some have made their way into mainstream media.

Prominent among skeptics is author Alex Berenson. A popular guest on prominent Fox News shows like The Tucker Carlson Show, the Unreported Truths on COVID-19 and Lockdowns writer has repeatedly asserted that vaccines are not as effective or as safe as Israel reports.

In the first few months of Israels vaccine rollout, Berenson took to Twitter to claim that that large-scale vaccination campaign did not seem to be having an effect on infection and serious illness. As coronavirus infection rates began to dramatically drop as the percentage of vaccinated Israelis grew, Berenson changed his focus from efficacy to safety. He implied, while providing no evidence, that illness and death resulting from COVID vaccination was being covered up by Israeli authorities. Berenson has taken these claims beyond Twitter, to the Fox News airwaves.

On Laura Ingrahams program The Ingraham Angle, Berenson asserted that vaccines are not 95 percent effective, thats pretty clear from the data coming out of Israel. On Carlsons show last month, Berenson said he believed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is very afraid that there will be cases of people getting vaccinated and sick or dying, as has happened in Israel. We know thats happened in Israel. Carlson agreed.

Prof. Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, has been closely tracking the pandemic and says Berensons claims are baseless. The evidence regarding effectiveness is overwhelming. There is zero possibility for any other explanation for what is happening in Israel besides vaccination, he says.

He recounts that skeptics like Berenson cast doubt on the findings after Israel began vaccinating citizens over age 60 in late December and COVID numbers began declining a few months later. They were saying, OK, numbers are dropping all over the world its not the vaccines that are responsible.

But in past weeks, much of Europe and the rest of the world has seen infections, hospitalizations and deaths rise again, while Israels figures have plunged after more than half its adult population has been vaccinated.

Even more convincing, says Segal, is the fact the drop in hospitalizations and death has hewn precisely according to the vaccination timeline. First there was a drop in over-60s, then the over-50s and then younger people, he says. Now were at the point where we have relatively few people in the country who have not been vaccinated, especially older people. We see that 80 to 90 percent of our remaining critically ill COVID patients come from that very small group.

Study after study backs up his assertions. Research by Maccabi Health Services and the Technion last month found that there have been 96 percent fewer cases, 90 percent fewer new daily critically ill patients and 85 percent fewer deaths since the rollout began.

As for charges swirling in online anti-vaccine circles that Israel is somehow concealing data to cover up vaccine injury, Segal says these accusations have no basis whatsoever. The data is there, its available and the evidence is overwhelming. If there are any delays, it is purely due to technical issues.

Berensons coverage of the pandemic was eviscerated in an article by Derek Thompson in the Atlantic last week, headlined Alex Berenson, the Pandemics Wrongest Man. The piece covered multiple misstatements and distortions by Berenson, but was particularly emphatic when it came to Israel.

Berenson is wrong about all sorts of little things when it comes to Israel, wrote Thompson. But I want to emphasize how straightforward and obvious the big picture is here. Israel is a world leader in vaccinations. Its COVID-19 cases have plunged, and its economy is roaring back to life.

Vaccine passports have become a political hot potato in many countries, as critics view them as invasive and discriminatory. To bolster this claim, they charge that Israel a pioneer in the use of vaccine passports to permit entry into large gatherings has become a two-tier society that has turned non-vaccinated people into second-class citizens deprived of rights and oppressed by the government.

A global study called the Virality Project, launched by a coalition of research institutions including Stanford and NYU, has set out to detect, analyze, and respond to incidents of COVID-19 vaccine disinformation across online ecosystems. In its most recent report, it observes that much of the propaganda regarding Israels vaccine passport program strikes an unmistakably antisemitic chord.

On far-right channels of the social media app Telegram, the report finds that articles and video content mentioning the Green Pass have been shared by users belonging to antisemitic Telegram channels as part of a narrative that claims that the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a Jewish plot against the goyim.

Holocaust imagery is rampant in such content. Across social media platforms, the report says, narratives being pushed by anti-vaccination and conspiratorial communities describing the present moment as a pre-Holocaust period wherein unvaccinated people will be second-class citizens and targets for persecution, similar to the Jewish people during the Holocaust and WWII. Essentially, groups can use the specter of vaccine passports to create a perception that rights and freedoms will be taken away, connecting these claims to historical examples of deprivation of rights like the Jewish people during World War II.

The app will know

Restrictions on non-vaccinated Israelis are being misrepresented and falsified towards this purpose. The English-language Twitter account Freedom Israel, which claims to be a grassroots organization that started due to the disproportionate measures the country has taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been retweeted and amplified internationally, has used doctored photographs to illustrate this alleged oppression.

The account tweeted a photo of chair-shaped signs on the Tel Aviv beaches in which the municipality encourages vaccination. The Hebrew ad reads Get vaccinated now in Tel Aviv! Beside it, an identical sign carries a Photoshopped mistranslation: Reserved for vaccinated people only. The post implied that these signs were actual chairs, and that only vaccinated people have access to them.

On the eve of Israels Holocaust Remembrance Day, the account posted a YouTube video portraying Israels vaccination campaign as like something by the Nazis, and claiming the country had created a hated underclass of the unvaccinated.

Among those retweeting Freedom Israel is once-respected Jewish feminist Dr. Naomi Wolf, who has become one of the most prominent challengers of masking, lockdowns and now vaccines. She has been fighting forcefully against proposals for vaccine passport legislation in the United States, characterizing them as a slippery slope to totalitarianism and oppression.

She has seized on the Israeli Green Pass as an example of the vaccine passports dangers. In four months, vaccine passports quote, unquotehave turned Israel into a closed society, destroyed civil society organizations, created an apartheid system, and activists and advocates and critics of the system in Israel are saying that they are surveilled 360 degrees, 24 hours a day and marginalized from society, Wolf warns in a YouTube video.

Predicting a dystopian Big Brother future if similar programs are adopted in the United States, she says the app will know who the vaccine dissenters are, and use that information to follow them and disrupt their ability to organize protests. Its already happening. Thats what weve seen in Israel. Its been used not just to identify whos been vaccinated and who isnt, but to track dissenters and silence dissent and critics.

Wolfs assertions are patently false. The official Health Ministry app is only one way to display the green passport; no one is required to download it. Each vaccinated Israeli also receives a vaccination certificate bearing a QR code and the holders national ID number, which can be printed out, carried in ones pocket and displayed. It can also be accessed via smartphone and computer.

Civil liberties organizations in Israel have, in fact, voiced concerns about potential abuse or overuse of vaccine passports. They are fighting legislation that would enable information on vaccinations to be shared with public agencies and employers without consent. Debates are taking place in and out of court as they are in the rest of the world as to whether proof of vaccination should be required for teachers to return to the classroom, and whether university students without Green Passes will be admitted to the classroom.

The executive director of the civil rights group Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights, Einat Ovadia, told Haaretz last week that we need to ensure that expanding the demand to present a Green Pass wont lead to other infringements of individual rights.

Zulat, together with Physicians for Human Rights, issued a report warning that expanded use of the green passport could lead to the erosion of individual rights, and pushed for increased PR efforts as an alternative strategy to get a higher percentage of the Israeli population vaccinated. Privacy groups worry about the Green Pass vulnerability to hackers.

Still, this reality hardly resembles the kind of existing totalitarian oppression that Wolf and other detractors describe. A spokesperson for Facebook said that the social network has tripled the number of people working to combat coronavirus disinformation, reviewing content 24 hours a day in over 50 languages, including Hebrew. A YouTube spokesperson said the platform removed over 850,000 videos from its platform for spreading dangerous or misleading COVID information. But this is not quite the silencing of vaccine opponents by government bodies; no one is being fined or thrown in prison.

Nor do non-vaccinated Israelis appear to be suffering from overly restrictive application of the rules in daily life. A recent New York Times piece describing life in Israel as a test case for a post-lockdown, post-vaccinated societyportrays the reality with which those in the country are familiar: That enforcement is far more apt to be overly lax than in danger turning the country into a police state.

A concert in Tel Aviv was the first time I was asked to show my Green Pass and the last, the Times Isabel Kershner wrote. She recounted staying at a Galilee bed and breakfast where food was served indoors to vaccinated and unvaccinated guests alike, and a crowded restaurant that allowed indoor seating to her unvaccinated young child. A Jerusalem restaurant inquired about green passports for reservations, but did not request to see them when they arrived to dine.

Green passports, says Segal, are first and foremost a safety issue, not a coercive tool. They have been a precautionary measure as we open up the economy, to make sure the virus is not spread in large gatherings.

He noted that those who are not vaccinated due to their age, for medical reasons or simply personal preference are not barred from any activity if they are able to provide a negative COVID test. The fact that they motivate people to get vaccinated is a side effect, Segal says.

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Fake news and Holocaust imagery: COVID anti-vaxxers around the world take aim at Israel - Haaretz

Virtually any question can be answered in seconds. Mobile phones, computers and tablets have given access to so much information. However, not all information is good information. Inaccurate and misleading information is known as fake news or disinformation.

11Alive is a Georgia news station that is helping Georgia residents get accurate information. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, they are a part of the media company TEGNA Inc.

11Alive developed a fact-checking feature similar to what can be found on websites like factcheck.org and Snopes. This feature is called Verify, where viewers can request any piece of information to be debunked or verified.

This [idea] came up in a brainstorming session with a bunch of people in TEGNA. There are so many rumors and so many things that are being spread that it really needs to be addressed, said 11Alive Digital Investigative Producer Lindsey Basye.

However, newsrooms like 11Alive must establish a certain level of trust with the public when they verify or debunk information. According to a 2020 Gallup poll, only 40 percent of Americans have a great deal/fair amount of trust in the media. Because of significant distrust in the media, 11Alive explains the verification process and all sources cited in each post to their viewers.

[Transparency] is a big part of our brand. Were going to try to find the answer, but we might not be able to get itbut were going to try and were going to keep trying until we can figure it out, said Basye.

When a request is made on Verify, it is determined by Lindsey Bayse to see if the question proposed can be accurately answered.

I go through some of [the questions], and theres a lot of venting. Theres no question. So that kind of stuff we dont respond to. We try to respond to almost all of them, but some of them arent productive, Basye said.

Once a response is deemed practical, a 13-member team of reporters, editors, producers and executive producers begin to investigate. The Verify team reaches out to a multitude of experts and sources to fact-check.

We dont speak from our point of view; we speak from experts, said Basye. Were really just a vessel for information to get to you.

However, just because a piece of information is claimed to be fact-checked, does not mean that it will be accepted by the public. Lynn Walsh is an Emmy award-winning journalist and the associate director of Trusting News. She emphasized the idea that in some cases, fact-checking can potentially have the opposite effect of informing the public.

If the fact check is coming from a source or news organization that someone already doesnt trust or questions; then they probably are not going to trust that fact-check, said Walsh. And in some cases, it actually pushes that person further away from the truth.

One of the primary problems with disinformation is the speed at which it spreads. False news stories were 70% more likely to be re-tweeted than true stories and true stories took around six times longer to reach 1,500 people, according to a study posted in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

To combat this, Verify has implemented a strategy to get the most exposure when a verification article is posted. They use Google Analytics to understand how people are asking a particular question and the verbiage used. Then, they put it into search engine optimization (SEO) to gain traction on Google for their verification posts.

I would say we get a few thousand [views], said Basye. A lot of these stories are picked up at different times.

Verify can help Georgia residents gain access to reliable data. As the United States continues to live in a pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 people, it is crucial to have access to accurate information.

Although newsrooms like 11Alive are verifying information, Lynn Walsh expressed that fact-checking still may not cure the spread of disinformation.

I dont think [fact-checking] would eliminate [disinformation]. People have always been curious or have been skeptical of things, and you have these theories that pop up, said Walsh. I think some of that would still exist due to people sharing that or just believing it and then kind of getting sucked in with some of that, right, because of social media.

Although 11Alives Verify may not be the cure for disinformation; it is the step in the right direction to help Georgians access accurate information.

Trey Young is a senior majoring in journalism at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.

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How One Atlanta News Station Is Fighting Against Fake News - University of Georgia

On February 22, 2021, US President Biden gave a speech announcing that in the US alone 500,071 people had died as a consequence of the coronavirus. The magnitude of it is just horrifying, a professor at Columbia University said, according to the New York Times. There are more horrifying numbers: since 2015, the Washington Post has logged every fatal shootingby on-duty police officers in the United States; there have been more than 5,000 to date. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the number of Americans struggling with hunger has risen to more than 50 million, including 17 million children. A coronavirus-induced economic disaster is only just on the horizon.

Quite a few Americans think some other matters are more important than these facts: Biden did not win the elections; COVID-19 is just a flu of some sort; there is a horrendous conspiracy of the elite aiming at suppressing the American people, etc. This is not just an American phenomenon; in Europe, including Holland, where I live, the QAnon-movement is growing, mostly among people on the right wing of the political spectrum, claiming, for instance, that the COVID-19 vaccine causes autism.

While obviously it is important to strive for correct information, there is no point in calling those who disagree with you nameswacky or producers of fake news. Above all, it is necessary to try and understand where alternative opinions and alternative facts come from. The sharpening debate over information, like increasing violence generally, are all phenomena of a deepening crisis in the social fabric of modern Western societies.

Opinions dont emerge from nowhere. How we think about events in life and social conditions depends greatly on who we areon the place we occupy in social life. Thus workers all across the globe experience life in modern society differently from the one percent that owns most of societys wealth. And its not just the money that you have, or dont; first of all, it is the position you have in the production process: being a CEO is a whole lot more satisfying, I assume, than having to collect stuff in a warehouse so it can be shipped someplace, to give just one example. Landowners, in John Steinbecks day as well as today (for instance, in Brazil or Argentina), have a different outlook on social life than farmworkers, or the bankers to whom they owe mortgages.

This observation, while not stressed as often as it should be, is hardly a novel one. The most famous version of it is this legendary 19th-century passage by Karl Marx, explaining the view that came to be called historical materialism:

Marx was trying to explain why people think as they do about their social experiencewhy, for example, enslaved people might seem to their masters as so different from non-slaves as to be members of a distinct race of humans; or why it seems normal to most people in the United States today that some people should have more access than others to the pleasures and necessities of life.

Marx was not the last to ponder this question. The Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek (18731960), renowned both as a scientist and as a socialist, has left us brilliant insights on how the experiences in our daily life are translated and stored in our brains. In one of his most famous articles2 Pannekoek started by explaining that the place of the human mind in historical materialism is not well understood. Historical materialism is first and foremost a way of explaining events that occur in society, especially the great movements of nations, the great reversals of society. These events are undertaken by people, by human beings. What was it that made them act the way they did, and still do? Often it was immediate need, Pannekoek writes,

It is obvious that the actions of individuals stem from their will, from what they have thought beforehand. Groups of people, on the other hand, not seldom do not really realize why they do what they are doing, they act on instinct. What is necessary in order to understand their actions is to see what is behind them. These actions that people undertake are not undertaken by accident. First of all, we have to live and so, above all, the economic organism that ensures our life reigns supreme. Pannekoek says:

One should not forget that throughout history and also in modern society the means of sustaining life are not assured. Worries about getting enough to eat, having decent shelter (or even shelter at all) still are on many peoples minds, day in and day out.

Why are the economic relations as they are? The current mode of production is the result of a historical, human-made process. Two elements are decisive in determining the economic relations in any given period: the technical infrastructure and the law, informal (custom) or formal. The first involves such matters as whether work is done by hand, is carried out with the help of tools and/or machines, or is even (semi-)automated; the latter decides how the relations between people in the production process are organized: thus, free labor agreements, the free exchange of commodities, free competition, freedom of business made capitalism. During the Middle Ages in Europe rules were based on serfdom; in many regions of the world, they were, for thousands of years, founded on slavery. In Pannekoeks words:

The technical infrastructure consists not only of machines and the like, but also of the skills and the natural sciences necessary to develop and operate them. In the course of history, the increasing division of labor has led to the separation of the mental, the intellectual aspects of work, leading to the formation of a separate group of workers, the intellectuals. The German socialist Willy Huhn (190970) wrote an interesting article on the social position of intellectuals, in particular left-wing intellectuals, calling them utopians.4 The first characteristic of Utopian socialism Huhn wrote,

With the first Utopian of Western history, Plato, the philosophers are at the helm of the State, and the island Utopia of Thomas More is governed by aclass of scholars. Do not the intellectuals raise a similar claimonce the juridical intelligentsia and presently the technical or even the economical intelligentsia (technocracy and bureaucracy)? The Utopians are searching for a social science in order to create new social conditions with its help. This action departs from their intellectual initiative, relies on the insight and the power to act of the intelligentsia, whereas the proletariatoffers to themthe spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement, as the Communist Manifesto states. For Utopianism the proletariat only exists from the point of view of the suffering, and thereby passive, class who needs help from above and from the outside.

In the consciousness of the acting human beings themselves, their thoughts, their ideas, are the causes of their actions; they don't usually ask where the thoughts come from. Likewise, mainstream historiography explains events in history from the ideas of people and their specific actions.5 This is not necessarily incorrect, but it is always incomplete. Historical materialism, according to Pannekoek, goes back to the causes from which these ideas arose: the social needs, which are the more complex forms of the human will to live, determined by the form of society. He gives a clear example of this in writing that idealistic historians explained the French Revolution from the sense of freedom of the emerging bourgeoisie, which threw off the yoke of absolutism and nobility. From the perspective of historical materialism, however, the explanation should be based on the need of emerging capitalism for a bourgeois state as the cause of the revolution. The latter must be, he adds, expressed more fully, be read in such a way that the emerging capitalism awakened in the bourgeois masses an awareness of the necessity of freedom in economic and political spheres, ignited a strong enthusiasm for these ideals, and thus drove them to the act of revolutionary action.

In short, the human mind is entirely determined by the surrounding world. Everything in the mind comes from the real world around, which acts on it through the senses. This does not imply a subordination of the spiritual to the physical, but the unity of the spiritual with the entire world. The spiritualwhat is in our brainsis real, exists, and therefore is material. Our brains, our minds, are constantly collecting impressions, experiences. Furthermore, the endlessly varied mass of impressions that penetrate the mind is processed into an abstract image, in which the generality of the concrete phenomena is summarized into concepts.

This last insight was developed by the 19-century German tanner Joseph Dietzgen,6 a thinker much respected by Pannekoek: to paraphrase his idea, you dont carry a Ford Mustang in your head, but the abstraction of this particular brand, of all sorts of cars that you have experienced, seen, heard, driven. In this way you can think about cars. The same goes for tables, etc. Your brain works like a subject librarian applying an extremely sophisticated version of the Dewey Decimal Classification. In a continuous stream impressions and experiences from the outside world enter into your brain. The infinite multiplicity and diversity of the world, Pannekoek summarized Dietzgens view, has no place in our heads; therefore, the mind must simplify them by forgoing differences and diversities that are incidental and accidental. The concepts are, of course, fixed, hard, sharply delineated, while the reality, which crystallizes in them, rushes by like a flowing stream ever different, endlessly diverse and varied. These impressions and experiences from the external world enter our mind, are collected and processed, and most of them sink into our subconscious and oblivion.

This not only holds true for an individual. Because we are part of society, we constantly exchange views and experiences, and these form a collective consciousness that is passed on to new generations. For instance, after growing up in a world structured into nation-states its difficult to avoid being (a bit) nationalistic. Many Americans agreed with Trump when, in his inaugural speech, he promised that from then on it would be America first. I couldnt help but feel pleased that it was a Dutch comedian who suggested that The Netherlands should be second.7 Furthermore, simply look at the intensity with which many people are convinced that the Russians and the Chinese are bad, not just their leadersas in every countrybut also the millions of workers. This did not happen overnight. Year after year, the Cold War has brainwashed us.

Basically, this is also how a social media platform like Facebook works. When you post a message on Facebook, it indexes various aspects to determine whether your friends will find your post interesting or not. Obviously, the first standard is getting likes (), but the comments and sharing of your update are even more important. A constant stream of information flows through the platform, and because of the way the algorithms are built you mostly get information, when you swipe through Facebook, that is strongly connected with the information your friends and fans like and share. You become part of a bubble that forms a particular collective consciousness of the world, potentially a new reality of alternative facts. This expression is a clear characterization of many of the messages that circle on online media, because it is of no importance whether a message is true or false, to be determined after serious fact-checking: whats important is that many people like it, thus making it a new fact in this particular bubble. Astronomers, like all other Facebook-users, form bubbles of their own,; so it happened that all of a sudden, from outer space, the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb punctuated the bubble with the message of a new kind of UFO, named Oumuamua.8

But however great the power of facts generated within a bubble, people continue to live outside the bubble, unless they make strenuous efforts to ignore this. This is one reason many peoples ideas about the world are filled with contradictions and confusions. While you probably cant convince an acquaintance that the alternative facts current in her bubble should be submitted to scrutiny and criticism, the continuing unfolding of events outside of the world of fake news can be expected to have some effect. Workers used to believe in parliamentary democracy, in the unions making us strong, that if we work hard our children will have a better, brighter future. None of this is true anymore. Since the crisis of the 1980s and especially since the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008 and the financial crisis that swept across the world in its aftermath, workers have been laid off, evicted from their houses when they cant afford the rent or mortgage, and many families now need even more jobs to make ends meet than before. These experiences, no doubt, are having a profound effect on their state of mind.

The political, social, and medical crisis that the United States (the European countries are following in line) is going through is profound and increasing. What comes next depends on the developments in the years to come, not just in the USA and Europe, but in many other countries where people are realizing more and more that poverty, racism, lack of shelter, femicide, and environmental problems can only be solved by taking matters into their own hands. As the material circumstances people live in become ever more desperate, they will actually be forced to drain the social swamp themselves. As it has happened in the past, despite all the fake facts people believed in other times.

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Fake News and Real Conditions The Brooklyn Rail - Brooklyn Rail

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University, where his research examines how people judge the credibility of digital content. His work has appeared in prominent publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, and Smithsonian Magazine. The digital document-based history curriculum he helped create has been downloaded 10 million times. Of note: Wineburg is the only one out of the top 50 in this years RHSU EduScholar rankings with a primary focus on online learning or education technology. Especially in light of that, I was curious to ask him about fake news, digital learning, and how teachers and parents should help children navigate online content.

Rick

Rick: So Sam, can you talk a bit about just what it is that you study and how you got into this field?

Sam: I started off as a history teacher, got curious about how kids learn, and landed in a Ph.D. program in Psychological Studies in Education at Stanford under Lee Shulman, my doctoral adviser and unpaid life coach. For most of my career, I studied how kids learn history, especially how they did make sense of conflicting historical texts. Since 2014, my research team has focused on how people tell whats true on the internet.

Rick: As you know, in this years RHSU EduScholar rankings, you were the only scholar in the top 50 who studies anything related to digital learning. Why is that?

Sam: Education researchers are pack animals. Youd think that independently minded scholars would look around and ask: What are the pressing issues of the day that no ones studying? Instead, they look at their neighbors and, without a great deal of thought, follow in their footsteps. Disinformation has eaten away at the fabric of democracy. Yet, in schools of education, you cant find more than a handful of scholars studying how students become informed citizens using the devices that occupy eight hours of their waking day.

Rick: How do you actually go about studying this stuff?

Sam: People have used a variety of methods: interviews, focus groups, even multiple-choice tests. But these methods are imprecise proxies. We think that if you want to know what people do on the Internet, dont ask them what they would do. Put them in front of a computer and watch them do it.

Rick: Youve done some pretty cool experimentscan you describe a few?

Sam: In 2019, the Hewlett Foundation supported us in conducting the largest study to date of how teenagers evaluate digital sources. We provided three-thousand high school students with a live internet connection and had them solve a series of tasks. One task asked them to evaluate a website that rejects the scientific consensus about climate change. When you Google the group behind it, you learn that theyre funded by Exxona clear conflict of interest. Yet, 92 percent of students never made the link. Why? Because their eyes remained glued to the original site. But my favorite study was when Sarah McGrewnow an assistant professor at the University of Marylandand I flew to New York and Washington, D.C., in 2017 to watch fact checkers at the nations most prestigious news outlets evaluate unfamiliar websites. We then observed a group of very smart people, Ph.D.s from five universities along with a group of Stanford undergraduates, solving the same tasks. Fact checkers uniformly saw through common digital ruses and arrived at truth in seconds. Academics and Stanford students, critical thinkers all, often spun around in circles, confused by the internets wiles.

Rick: Tell me a bit morewhy did the fact checkers do a better job than the smart group?

Sam: The intelligent people weve studied are invested in their intelligence. That investment often gets them in trouble. Because theyre smart, they think they can outsmart the web. They land on a website that looks professionally prepared, with scholarly references and a list of research reports, and conclude, Looks OK. Basically, theyre reading the web like a piece of static printthinking that they can determine what something is by looking at it. Unless you have multiple Ph.D.s in a half-dozen fieldsimmunology, virology, economics, physics, political science, and historyyoure kidding yourself. On the internet, hubris is your Achilles heel. Fact checkers have a different approach. They understand that online information demands a different kind of reading, a process we call lateral reading. Rather than dwelling on an unfamiliar site, they take a quick peek, leave it, and then open up multiple tabs to search for information about the group or organization behind the original site. They return to the original site only if it checks out. In other words, they learn about a site by leaving it to consult the broader web.

Rick: How does lateral reading compare to how we usually teach students to identify credible sources?

Sam: Teaching kids to do lateral reading goes against what they learn in school about judging a text: Read it thoroughly and only then render judgment. Yet, on the web, where attention is scarce, expending precious minutes reading a text, before you know who produced it and why, is a colossal waste of time. Lateral reading isnt a cure-all. But research weve conducted shows that it can take a big chunk out of students most egregious errors. We saw this in a study we just published, in which we used examples of bogus nutrition information in the context of a college nutrition course at the University of North Texas. In videos that we integrated into the course, we modeled how to vet nutrition information by turning to the web and looking into who produced the information. The results were stunning: Over the semester, lateral reading went from the least used to the most used strategy for evaluating the trustworthiness of a site.

Rick: This is a hugely timely, hugely useful topic. How do you make sure this research actually gets to educators and parents?

Sam: The internets created lots of problems, but its also lowered the opportunity costs for academics who want to make a dent on society. My research group continues to put its work through peer review. But once an articles accepted, thats when the real work begins. How do we turn research studies into materials that busy teachers in challenging contexts find useful? Our document-based history curriculum has been downloaded 10 million times and adopted by LAUSD, the nations second-largest district. Our digital-literacy curriculumfull disclosure, work that was supported by Google.orghas 65 classroom-ready lessons and assessments, and a set of videos produced by John Greens Crash Course that have been viewed over two million times. This summer, working with Justin Reich at MITs Teaching Systems Lab, we launched a Civic Online Reasoning MOOC. All of our materials have remained free. Anyone can download them just by registering at sheg.stanford.edu.

Rick: Are there any popular approaches to teaching students to determine the credibility of online content that arent actually credible themselves?

Sam: Unfortunately, there are a lot of approaches that address web credibility like a game of twenty questions: Is the site a .org? If so, Its good. Is it a .com? If so, Its bad. Does it have contact information? That makes it good. But if it has banner ads? Its bad. Problem is that bad actors read these lists, too, and each of these features is ludicrously easy to game. Antiquated advice even appears on websites of prestigious universities. One of them disseminates guidelines for web credibility written in 1996, the internets Paleolithic era.

Rick: How early should we begin teaching students these things?

Sam: Easy, the moment we give them a smartphone.

Rick: Last question, is there anything youd encourage policymakers or philanthropists to do in this area that would be especially helpful?

Sam: Whatever name it goes by, if teaching web credibility remains an add-on, its effect will be negligiblejust another barnacle on the hull of the curriculum. Were deluding ourselves if we think an elective can drag us out of this mess. The challenge is not to add a new feature to a bloated curriculum but to transform the curriculum we already have. How, in the face of our current digital assault, do we rethink the teaching of history, science, civics, and language artsthe basics? When we think about the high school curriculum, how much longer can we turn a blind eye when kids are historicized by sites that claim that thousands of Black Americans took up arms for the Confederacy or that the Holocaust was a hoax? Or pseudoscience sites that purport to show a link between vaccinations and autism? On every question we face as citizensto raise the minimum wage, to legalize marijuana, to tax sugary drinks, to abolish private prisons, you name itsham sources jostle for our attention right next to trustworthy ones. Failing to teach kids the difference is educational negligence. If the storming of the Capitol on January 6, an insurrection fueled by digital toxins, was not a Sputnik moment, I dont know what is. Crawling ourselves out of this mess will require experimentation, lots of trial and error, and substantial investment. It wont come cheap. Then again, neither is the cost of maintaining a flourishing democracy.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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The Stanford Scholar Bent on Helping Digital Readers Spot Fake News (Opinion) - Education Week

We dwell in a society where fake news and rumours spread like wildfire. When Aurat March was held, fake and tempered videos were shared all over social media. Many senior journalists also shared those videos on their timeline/Twitter without even checking the source for once, creating a life-threatening situation for the organizers. Also, the bully culture in social media has also fueled this, with people start bashing anyone and start humiliating them for a crime they never did. We have seen the case of Mashal khan and we all know what went down.

Recently, in the case of Meesha Shafi, media outlets spread fake news mostly Indian media outlets and our people started sharing it. We have seen the worst cases in India where people were lynched and killed because of people sharing fake information on social media. If we want harmony in our city, we need to curb this cancer until it is too late.

RAZI UDDIN AHMED WANI,

Karachi.

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Fake news culture - The Nation

A study published in Computers in Human Behavior suggests that brief exposure to online misinformation can unknowingly alter a persons behavior. The experiment found that reading a fake news article slightly altered participants unconscious behavior, as evidenced by a change in their performances on a test called the Finger Tapping Test.

Social media plays a central role in the exchange of information among the public, and its influence is only growing. People increasingly use online platforms to read and discuss news, and algorithms help tailor this environment to a users interests and behavior. Study author Zach Bastick says that these filtered environments risk creating a distorted reality whereby users are exposed to content that reinforces their views at the expense of alternate viewpoints.

Online platforms also facilitate the spreading of inaccurate information. Bastick was particularly interested in studying misinformation that is intentionally spread for malicious purposes such as political or financial gain. Some scholars worry that such misinformation termed disinformation can lead to changes at the individual level that add up to impact society and potentially undermine democracy.

Still, the extent that disinformation can unconsciously affect behavior is unknown, prompting Bastick to conduct his own experimental study.

The experiment involved 233 students between the ages of 17 and 21 who were attending a university in France. Bastick wanted to see whether reading a fabricated fake news article would alter the students behavior without them knowing it. As a measure of unconscious behavior, Bastick had the students complete a cognitive and motor function test called the Finger Tapping Test (FTT) a test that asks a subject to repeatedly tap a computer key with one finger as fast as they can.

First, students completed the FTT as a measure of their maximum tapping speed (MTS). Next, the students were randomly assigned to one of three groups. One group read a positive false news item that reported that a fast MTS was a trait of successful people, associated with happiness and positive relationships. A second group read a negative false news item that said that a fast MTS was associated with deviance and brutality. A third group read a control text that did not mention tapping speed. After reading the article, students completed the FTT a second time.

Remarkably, the students demonstrated changes in their tapping speed that were associated with the false news text they read. Specifically, the group that read the positive false information showed an increase in their maximum tapping speed by about 5%. This was after taking into account any practice effects (as determined by practice effects observed in the control group). The group that read the negative false information showed a slight increase in MTS of about 1.5%, but this was not statistically different from the control group.

Moreover, the subjects appeared unaware that the news items were affecting their behavior. Participants self-estimations for changes in tapping speed were not found to correlate with their actual changes in tapping speed.

Notably, the average exposure time to the news items was under 5 minutes, suggesting that a very limited degree of exposure to fake news can surreptitiously influence behavior. Bastick says his study most likely underestimates the impact of false information. As the author points out, disinformation on social media is likely to be far more influential, given the potential for repeated exposure and endorsement by friends and other users.

While the behavior changes witnessed were relatively small, Bastick says that the huge audience of online platforms and the potential for viral content can lead to large-scale outcomes. For example, Bastick says, had every voting-eligible citizen been exposed to a disinformation campaign at least as effective as the 5.15% increase that was perceived in the positive group of this experiment (after controlling for practice effects), this would have been sufficient to flip the margin of the popular vote in the last two US presidential elections (2016: 2.09%, 2012: 3.86%).

Bastick says that his study highlights the need to further investigate how disinformation can impact behavior, find ways to prevent such manipulation, and build stronger democratic processes. These findings raise deep concerns for the future of society and politics, Bastick warns. Disinformation risks skewing individuals worldviews and deleteriously informing their behavior. Deliberately produced and targeted disinformation aimed at behavior modification amplifies these risks, by introducing incentives and optimization.

The study, Would you notice if fake news changed your behavior? An experiment on the unconscious effects of disinformation, was authored by Zach Bastick.

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Five minutes of exposure to fake news can unconsciously alter a persons behavior, study finds - PsyPost

MIAMI, FL Many a fall Sunday for the citizens of Miami will be spent either in attendance at Hard Rock Stadium, or watching on TV, the Miami Dolphins engage in the existential struggle that is an NFL game. The team, which first suited up in 1966, has a long and illustrious history, punctuated by the (at the time of this writing) only NFL team to post the perfect season, the 1972 Dolphins, whose 17-0 record is still the standard of single season perfection. Other teams helmed by the late, great Don Shula still hold a place of reverence in the Miami lore. However, after the end of the Shula era (1995), the team found itself in the NFL wastelands, condemned to never return to the promised land.

However, as the Miami Dolphins take the field for their October 13, 2030 tilt, the years of wandering in the NFL desert are a distant memory. The glory days are not only back, but some would argue, these are the greatest days in franchise history. Winners of 2 of the last 5 Super Bowls and coming off a controversial loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2029 AFC Championship game, Miami is gearing up once again for another run, with its rapidly expanding fan base calling for the Drive for 5 and resurrecting the One of the Thumb mantra originally adopted by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Loaded with a roster full of talented players just coming into their primes, this team is set to dominate the league. The present and the future are brighter than the bikinis seen on South Beach.

How did the Dolphins get to this point, some might wonder? Well, the Dolphins will actually pay homage to the key to their dynastic aspirations, for the Oct 13th game has been designated as a day to celebrate that player. On that day, they will celebrate the latest entry into their roster of honor: Offensive Tackle Laremy Tunsil. The one-time Dolphins first round pick and recently retired player, who decided that after 14 years of high-level play, his body was done, will return to where his NFL career started.

Some might wonder why the Dolphins would do something like this, given that Tunsil last suited up for Miami in 2018. A good, perennial All-Pro/Pro-Bowl career should be respected, but why the celebration? Perhaps in a bit of trolling, but also in pointing out the obvious, the Miami franchise felt that would be only fitting to honor the key to the success. When Tunsil left the Dolphins, it was part of a short-sighted trade to Houston, who, desperate to offer some semblance of protection for their one-time franchise quarterback, Deshaun Watson, sent the Dolphins their 2020 and 2021 first round and 2021 second round draft pick for the left tackle. There were some other players involved, but the main aspect of that trade would be the draft picks.

For Houston, it was a sign that they were playing for 2019, trying to win it all, whereas the 2019 Dolphins, fresh off a disappointing 7-9 season, had cleaned house in the front office, looking for a reset. In the short term, it appeared that Houston had made the right move, at least until they blew that 24-0 lead in Kansas City. From there, the fall of the Houston franchise is still well-chronicled as an abject lesson for teams sacrificing the future for the present.

As for Miami, many now look back on that trade as the start of the rise of the current Dolphins run of glory. The 2019 team finished a better-than-expected 5-11, and drafted wisely in the following drafts. In particular, their flurry of draft moves before the 2021 draft, when they parlayed the #3 overall draft pick, obtained from Houston, into 13 picks in the top 3 rounds of the 2021-2023 NFL drafts. The 10-6 near-miss of 2020 seemed to portend future greatness, and the prognosticators did not miss the mark. 2021 marked the first of 8 straight playoff appearances (and counting) for the team.

While the AFC East still kept its crown of NFL primacy, the epicenter shifted from New England to Miami. Miami took special pride in their AFC Divisional round showdown with New England in 2025, when the last Belichick team was felled in a 31-10 beatdown, which saw Belichick retire from the team shortly afterwards. Super Bowl appearances in 2025, 2026 and 2028, with wins in the later two, followed. A ticket to Dolphins game is perhaps the hardest thing to get in Miami these days, even tougher to get into than some of the exclusive nightclubs, back in business after the massive COVID-19 downturn in the early part of the decade.

When told about the Dolphins honor, Tunsil, now opening his CBD smoking and mask franchise, was both humored and honored. Initially, it seemed like a [Easterby] move by my old team, honoring me even though I havent played for them in twelve years. However, the more I think about it, the more I get it. I mean, they are acknowledging the truth, that through me, they achieved so much success. You cant believe the number of Miami fans that come up to me and congratulate me for all I did for the team. Not even [failed Senate candidate] Hershel Walker achieved this, and that trade was the one that got the other Texas team their championships. Besides, Miami is gonna be good for business after that game. Its a win/win. I already sent them a conceptual design for the honor.

Also that day, the Dolphins plan to acknowledge the contribution of the front office executive who made this possible: former Houston Head Coach and GM Bill OBrien. Bill OBrien, now in his 4th season coaching the Texas Longhorns, said that he would not be able to attend the ceremony. In subsequent correspondence, he didnt seem too happy about the reminders of this deal, but it could also have been the aftermath of a 63-14 loss to the Houston Cougars in Austin. First off, I gotta coach better. That loss in one me. Second, I am focused on being the best coach of the Texas Longhorns I can be. When pressed about Miami, BOB really did not want to talk about it. Dont matter Brian! We beat A&M in the Texas Bowl last year!

Uh, Coach, my name isnt Brian. Our reporter noted.

Doesnt matter, Brian! We are building a winner. Once I settle into my dual-hatted role as deputy athletic director, we are going to take the Longhorns to never-before seen heights!!!

When we asked the Miami franchise about this, one unnamed exec just shrugged. I mean, he was the exec who made our success possible. More than a few of us called him the greatest general manager in team history. No disrespect to our current guy. He is clearly rocking it, but if not for BOB, we aint where we are now. End of story.

As for the opponent for that game, the Houston team continues to say that they dont pay much attention to it. More than likely, it is that they have so many other worrying issues. The team will not look upon the 2020s fondly. Mismanaged drafts, unfortunate free agent strategies, and a lack of any playoff success (no playoff appearances in the 2020s) made the Houston team the laughing stock of the NFL. We tried to ask the Pontifex Maximus of Football Operations about the Houston team, but his Eminence Jack Easterby was not taking any correspondence according to his spokesman and team owner Cal McNair. As for the Deshaun Watson situation, we are still under a court-ordered gag rule about that situation, so to avoid another lawsuit, we will honor that one.

So, while Miami looks for a third Super Bowl in a six-year stretch, the Houston Crusaders continue to look to win more games, and less of the Bum Toro awards they seem to annually win from Texas Monthly. [Folks may remember when Texas Monthly came out with the Bum Steer Awards in their annual issue, but after 2023, the Houston team, which was renamed that same year, committed so many gaffs and had so many problems that the editors at Texas Monthly just up and renamed it the Bum Toro Award. This was unfortunate timing, as Toro was fired as the Houston mascot shortly after the 1st Bum Toro awards came out.]

[Editors Note: This is part of our future projection series, which no one was really asking for, but we decided to give you, the reader, anyway. Kinda similar to all the Easterby sermon videos and the Building the Texans series the team is giving its fans. Enjoy.]

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TOTALLY NOT FAKE NEWS: The Key to Franchise Success - Battle Red Blog

Documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback thought he had caught Ron Watkins in the finale of the HBO docuseries "Q: Into the Storm."

Watkins, the former administrator of the platform where the creator of the QAnon conspiracy theory posted, told Hoback, "It was basically three years of intelligence training, teaching normies how to do intelligence work. It was basically what I was doing anonymously before, but never as Q," Watkins said, but immediately tried to backtrack on the statement, adding: "Never as Q. I promise. I am not Q."

"Ron had slipped up," Hoback said in the episode. "He knew it, and I knew it and after three tireless years of cat and mouse." By saying he was "anonymously" involved with the QAnon world, Watkins appeared to leak that he may have been acting as "Q," the anonymous figure who ran the theory with messages on 8kun, owned by Watkins' father.

But in the days after Sunday's episode aired, major promoters of the conspiracy theory, which alleges a "deep state" cabal of human traffickers exists at the top levels of power in the US, weren't remotely convinced.

One QAnon influencer told his 100,000 Telegram subscribers that the documentary was "fake news" on Wednesday. "Total FAIL on so many levels," he said.

Jake A, 33, aka Yellowstone Wolf, from Phoenix, wrapped in a QAnon flag, addresses supporters of US President Donald Trump as they protest outside the Maricopa County Election Department as counting continues after the US presidential election in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 5, 2020. Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images

Another influencer with 33,000 Telegram subscribers said on Wednesday, "They really thought the HBO special would take us down?" The post, viewed by 37,000 users as of Thursday morning, compared the QAnon community to Jesus and his disciples. "If Jesus turned the world upside down with 12 people," the post said, "Imagine what we could do? How many are we now?"

"Q" has been silent since his last 8kun post on December 8, 2020.

QAnon researchers had predicted that the community would discredit any evidence regarding the identity of "Q." Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right, an organization that tracks right-wing extremism worldwide, told Insider in an interview last fall that the identity of "Q" wouldn't matter to the movement.

"Every iteration has to become plausible for them, and sort of co-exist within what they already believe through QAnon," Reid Ross said. "They can't walk it back they have to continue to move forward."

Watkins is the former operator of 8kun, the fringe platform where "Q" first posted. His father, Jim, is the owner of the platform, which is a revamped version of the now-defunct 8chan.

He previously denied being "Q" in a conversation with Insider. In an April 3 message on his Telegram channel, where he has 152,000 subscribers, Watkins said, "Friendly reminder: I am not Q."

Watkins has been a major influencer and, in some ways, a hero for the QAnon community, leveraging his power in the community to become one of the most vocal supporters of the pro-Trump "Stop the Steal" campaign last fall. In encouraging followers to discredit President Joe Biden's election win, he was retweeted by Trump and his allies on several occasions, including Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer and de facto "Stop the Steal" czar.

Watkins' main target was Dominion Voting Systems, the voting-technology company used by several states that was baselessly accused by the right of interfering with the election. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) denied such allegations and has said the 2020 presidential election was the most "secure" in history.

In November, as part of his campaign to allege the election had been corrupted, Trump shared a video from One America News Network, the far-right pro-Trump propaganda network. The clip featured Watkins as a "cyber analyst" exposing "shocking vulnerabilities" in Dominion technology. Trump also retweeted a tweet from Watkinsin December.

Watkins appeared to finally accept Trump's defeat in a message for his 152,000 Telegram followers on January 20. "We gave it our all. Now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able," he said.

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After the identity of 'Q' may have been revealed in a documentary, QAnon followers are calling it 'fake news' - Business Insider

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday said it has not issued any warnings of deaths in India due to Covid-19. Taking to Twitter, the WHO said a video claiming that the WHO has warned of 50,000 deaths in India is "fake news". The WHO has not issued any such warning, it said.

"A video claiming WHO has warned of 50,000 deaths in India by April 15 is fake news. WHO has not issued any such warning," the World Health Organization Regional Office for South-East Asia (SEARO) said in a tweet.

As per the union health ministry's data, 56,033 people have died due to coronavirus in Maharashtra in the last one year. Whereas in Tamil Nadu (12,789), Karnataka (12,657), Delhi (11,096), West Bengal (10,348), and Uttar Pradesh (8,894) have succumbed to the COVID-19 infection in the same period.

Currently, India is in the fourth spot in terms of global coronavirus deaths. Ahead of India are the United States (555,615); Brazil (332,752), and Mexico (204,399), according to the latest data by the Johns Hopkins University. Globally, 28,61,677 people have died due to COVID-19 as of April 6.

Also read: Maharashtra lockdown: Rs 40,000 crore dent on Indian economy; explained

Also read: IMA urges PM Modi to include all above 18 in COVID-19 vaccination drive

Excerpt from:

WHO warns of Covid-19 fake news; clarifies never predicted deaths in India - Business Today

The term 'fake news was co-opted by the Frances Jacobin government during The Terror

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SIMON SCHAMA: Over the next two years, Mary witnessed the worst excesses of the Jacobin government. By late 1793, the myth of revolution, a spontaneous act by the people for the common good, had turned into its nightmare antithesis-- the dictatorship of the Terror, in which over 10,000 people were rounded up and sent to the guillotine, including a number of Mary's newfound friends.

Privately determined to write her own history of the Revolution, Mary relied on copies of the latest government reports to keep abreast of the news. And in them, you can see how the will of the people and the language of liberty became increasingly debased into the propaganda slogans of unlimited state power.

Here is a speech at the Jacobin club, and he says anybody thought to be hostile to the Revolutionary government should be put under national anathema. That means, basically, you're a non-citizen. You're a non-person.

The people will distinguish between the friends of the Revolution, those who sustain it at the expense of their own life in order that it should triumph despite "les ennemis du peuple," despite the enemies of the people. You know, that has so many echoes in dictatorships of the people, right wing as well as left wing. And it hadn't happened before, so in that sense, it's a fatal inauguration.

With Britain now at war with France, foreigners like Mary became suspected of being a fifth column, acting on behalf of hostile foreign monarchies to bring down the Revolution. This one is from the spring of 1793, and for the first time, the word "tranger," foreigner, now becomes a synonym for suspicious person. Foreigners were particularly responsible for spreading false assignais, false money, and then-- uh-oh-- "les fausses nouvelles," fake news. So from being kind of embraced as brotherly and sisterly heroes rallying to the cause of the Revolution, you now basically find yourself, if you're someone like Mary, as carrying a horrible virus, the virus of fakery, corruption, and probably, sooner or later, treason.

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The little-known origin of the term 'fake news' - Yahoo News