Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

Republican Lawmakers in Five States Propose Bills to Criminalize Peaceful Protests by Spencer Woodman.

I don’t mind prosy reporting but I should not be forced to recover information that was (or should have been known) to the reporter.

Quick summary of Woodman’s post: Iowa, imagined future law; Michigan, proposal that died last year; Minnesota, two pending bills; North Dakota, one pending bill, Washington, one pending bill. So, three states and not five.

The scattered links aren’t ones to help the reader track the current status of legislation, if it exists. Nor are the authors of these offenses against the common good identified.

Actionable reporting appends links to prose that enable readers to go beyond the text. In this case, links to legislatures, current bill status and authors of the legislation.

Here’s an actionable appendix for Woodmen’s post:

Iowa Legislature

Imagined future bill, “suck it up, buttercup bill,” to be proposed by Representative Bobby Kaufman.

Michigan Legislature

HOUSE BILL No. 4643 – An act to create a commission relative to labor disputes, and to prescribe its powers and duties; to provide for the mediation and arbitration of labor disputes, and the holding of elections thereon; to regulate the conduct of parties to labor disputes and to require the parties to follow certain procedures; to regulate and limit the right to strike and picket; to protect the rights and privileges of employees, including the right to organize and engage in lawful concerted activities; to protect the rights and privileges of employers; to make certain acts unlawful; to make appropriations; and to prescribe means of enforcement and penalties for violations of this act,” by amending section 9f (MCL 423.9f).

Referred to Senate Committee on Commerce – 12/8/2016 (died)

Authors:

Gary Glenn – (primary), Amanda Price, Michael McCready, Joseph Graves.

Unlike the Michigan legislature page, I substituted links to member webpages instead of bills they have sponsored. Interesting data on sponsorship but not helpful for contacting them. BTW, the link for Amanda Price is to her Wikipedia page. Doesn’t have a member page at the legislature.

Minnesota Legislature

Two bills:

1. A bill for an act relating to public safety; increasing penalties for obstructing a highway; amending Minnesota Statutes 2016, sections 160.2715; 609.74.

   Authors:
   Lohmer; Fenton; Zerwas; Rarick; Miller; Runbeck; Albright; Green; Daudt; Lueck; Uglem; Dettmer; Daniels

2. A bill for an act relating to public safety; creating the Minnesota Public Safety Personnel Protection Act; increasing penalties for obstructing emergency responders; amending Minnesota Statutes 2016, section 609.50.

   Authors:

   Garofalo; Newberger; Lohmer; Uglem.

North Dakota Legislature

HOUSE BILL NO. 1203 A BILL for an Act to create and enact section 32-03.2-02.2 of the North Dakota Century Code, relating to the liability exemption of a motor vehicle driver; and to amend and reenact section 39-10-33 of the North Dakota Century Code, relating to pedestrians on roadways. PDF text as introduced.

Authors: Representatives Kempenich, Brandenburg, Laning, Oliver, Rohr; Senators Cook, Schaible.

Washington Legislature

SB 5009 – 2017-18 Concerning offenses involving economic disruption.

Authors: Ericksen, Sheldon

Known as Preventing Economic Disruption Act (PEDA) in the 2017 legislative session.

Actionable reporting lowers the bar for readers to act on what they have read.

World Newspapers and Magazines Online

Newspaper and magazine listings for one hundred and ninety-nine (199) countries.

At the rate of one country per week, it would take 3.8 years to work your way through this listing.

Considering the depth of government and corporate deception, don’t you owe it to yourself, if not your readers, to sample that deception widely?

In an age of automatic, if not always smooth and correct, translation, do you have a good excuse for doing any less?

Maybe there is something to reading accounts of recent history. (A fascination with markup/computer and ANE languages doesn’t lead to much recent reading in “recent” history.)

But I was reading Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002), when I encountered a repetition of the currently popular meme, “Russian hackers hacked the DNC.” (Despite the Podesta emails being obtained due to user carelessness that is hard to characterize as a “hack.”)

History Repeating (Not for the first time)

Set your wayback machine for 1981, another time when Russia (then the USSR) was an “evil empire.” (Or so claimed by people with particular agendas.)

A Turkish facist and member of a violent anti-left party in Turkey, one Mehmet Ali Agca, attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in May 1981. After being interrogated for 17 months, Agca “confessed” that he was an agent of the KGB and Bulgarians.

Herman and Chomsky walk through the unraveling of this fantasy of the Reagan era political elites (pages xxvii-xxix), only to conclude:

…
The New York Times, which had been consistently supportive of the connection in both news and editorials, not only failed to report Weinstein’s negative findings from the search of the Bulgarian files, it also excluded Goodman’s statements on the CIA penetration of the Bulgarian secret services from their excerpts of his testimony. The Times had long maintained that the CIA and the Reagan administration “recoiled from the devastating implication that Bulgarian agents were bound to have acted only on a signal from Moscow.” 58 But Goodman’s and Ford’s testimony show that this was the reverse of the truth, and that CIA heads William Casey and Robert Gates overrode the views of CIA professionals and falsified evidence to support a Soviet linkage. The Times was not alone in following a misleading party line, but it is notable that this paper of record has yet to acknowledge its exceptional gullibility and propaganda service.
…

Hmmm,

recoiled from the devastating implication that Bulgarian agents were bound to have acted only on a signal from Moscow

Does that sound similar to anything you have read recently or have heard repeated by the out-going US president?

December 11, 2016

Jump forward now to December 11, 2016 and you can read the New York Times reporting:

…
“This is why I hate the term ‘we speak truth to power,’” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former senior C.I.A. analyst. “We don’t have truth. We have really good ideas.”

Mr. Lowenthal said that determining the motives of foreign leaders — in this case, what drove President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to order the hacking — was one of the most important missions for C.I.A. analysts. In 2002, one of the critical failures of American spy agencies was their inability to understand Saddam Hussein’s goals and motives.
…

A simple search reveals the internet is replete with such trash talking by the CIA, DHS, FBI and an assorted of agencies that rearrange conclusions but offer no facts in support of those conclusions.

A Final Blow as 2016 Closes

With the same credibility I would accord the now discredited NYTimes fable about Russian backing for the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II, hacking of the Democratic National Committee at the direction of Vladimir Putin, comes this final shot from Russian hackers:

Since the Islamic States hasn’t claimed credit, it must be those damned Russian hackers! (Caution: That is “fake news.” Carey may have been sabotaged by someone but it wasn’t Russian hackers.)

A Case For Topic Maps & Subject Identity Anyone?

I haven’t worked out the details but these repeated charades by the US government, among others, offer an opportunity to put subject identity as defined by topic maps to work for true journalists.

The particulars of any particular subject vary but they all have:

1. Accusations sans evidence by one or more agencies of the US government
2. Chest-thumping by the New York Times (and others) in both reporting (sic) and editorial columns
3. Articles/editorials rely on unnamed government sources or financially interested contractors
4. Months without any evidence but more chest-thumping by US government agencies and their familiars

When all four of those properties are found, you are at least part way to identifying yet another repetition of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II fable.

Although, quite honestly, it needs a catchier moniker than that one.

Suggestions?

Hoaxy (beta)

From the faq:

Q: What is Hoaxy?

Hoaxy visualizes the spread of claims and related fact checking online. A claim may be a fake news article, hoax, rumor, conspiracy theory, satire, or even an accurate report. Anyone can use Hoaxy to explore how claims spread across social media. You can select any matching fact-checking articles to observe how those spread as well.

Q: How does it work?

A: We track the social sharing of links to stories published by two types of websites: (1) Independent fact-checking organizations, such as snopes.com, politifact.com, and factcheck.org, that routinely fact check unverified claims. (2) Sources that often publish inaccurate, unverified, or satirical claims according to lists compiled and published by reputable news and fact-checking organizations.

Q: What does the visualization show?

A: Hoaxy visualizes two aspects of the spread of claims and fact checking: temporal trends and diffusion networks. Temporal trends plot the cumulative number of Twitter shares over time. The user can zoom in on any time interval. Diffusion networks display how claims spread from person to person. Each node is a Twitter account and two nodes are connected if a meme (link to a story) is passed between those two accounts via retweets, replies, quotes, or mentions. The color of a connection indicates the type of information: claims and fact checks. Clicking on an edge reveals the tweet(s) and the link to the shared story; clicking on a node reveals claims shared by the corresponding user. The network may be pruned for performance.

Q: Who decides what is true or not?

A: We do not decide what is true or false. Not all claims you can visualize on Hoaxy are false, nor can we track all false stories. We aren’t even saying that the fact checkers are 100% correct all the time. You can use the Hoaxy tool to observe how unverified stories and the fact checking of those stories spread on public social media. We welcome users to click on links to fact-checking sites to see what they’ve found in their research, but it’s up for you to evaluate the evidence about a claim and its rebuttal.

…

Interesting!

My only difficulty was in thinking of a “false story” that would be of interest to me in my day to day reading.

Who publishes false stories about XQuery or software vulnerabilities?

Ok, conceding that I take all government statements/findings, etc., as false until confirmed by someone I do trust and that vendors fall into the same camp as governments.

Those false stories aside, which rarely see contradiction in public, I don’t know what other false stories to ask about.

Can you help me?

What false stories when using Hoaxy return the best propagation graphs?

Thanks!

Got a confidential news tip?

From the webpage:

Do you have the next big story? Want to share it with The New York Times? We offer several ways to get in touch with and provide materials to our journalists. No communication system is completely secure, but these tools can help protect your anonymity. We’ve outlined each below, but please review any app’s terms and instructions as well. Please do not send feedback, story ideas, pitches or press releases through these channels. For more general correspondence visit our contact page.
…

The New York Times offers five (5) ways that offer some protection to your anonymity, depending upon your skill and what you leak.

When you leak, request posting of the raw leak within some reasonable period of time.

Government data belongs to the people, not its publisher.

Fake news and online harassment are more than social media byproducts — they’re powerful profit drivers by Soraya Chemaly.

From the post:

Fake news is being tied to everything from the influence of Russian troll farms on the presidential election to an armed man’s invasion of a Washington, D.C., restaurant as the ludicrous but terrifying culmination of an incident known as Pizzagate. Fake news isn’t just dangerous because it distorts public understanding but, as in the case of Pizzagate, or Gamergate before that, because it is frequently implicated in targeted online harassment and threats.

Most media commentary about this issue centers on three primary areas: the nature of the “truth,” the responsibilities of social media companies to the public good, and the question of why people believe outrageous and unverified claims. Very little has been said, however, about a critical factor in the spread of fake news and harassment: They are powerful drivers of profit.

…

Fake stories and harassment have a point of origin, but the real problem lies elsewhere — in the network effects of user-generated content, and the engagement it drives. Engagement, not content, – good or bad, true or false — is what generates Internet revenues and profit. So in that sense it makes no difference whether the content is “good” or “bad,” true or false. Our posting, sharing, commenting, liking and tweeting produces behavioral and demographic data that is then packaged and sold, repackaged and resold. In this economy, one that cuts across platforms, hateful or false representations are as easily converted into analytical, behavioral and ad-sales products as truthful or compassionate ones. Indeed, they are probably more lucrative.
…

Soraya dismisses the barring of “fake news” sites as a “public panacea.

As I pointed out in my post sub-titled as Hate as Renewal Resource, any viable solution must be profit-driven.

Make the blocking of hate, whatever particular kind of hate you dislike, into a product. The amount of hate in the world is almost boundless so it’s a never ending market for your product or service.

Lack of imagination on the part of Facebook, Twitter and other social media is the only explanation I have for their continued failure to enable users to filter their content (or purchase filtering from others).

100 tools for investigative journalists – Update December 2016 by @Journalism2ls.

A listicle but what a listicle!

Categories are: Analytics, Brainstorm, Collect Data, Data Stories, Location, Monitor a story, Multimedia Publishing, Paper Trail, People Trail, Privacy, Production, Reporting, Snowfalling, Structure your story, Verification.

Just finding:

Hushed, temporary anonymous phone numbers: http://hushed.com/

made the time I spent perusing this listing worth while!

Under President-elect Trump, as under President Obama, there will be people who guard their own privacy and victims.

Which one do you want to be?

In Who Enabled Russian “Interference” With Election? (Facts, Yes, Facts), I posted queries against the New York Times Article API that counted all their stories on both Wikileaks and Hillary Clinton between September 1, 2016 and November 7, 2016.

You can run the queries for yourself (unlike CIA “evidence” which remains a matter of rumor and conjecture) but the final results show that from September 1, 2016 and November 7, 2016, the New York Times published articles on Wikileaks and Hillary Clinton 252 times.

Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger and Scott Shane posted The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S., which is a lengthy recounting of the events and coverage of the Clinton/Wikileaks story.

The authors characterize the roles of the Times and the press as:

…
Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.
…

I responded to an earlier New York Times criticism of Wikileaks in Drip, Drip, Drip, Leaking At Wikileaks saying:

…

The New York Times, a sometimes collaborator with Wikileaks (The War Logs (NYT)), has sponsored a series of disorderly and nearly incoherent attacks on Wikileaks for these leaks.

The dominant theme in those attacks is that readers should not worry their shallow and insecure minds about social media but rely upon media outlets to clearly state any truth readers need to know.

I am not exaggerating. The exact language that appears in one such attack was:

…people rarely act like rational, civic-minded automatons. Instead, we are roiled by preconceptions and biases, and we usually do what feels easiest — we gorge on information that confirms our ideas, and we shun what does not.

Is that how you think of yourself? It is how the New York Times thinks about you.

There are legitimate criticisms concerning Wikileaks and its drip, drip, drip leaking but the Times manages to miss all of them.

For example, the daily drops of Podesta emails, selected on some “unknown to the public” criteria, prevented the creation of a coherent narrative by reporters and the public. The next day’s leak might contain some critical link, or not.

Reporters, curators and the public were teased with drips and drabs of information, which served to drive traffic to the Wikileaks site, traffic that serves no public interest.

…

Wikileaks/Assange weren’t seeking a coherent narrative but rather a knee-jerk ringing of the Clinton/Wikileaks bell.

Once all the emails appeared, there was some personal embarrassment to be sure but any New York cop would be saying: “Show’s over, nothing to see here, move along, move along.”

The strategy of drip, drip, drip leaking kept the press in a high state of alert, despite the nearly universal disappointment that followed every actual leak.

Lessons Learned?

If the data for leaking is weak and/or mundane, wait for critical time frames when time for reflection is in short supply and deadlines are tight. Then leak with great show and promise the “next” leak will be the one with real juicy details.

If your data is strong, “smoking gun,” sort of stuff, you may want to pick off opponents one at a time.

What’s your strategy for leaking data?

A local news reporter covering a story of fire fighters who were dismissed for “inappropriate pictures,” described “inappropriate pictures” as bureaucratic speak for, what an unnamed source who had seen the pictures described as “bad.”

Whether you say “inappropriate pictures,” or “bad,” the report has nearly zero semantic content.

To illustrate, here’s a quick summary:

Four unnamed fire fighters were terminated in Cherokee County, GA because of “inappropriate pictures,” which were taken at some unknown fire station in Cherokee County, on some unknown date, involving a person or persons or animals or plants or minerals unknown. The “inappropriate pictures,” have also been described as “bad.”

Do you see any “news” in that morass of undisclosed, unnamed, unknowns?

It sounds more like a soft-porn ad than a news report.

If you want to gain credibility as a reporter, try reporting facts on stories that inform the public on issues relevant to them. Leave the soft-porn to others.

Reporting and punditry that escaped infamy by Michael J. Socolow.

Does this remind you of reporting during 2016:

…
As the day wore on, real reporting receded, giving way to more speculation. Right-wing commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. told an audience five hours after the attack that he shared the doubts of many American authorities that the Japanese were truly responsible. He “reported” that US military officials weren’t convinced Japanese pilots had the skills to carry out such an impressive raid. The War Department, he said, is “concerned to find out who the pilots of these planes are—whether they are Japanese pilots. There is some doubt as to that, some skepticism whether they may be pilots of some other nationality, perhaps Germans, perhaps Italians,” he explained. The rumor that Germans bombed Pearl Harbor lingered on the airwaves, with NBC reporting, on December 8, that eyewitnesses claimed to have seen Nazi swastikas painted on some of the bombers.
…

More recent media failures include 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

Even more recently, the media has seized upon flights of fancy by “experts” to blame North Korea, Russia, the Islamic State and others for a variety of ills and disasters.

Thoughts on what leads to such media failures time and time again? I can’t think of a single major news event in the last fifty (50) years that wasn’t accompanied by:

…terrible punditry, inaccurate reporting, and ridiculous commentary

to steal Socolow’s closing line.

The failure of the news media reminds me of a discussion with a Hebrew Bible professor over the translation of a verse into English. He conceded that we don’t know the meaning of a particular term but said a translator cannot simply pass over an unknown term, but must translate it. The verse in question is well-known so the committee took refuge in giving the term an incorrect but “traditional” translation.

To what degree does the news media offer “terrible punditry, inaccurate reporting, and ridiculous commentary” because of a requirement that events, people, causes, “make sense?”

That is it is unsatisfying to report a plane crash, stock failure, bombing, without some attempt to outfit the event with an explanation.

I’m not sure if unsatisfying applies to the reporters, the news consuming public, or both.

For my part, I’m incurious about the motives of people who harm other people, assuming that even the “alleged perpetrator” has some insight into their motives. Motive is a complex and difficult subject under the best of circumstances and a sound bite of less than 30 seconds is a long way from being sufficient.

But it leaves the viewer with the false impression they have learned something about an event, people, etc.

One way to avoid “…terrible punditry, inaccurate reporting, and ridiculous commentary…,” unless you are required to respond to a particular event, is to simply ignore reporting for several days or weeks after an event. The more major the event, the longer you should delay.

For example, when 9/11 occurred, I was in San Jose, California at a Unicode conference. In fact, I was working on email waiting for the conference to start.

After the news had spread, the conference organizers asked the attendees what we wanted to do. Given the choice of watching loops of planes crashing into the World Trade Center and uninformed commentary or continuing with the conference, we chose the latter.

Delayed consumption of news of major events won’t improve the quality of the immediate reporting but it may give time for more reasonable voices to emerge. Still waiting on that to happen for 9/11.

Avoiding “fake” news, NPR station WMOT is recycling “old news.”

Seriously.

Looking for a recent article on combining multiple sources of DNA I found:

Combining The DNA Of Three People Raises Ethical Questions by Rob Stein, Nov. 10, 2014.

In a darkened lab in the north of England, a research associate is intensely focused on the microscope in front of her. She carefully maneuvers a long glass tube that she uses to manipulate early human embryos.

“It’s like microsurgery,” says Laura Irving of Newcastle University.

Irving is part of a team of scientists trying to replace defective DNA with healthy DNA. They hope this procedure could one day help women who are carrying genetic disorders have healthy children.
…

Compare that post to:

Combining The DNA Of Three People Raises Ethical Questions by Rob Stein, 22 hours ago.

In a darkened lab in the north of England, a research associate is intensely focused on the microscope in front of her. She carefully maneuvers a long glass tube that she uses to manipulate early human embryos.

“It’s like microsurgery,” says Laura Irving of Newcastle University.

Irving is part of a team of scientists trying to replace defective DNA with healthy DNA. They hope this procedure could one day help women who are carrying genetic disorders have healthy children.
…

I took a screen shot that includes WMOT and the article title, plus saved the page, just in case through the magic of silent correction, this example of “news” reporting goes away.

At least to me, two year old news isn’t the same as news 22 hours ago.

You?

PS: The loss of credibility by the media has been entirely self-inflicted. See media coverage of the 2016 presidential race for example. Why would anyone trust a news source that was so badly wrong?

Hard work, good journalism, timely reporting, all of those are the elements needed for the media to regain credibility. Credible journalists don’t attempt to suppress “fake news.” Attempts to suppress “fake news” signal a lack of commitment to credible journalism. Credible journalism doesn’t notice “fake news.”

Fake News Is Not the Only Problem by Gilad Lotan.

From the post:

There have been so many conversations on the impact of fake news on the recent US elections. An already polarized public is pushed further apart by stories that affirm beliefs or attack the other side. Yes. Fake news is a serious problem that should be addressed. But by focusing solely on that issue, we are missing the larger, more harmful phenomenon of misleading, biased propaganda.

It’s not only fringe publications. Think for a moment about the recent “Hamilton”-Pence showdown. What actually happened there? How disrespectful was the cast towards Mike Pence? Was he truly being “Booed Like Crazy” as the Huffington Post suggests? The short video embedded in that piece makes it seem like it. But this video on ABC suggests otherwise. “There were some cheers and some boos,” says Pence himself.

In an era of post-truth politics, driven by the 24-hour news cycle, diminishing trust in institutions, rich visual media, and the ubiquity and velocity of social networked spaces, how do we identify information that is tinted — information that is incomplete, that may help affirm our existing beliefs or support someone’s agenda, or that may be manipulative — effectively driving a form of propaganda?

…

Biased information — misleading in nature, typically used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view — is a much more prevalent problem than fake news. It’s a problem that doesn’t exist only within Facebook but across social networks and other information-rich services (Google, YouTube, etc.).
…

A compelling piece of work but I disagree that biased information “….is a much more prevalent problem than fake news.”

I don’t disagree with Lotan’s “facts.” I would go further and say all information is “biased,” from one viewpoint or another.

Collecting, selecting and editing information are done to attract readers by biased individuals for delivery to biased audiences. Biased audiences who are driving the production of content which they find agreeable.

Non-news example: How long would a classical music record label survive insisting its purchasers enjoy rap music?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgjjxkafbWc

At least if they were attempting to use a classical music mailing list for their records?

To blame “news/opinion” writers for bias is akin to shooting the messenger.

A messenger who is delivering the content readers requested.

Take Lotan’s example of providing more “context” for a story drawn from the Middle East:

…
A more recent example from the Middle East is that of Ahmed Manasra, a 13-year old Palestinian-Israeli boy who stabbed a 13-year old Israeli Jew in Jerusalem last Fall. A video [warning: graphic content] that was posted to a public Facebook page shows Mansara wounded, bleeding, and being cursed at by an Israeli. It was viewed over 2.5M times with the following caption:

Israeli Zionists curse a dying Palestinian child as Israeli Police watch…. His name was Ahmad Manasra and his last moments were documented in this video.

But neither the caption nor the video itself presents the full context. Just before Manasra was shot, he stabbed a few passersby, as well as a 13-year old Israeli Jew. Later, he was taken to a hospital.
…

Lotan fails to mention Ahmad Manasra’s actions were in the context of a decades old, systematic campaign by the Israeli government (not the Israeli people) to drive Palestinians from illegally occupied territory. A campaign in which thousands of Palestinians have died, homes and olive groves have been destroyed, etc.

Bias? Context? Your call.

Whichever way you classify my suggested “additional” context for the story of Ahmad Manasra, will be considered needed correction by some and bias by others.

In his conclusion, Lotan touches every so briefly on the issue upper most in my mind when discussion “fake” or “biased” content:

…
There are other models of automated filtering and downgrading for limiting the spread of misleading information (the Facebook News Feed already does plenty of filtering and nudging). But again, who decides what’s in or out, who governs? And who gets to test the potential bias of such an algorithmic system?
…

In a nutshell: who governs?

Despite unquestioned existence of “false,” “fake,” “biased,” “misleading,” information, “who governs?,” has only one acceptable answer:

No one.

Enabling readers to discover, if they wish, alternative, or in the view of some, more complete or contextual accounts, great! We have the beginnings of technology to do so.

A story could be labeled “false,” “fake,” by NPR and if you subscribe to NPR labeling, that appears in your browser. Perhaps I subscribe to Lady GaGa labeling and it has no opinion on that story and unfortunate subscribers to National Review labeling see a large green $$$ or whatever it is they use to show approval.

I fear censors far more than any form or degree of “false,” “fake,” “biased,” “misleading,” information.

You should too.

There may be others but this is the first “fake news” story that I have seen that is critical of “fake news.” At least by NPR.

Students Have ‘Dismaying’ Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds by Camila Domoske

Domoske does a credible summary of the contents of the executive summary, for which only one paragraph is necessary to opt out of presenting this story on NPR:

…
When we began our work we had little sense of the depth of the problem. We even found ourselves rejecting ideas for tasks because we thought they would be too easy. Our first round of piloting shocked us into reality. Many assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally savvy about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite. We hope to produce a series of high-quality web videos to showcase the depth of the problem revealed by students’ performance on our tasks and demonstrate the link between digital literacy and citizenship. By drawing attention to this connection, a series of videos could help to mobilize educators, policymakers, and others to address this threat to democracy.
…

Comparing the NPR coverage and the executive summary, the article reflects the steps taken by the study, but never questions its conclusion that an inability to assess online information is indeed a “threat to democracy.”

To support that conclusion, which earned this story a spot on NPR, the researchers would need historical data on how well or poorly, students assessed sources of information at other time periods in American history, along with an assessment of “democracy” at the time, along with the demonstration of a causal relationship between the two.

But as you can see from the NPR article, Domoske fails to ask the most rudimentary questions about this study, such as:

“Is there a relationship between democracy and the ability to evaluate sources of information?”

Or, “What historical evidence demonstrates a relationship between democracy and the ability to evaluate sources of information?”

Utter silence on the part of Domoske.

The real headline for a follow-up on this story should be:

NPR Reporter Unable To Distinguish Credible Research From Headline Driven Reports.

I’m going to be listening for that report.

Are you?

The Fact Checker’s guide for detecting fake news by Glenn Kessler.

Glenn’s post isn’t an outright attack on Facebook, the standard fare at the New York Times since Donald Trump’s election. How long the Times is going to sulk over its rejection by most Americans isn’t clear.

Glenn descends into the sulking with the Times when he writes:

…
Look at the ads

A profusion of pop-up ads or other advertising indicates you should handle the story with care. Another sign is a bunch of sexy ads or links, designed to be clicked — “Celebs who did Porn Movies” or “Naughty Walmart Shoppers Who have no Shame at All” — which you generally do not find on legitimate news sites.
…

The examples are nearly Facebook ad headlines and Glenn knows that.

Rather than saying “Facebook,” Glenn wants you to conclude that “on your own.” (An old manipulation/propaganda technique.)

Glenn’s “read the article closely” was #4, coming in after #1, “determine whether the article is from a legitimate website,” #2, “Check the ‘contact us’ page,” or #3, “examine the byline of the reporter and see whether it makes sense.”

How To Recognize A Fake News Story has “read past the headline” first.

Even “legitimate websites” make mistakes, omit facts, and sometimes are mis-led by governments and others.

Read content critically, even content about spotting “fake news.”

How To Recognize A Fake News Story by Nick Robin-Searly.

A handy “fake news” graphic:

Even if Facebook, Twitter, etc., eventually take up my idea of shareable content filters, you should evaluate all stories (including mine) with the steps in this graphic.

Short form: Don’t be a passive consumer of content. Engage with content. Question its perspective, what was left unsaid, sources that were or were not relied upon, etc.

Your ignorance is your own and no one can fix that other than you.