Maha Bali has a great post on getting to the source of faked Trump video. She does a great job narrating her process, along with reflecting on it, so I’ll just suggest you go to her blog and read it now. It’s well worth your time. In particular, two things jump out at me — Continue reading

I’m sitting here starting an argument with you and you are starting an argument with me. I am against expressive social media, I say. I think it is making us very dumb and we should use other forms of social media to teach kids. “But, Mike,” you may be thinking, “why are you so binary, Continue reading

I’ve generally kept my advocacy for the Lead-Crime Hypothesis off this blog. This is a blog about web-enabled education, after all. But today I can probably get away with it because there’s a web literacy connection. Seriously, I promise. For those who don’t know the lead-crime hypothesis, it goes like this: the massive crime wave Continue reading

I can’t make it to MisInfoCon, unfortunately, or the #fakenewssci conference going on right now on the East Coast (can we get a few West Coast misinformation conferences please?) But I thought I’d offer my take on a frame for the problem of misinformation on the web. When you listen to the psychologists talk about misinformation, Continue reading

Back before the election I was working on a book on the problems of living in “the stream” — this endless flow of stuff we read, retweet, and react to. My argument in that still unfinished work was that while the stream is useful and exciting it also warps our sense of reality in unhelpful ways. Forced Continue reading

Jesse Walker on how our need for narrative creates a market for both conspiracy theory and fake and slanted news: For a lot of people, the real assumption that they bring to the news, even beyond their partisan affiliations, is an expectation of a smooth narrative. They expect news stories to look like the movies Continue reading