Beautiful essay this week by Zeynep on Politico, six paragraphs you should read to become a smarter human. But I just want to point to something in paragraph three very relevant to media literacy: Deluged by apparent facts, arguments and counterarguments, our brains resort to the most obvious filter, the easiest cognitive shortcut for a… Continue reading

More journalistic mess-ups in the news today, this time from the Associated Press, which labeled director/producer Costa-Gavras as dead when he is very much alive. Via Alexios Mantzarlis here’s a snapshot of the AP headline on the Washington Post from yesterday (I think?) of a hoax that happened almost a week ago. How did it happen? Well a person… Continue reading

One of the nice things about running a blog-fueled grassroots semi-funded initiative is the agility. The Digipo project has moved far and fast in the past year. But one of the bad things is all the old blogposts a just a snapshot in time, and often out of date. I’ve wanted to get everything updated… Continue reading

One of the things I’ve been trying to convince people for the past year and a half is that the only viable literacy solution to web misinformation involves always checking any information in your stream that you find interesting, emotion-producing, or shareable. It’s not enough to check the stuff that is suspicious: if you apply your investigations… Continue reading

I have been talking about Pinterest as a disinformation platform for a long time, so this article on QAnon memes on Pinterest is not surprising at all: Many of those users also pinned QAnon memes. The net effect is a community of middle-aged women, some with hundreds of followers, pinning style tips and parfait recipes… Continue reading

Dave Winer has a great post today on the closing of blogs.harvard.edu. These are sites run by Berkman, some dating back to 2003, which are being shut down. My galaxy brain goes towards the idea of federation, of course. The idea that everything referencing something should store a copy of what it references connected by… Continue reading

Thanks to initial work by folks at Wellesley and Wikidata work from 9of99 on Wikipedia, the Newspapers on Wikipedia project has both created an initial Wikidata set of extant U.S. Newspapers and mapped that to needs for page and infobox creation. The full set is here and can be queried in multiple ways: http://tinyurl.com/yb6sng9e Visually… Continue reading

So I forgot to report this, but I put together a team and submitted a proposal to the Rita Allen Misinformation Solutions Forum contest, and our project was chosen out of all the submissions as one of five finalists. I’ll be going to D.C. in October to pitch it in a competition for one of… Continue reading

I was putting together materials for my online media literacy class and I was about to pull this video, which has half a million views and proposes that AIDS is the “greatest lie of the 21st century.” According to the video, HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, retrovirals do (I think that was the point, I honestly… Continue reading