A couple people asked me to expand on comments made in my recent Familiarity = Truth post. In it I say this about the Buzzfeed finding that over 50% of Clinton supporters who remember fake anti-Clinton headlines believed them: [A] number like “98% of Republicans who remember the headline believed it” does not mean that 98% of… Continue reading

So I have news, lots of news. If you’re the sort of person who just wants to jump into what I’ve launched and started building with the help of others, you can go here now, see what we’re launching, and come back to read this later. For the rest of you, long theoretical navel-gazing it… Continue reading

Almost a month ago, I wrote a post that would become one of my most popular on this site, a post on the They Had Their Minds Made Up Anyway Excuse. The post used some basic things we know from the design of learning environments to debunk the claim that fake headlines don’t change people’s… Continue reading

Consider this my one year report. 😉 The core idea of Wikity was simple: what if we bent the world of social media a bit away from the frothy outrage factory of Twitter and Facebook towards something more iterative, exploratory, and constructive? I took as my model Ward Cunningham’s excellent work on wiki and combined it… Continue reading

Here’s a fake story that was shown a number of places on the web during the campaign, claiming that protesters of Donald Trump were being paid. This has been covered so many times by so many fake and satirical sites that it is now an article of faith among Republicans, due to exposure effects. Here’s… Continue reading

I’m playing with this idea of Facebook posting as “rebuttal shopping”. The idea is that a lot of stuff that goes viral on Facebook is posted as an implicit rebuttal to arguments that the poster feels are being levied against their position. This stuff tends to go viral on Facebook because the minute the Facebook… Continue reading

The Stream is a weird place. Your Facebook feed, for example, is a series of posts by various people that in some ways resembles a forum, but in other ways it’s not at all like a forum.  When you post something to Facebook, there’s not an explicit prompt you are responding to, which seems non-problematic… Continue reading

Let’s continue to look at how Facebook has harmed public discourse, because I’m getting increasingly worried that once Facebook blocks fake news people will say problem solved. And really, the problem is not even close to solved. One of Facebook’s oldest features is the “wall” although we seldom call it that anymore. The wall in Facebook… Continue reading

TechCrunch has a story seemingly sympathetic to Facebook’s plight, which has this graf in it: Because Facebook and some other platforms reward engagement, news outlets are incentivized to frame stories as sensationally as possible. While long-running partisan outlets may be held accountable for exaggeration, newer outlets built specifically to take advantage of virality on networks… Continue reading

So Facebook will ban fake news sites from their ads network, as will Google, which shows you exactly how hard it would have been to do this six months ago. But in any case, problem solved, right? Unfortunately, no. Fake sites that get traffic can get on other ad networks, or go the malware route, or… Continue reading