Philando Castile, new types of hoaxes and hacking Slack

Hi everyone,

Here’s what we’ve been up to since last time:

• The shooting of Philando Castile was another shocking example of an innocent black American gunned down by a police officer, perhaps made doubly shocking because the aftermath was livestreamed to Facebook by Castile’s girlfriend. Claire Wardle decided to look at how news organisations used that video, with detailed research and interesting results
• Aside from the regular misattributed quotes, celebrity “deaths” and parody accounts, two new types of social media hoax have surfaced around news stories in recent weeks. Here’s what they are and how to spot them.
• We’ve written a few times about the tricky processes of contacting eyewitnesses on social media a few times here at First Draft, with repeated requests from different reporters at the same organisation a regular issue. Tom Trewinnard looked at some quick fixes to make sure this doesn’t happen, using Google Docs, Slack and Checkdesk.

What else was there?

First up is the sad news that our colleagues at Reported.ly will cease operating at the end of August unless they find some more funding or a new home (wink, nudge), an eventuality Poynter’s fact-checking don said means “social media will lose an important gatekeeper”; Ariana Huffington is stepping down from the Huffington Post; BuzzFeed Canada editor (and First Draft member) Craig Silverman looked behind the curtain of a Canadian fake news site to see what makes it tick; Washington Post opinion writer David Ignatius explained why some Trump supporters just don’t give a damn about the facts; Wired looked at how the excellent NYT reporter Rukmini Callimachi uses social media to “get inside the minds” of Daesh; Facebook announced it would be tweaking its Newsfeed algorithm to punish clickbait headlines and bypassing adblockers; and, in heartening proof that fakes aren’t just in news, Science magazine explained how one hoaxer set the agenda for decades of evolutionary research with a fake human ancestor.

Finally, if you haven’t seen it already, John Oliver turned his acerbic and astute essay format at Last Week Tonight to the topic of journalism this week. Watch on YouTube if you’re in the US, or Facebook elsewhere.

Until next week, all the best and stay true,

Alastair

Alastair Reid
Managing editor
First Draft
@ajreid