Algorithmic accountability, disinformation war, and how political regulation of free speech can be abused

Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

edited by Marco Nurra

🔔 Pleased to announce our first 500+ confirmed #ijf18 speakers. All festival sessions are free entry for all attendees. Come and join us!

• How ProPublica became big tech’s scariest watchdog. The nonprofit is fighting fire with fire, developing algorithms and bots that hold Facebook and Amazon accountable. “We actually built machine learning AI to determine what is a political ad and what is not a political ad. It turns out that’s how you police an algorithm. You need some algorithms sometimes to do that kind of accountability.”
  🔔 Julia Angwin will be a #ijf18 speaker
• This is how quickly fake news that exploits tragedy spreads on Facebook. Quartz describes how conspiracies claiming a vocal survivor of the Florida shooting is a “crisis actor” quickly attracted over 100,000 shares, as well as seized trending lists and search suggestions.
• How Vladimir Putin mastered the cyber disinformation war. “By emphasising the activities of the trolls, even though we cannot be sure of the true extent of their impact, Americans appear to have accepted that information is indeed a weapon — the idea so close to Mr Putin’s heart. The whole world, it seems, is now speaking the Kremlin’s language.”
  🔔 Andrei Soldatov will be a #ijf18 speaker
• Is Donald Trump a traitor? James Risen, The Intercept’s senior national security correspondent, is starting a series on the Trump-Russia inquiry (part 2 is coming soon). “Americans must live with the uncertainty of not knowing whether Trump has the best interests of the United States or those of Russia at heart.”
  🔔 James Risen will be a #ijf18 speaker
• Think very carefully before regulating speech. “I would suggest that voters in any country approach the idea of regulating speech on Facebook and Google with extreme caution,” writes Donald Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post, pointing to how political regulation of free speech can be abused.
• Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s propagandistic use of social media and his attacks on Rappler and other news outlets. “Duterte has said that a free press is a privilege, not a right. That’s something very worrying. A free press is a right guaranteed by our own constitution.”
  🔔 Maria Ressa (CEO and executive editor of Rappler) and John Nery (Columnist at the Philippine Daily Inquirer) will be #ijf18 speakers
• Turkey sentences journalists to life in jail over coup attempt. The prominent journalists handed life sentences were the brothers Ahmet Altanand Mehmet Altan, who have been detained since 2016, and Nazlı Ilıcak. The conviction defies an order by Turkey’s highest court to release Mehmet Altan, after it found last month that his imprisonment had violated his constitutional rights.
• NPR’s Elizabeth Jensen tells how an NPR listener fact-checked a six year old story by writing a 13,000-word post on his blog, and finally got a correction. “He told me he never considered contacting NPR at the time he discovered the errors (in 2012), so they could immediately be corrected. He subsequently told me this week that he is pleased about the corrections.”
• Do readers ‘own’ the New York Times now? “Today, print and digital subscribers account for 60 percent of the paper’s revenues, and those revenues are growing, erasing the adage that readers don’t and won’t pay for news,” writes Jack Shafer.
• Publishers’ pivot to video appears to have become a pivot to layoffs… Vox Media, one of the many companies that embraced social video over the past two years, said Wednesday that it will lay off 50 employees, approximately five percent of its workforce.