YES, fact-checking works. NO, the government shouldn’t regulate ‘fake news’
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Published in
3 min readOct 13, 2017
edited by Marco Nurra
But first of all, how about participating in #ijf18 with your ideas?
- History proves how dangerous it is to have the government regulate fake news. “This is problematic for several reasons. First, there is a huge amount of empirical data from different countries throughout history that make it clear that even democratic governments tend to use this kind of power to silence opponents and shut down speech they don’t like. During the French Revolution, for example, policing the truth resulted in the execution of those who were accused of disseminating false news, which included anyone critical of those behind the Reign of Terror. In 1798, the U.S. Congress passed the Sedition Act in order to punish false statements about the government made with malicious intent. It was used to suppress opinion with which the Federalist administration of President John Adams disagreed. This is one of the reasons why prosecution for lies about the government are outlawed in the U.S. and why this kind of speech is protected by the First Amendment.”
- These two studies have found that correcting misperceptions works. Giving people corrective information about economic and political issues helps change their inaccurate views — in spite of partisan beliefs. This research joins other recent publications to find that people are not impossible to fact-check.
- “Things happened on our platform that shouldn’t have happened” in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. Exclusive interview with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg.
- Facebook says its fake news label helps reduce the spread of a fake story by 80%. BuzzFeed News obtained an email sent by a Facebook executive to its fact-checking partners that for the first time shared internal data about the program.
- Tim O’Reilly on ways to put the brakes on “fake news” and rebuild trust on the internet. In “WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us,” web guru O’Reilly suggests it is time to reinvent social institutions for our online era.
- What if war were declared and nobody came? The German election did not turn out to be the disinformation battleground some predicted, but #WahlCheck17 did end up with skills acquired and lessons learned.
- The ProPublica Local Reporting Network will fund reporters who already live in the communities they are writing about. With the effort, ProPublica wants, however slightly, to help fill some of the gaps left by the hollowing-out of local reporting, said Eric Umansky, deputy managing editor of ProPublica “We’re quite cognizant of the fact that the greatest squeeze on accountability journalism has happened on local regional levels,” he said.
- The share of women in newsrooms has increased barely 1 percentage point since 2001, ASNE data shows. Things are almost as bad when it comes to the hiring of people of color: the share of POC working in American newsrooms is up 2.9 percent since 2001.
- Why objective journalism is a misleading and dangerous illusion. By Rob Wijnberg (De Correspondent).
International Journalism Festival is the biggest annual media event in Europe. It’s an open invitation to interact with the best of world journalism. All sessions are free entry for all attendees, all venues are situated in the stunning setting of the historic town centre of Perugia.