Communications Major

New start-ups and other social platforms sense opportunity as Twitter grapples with changes from Elon Musk, its new owner.

A new MIT study shows why Twitter’s fake news problem will be so hard to solve. The study analyzed millions of tweets sent between 2006 and 2017 and came to this chilling conclusion: “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.” It also found that “the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.”

Trump’s followers see a completely different presidency than the rest of the world sees. That’s because they are watching, reading or listening to right-wing media — and right-wing media is showing them a presidency that does not exist. After decades of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and Breitbart, conservatives can no longer tell fact from fiction. 

If "fake news" sites tipped the 2016 U.S. presidential election in the wrong direction, we need to be vigilant to make sure that the next four years (and beyond) are not further manipulated.

The internet has always contained the seeds of postmodern hell. Mass manipulation, from clickbait to Russian bots to the addictive trickery that governs Facebook’s News Feed, is the currency of the medium. It has always been a place where identity is terrifyingly slippery, where anonymity breeds coarseness and confusion, where crooks can filch the very contours of selfhood. In this respect, the rise of digital manipulation of video is the culmination of the internet’s history to date—and it may make the current era of “fake news” seem quaint.

"Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo."

BuzzFeed's bogus rationale for publishing the Trump "dossier" is just the latest sign of the profession's implosion...

Fake news is actually really easy to spot -- if you know how. Consider this your New Media Literacy Guide.