The far right has put RNLI volunteers in the crosshairs

Sharing without clicking on news in social media

Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs by conservatives (76.94%) than liberals (14.25%), probably because, in our dataset, the vast majority (76–82%) of them originated from conservative news domains. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere.

Local U.S. TV News Will Soon Be Entirely Right Wing Propaganda

Thanks to the destruction of media consolidation limits, Republicans will soon enjoy propaganda and market domination over what's left of local U.S. news.

It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

At a time when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, we should be living in a utopia of public discourse. We're not.

Fake news spreads like an epidemic. Here’s how to stop it.

Researchers study fake news the same way they study the spread of disease. When misinformation “goes viral”, it is not just a metaphor. It is what’s actually happening. via @straits_times str.sg/viz-misinformation

Opinion: Losing the Local Journalism Initiative leaves communities in the dark

With more outlets vying for federal funding, why are national outlets opening up new bureaus in communities with healthy media ecosystems?

Scam!

64K votes, 1.2K comments. 719K subscribers in the NonPoliticalTwitter community. Twitter and Bluesky without the politics. Come vibe with us as we…

Could this be the beginning of the end for the billionaire-owned media propaganda blitz?

A campaign to free our national press from foreign billionaires like Rupert Murdoch is gaining momentum and attracting big-name support

14 Theses on Online Political Violence

The old world of content safety practices is dead, and the new one is struggling to be born.

The BBC Is Just Nodding Along

The corporation's news coverage has lost its soul as a bulwark against unaccountable power and extremism, writes a former BBC News producer

Data Feminism for AI

Attacks on women and trans people are not happening in a vacuum. Communications scholars W. Lance Bennett and Marianne Kneuer recently argued that we are witnessing the intensification of "illiberal public spheres" around the world (Bennett and Kneuer, 2023). These are characterized by a set of anti-democratic communications tactics that include the denigration and exclusion of minoritized people, targeted attacks on the press and political institutions, and transgression of norms of civil discourse. Such tactics are enabled and amplified by the social media platforms owned by Big Tech, whose business model elevates attention above all other metrics, such that they profit richly off extremism, threats, spectacle, and lies. The success of this corporate partnership with right-wing extremism is evident in the proliferation of book bans (Magnusson, 2024), the demonization of DEI and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 2022), and mob tactics to doxx, intimidate, misrepresent, and otherwise silence people that study misinformation, speak out against racial and gender violence, or rule against insurrectionists (Edmonds, 2024). At the same time, we have seen the continued work of feminists, including Latin American, Indigenous, and abolitionist feminists in the US and globally, doing the work of imagining alternate worlds (Cullors, 2021; Davis, 2022; Ricaurte, 2019; Simpson, 2017). This paper represents our own first attempt to imagine a more equitable, sustainable, feminist world for AI research.

Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters

Exclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism

Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters

Exclusive: Site takes a cut of subscriptions to content that promotes far-right ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism