Do you really know where your news comes from?
Americans Trust Local News. That Belief Is Being Exploited. (Published 2019)
A growth in impostor local news that promotes ideological agendas.
Show your work: The new terms for trust in journalism - PressThink
The transparency movement has finally come of age. Power has shifted to the users. Their trust has to be earned in different ways now.
Opinion | The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media
A note from our owner.
Why Don’t We Learn from Social Media? Studying Effects of and Mechanisms behind Social Media News Use on General Surveillance Political Knowledge
Does exposure to news affect what people know about politics? This old question attracted new scholarly interest as the political information environment is changing rapidly. In particular, since c...
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.
When everything is news, nothing is news
Thoughtlessly repeating PR talking points and sharing guesswork as rumor is creating a trust problem.
Media Bias/Fact Check News
We are the most comprehensive media bias resource on the internet. There are currently 3900+ media sources listed in our database and growing every day.
Semafor Keeps Hosting Ridiculous “Restoring Trust In Media” Events That Only Further Undermine Trust In Media
You might recall that when political news website Semafor entered the media industry on the back of $25 million in private money, they made all kinds of promises about how they were somehow going t…
Following news on social media boosts knowledge, belief accuracy and trust
Many worry that news on social media leaves people uninformed or even misinformed. Here we conducted a preregistered two-wave online field experiment in France and Germany (N = 3,395) to estimate the effect of following the news on Instagram and WhatsApp. Participants were asked to follow two accounts for 2 weeks and activate the notifications. In the treatment condition, the accounts were those of news organizations, while in the control condition they covered cooking, cinema or art. The treatment enhanced current affairs knowledge, participants’ ability to discern true from false news stories and awareness of true news stories, as well as trust in the news. The treatment had no significant effects on feelings of being informed, political efficacy, affective polarization and interest in news or politics. These results suggest that, while some forms of social media use are harmful, others are beneficial and can be leveraged to foster a well-informed society.
Political disinformation concentrates in repeated claims across media
The prevalence and dynamics of disinformation remain contentious, partly because measures have relied on posts containing URLs from untrustworthy sources. We move beyond this by detecting disinformation in text and across posts. Using retrieval-augmented generation, we match six million Facebook, Instagram, and X posts by politicians from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, and two million articles from news outlets to fact-checked claims. We show that disinformation is concentrated in a small number of combinations of policy issues and parties and that just over hundred distinct claims account for around half of all disinformation across the three countries. They often appear first on a single platform, later on multiple, and subsequently in news coverage before being fact-checked. These findings suggest that disinformation is concentrated in a narrow segment of political communication, potentially creating repeated exposure that may shape the terms of public debate through both social and news media.
Language Models Trained on State Media Sources Launder Propaganda
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Research, Attention, and Manipulation
Questionable articles can quietly move into Wikipedia and news outlets without notice.
Social media ‘trust’/’distrust’ buttons could reduce spread of misinformation | UCL News
The addition of ‘trust’ and ‘distrust’ buttons on social media, alongside standard ‘like’ buttons, could help to reduce the spread of misinformation, finds a new experimental study led by UCL researchers.
Building Trust in the Open
How Protocols for Publishers points to the future of journalism — and the web
The Metric Media network runs more than 1,200 local news sites. Here are some of the non-profits funding them.
<p>This is the first part of a two-part investigation. The second piece can be found here. As local news outlets across the US struggle to stay afloat, pop-up newsrooms are filling the void. Organizations with ties to political parties, special-interest groups, and lobbyists have emerged under the guise of news. One of the biggest such […]</p>
Building trust in the open
How Protocols for Publishers points to the future of journalism – and the web
