Human Nature Spreads Fake News Faster Than the Truth
Who’s to blame for the spread of fake news? Common suspected culprits are Russian bots and social media platforms propagating false information without any checks in place. A recent study from MIT hints at a more disparaging truth — we don’t have anyone to blame but ourselves. The Numbers Don’t Lie “Falsehood diffused farther, faster, deeper, […]
Is Tech Trying to Take Over Local News?
At its core, social media functions as a modern avenue for information exchange. This is a huge (if not the main) reason why this technology niche is affecting so many facets of our lives. One new trend springing up across social media platforms is the integration of a location-based feature to show you content that’s […]
Facebook Will Likely Have to Testify About Those Russian Ads
Any banking app developer online during last year’s contentious U.S. presidential election knows that the social media landscape was a mess. In the era of Facebook and Twitter, civic debate is now powered as much by memes and the dreaded fake news as much as it is an exchange of thoughts and ideas. But since […]
Tech Companies Stamp Out Neo-Nazis After Charlottesville
The events this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, shocked the nation, and Trump’s equivocating response threw salt in the wound. For many years now, the trend of political polarization has made common ground harder and harder to find, but it used to be that denouncing Nazis was as American as hot dogs, sparklers, and apple pie. […]
Airbnb Kicks Alt-Right Extremists to the Curb Before Protest
One of the recurring themes in the tech world during the Trump era so far is startups’ need to align their actions with their professed values. Twitter has had to find ways to fight trolling and abuse without completely squashing free speech. Facebook and Google are attempting to fight the fake news that propagated on […]
Zuckerberg Listens to America (But Isn’t Running for Office)
Before he was elected president, Donald Trump was just a businessman (by many accounts, a corrupt and failed businessman) and celebrity with no real experience in the political realm. According to his supporters, what qualified him for office were his willingness to play outside Washington’s established rules and his prodigious deal-making skills — after all, […]
Leak Reveals Facebook’s Content Moderation Policies
Tasked with monitoring content generated from 2 billion users from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, Facebook’s moderators have a tough, maybe even impossible, job. These reviewers often have less than 10 seconds to decide whether or not content is appropriate, leaving them no time for nuance. The Guardian recently obtained more than 100 internal […]
French Election Hacks Underline the Need for Cybersecurity
When Dogtown Media was in Washington, D.C. a couple weeks ago for AppCon 2017, cybersecurity issues were one of the main topics of discussion. Along with our colleagues in ACT – The App Association, we are concerned with the use of encryption backdoors by law enforcement, the shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals, and the general […]
Google Spotlights Fact-Checkers to Manage Misinformation
Last week, Facebook announced its News Integrity Initiative, another gesture toward fixing the internet’s misinformation epidemic. While the social media giant has received most of the flak for the explosion of fake news, NYC app developers are well aware that it’s not the only platform guilty of disseminating false information. As the search engine, Google […]
Facebook Looks for New Approaches to the Fake News Problem
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2016 was “surreal.” The Oxford English Dictionary went with “post-truth.” The Australian Macquarie Dictionary settled on “fake news.” No matter what term social media app developers prefer to use to define it, 2016 was the year that the conspiracies, propaganda, and outright hooey that used to be the purview […]