Honest Truth and Democracy

Micheal Lynch encourages honest discourse. He notes that "democracy is a space of reasons" based on agreed truth.

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Fake News Database From Politico

Cristiano Lima and Andrew Britz report on a "fake news" database created by Politico. The database can be searched here: https://www.politico.com/interactives/2018/is-this-true.

Note that Politico is critical of the current administration, and, like Wikipedia, nominations of "fake news" websites are submitted by the public (probably mainly Politico readers). So the database may express a bias against conservative viewpoints.

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Credo InfoLit Learning Community

Credo maintains an InfoLit Learning Community where professionals discuss information literacy and website evaluation. And it is a place for Credo to market its products.

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Fake News Study

Robinson Meyer investigates a study of Twitter and "fake news" done by Vosoughi, Roy and Aral (2018).

The abstract for Vosoughi et al. (2018) follows:

There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social well-being. To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.

>p>A related essay (Lazer et al., 2018) recommends either governmental regulation or creating tort remedies for those harmed.

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Fake News

Eric Schmidt discusses fake news and foreign influence in U.S. information sources.

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Identifying False Information

Julie Joyce says that the basic technique for identifying misinformation is to "Question everything, test everything. "

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