Hard times are here for news sites and social media. Is this the end of Web 2.0?
One recent study by Science Feedback found that user engagement with so-called superspreaders of misinformation increased 44% on the platform since Musk took over.
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One recent study by Science Feedback found that user engagement with so-called superspreaders of misinformation increased 44% on the platform since Musk took over.
Does Facebook’s method work? A study done by Science Feedback said yes, but only to a certain extent. Facebook’s interventions on accounts that repeatedly share disinformation and misinformation results in reduced engagement on posts that violate community standards. However, the study found that this did not change the behavior of repeat offenders in the long run.
While COP27 goes into overtime and should officially end this Saturday, November 19, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, climate disinformation is in full swing on the networks. The fake news fraudulently tries to oppose an ideology in the face of a scientific consensus on global warming.
Guests:
– Eric Guilyardi, research director at CNRS, co-editor of the 5th IPCC report
– Emmanuel Vincent, doctor in Climatology and founder of the NGO Science Feedback.
Science Feedback, a French nonprofit fact-checking organization that employs journalists and scientists, provided ProPublica with 427 active URLs of articles about climate change in French and other languages it has rated false since 2021. A fifth of them were earning money with Google, according to the analysis.
How do you know if the fact-checking program works? The fact-check group Science Feedback attempted to answer this question by analyzing Facebook data captured through CrowdTangle and Buzzsumo. (…) “In our research we have been able to show how much Facebook is reducing the visibility of posts in these repeat offender accounts. We were able to transparently verify that Facebook is implementing this policy. Otherwise there is no way of knowing that. We really need this kind of data if we want to be able to measure what is happening on the platform,” Vincent told Rappler.
BBC News Brazil reached out to Dutch microbiologist Elisabeth Bik and the editors of Science Feedback to analyze the study that served as the basis for the application TrateCov, developed by Brazil’s Ministry of Health. They found several flaws in the study. For instance, the number of participants in the study showed some discrepancies and the study was peer-reviewed in just one day, a questionably brief period of time…
Without standards on capturing data on how the children reacted, and without a matched group of children who didn’t wear masks, there’s no way to say that the masks caused the children’s reactions. This Instagram post recycled a claim made in early January. The fact-checkers at Health Feedback debunked that one a few days later (hat tip to Health Feedback for their work on this.)
“A video where a woman unravels the fibre from several Covid-19 dry swabs and claims that the material is “alive” and made of “Morgellons”, a filament associated with an unproven medical condition, has garnered tens of thousands of views on both Facebook and YouTube since early January. These claims are false – the synthetic fibre of the dry swabs is not “alive” and has no connection with Morgellons disease.(…) “According to Dr. Flora Teoh, a science editor at Health Feedback, a not-for-profit organisation that fact-checks scientific and health-related content, Morgellons disease is “controversial and poorly understood”. “
“The decline in global average area burned has indeed been misused to support false claims (cf. Climate Feedback fact-check) numerous times. There is strong evidence that the increase in fire activity we are seeing in many forested regions is indeed linked to climate change.”
“To lend their narratives an air of legitimacy, sites sometimes turn to shoddy scientific research. The research, which had not been peer reviewed, claimed to have found similar proteins in the new virus and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. According to health fact-checker Health Feedback, the researchers failed to recognize that the same protein sequences could be found in a variety of organisms.”