Selection of early anti-Gülenist headlines in Sözcü – which is now accused of links to "FETÖ". Its last anti-Gülenist headline was yesterday https://t.co/VIr7taJT91
— Ankaralı Jan (@06JAnk) May 19, 2017
#IPIWoCo participants stand against the ongoing criminalisation of journalism in #Turkey #FreeTurkeyJournalists #FreeTurkeyMedia #Sözcü pic.twitter.com/oFrlK7OfV1
The Internet is awash in viral news sites trying to game social or search algorithms that try to attract eyeballs to the latest story that’s dominating users’ feeds. While many of these sites are run by shady characters, Spain’s largest newspaper, El País, has tried to create a site that marries the fun of viral sites with the trustworthiness of a legacy broadsheet.
The site, called Verne — after the author Jules Verne — features a mix of first-person narratives, explainers, quizzes, and native social videos.
“A lot of people in the market are talking about paywalls or free traffic very much from an angle from what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes people think there is only one strategy: theirs,” Christian Röpke, the CEO of German newsweekly Die Zeit’s online presence Zeit Online, recently told my colleague Joseph Lichterman. As Zeit Online tries to attract a younger audience that might ultimately pay for its product, it’s trying a number of different strategies, from live events to new types of editorial content.
Back in March, the director of the International Fact Checking Network, Alexios Mantzarlis posted a tweet with the image below, in an attempt to explain the relationship between fact-checking, verification and debunking.
To journalists, this diagram makes sense. Fact-checking and verification have occupied quite different spaces within journalism, and the skills have been seen as distinct and specialist. Only with the rise of fabricated news websites did fact-checking and verification organizations find themselves both being asked how to ‘debunk’ these sites.
Facebook engineers may be spending a lot of time trying to solve the platform’s fake news problem, but it hasn’t forgotten about the site’s other, equally persistent foe: clickbait.
Facebook said Wednesday that it’s further tweaked its algorithm to display fewer clickbait headlines in users’ News Feeds. The tweak targets headlines that either “withhold information intentionally leave out crucial details or mislead people” or those that “exaggerate the details of a story with sensational language tend to make the story seem like a bigger deal than it really is.” Facebook is evaluating those criteria as individual signals, which it says will let it better detect different kinds of clickbait headlines. It’s also now targeting clickbait on a post-by-post basis, which it says will help it target clickbait on a more granular level.
Did “sinister” emotional manipulation by the data analytics company, Cambridge Analytica, decide the U.S. election? History suggests otherwise.
After the election, one company claimed the credit for engineering Trump’s victory: Cambridge Analytica. The company stated that it had analyzed Facebook along with other publicly available data for around 230 million Americans and combined this with individualized psychological profiling to provide personalized advertising and promote turnout to Trump’s rallies. Alarmist accounts see the company’s use of social media data, computer learning, and psychometric targeting as terrifying new inventions in electoral campaigns. These fears are amplified by the company’s backers: it counts the mysterious Mercers amongst its investors.
A new tool from the Associated Press will now allow users of its service to pull in topical and verified content shared by users on social media such as photos and videos around breaking news. Using the web interface provided by social media platform manager SAM (AP owns a stake in SAM and has been using it since 2015), AP Social Newswire lets AP clients look through social content that is being curated and vetted by AP editors in real-time.
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