Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • On Election Day, Facebook and Twitter Did Better by Making Their Products Worse

    Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites defended against election-related disinformation campaigns by quickly identifying and removing fake accounts and putting labels and warnings on posts that made false claims of voter fraud and premature claims of victory. Instead of frictionless usability, they slowed or shut down core parts of their products such as limiting political ads, tweaking recommendation algorithms, and/or preventing sharing and comments on questionable posts. Threats will continue in the weeks ahead, but the companies have prevented widespread disinformation campaigns so far.

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  • How to Combat Disinformation Targeting Black Communities

    Several groups are working to counter disinformation aimed at the Black community by spreading accurate information and elevating local voices as trusted messengers. Organizations have disseminated accurate information via social media, used hackathons and video game launches to get Black and other youth of color interested in voting, provided shareable content to progressive organizations, and created a guide to help people identify fake accounts and bots. Nonprofit First Draft also provides a two-week disinformation training course in English and Spanish with daily lessons sent by text.

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  • With Talk2020, The Wall Street Journal turns an internal reporting tool into a reusable news product

    Talk2020 is a searchable database from the Wall Street Journal with thousands of transcripts from presidential and vice-presidential candidates’ campaign speeches, media appearances, debates, and more. Users can filter by issue, date, candidate, or keyword to find quotes and facts about a candidate’s record. It began as an internal tool to help reporters and editors working in the D.C. bureau frame and inform their own journalism, but focus groups showed that news consumers also wanted to be able to quickly locate quotes and facts for their own edification and to support fact-based debates with others.

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  • How Tracking Can Improve Gender Representation in Sourcing from J-School to the Newsroom

    Based on an approach that one participant termed “what gets measured gets done,” several Canadian media watchers and news organizations are prodding journalists to quote more women in news stories by auditing sources' genders in past stories. One Montreal Gazette reporter's tally of her newsroom's stories increased how many women were quoted in stories from 29% of stories to 42%. The Gender Gap Tracker tracked Canada's seven most influential news platforms, and saw an increase in the use of female sources in stories by 4% in less than two years, nearly as big a gain as in the previous 26 years.

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  • How They Did It: Tracking Down a Rwandan Genocide Suspect

    Years after international authorities had stopped searching for a man suspected of being an architect of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a freelance journalist spent eight months searching data and doing on the ground reporting to find the suspect in central France. A story on the find by journalist Théo Englebert led Rwanda to issue an arrest warrant and a French prosecutor to open a counterterrorism investigation. Englebert's sleuthing provides a tutorial on "finding someone who wants to disappear."

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  • Rev. Yearwood Unites Hip Hop Culture With Climate Justice

    Rev. Lennox Yearwood, founder of the Hip Hop Caucus, is using music and comedy to highlight the intersection of climate change and racial justice. His group released a music video talking about the Flint water crisis and they produced a stand-up comedy special about climate change. By using the power of storytelling, he believes he’s able to bring young people and their stories into the climate movement.

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  • This game can stop people from falling for COVID-19 conspiracies

    To combat the spread of conspiracy theories, researchers at Cambridge’s Social Decision Making Lab have created an interactive game that puts users in the shoes of "manipulators" to teach them how to "question social media posts that have the hallmarks of engineered virality." Although experts say playing the game just one time will likely not result in sustainable change, a similar game that focused on understanding how fake news was created found that users' beliefs in fake news decreased by an average of 21%.

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  • As Trump Blames 'The Chinese Virus,' These Asian American Women Won't Stand For The Racism

    Responding to growing attacks on Asian Americans, based on racist reactions to the pandemic, one young woman self-published a handbook, "How to Report a Hate Crime," in multiple languages. Though limited funding kept its print run small, the booklet found an audience through social media. Then its author connected with the victim of a verbal assault, inspired her to push back against police department apathy, and sparked a number of new hate-crime reports and better training for Los Angeles police officers.

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  • The Wayback Machine and Cloudflare Want to Backstop the Web

    The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine crawls and caches websites to preserve a history of deleted pages. The Wayback Machine has archived a large amount of the public web over the past two decades, adding more than a billion URLs a day to its databases. The archive has over 468 billion web pages in total, and more than 45 petabytes of data. A new partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which caches a static version of websites, has had promising results. Powering Cloudflare’s work with the Wayback Machine’s interface has allowed them to find more sites to archive.

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  • Pa. Supreme Court halts Philly criminal trials streamed on YouTube over possible harassment

    Philadelphia criminal trials were broadcast live on a public YouTube channel to provide for public access to the courts during the pandemic shutdown, but the practice was halted over a complaint by prosecutors that this means of public access created opportunities for harassment and intimidation of victims, witnesses, and defendants. Responding to an emergency petition by the Philadelphia district attorney, the state Supreme Court halted the YouTube broadcasts. Prosecutors said they will explore alternatives including private Zoom calls and closed-circuit feeds.

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