misinformation

IPG Mediabrands has unveiled plans to step up its efforts to safeguard clients from the negative impact of misinformation in media — especially on social media — prioritizing political, climate, health care, AI-generated and brand-specific content. The initiative, which was announced along with a new spate of research revealing how consumers feel about brand advertising in misinformation environments, includes an expansion of an ongoing research relationship between IPG Mediabrand’s Magna and brand content safety platform Zefr, as well as new technology developed by IPG Mediabrands’ Kinesso unit.

A bipartisan coalition with support from Hollywood power players and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Archewell Foundation is working to prepare U.S. voters for a possible deepfake onslaught as the campaign year goes into high gear. With federal agencies and social media companies barely talking to each other about AI-driven misinformation threats, “this is a disaster waiting to happen — no one’s doing the public inoculation,” warned Miles Taylor, chief policy officer of The Future US, which is coordinating the campaign.

The justices must distinguish between persuading social media sites to take down posts, which is permitted, and coercing them, which violates the First Amendment.

Civil rights lawyers and Democrats are sounding alarms about Mr. Musk’s claims about voting. The Biden campaign called his posts “profoundly irresponsible.”

AI is making it easy for anyone to create propaganda outlets, producing content that can be hard to differentiate from real news.

The program will roll out next year, according to executives.

CBS News and Stations will launch a new unit to examine misinformation and so-called “deepfakes,” or false videos that can often be generated via artificial intelligence. The new unit, CBS News Confirmed, will be led by Claudia Milne, CBS News and Stations SVP and head of standards and practices, along with Ross Dagan, EVP and head of news operations and transformation for CBS News and Stations.

Now rebranded as X, the site has experienced a surge in racist, antisemitic and other hateful speech. Under Musk’s watch, millions of people have been exposed to misinformation about climate change. Foreign governments and operatives — from Russia to China to Hamas — have spread divisive propaganda with little or no interference.

CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon says the network has sifted through more than 1,000 videos of the Israel-Hamas war — and only 10% are usable. “There are many reasons why, but some of those reasons are directly tied to misinformation. They absolutely are,” McMahon said on Thursday. The broadcaster is investing in its own AI capabilities — and in combatting misinformation, she added.

An escalating campaign, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans, has cast a pall over programs that study political disinformation and the quality of medical information online.

Facebook and YouTube are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

X’s failure to slow the spread of disinformation on the internet would have violated E.U. social media law, had it been in effect.

Misinformation about voting and election denialism didn’t swamp the midterms as many experts had feared — and many election deniers on the ballot, particularly for the crucial secretary-of-state roles, lost their races.

When users search for election content on either Google or YouTube, recommendation systems are in place to highlight journalism or video content from authoritative national and local news sources such as The Wall Street Journal, Univision, PBS NewsHour and local ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates.

Executives from Tegna, Fox Owned Stations and Graham Media Group share best practices from the front lines for coping with the daily flood of disinformation and misinformation that besieges newsrooms and their social channels at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum, held in-person and virtually on Dec. 14. Register here.

The new set of policies will cover not just the COVID-19 vaccines or long-approved vaccines against diseases like measles and hepatitis B, but also general claims about vaccines, YouTube said.

Researchers have identified YouTube as playing a major role in misinformation campaigns, including the effort to discredit the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Yet it has repeatedly ducked the brunt of backlashes that Facebook and Twitter have absorbed head-on.

Coronavirus misinformation has spiked online in recent weeks after a decline in the spring, misinformation experts say, as people who peddle in falsehoods have seized on the surge of cases from the Delta variant to spread new and recycled unsubstantiated narratives.

Brown communities are among those who have been disproportionately targeted with misinformation and disinformation, especially in regard to political and health information. In response, Voto Latino, the largest Latinx voter registration organization in the nation, and Media Matters for America, a nonprofit media watchdog, have partnered to launch the Latino Anti-Disinformation Lab, which will work to better understand and combat misinformation at all stages and channels.

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology is continuing its series of hearings on how misinformation and disinformation — the lies of the 21st century — have impacted recent events in our nation. As lawmakers explore this issue, they should be mindful of the vital role radio and television broadcasters play in our communities by exposing lies, uncovering the truth and reporting the facts.

In an effort to combat misinformation, Twitter says it hopes to build a community of “Birdwatchers” that can eventually help moderate and label tweets in its main product.

Eager to look neutral — and worried about being accused of lefty partisanship — mainstream news organizations across the political spectrum have bent over backward to aid and abet Trump’s disinformation campaign about voting by mail by blasting his false claims out in headlines, tweets and news alerts, according to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Looking ahead to November, Facebook says it is “actively speaking with election officials about the potential of misinformation around election results as an emerging threat.” It’s the social network’s latest step to to combat election-related misinformation on its platform as the Nov. 3 election nears — one in which many voters may be submitting ballots by mail for the first time.

The post in question featured a link to a Fox News video in which Trump says children are “virtually immune” to the virus. Facebook said Wednesday that the “video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation.”

What local journalists need to know, and do, to combat misinformation. The threat is not only a barrage of misinformation — false reports, images, and videos — directly aimed at journalists. Even more alarming, today’s organized misinformation campaigns use journalism’s own strengths, like fact-checking and community reputation, and turn them against the news media.

The station group will work with First Draft to train its journalists to identify and verify false information online and help audiences spot misinformation. It will also expand its news fact-checking initiative Verify.

In a new study conducted by the Institute for the Future, a California-based nonprofit think tank, researchers found more than 80% of journalists admitted to falling for false information online. The data was based on a survey of 1,018 journalists at regional and national publications in the United States.

In a nearly 2,000-word blog post sent to Poynter on Wednesday, Facebook announced a slew of new things it’s doing to combat false news stories, images and videos.