Liz Schwartz

Muslim candidates face online hatred, disinformation

The Information Disorder Update: November 1, 2018 With an unprecedented number of Muslim candidates running in the midterm elections, a virulent Islamophobic backlash has erupted in some districts — often laced with online mis- and disinformation. More than 90 American Muslims sought statewide or national office this year, and about 50 made it through the primaries, up […]

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Muslim candidates face online hatred, disinformation

The Information Disorder Update: November 1, 2018 With an unprecedented number of Muslim candidates running in the midterm elections, a virulent Islamophobic backlash has erupted in some districts — often laced with online mis- and disinformation. More than 90 American Muslims sought statewide or national office this year, and about 50 made it through the primaries, up

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The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. The views expressed in the Shorenstein Center Fellows Research Paper Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of Harvard Kennedy School or of Harvard University. Fellows Research Papers have not undergone formal review and approval. Such papers are included in this

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Social Media Becomes Battleground for Voting Integrity Misinformation

Information Disorder Update: October 30, 2018 Social media users have raised a chorus of complaints and allegations during the midterm campaign about the purging of millions of names from registration rolls to suppress voter turnout. Several state governments have responded that their critics are mischaracterizing routine and legally mandated maintenance of the rolls to keep them current

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Social Media Becomes Battleground for Voting Integrity Misinformation

Information Disorder Update: October 30, 2018 Social media users have raised a chorus of complaints and allegations during the midterm campaign about the purging of millions of names from registration rolls to suppress voter turnout. Several state governments have responded that their critics are mischaracterizing routine and legally mandated maintenance of the rolls to keep them current

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False information about caravan animating militia activity at the border

Information Disorder Update: October 26, 2018 Supporters of a private militia are spreading misinformation on social media about the Central American migrant caravan. One baseless claim asserts that “42,000 immigrants” intend to join the caravan. This warning appears to have reached tens of thousands of users on social media. Related posts on Twitter gained thousands of retweets;

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False information about caravan animating militia activity at the border

Information Disorder Update: October 26, 2018 Supporters of a private militia are spreading misinformation on social media about the Central American migrant caravan. One baseless claim asserts that “42,000 immigrants” intend to join the caravan. This warning appears to have reached tens of thousands of users on social media. Related posts on Twitter gained thousands of retweets;

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Facebook Friends? The Impact of Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Changes on Nonprofit Publishers

Abstract: This paper analyzes the changes in traffic from Facebook to non- profit news organizations before and after the major change to the Facebook News Feed in January 2018, implemented in response to the controversy over fake news dissemination from Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election in the United States. We find that while the

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Dr. Claire Wardle on misinformation in the global context

Dr. Claire Wardle, Shorenstein Center Research Fellow and founder of First Draft, spoke as part of the Misinformation Speaker Series organized by the Shorenstein Center and the NULab at Northeastern University. Conversations about information disorder in the US are disproportionately focused on political disinformation and the Facebook newsfeed. This talk argues that globally we should recognize

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Assessing a Case of Information Disorder: The Next Civil War

Information Disorder Update: October 23, 2018 This newsletter issue from the Information Disorder Lab explores how mis- and disinformation can spread even after being denied mainstream social media access. A prominent advocate of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience publishes a series of online articles warning that leftists are fomenting civil war in the United States. A network of

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The Information Disorder Update: October 16, 2018

To get the weekly Information Disorder newsletter direct to your inbox, subscribe here. Warren DNA Confusion U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry video was designed to extinguish the lingering allegations against her, but instead appears to have fanned the flames of mis- and disinformation. When the Massachusetts Democrat released her DNA results on Monday, the backlash on social media reflected

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Sarah Smarsh

Experiencing and Reporting on Rural America

Sarah Smarsh is the author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (Scribner, September 2018), a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. A freelance journalist and former professor of nonfiction writing, Smarsh covers politics and economic inequality for The Guardian, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and others from

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