Liz Schwartz

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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The Vanishing Voter by Thomas E. Patterson

The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty Thomas E. Patterson, Shorenstein Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, September, 2002 During the 2000 presidential campaign with the support of a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy conducted the most exhaustive study

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The Vanishing Voter Project: 2000 and 2004

The Vanishing Voter Project was based at the Shorenstein Center during the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. Through research, the project tried to understand the factors that affect public involvement and to use this information to propose constructive changes in the election process. In 2000, the Vanishing Voter Project centered on weekly national surveys designed to

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