Archive for 2019

WIDELY CITED STUDY OF FAKE NEWS TURNS OUT TO BE BOGUS:

Last year, a study was published in the Journal of Human Behavior, explaining why fake news goes viral on social media. The study itself went viral, being covered by dozens of news outlets. But now, it turns out there was an error in the researchers’ analysis that invalidates their initial conclusion, and the study has been retracted.

The study sought to determine the role of short attention spans and information overload in the spread of fake news. To do this, researchers compared the empirical data from social networking sites that show that fake news is just as likely to be shared as real news — a fact that Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University and a co-author of the study, stresses to Rolling Stone is still definitely true — to a simplified model they created of a social media site where they could control for various factors.

Because of an error in processing their findings, their results showed that the simplified model was able to reproduce the real-life numbers, determining that people spread fake news because of their short attention spans and not necessarily, for example, because of foreign bots promoting particular stories. Last spring, the researchers discovered the error when they tried to reproduce their results and found that while attention span and information overload did impact how fake news spread through their model network, they didn’t impact it quite enough to account for the comparative rates at which real and fake news spread in real life. They alerted the journal right away, and the journal deliberated for almost a year whether to issue a correction or a retraction, before finally deciding on Monday to retract the article.

Good for them to note the error.

WE, THE PRESS: “Frank Bruni, formerly the New York Times’s White House reporter and now a columnist for the paper, has a long, long op-ed that is unintentionally revealing. It is headlined, ‘Will the Media Be Trump’s Accomplice Again in 2020?’ As though the press were pro-Trump in 2016! ‘We have a second chance. Let’s not blow it.’ A second chance to help a Democrat beat Donald Trump.”

Just think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

OPEN THREAD: End the weekend with flair.

#BELIEVEALLWOMEN: 70 Years After They Were Wrongly Imprisoned, the Groveland Four Have Been Pardoned: The criminal justice system failed four black men after a white woman accused them of rape.

Nearly 70 years ago, four black men in Lake County, Florida, were accused and convicted of raping a white woman. Today, Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, and Earnest Thomas have received posthumous pardons from the state.

The men, commonly referred to as the “Groveland Four,” were accused of raping a 17-year-old in 1949. Greenlee, Irvin, and Shepherd were beaten into confessing after their arrest. According to the Innocence Project, documents from the case revealed that there was no evidence of a sexual assault. In addition to the documents, no physical evidence of the men’s involvement was presented in court, including a medical examination of the accuser. . . .

A former FBI agent who testified on Irvin’s behalf said prosecutors manufactured evidence. Despite this, Irvin was convicted a second time for the rape.

Sounds like a college campus today.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Texas corrections officer accused of having sex with multiple inmates. “More charges were filed Thursday against Sinead Nichole Hagan, 27, for improper sexual activity with a person in custody at Hopkins County Jail, radio station KSST reported. The X-rated video surfaced as Texas Rangers investigated Hagan for her relationship with another inmate.”

THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS: One of the fundamental elements of good journalism is “show, don’t tell.” This means that reporting facts are preferred over interpretation or characterizations. But it’s not hard to see why distrust in the legacy media is ever-rising.

“Americans blame shutdown on Trump over Democrats by wide margin, poll finds” blares USA Today. Wide margin? The poll actually shows that:

When asked, “Who do you think is mainly responsible for this situation?” 53 percent of Americans told pollsters they blamed Trump and congressional Republicans.

Three points is a “wide” margin? Moreover, the story’s kicker admits that “The poll of 788 Americans was conducted Jan. 8-11 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent.” When the spread is less than the margin of error, that’s usually called a “split” or “close” race.

What more, this important fact isn’t revealed until the third paragraph. Given the fact that as many as 25 percent of American adults get their news from Facebook, and given that too many people never read past the headline, this is especially egregious. “Fake news”? No, but “Wrong” news? Absolutely.

HIGH SPEED PASS OVER TORONTO IN AN F-35: Dramatic photo. It’s a still that captures the energy and speed. Great colors and color contrast. Congrats to the USAF Airman 1st Class who snapped it.

THIS HAS BEEN MY OBSERVATION:

TWITTER TWITS:  A former Portland mayoral candidate condemned the Portland police via Twitter for shooting a paranoid schizophrenic home invader who was pulling a knife on an officer.  It’s not clear what she thought the alternative was.  She recommended that we “stop funding this deadly paramilitary force and start funding things that actually keep the people of Portland safe.”  When conservative talk-radio host Lars Larson pointed out the facts of the case, the twits at Twitter banned him for 12 hours.