Facebook Spreads Fake News Faster Than Any Other Social Website, According To New Research
Mark Travers
March 21, 2020
This article contains information about research that has concluded how Facebook is a driving source of fake news and websites that desiminate fake news. It has found that Facebook is “ the referrer site for untrustworthy news sources over 15% of the time. By contrast, Facebook referred users to authoritative news sites only 6% of the time.” With the level of control and active userbase that facebook has amongst the voting age public, the fact that information that is blatantly misleading or false about issues that would be important to the electorate poses a danger to democracy itself.
The Rise of the Deepfake and the threat to democracy
Simon Parkin
June 22, 2019
Deepfake technology only makes the problem worse. As AI algorithyms are better able to match faces with other people’s bodies in digital video formats, it is becoming closer to being indiscernible, where it takes a good eye to be able to spot a fake footage from a real one. This has implication for electoral campaigns as well as the general public whose reputation could be destroyed faster than it can be recovered once a deepfake is proven wrong. In the article, it states that “In May, researchers at Samsung’s AI lab in Moscow published “footage” of Marilyn Monroe, Salvador Dalà and the Mona Lisa, each clip generated from one still image. While it is still fairly easy to discern a deepfake from genuine footage, foolproof fabrications appear to be disconcertingly close. Recent electoral upsets have demonstrated the unprecedented power of political entities to microtarget individuals with news and content that confirms their biases. The incentive to use deepfakes to injure political opponents is great.” In other words, the technology will get better as the incentive to cause chaos and disruption is greater depending on the side that wants to make use of this technology.
Here are some things to think about–
1. These are both articles and for this assignment each source must be a different genre and/or media
2. The citations are not properly formatted. See the Unit2 guidlines for cites that help you format these, such as Purdue OWL, Citation Machine, and EasyBib
3. These annotations are incomplete–see the guidelines for all the parts you need to include in each annotations. To be brief they are: summary, evaluation, quotations. See what each of these entails in the guidelines.