Tom Felle, University of Galway
Media freedom has long been essential to healthy democracy. It is the oxygen that fuels informed debate, exposes corruption and holds power to account. But around the world, that freedom is under sustained attack.
Rebecca Brown, University of Oxford
Parents frequently lie to their children. “No, you can’t have any chocolate – it’s all gone,” when there’s a jumbo bar of Dairy Milk in the cupboard. “No, you can’t have my phone to watch YouTube – the battery’s flat,” when it’s at a solid 65%.
Sharon Coen, University of Salford
The start of the new year brings inevitable pressure to start fresh, with new hobbies, exercise regimes and healthy diets. But there is one diet you may not have thought of improving this year: your media and news consumption.
Jan. 2, 2024 /Politics/ — 2024 is shaping up to be a bumper year for elections! Here are some noteworthy examples beyond the UK and USA: Continue reading
Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol and Jana Lasser, Graz University of Technology
According to fact checkers, Donald Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency. That’s around 20 a day. But, according to several opinion polls during his presidency, around 75% of Republican voters still considered Trump to be honest.
Scams are one of the most pervasive Cyber Safety threats of our time. The sheer volume is staggering – people are collectively wading through 3.4 billion phishing emails on a daily basis – and scams are becoming more sophisticated and harder to spot without help. Today, Norton, a leader in Cyber Safety and part of Gen™ (NASDAQ: GEN), is inviting people to join in the fight against scams by offering early access to Norton Genie, a real-time AI-powered scam detector, to provide an easy, fast and free way to check if texts, emails, websites and social media posts are a scam. Continue reading
Stacey Wood, Scripps College and Yaniv Hanoch, University of Southampton
Online fraud is today’s most common crime. Victims are often told they are foolish for falling for it, but fraudsters use psychological mechanisms to infiltrate the defences of their targets, regardless of how intelligent they are.
So it’s important to keep up with the latest scams and understand how they work.
Sean Dodson, Leeds Beckett University
Buzzfeed News, once a shining star of digital journalism, has announced it will shut its award-winning news division for good, laying off about 60 journalists in a move its founding editor, Ben Smith, described as “the end of the marriage between social media and news”.
April 18, 2023 /Business/ — Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox Corporation and its Fox News Channel on March 26, 2021, alleging that the network defamed the company by repeatedly making false and defamatory claims about its voting machines in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
The lawsuit alleged that Fox News hosts and guests, including former President Donald Trump, made false and defamatory claims about Dominion’s voting machines, including that they were “rigged” and “susceptible to hacking.” The lawsuit also alleged that Fox News’s coverage of Dominion’s voting machines was “reckless and false” and that it caused Dominion to suffer “severe and irreparable harm.”
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April 17, 2023 /MEDIA/ — The future of AI-powered disinformation is a concerning one. As AI technology continues to develop, it will become increasingly easy to create and spread false or misleading information. This could have a devastating impact on our society, as it could erode trust in institutions, undermine democracy, and lead to violence.
There are a number of ways in which AI could be used to spread disinformation. For example, AI could be used to create fake news articles, social media posts, and videos that are designed to look like they are from legitimate sources. AI could also be used to target people with personalized disinformation, based on their interests and beliefs.
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