Agreed that what we're seeing are Internet-enabled implementations of old
practices. I think that there has been a recent renewal of awareness of how
effective these dark arts can be at generating revenue and perhaps
affecting political systems.
Over the years, a number of people and organizations have tried to
manipulate the neutrality of Wikipedia content for political, financial, or
PR advantage. I have the impression that the community's human resources
capacity and technical tools are currently insufficient in comparison to
the scale of the problems. I'm hoping that some of the tools that are being
developed as a part of the anti-harassment initiative will help a little.
I'm also thinking that a good exercise for students in Wikipedia in
Education classes would be to identify content that is noncompliant with
neutrality and verifiability standards, and either change that content
themselves or flag it for review by more experienced editors.
Pine
On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 5:53 AM, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Pine wrote:
I'm finding it encouraging to see that a number of researchers and
journalists are taking these problems seriously, trying to understand
them,
social-media-could-outfox-technical-solutions-for-now
I'm encouraged by the studies, but confused about why the fake news
phenomenon is considered novel, rather than continuations of age-old
disinformation, yellow journalism, aggressive public relations,
manufactured consent, astroturfing, propaganda, and deceptive
marketing. There's nothing new about it other than the term.
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