Communication

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook

apnews.com - by Seth Borenstein - January 9, 2019

. . . People over 65 and ultra conservatives shared about seven times more fake information masquerading as news on the social media site than younger adults, moderates and super liberals during the 2016 election season, a new study finds.

The first major study to look at who is sharing links from debunked sites finds that not many people are doing it. On average only 8.5 percent of those studied — about 1 person out of 12 — shared false information during the 2016 campaign, according to the study in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances . But those doing it tend to be older and more conservative.

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A building destroyed by the Camp Fire is seen in Paradise, California, U.S., November 13, 2018. REUTERS/Terray Sylvester

reuters.com - by Andrew Hay - November 17, 2018

When a “megafire” engulfed Paradise, California, officials and residents had to abandon their evacuation plans and improvise new ways to save lives, learning lessons that could help the growing number of U.S. communities at risk to wildfires.

As strong winds sent flames roaring into Paradise at 2 miles per minute, emergency personnel and locals realized their escape plans, crafted after a 2008 blaze, would not work.

“The lessons we had learned in the past kind of went out of the window due to the sheer speed and intensity of this fire,” Paradise Emergency Operations Coordinator Jim Broshears said in a phone interview.

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CLICK HERE - STUDY - PNAS - Social learning and partisan bias in the interpretation of climate trends

techcrunch.com - by Devin Coldewey - September 3, 2018

Some topics are so politically charged that even to attempt a discussion online is to invite toxicity and rigid disagreement among participants. But a new study finds that exposure to the views of others, minus their political affiliation, could help us overcome our own biases.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, led by sociologist Damon Centola, examined how people’s interpretations of some commonly misunderstood climate change data changed after seeing those of people in opposing political parties.

The theory is that by exposing people to information sans partisan affiliation, we might be able to break the “motivated reasoning” that leads us to interpret data in a preconceived way.

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Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the Cambridge Analytica scandal with ads in multiple US and British newspapers Sunday.  JENNY KANE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

usatoday.com - by Marco della Cava - March 25, 2018

As Facebook continues to buffet winds of criticism, its founder took out full page ads in U.S. and British newspapers Sunday to apologize to consumers for not properly securing their personal data.

"This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time," Mark Zuckerberg said in the signed ad, which was published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and six British papers. "We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can't, we don't deserve it."

The ad refers to the misuse of 50 million Facebook profiles, which were mined through an app created by a Cambridge University professor and then sold, in violation of Facebook's terms of service, to Cambridge Analytica, a company that used the profiles to create election ad-targeting tools for the campaign to elect Donald Trump.