Immediately after the 2016 election, many Americans discovered just how much fake news they were sharing via social media. And for about ten minutes, the term fake news had a specific and literal meaning; it referred to fabricated stories made to look like news, and which serve either as clickbait to generate ad revenue or as mischief to fan the ...
It was encouraging to see our most prominent millennial Member of Congress, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recognize the link between a healthy democracy a professional class of journalists. On Friday, presumably in response to the startling number of layoffs at BuzzFeed, @AOC tweeted this: True to form, Mike Masnick of Techdirt replied: It is ironically quaint at this point to see ...
In several posts on the subject of Facebook and fake news, I have opined that if we users are going to believe and disseminate bogus information, that’s mostly an us problem, one which Facebook likely cannot solve. In that spirit, there is an extent to which I agree with Mike Masnick’s Techdirt post on May 2 calling Facebook’s plans to ...
On Monday, I was up early and first heard about the Las Vegas shooting on the radio in the car. It was still dark, and the winding road thick with fog, lending an eerie mood to the sound of Scott Simon’s voice on NPR reporting what little was known about this latest incident in what is now an epidemic of ...
The implication that copyright is fundamentally a tool of censorship is a favorite theme among its critics. They rarely miss an opportunity to ring this particular bell when the chance presents itself; and most recently, Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica, reported that Sirius XM filed a DMCA notice to have an archive of interviews between Howard Stern and Donald ...
