So I decided to make my final blog post cover yet another recent fake news story. Recently a story entitled "Clinton Foundation Cargo Ship Raided At Port Of Baltimore Reveals Sick Secret," was posted on a site called DailyUsaUpdate, a site already well know for trafficking in fake stories. This latest article claimed that a raid on a Clinton foundation owned cargo ship found at the Port of Baltimore found around 460 illegal refugees in shiping contains on board the ship. The odd part about this story is that if you do a little digging you’ll find that the no such ship appears on the cargo manifest for the Port of Baltimore. You most likely will also find that the Clinton Foundation does not own any cargo ships to begin with.
Luckily, it seems that this story is having trouble getting off the ground. From all the places I checked, no one seems to be buying into this story. Perhaps this is a sign that people are wising up to fake news or perhaps it was just to farfetched to believe this time but I found that nobody's even talking about this latest story. Though it might be a tad optimistic of me, I would like to see this as a sign that if this is not a sign of people wising up, to see it as a sign that some of the new means of combating fake news are working. Though I only saw this mentioned in one of the articles I read in researching this story, article titled Fake news: Clinton Foundation has no ships, didn’t smuggle refugees posted on politifact mentions how “The article was flagged by Facebook users, as part of the social media site’s efforts to cut down on fake posts being shared in news feeds.” Though it might be a tad early to say this, I am glad that it seems that some of the new ways social networks are implementing to fight fake news are working. Politifact, and Internet Rumors Bloggers. "Clinton Foundation Has No Ships, Didn't Smuggle Refugees." @politifact. N.p., 12 May 2017. Web. 13 May 2017.
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Today is a dark day for the truth. When trying to find an article about propaganda and fake news I stumbled across an article called BBC - Future - Lies, propaganda and fake news: A challenge for our age. The article itself said nothing that has not been said before save for one tidbit. The author opens the article by asking who the first black president was, and then asks the reader to google the answer. Doing so proved to be incredibly disheartening. The third articles when googling “first black president” was an article titled The Seven Black Presidents Before Barack Obama. I did not even bothering reading the article. My disappointment comes not only from the fact that this article existed but that it was the third google search result. I was expecting to just see an article about Barack Obama to be the highest result but instead we get a joke video being the highest result, followed by an article refuting claims that there was a black president before Obama and then an article spouting utter nonsense. After that google includes a list of “similar” questions all of which point to a man named John Hanson being the first black president. Doing a tiny bit of research on the matter here is what I learned about John Hanson:
Gevinson, Alan. "Teaching History.org, Home of the National History Education Clearinghouse." Was There an African American President Before Barack Obama? | Teachinghistory.org. Teachinghistory.org, n.d. Web. 05 May 2017. Gray, Richard. "BBC - Future - Lies, Propaganda and Fake News: A Challenge for Our Age." BBC News. BBC, 01 Mar. 2017. Web. 05 May 2017. Today I am writing about Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of wikipedia, and his new site that he hopes will help fight against fake news. In theguardian article entitled Wikipedia founder to fight fake news with new Wikitribune site, it talks about what exactly Wikitribune is going to be and why Wales believes it will help to stop the spread of false information. In essence Wikitribune will be for news what Wikipedia is for general information. The articles presented on the site will be written by professional journalists with the aid of “an army of volunteer community contributors.” (Hern, Alex) The idea being that with so many people, both paid and unpaid, fact checking the information presented the resulting articles will be more factually sound and contain less bias and opinions on the content. In my opinion this seems like a great idea. So far in my research of fake news, along with the ethical issues that surround it, the most ethical solution to the problem is simply fact checking everything. The primary issue of censoring fake news is how doing so would violate freedom of speech as well as open up the possibility of abuse in what content is censored. By having a large forum open to the public to help filter out the falsehoods present in ongoing stories, it helps people who are not willing or not capable of fact checking for themselves a large pool of allegedly unbiased and factual information. The issues I see with Wikitribunel are the same issues many have with Wikipedia. The article made it seem that not everyone is free to edit the sites content but that has yet to be seen. The issue with Wikipedia and potentially Wikitribunel is that since it is so easy to edit or vandalize a page some stories might be changed to contain fake news and a lot of people might read and buy into the false story before it get corrected. Though I feel Wikitribunel may become an excellent tool, I still feel it is necessary for everyone to take it upon themselves to fact check information before believing in it.
Hern, Alex. "Wikipedia Founder to Fight Fake News with New Wikitribune Site." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 24 Apr. 2017. Web. 29 Apr. 2017. Talking more about censorship, Facebook is currently creating a tool that would allow governments to prevent certain posts to appear. They are doing so in hopes of getting China to allow their company to do business in China. Though the software is in development it may not ever see the light of day as Facebook has a history of announcing new features that never see the light of day. The reason I find this particular software to be so interesting is the potential it has to be abused. The very nature of the software is anti free speech and goes against what we as American believe. Though the software is intended to be used by China, there is no guarantee it would not be used here in the US as well. I personally feel that the software’s potential to be misused makes it dangerous. On the other hand however, Facebook is a company and they are entitled to try to expand their business. What I feel this all boils down to is that people need to get their news from other sources besides what pops up on their Facebook feed. Having too much faith in any one source is problematic and it is always best to fact check information for yourself.
Isaac, Mike. "Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back Into China." The New York Times. The New York Times, 22 Nov. 2016. Web. 21 Apr. 2017. Earlier this month, Germany approved a bill that will impose a fine to social network sites that fail to remove “criminal content” as defined by German law within 24 hours of it being posted. The bill also states that other illegal content must be removed with seven day. Though the bill still needs parliamentary approval before going into effect, it is likely to pass. With this being said, I am unsure where I stand on this bill. Looking at it in one light, it will undoubtedly reduce the amount of hate speech posted online. The downside however it will likely cause many posts, that do not contain “illegal content”, to be removed. This will happen because social network sites will likely not want to risk being fined and therefore err on the side of caution in regard to removing posts. This raises the prime ethical concern of monitoring fake news. Though readers do not want to be deceived by false information, posters want to be able to post opinion pieces. With this bill in place, those opinion based posts would be subject to removal if they contain opinions that could be seen as “illegal content.” Personally, though I agree that something needs to be done about fake news, I do not believe this is the way to handle the issue.
Cnbc. "Germany Could Start Fining Social Media Giants $53 Million for Not Tackling Fake News, Hate Crime." CNBC. CNBC, 06 Apr. 2017. Web. 13 Apr. 2017. This week I chose to write about a facebook post created by Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, and contains his thoughts on how Facebook should handle fake news and explains the issues of doing so. The post is a little old but still gets across some points about my essay topic. Though normally a facebook post would not be a very good source of information I feel that using a post made by the company CEO is a reliably enough source of information regarding the company. Though many of the specifics only relate to what facebook is doing about fake news the more broad topics addressed in the post address the underlying ethical issues about fake news and why it is difficult to police.
Zuckerberg’s post does an outstanding job addressing the my paper’s core topic, expressing how people both want the stories they read to be accurate and relate to them but also do not want to be limited on what they post. I especially liked this quote: “The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically. We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible. We need to be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or to mistakenly restrict accurate content. We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties” (Zuckerberg, Mark). This quote in particular essentially explains the entire ethical problem fake news creates. Nobody wants to be deceived but when limits are placed on what people are allowed to say or post where does it end. The post also list what facebook is currently working on to help stop the spread of fake news including: Stronger detection, Easy reporting, Third party verification, Warnings, Related articles quality, Disrupting fake news economics, and user feedback. Most of these countermeasures are work in progress or updated versions of systems already in place and Zuckerberg himself is aware that many of these systems may not work in detecting and deterring fake news stories. Zuckerberg, Mark. “A lot of you have asked what we're doing about misinformation..." Facebook. N.p., 18 Nov. 2016. Web. 05 Apr. 2017. So today I was browsing news articles looking for something to write about when I found one called Pennsylvania high school gives nearly 500 students suspension notices. The article mention how this mass suspension is the new school principals means of cracking down on truancy. This bothers me however. If the Principal is trying to get students to come to class, why is she kicking kids out, albit temporarily. At least for me, I have never understood suspension as a form of punishment from school. These are kids already willing to skip class in order to goof around and now they have the added excuse of being suspended and literally not being allowed to go. The idea behind suspension is that they are being punished for misdemeanor but all it is really doing is shifting the responsibility of punishment back to the parents. Normally I believe that it the parents responsibility to discipline but how are they supposed to supervise their child when they have to go to work and the child gets to be home alone. Not only that but considering the sheer number of suspensions just issued, most of that student's friends are also currently not in class and free to hang out. In my opinion suspension from school is an ineffective form of punishment in a school environment. Honestly though I do not have a better alternative. The ones that come to mind are of course detention and additional work but I am unsure how effective those would be when the students regularly skip out on required classes anyway. What are your thoughts on the matter? Does suspension work as a punishment in schools or are there better ways of handling it?
"New PA Principal Issues Suspensions to Half of High School's Students." Fox News. FOX News Network, 31 Mar. 2017. Web. 31 Mar. 2017. Before I start, I know this entry is very late. Having gone back home for spring break I completely forgot about making a blog post. It did not help the matter that all the big stories were either about Trump saying something or doing something stupid or about a terrorist attack in London. I have already wrote about Trump’s tweets in another blog post and I did not want to write about a terror attack so I dug around and eventually found an article that peaked my interest. The article titled Movie studios think you’ll pay crazy amounts of money to watch movies still in cinemas at home was posted on Quartz Media this past Thursday and it talks about how, with the decline of DVD sales, companies like Universal and Warner are trying to get digital rentals out faster for their movies and how they are meeting opposition from AMC and Regal. Though I is an odd topic to address all of a sudden it did get me thinking about when the last time I actually bought a DVD or Blueray was. I realised that most of the time I’ll see a movie in theaters and not feel the need to go and buy it when it comes out later. I also realised that even if I decided I did want to watch the film again later I would usually just see if it was available online first. Back to the story though, in order to get around exclusive screening, companies would have to charge around thirty dollars to rent a movie weeks after it was played in theaters. I do not know about you but I do not think I would be willing to spend that kind of money just to watch the latest blockbuster early.
Rodriguez, Ashley. "Movie Studios Think You'll Pay Crazy Amounts of Money to Watch Movies Still in Cinemas at Home." Quartz. Quartz, 23 Mar. 2017. Web. 26 Mar. 2017. Today I decided to talk about Gen. James Cartwright his guilty plea regarding the mishandling of classified information. Though this story is a bit old, it interested me due to the many ethical issues that it brought up. To start this has been an ongoing case since 2012 when classified information regarding Stuxnet, a computer virus designed to hamper Iran’s nuclear program, was leaked to the public. At the time Gen. Cartwright denied claims of being the source of the leak but has now retracted that statement.
Moving on to the ethical issues, I am going to start with the Stuxnet virus in general. Though created to prevent the development of nuclear weapons by Iran, the virus got out and “infected millions of computers around the world.” (Groll) This begs the question whether or not the US did the right thing in developing the Virus. Though it did cripple Iran’s nuclear program it also hindered people globally for no reason. In quote by norton, “Stuxnet is a computer worm that targets industrial control systems that are used to monitor and control large scale industrial facilities like power plants, dams, waste processing systems and similar operations. It allows the attackers to take control of these systems without the operators knowing. This is the first attack we’ve seen that allows hackers to manipulate real-world equipment, which makes it very dangerous.” (Norton) This begs the question, was it ok for the US to develop such a dangerous weapon. Next on the list of issues this topic brought up is the spread of misinformation brought on by Gen. Cartwright original statement. Though he was clearly cited as the source of the leaks, he lied to the FBI and claimed to have no connection to the leak. This claim prolonged to FBI investigation for several years. On top of prolonging an FBI investigation, it also helped spread misinformation regarding the case. Fake news is a serious problem which I am going in more detail in my research paper. The Final issue this story brought up and the one most fascinating to me is the sentencing. Though no official sentencing has yet to be given, according to the article Gen. Cartwright is only facing zero to six months in prison. The other shocking part is that he is not being sentenced for the leaking of classified information but for lying during an FBI investigation. This sentencing may create a bad pretense for how this sort of case is handled and also makes it seem that Gen. Cartwright is getting off light due to his rank. I have to ask, what are other people’s thoughts on this. Personally I just find this whole thing fascinating. Scary but fascinating. Groll, Elias. "'Obama's General' Pleads Guilty to Leaking Stuxnet Operation." Foreign Policy. The Cable, 17 Oct. 2016. Web. 16 Mar. 2017 "Stuxnet Worm – Malware Virus Attack | Norton." Stuxnet Worm – Malware Virus Attack | Norton. Norton, n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2017. Despite my best efforts to avoid this topic, today I am getting a bit political. Recently Donald Trump tweeted out the following statement, “How low has President Obama gone to [tap] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” The issue with this tweet is that not only is it not backed up by any reputable source but is also not within the power of the president. The US president does not have the authority to order a domestic wiretap on a US citizen without casus belli. According to an article in the Bloomberg View, “Only a court can order a domestic wiretap, and that only after a showing of probable cause by the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” (Noah Freldman) Also stated by Josh Earnest, Obama’s former White House press secretary “If the FBI decided to use their wiretapping authority in the context of the counterintelligence or criminal investigation, it would require FBI investigators, officials at the Department of Justice going to a federal judge, and making a case, and demonstrating probable cause to use that authority to conduct the investigation.” (Josh Earnest) With all of that said there are only really two options in this scenario that could be true. Either Trump has made another bull faced lie in an attempt to distract people or FBI investigators (not the former president) did tap his phones in which case he was under a series criminal investigation. Neither option would benefit the sitting president.
I bring all this up because it is an excellent example of fake news, the topic of my research for the group project. This is a prime example of how fake news spreads. One of the major ways fake news spreads is when a “reputable” source or one with a large following makes a statement which they may or may not believe to be true based off of unsited or unsourced information. This is exactly what President Trump is doing, spreading false information without sources to a large audience. So thanks Mr. President thanks for contributing to the growing problem of fake news. Feldman, Noah. "Trump's Wiretap Tweets Raise Risk of Impeachment." Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, 06 Mar. 2017. Web. 11 Mar. 2017. Schwartz, Ian. "Earnest: The President Can't Unilaterally Order The Wiretapping Of A U.S. Citizen." Video | RealClearPolitics. RealClearPolitics, 6 Mar. 2017. Web. 11 Mar. 2017. |
AuthorIan Kindall a CD major emphasizing in Game Design Archives
May 2017
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