On a recent afternoon in Helsinki, a group of students gathered to hear a lecture on a subject that is far from a staple in most community college curriculums. Standing in front of the classroom at Espoo Adult Education Centre, Jussi Toivanen worked his way through his PowerPoint presentation. A slide titled “Have you been hit by the Russian troll army?” included a checklist of methods used to deceive readers on social media: image and video manipulations, half-truths, intimidation and false profiles.

It’s late morning and roughly 25 senior citizens are learning how to talk to Siri. They pick up their iPads and press the home button, and pings echo around the room as Siri asks what she can do to help. “Siri, what’s the closest coffee shop?” one woman asks. “Sorry I’m having trouble with the connection, please try again?” Siri says.

Updates to groups, the News Feed, and Messenger are meant to reduce harmful content.

A recently published study found that Facebook users over 65 years old were far more likely than other adults to share disinformation on social media. Researchers at both Princeton and New York University concluded that though the practice of spreading so-called fake news was rare overall, a person's likelihood of sharing it correlated more strongly with age than it did education, sex, or political views.

How can I describe the fine of between $3 billion and $5 billion that Facebook is likely to pay to the Federal Trade Commission — which will doubtlessly be touted as its largest ever — to settle the government’s inquiry into what the social networking giant called “our platform and user data practices”? How about: It’s a parking ticket. Not a speeding ticket. Not a DUI — or a DUI(P), data under the influence of Putin. A parking ticket.

Fake news is a threat to American democratic institutions, whether through online election interference or, in extreme cases, inciting violence. It also can destroy a person’s reputation and career. Social media companies are spending huge amounts of money to combat the problem but with little success.

Fake news is an epidemic on social media. Even President Barack Obama is concerned about the effect this reckless spread of misinformation is going to have on our nation, and, as he revealed in a lengthy interview with The New Yorker, the effect it will have on our planet. Obama blamed fake news — and social media more broadly — for being a major reason why the country can’t come together to combat global climate change.

In the free marketplace of ideas, true ideas are supposed to compete with false ones until the truth wins -- at least according to a leading rationale for free speech. But what if the rise of fake news shows that, under current conditions, truth may not defeat falsehood in the market? That would start to make free speech look a whole lot less appealing. The rise of fake news therefore poses a serious challenge to our basic ideas about the First Amendment. Much of the debate in recent weeks has focused on social media and search engines.

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation. Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts...

THE EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENON of fake news spread by Facebook and other social media during the 2016 presidential election has been largely portrayed as a lucky break for Donald Trump. By that reckoning, entrepreneurial Macedonian teenagers, opportunists in Tbilisi and California millennials have exploited social media algorithms in order to make money — only incidentally leading to the viral proliferation of mostly anti-Clinton and anti-Obama hoaxes and conspiracy theories that thrilled many Trump supporters.

Video of the controversial aid group Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the “White Helmets,” has leaked showing the staging of a fake rescue. By Dan Wright.

Jon Stewart is a seasoned satirical news expert. Last night (Nov. 30) in New York City, the former Daily Show host took aim at the real media, commenting on its failures in the latest election cycle and its loss of trust among Americans. “What the media has become is an information-laundering system,” Stewart said, citing the thin, porous line between news published by mainstream media and fake news.

Electric-car evangelist is the target of concerted negative online campaign linked to influential rightwing network

Many of the fake news websites that sprang up during the US election campaign have been traced to a small city in Macedonia, where teenagers are pumping out sensationalist stories to earn cash from advertising. The young man sitting in the cafe looks barely more than a boy - he hasn't shaved for a few days, yet he's a long way off achieving designer stubble. The hair on his chin and cheeks is still soft and his smart navy blazer and clean white shirt make him look as if he's in school uniform.

Those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it. By Glenn Greenwald.

“Mostly it has to do with words, especially binary oppositions like ‘real’ and ‘fake,’ and ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal,’ which are, of course, essentially meaningless … their value being purely tactical. Which is to say they denote nothing.” By CJ Hopkins.

CDU politician Patrick Sensburg wants to criminalize the creation of fake news. He told DW about what makes misinformation so dangerous and why offenders could be tried for espionage.

Tim Pool

Facebook is going to start fact-checking, labeling, and burying fake news and hoaxes in its News Feed, the company said Thursday. The decision comes after Facebook received heated criticism for its role in spreading a deluge of political misinformation during the US presidential election, like one story that falsely said the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump.

Here is the reality that Lenny Pozner faces every day: On a Friday morning four years ago, Lenny dropped off his son, Noah, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. It was three weeks after Noah's sixth birthday, and he had just lost his first tooth. He was a little guy, bright and inquisitive, who loved books and started reading at an early age. "He had this charm about him,” said Pozner. “He was handsome. He was incredibly loving." But that morning, on Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook and gunned down Noah, along with 19 other children and six staff members.

Earlier this week, Facebook said that it would be partnering with fact-checking sites like Snopes to help weed out the fake news that has been plaguing the site in recent years. But it seems that Germany is not confident that self-regulation will be enough. The chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Thomas Oppermann, has suggested a new law that would require companies like Facebook to set up an office in the country that would deal with fake news and hate speech at all hours of the day.

US government “propagandists” push for a foreign policy of “intervening around the world,” former presidential candidate and founder of the Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Dr. Ron Paul, told RT in a wide-ranging interview that also touched on Syria.

In an interview with Sputnik, Igor Nezhdanov suggested that despite the wide array of fake videos about Syria, the story always remains the same. On Monday, the Egyptian Interior Ministry said that the country's police detained a man for making staged "wounded children" photos, which he was planning to post on social media. He had intended to claim that they were actual photos of destruction and injured people in Aleppo.

Germany's government plans to create a center to fight "disinformation" online ahead of next year's elections, a media report has said. The move comes amid reports that fake news influenced the US election.

Bana al-Abed, the Syrian girl whose Tweets from eastern Aleppo captured the world’s attention, meets with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan at his palace in Ankara.

“Yet, the Times falsely asserts that “a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states.” But the two largest states, Virginia, which had almost 300,000 slaves, and Massachusetts, which had none, both favored the Virginia Plan in the early days of the convention.” By Steve Byas.

Assuring users that the company’s entire team of engineers was working hard to make sure a glitch like this never happens again, Facebook executives confirmed during a press conference Tuesday that a horrible accident last night involving the website’s algorithm had resulted in thousands of users being exposed to new concepts. [Satire]

President Obama on Friday signed the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, providing nearly $619 billion for war and military spending. The measure passed both houses of Congress with a veto-proof majority and will bring troops a modest pay raise while increasing the number of active-duty soldiers to more than 1.3 million. The NDAA also restricts transfers from the Guantánamo Bay detention center, guaranteeing that Obama will leave office without fulfilling his pledge to close the prison.

When the issue of “fake news” came to prominence at the end of this year’s election cycle, traditional media outlets were the firsts to engage in relentless finger-pointing. Journalists everywhere deplored the spread of misleading, lazily reported and, in some cases, totally fabricated stories that had been facilitated by social media. That’d be ignoring — of course — that in a competitive media climate where virality and accuracy go head-to-head...

Those who want to combat Fake News should stop aggressively spreading it when it suits their agenda. Julian Assange is a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him (into which category one falls in any given year typically depends on one’s feelings about the subject of his most recent publication of leaked documents). But one’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article, which is not about Assange. This article, instead, is about a report published this week by The Guardian that recklessly attributed to Assange comments that he did not make.

False Story About Hacking U.S. Electric Grid. By Glenn Greenwald.

The Washington Post on Friday reported a genuinely alarming event: Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. power system through an electrical grid in Vermont. The Post headline conveyed the seriousness of the threat: The first sentence of the article directly linked this cyberattack to alleged Russian hacking of the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta — what is now routinely referred to as “Russian hacking of our election” — by referencing the code name revealed on Wednesday by the Obama administration when it announced sanctions on Russian officials...

Russia has coordinated a campaign over the past two years to influence Sweden’s decision making by using disinformation, Russia has coordinated a campaign over the past two years to influence Sweden’s decision making by using disinformation, propaganda and false documents, according to a report by researchers at The Swedish Institute of International Affairs. One of the main tools for spreading false information was the Swedish language version of the state-funded news website, Sputnik News, one of the reports co-authors Sebastian Åsberg told Radio Sweden.

The BBC is to assemble a team to fact check and debunk deliberately misleading and false stories masquerading as real news. Amid growing concern among politicians and news organisations about the impact of false information online, news chief James Harding told staff on Thursday that the BBC would be “weighing in on the battle over lies, distortions and exaggerations”. The plans will see the corporation’s Reality Check series become permanent, backed by a dedicated team targeting false stories or facts being shared widely on social media.

Current theater critic and Fox News commentator Judith Miller is undoubtedly best known for her fact-free reporting on Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” for the New York Times that helped create the pretext for the 2003 war in Iraq. So it was rather odd yesterday when Miller criticized President Obama’s decision to commute the sentence of Chelsea Manning by wondering, “How many people died because of Manning’s leak?” The quick answer is none, but the internet wasn’t going to let Miller off that easy.