An unsigned and suspicious article, featured on the website of the Kosovar public broadcaster in the middle of the last election campaign, resparked the debate in Pristina on the use of false news as a tool for propaganda and political struggle.

We take a look at how media outlets in the UK - and in Europe, Asia, Australia and USA - were all caught out by a Finland story that was just too good to be true. Because it wasn't.

Effectively engaging with audiences is key in keeping news media and journalism initiatives afloat. However, trust in the media is in decline, and it impacts engagement as well.

Much time and money have been spent on combatting misinformation through fact-checking. But it’s not clear whether it has any impact at all.

In many different parts of the world, trust in public and public-serving institutions – especially the news media – has declined alarmingly over at least the last decade.

As the trolling ramped up in 2015, President Sauli Niinisto called on every Finn to take responsibility for the fight against false information. A year later, Finland brought in American experts to advise officials. The education system was also reformed to emphasize critical thinking. “The first line of defense is the kindergarten teacher'.

Among the changes:
Facebook is now reducing the reach of groups that repeatedly spread misinformation.
It is exploring the use of crowdsourcing as a way to determine which news outlets users trust most.
And the company is adding new indicators to Messenger, groups and News Feed in an effort to inform users about the content they’re seeing.

Claudio E. Cabrera of the New York Times, who specializes in search engine optimization, describes how he keeps track of what’s hot in search and how that informs coverage — and what the limits are.

The current system for delivering news online is broken. Readers and journalists will need to work together to find a new one.

Are we all just clicks away from identifying as ‘flat-Earthers’?

How online fear feeds political smear campaigns, stock market rumors, and ISIS propaganda.

A barrage of fake images in Kashmir. Jency Jacob had never seen anything like it. “We have been fact-checking since November 2016,” the Boom Live managing editor tweeted on Monday. “Never before has one incident taught us so many things about new forms of #fakeimages.”

“For a society to have ready access to high-quality news is essential not just for the moment, but for the long-term sustainability of democracy.”

From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the Syrian civil war, we've learned that a real video can be just as misleading as a fake one.

The research examined two main questions:
1. Do uncivil comments on news stories make people perceive other site users and the news site more negatively?
2. Do people make this evaluation about the news site based on the first few comments they see or based on the predominant tone of all the visible comments in the stream?

Heated debates focus on new and emerging technologies in the lives of children, young people, families and schools. New research brings together the perspectives of tech industry insiders and those of young people, parents, and educators across Europe, to explore the future of tech and provide practical recommendations.

A conversation with Jonathan Gray and Liliana Bounegru, editors of the Data Journalism Handbook 2: Towards a Critical Data Practice.

Are they blinded by their political passions? Or are they just intellectually lazy? An opinion piece by psychologists Dr. Gordon Pennycook and Dr. David Rand.

According to Serbian fact-checking portal Raskrikavanje, more than 700 false or unverified news stories were published on the front pages of three Serbian tabloids (Informer, Alo and Srpski Telegraf) in 2018.
These false or unfounded news articles were mainly pushing narratives on President Putin’s strong support to Serbia and the war rhetoric and inflammatory reporting on Kosovo.

Through 20 interviews with stakeholders in online advertising, this study looks at how the programmatic advertising industry understands “fake news,” how it conceptualizes and grapples with the use of its tools by hoax publishers to generate revenue, and how its approach to the issue may ultimately contribute to reshaping the financial underpinnings of the digital journalism industry that depends on the same economic infrastructure.

Parenting for a Digital Future releases the fourth in its series of reports from its nationally representative survey of UK parents of children aged 0-17. This report highlights why digital inequalities matter in our increasingly digitalized and connected world. In this post, Sonia Livingstone and Dongmiao Zhang discuss the major findings from the study, and outline why socio-economic status and parental education are extremely important in shaping children’s digital lives and why.

The internet has always been awash with misinformation and hate, but never has it felt so inescapable and overwhelming as it did this year. From Facebook’s role in fanning the flames of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar to the rise of QAnon to the so-called migrant caravan to the influence campaign conducted by the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency, 2018 was a rough year to be online, regardless of the strength of your media literacy skills.

11 studies we have found valuable for insights on how children conceptualise privacy, their (often frustrated and resigned) interactions with digital environments, their understandings of data, and the role of parents in children’s privacy online.

As governments, institutions, civil society and industry seek to tackle the challenges posed by misinformation, improving the public’s media literacy and/or digital literacy is often cited as a potential solution.
Gianfranco Polizzi, a PhD researcher at the LSE, discusses how critical digital literacy relates to trust, and how policy conversations should be redirected.

“We have seen this rapid rise in deep learning technology and the question is: Is that going to keep going, or is it plateauing? What’s going to happen next?”

A large-scale study by the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that young people at every stage from middle school to college were consistently unable to differentiate news from advertising, or false information from the truth, a state of affairs the researchers described as “bleak.”

Тhe government has banned the term “fake news” after urging ministers to use “misinformation” or "disinformation" instead.

Algorithms are a black box. We can see them at work in the world. We know they’re shaping outcomes all around us. But most of us have no idea what they are — or how we’re being influenced by them.

Teachers are looking for ways to integrate media literacy into their classroom – especially since it became obvious that students cannot distinguish between real or fake news. Here are six ways to help you teach your students to be media literate.

Misinformation and distrust are the characteristic of our time. They make the question of how to approach and promote critical digital literacy particularly important. Gianfranco Polizzi suggests ten texts that offer a framework for thinking about how to do it.