Agreed that what we're seeing are Internet-enabled implementations of old practices. I think that there has been a recent renewal of awareness of how effective these dark arts can be at generating revenue and perhaps affecting political systems.
Over the years, a number of people and organizations have tried to manipulate the neutrality of Wikipedia content for political, financial, or PR advantage. I have the impression that the community's human resources capacity and technical tools are currently insufficient in comparison to the scale of the problems. I'm hoping that some of the tools that are being developed as a part of the anti-harassment initiative will help a little. I'm also thinking that a good exercise for students in Wikipedia in Education classes would be to identify content that is noncompliant with neutrality and verifiability standards, and either change that content themselves or flag it for review by more experienced editors. Pine On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 5:53 AM, James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com> wrote: > Pine wrote: > > > > I'm finding it encouraging to see that a number of researchers and > > journalists are taking these problems seriously, trying to understand > them, > > and trying to improve the situation. > > http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/tech/misinformation-on- > social-media-could-outfox-technical-solutions-for-now > > I'm encouraged by the studies, but confused about why the fake news > phenomenon is considered novel, rather than continuations of age-old > disinformation, yellow journalism, aggressive public relations, > manufactured consent, astroturfing, propaganda, and deceptive > marketing. There's nothing new about it other than the term. > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
