Fake News

McGill University public policy analyst Taylor Owen, who studies the political impact of digital technology, has warned that Canada's upcoming election is easy prey for social media manipulators. "Social media is a highly manipulable mechanism for political speech, which inherently can divide us in very clear ways," Owen told CBC News. Owen says that social media...

According to the latest CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey, that involves over 25,000 internet users in over two dozen countries, almost nine in 10 Canadians surveyed said they had been fooled by fake news at least once. Facebook was the most commonly noted source of phony news, followed by Twitter (via CTV News). The survey was conducted...

A number of tech execs have been invited to speak about fake news in Ottawa this year. According to a new report from CBC, executives from some of the world's largest digital and social media firms — including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — have been invited to appear before an international...

A recent study published in Science Advances (via The Verge), which examined the behaviour of users of different ages in the months before and after the 2016 US presidential election, has revealed that users aged 65 and older shared nearly seven times as many fake news articles as the as the youngest age group (18 to 29)....

In a blog post published earlier today, WhatsApp announced that it will now be labelling forwarded messages in an attempt to help stop the spread of misinformation. The new label will indicate when a message has been forward to someone from another user. In the blog post, the company said: “This extra context will help...

According to a new report from Reuters, Facebook is planning to launch an election integrity initiative that will help protect Canada's next election from cyber threats. The decision was made due to pressure the social network is facing over its role in possible Russian meddling in the last U.S. presidential election. Canada's minister of democratic institutions...

Despite previous reports, Twitter is not considering adding a button designed to let users flag fake news. The Washington Post Thursday ran a report detailing that the micro-blogging website had developed a "prototype" button that would allow users to report false or misleading news and/or information from the site. This prompted widespread concern that the button...

Google has given its news aggregation service a revamp to remove clutter on the page and give it a cleaner look for its desktop version. With the new design, readers will be able to see content that has been fact-checked by third parties. Google has also introduced a section on the right-side of the desktop...

After facing a lot of criticism recently, especially during the US Presidential election, Facebook is cracking down on fake news and fake accounts. The company announced on Wednesday that it is implementing system wide changes to crack down on fake accounts that spread fake news and cause mayhem. The security improvement was described as being...

Google furthered its strategy Friday to identify and rid the online world of "fake news" by globally rolling out a Fact Check tag in Google News search results. The new tags, to be used in all languages for users worldwide, will use third-party fact-checkers to indicate whether news items are true, false or somewhere in-between....

In November of last year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi banned 86% of the country’s legal tender from circulation. While the goal was to get rid of “black money,” a term used in India for cash that is stored outside of the country’s banking system to evade taxes, it brought to light another issue that […]

Following accusations for spreading fake news, Facebook has been busy addressing this major problem. Apparently, the social media giant has found a way to reduce the avalanche of hoax news showing up in our news feed by changing some ad policies and by using external sources — alongside easing reporting — and, as such, also...