Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is fighting fake news with a $1 million grant to The Poynter Institute for a new initiative to promote and standardize ethics in journalism. Newmark said that fake news was a threat to democracy. Poynter will hire a faculty member to among other tasks improve the public’s ability to discern bogus stories. (San Francisco Chronicle, December 12, 2016, by Dominic Fracassa)
Facebook and Google’s efforts to stem fake news has not been totally successful in scrubbing the internet as fake ads keep cropping up on the websites of such news outlets as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. (Digiday, december 13,2016, by Lucia Moses)
Obscure ad tech companies have more power than companies like Kellogg’s and All State to deal a powerful blow to fake news. AppNexus is withholding its ad-serving tools from Breitbart and can also withhold it from fake news sites making it impossible for them to make a living. (Wired, December 15, 2016, by Davey Alba)
Facebook is undertaking new efforts to fight fake news including third-party fact-checking. Reliable fact-checkers will review stories to determine their veracity and if lacking, stories will be marked as false in users’ News Feeds. (The Poynter Institute, December 15, 2016, by Benjamin Mullin and Alexios Mantzarlis)
Law professor Eugene Volokh warns that while fake news is bad, government attempts to stifle it are worse. He provides a number of historical examples including the Sedition Act of 1798 that attempted to punish those spreading falsehoods about the government. (The Washington Post, December 9, 2016)