Building Back Truth in an Age of Misinformation


Book Description

How can we build back truth online? Here’s how. How can we build back truth online? In this book, researcher Leslie F. Stebbins provides solutions for repairing our existing social media platforms and building better ones that prioritize value over profit, strengthen community ties, and promote access to trustworthy information. Stebbins provides a road map with six paths forward to understand how platforms are designed to exploit us, how we can learn to embrace agency in our interactions with digital spaces, how to build tools to reduce harmful practices, how platform companies can prioritize the public good, how we can repair journalism, and how to strengthen curation to promote trusted content and create new, healthier digital public squares. New, experimental models that are ethically designed to build community and promote trustworthy content are having some early successes. We know that human social networks—online and off—magnify whatever they are seeded with. They are not neutral. We also know that to repair our systems we need to repair their design. We are being joined in the fight by some of the best and brightest minds of our current generation as they flee big tech companies in search of vocations that value integrity and public values. The problem of misinformation is not insurmountable. We can fix this.




The Misinformation Age


Book Description

“Empowering and thoroughly researched, this book offers useful contemporary analysis and possible solutions to one of the greatest threats to democracy.” —Kirkus Reviews Editors’ choice, The New York Times Book Review Recommended reading, Scientific American Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false beliefs. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? The Misinformation Age, written for a political era riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, shows convincingly that what you believe depends on who you know. If social forces explain the persistence of false belief, we must understand how those forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively. “[The authors] deftly apply sociological models to examine how misinformation spreads among people and how scientific results get misrepresented in the public sphere.” —Andrea Gawrylewski, Scientific American “A notable new volume . . . The Misinformation Age explains systematically how facts are determined and changed—whether it is concerning the effects of vaccination on children or the Russian attack on the integrity of the electoral process.” —Roger I. Abrams, New York Journal of Books




Finding Reliable Information Online


Book Description

Our information-saturated environment causes us to spend too much time searching, surfing and organizing the information in our lives. But finding reliable high quality information can be a problem. We are often so buried in information-- and strapped for time-- that we grab the search results without bothering to evaluate its quality. Stebbins shows you how to cut out unreliable information and find online information you can rely on.




Bullspotting


Book Description

This entertaining and educational book applies the tools of critical thinking to identify the common features and trends among misinformation campaigns. With illustrations drawn from conspiracy theorists and deniers of every stripe, the author teaches readers how rumors are started, and the rhetorical techniques and logical fallacies often found in misleading or outright false claims. What distinguishes real conspiracies from conspiracy theories, real science from pseudoscience, and actual history from bogus accounts purporting to be history? How does one evaluate the credibility of rumors and quotes or judge the soundness of legal arguments advanced by tax deniers? Readers will learn how to make these critical distinctions and also how to spot "evidence" that has been manufactured or manipulated in some way to create a false impression. At a time when average citizens are bombarded with false information every day, this entertaining book will prove to be not only a great read but also an indispensable resource.




Truth-Seeking in an Age of (Mis)Information Overload


Book Description

The unprecedented spread of false and misleading information is the flip side of the Internet's promise of universal access and information democratization. This volume features original contributions from scholars working on the challenge of misinformation across a wide range of STEM, humanities, and art disciplines. Modeling a collaborative, multidisciplinary "convergence approach," Truth-Seeking in an Age of (Mis)Information Overload is structured in three parts. Part one, "Misinformation and Artificial Intelligence," confronts the danger of outsourcing judgement and decision-making to AI instruments in key areas of public life, from the processing of loan applications to school funding, policing, and criminal sentencing. Part two, "Science Communication," foregrounds the need to rethink how scientific findings are communicated to the public, calling on scientists to cooperate with colleagues in other disciplines and community representatives to help minimize the negative effects of mis/disinformation in such vital areas as climate change science and public health. Part three, "Building Trust," further advocates for and explores instances of trust-building initiatives as a necessary precondition of both community-oriented scholarly activity and effective intervention strategies in high impact areas such as public health.




Spiritual Truth in the Age of Fake News


Book Description

“Fake News! That’s Fake News!” In a few short years, the phrase “Fake News” has earned a place in dictionaries, in national discourse, and in our daily lives. But Fake News is not new. Fake News began when people first interpreted the Bible to advance their own agenda. Commonly-held beliefs about what the Bible says regarding women, LGBTQ folks, slavery, immigrants, and Jews trumpets Fake News that is destroying people’s lives. What is the best way to counter Fake News? With the truth. To do so, Episcopal priest Elizabeth Geitz turns to the #1 bestselling book year after year—the Bible. Sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and heterosexism are experiencing an alarming resurgence today. It is time for an accessible book that sets the record straight on what the Bible really says regarding the many “isms” affecting all of us. It is time for the Fake News about the Bible to come to a screeching halt. The 101 eye-opening reflections in Spiritual Truth in the Age of Fake News are a call to action for people of different faiths or no faith at all. This a must-read for anyone exhausted by the daily barrage of Fake News who is seeking the relief of the authentic.




After the Fact?


Book Description

Why do we no longer trust facts, experts and statistics? In this essential guide to the turbulent times in which we live, Marcus Gilroy-Ware investigates our era of post-truths and fake news and answers the question of where we can go from here. We are supposed to have more information at our disposal now than at any time in history. So why, in a world of rising sea levels, populist leaders, resurgent fascism and a global pandemic, do so many people believe bizarre and untrue things about the world we live in? In After the Fact?, Marcus Gilroy-Ware shows us what really created the conditions for mis- and disinformation, from fake news and conspiracy theories, to bullshit journalism and the resurgence of the far-right, and why liberal newspaper columnists and centrist politicians are unable to turn back this tide. Spanning politics, culture, psychology, journalism, and much more, After the Fact? is a timely wake-up call for those who believe we can simply go "back to normal", and instead argues that, if we are to put an end to "fake news" we must deal with the broader social crises that are responsible for it.




Building Age


Book Description




Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy


Book Description

The new edition of Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy offers an updated overview and critical discussion of contemporary discourses around truth, misinformation, and democracy, while also mapping cutting-edge scholarship. Through in-depth analyses of news articles, commentaries, academic publications, policy briefs, and political speeches, the book engages with the underlying normative ideas that shape how fake news is being addressed across the globe. Doing so, it provides an innovative, critical contribution to contemporary debates on democracy, post-truth, and politics. Three new chapters: Chapter 2 provides an outline of the scholarly field of research into fake news; Chapter 5 examines how issues of fake news and (mis)information have become intertwined with contemporary crisis events; and Chapter 9 presents democratic alternatives to post-truth solutionism. A new foreword by Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser. Fully updated examples and studies from contemporary events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States Capitol attack, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Extended discussions on the causes of democratic decline, currently proposed solutions to fake news, and democratic alternatives to our current predicament. Interesting, informative, and well documented, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy continues its commitment to understand and engage with the current state and future of democracy.




Data Mining


Book Description

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, Fourth Edition introduces concepts, principles, and methods for mining patterns, knowledge, and models from various kinds of data for diverse applications. Specifically, it delves into the processes for uncovering patterns and knowledge from massive collections of data, known as knowledge discovery from data, or KDD. It focuses on the feasibility, usefulness, effectiveness, and scalability of data mining techniques for large data sets. After an introduction to the concept of data mining, the authors explain the methods for preprocessing, characterizing, and warehousing data. They then partition the data mining methods into several major tasks, introducing concepts and methods for mining frequent patterns, associations, and correlations for large data sets; data classificcation and model construction; cluster analysis; and outlier detection. Concepts and methods for deep learning are systematically introduced as one chapter. Finally, the book covers the trends, applications, and research frontiers in data mining. - Presents a comprehensive new chapter on deep learning, including improving training of deep learning models, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and graph neural networks - Addresses advanced topics in one dedicated chapter: data mining trends and research frontiers, including mining rich data types (text, spatiotemporal data, and graph/networks), data mining applications (such as sentiment analysis, truth discovery, and information propagattion), data mining methodologie and systems, and data mining and society - Provides a comprehensive, practical look at the concepts and techniques needed to get the most out of your data - Visit the author-hosted companion site, https://hanj.cs.illinois.edu/bk4/ for downloadable lecture slides and errata