Media & Society: 14

Fake news and media control

New challenges to state power over ‘mass’ media: Fake news, social media, censorship and governmental control.

Tasks

If you are intending to submit SP4 (on social media and politics), the deadline is the last day of the semester. Details here.

Slides

Download slides - PDF

Reading

Allcott, H. and Gentzkow, M. (2017) Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of economic perspectives, 31(2):211–36

NB - This reading is from an economics journal, there are bits of maths scattered throughout it, ignore them unless it interests you! Take notice of the definitions, the general methods and the results.

Download PDF

Other material

Update: 18 Dec 2024

Not all ‘factchecking’ site are equal…

“Tech firms know more about us than any spy agency — ex-GCHQ chief”
9th Oct 2019 - The Guardian

Digital campaigning, a Guardian newspaper series about online politics during the 2019 UK general election

Nov 2019: Poynter article on UK ‘fact-checking’ debacle during the 2019 UK general election

Buzzfeed: Macedonian teenagers and ‘fake news’

Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)
2018 follow-up investigation into Macedonian ‘news’ sites - weirder than ever…

Factbase Trump related material ↗️

July 2023

FT Report on Yevgeny ‘Wagner’ Prigozhin’s media activities in the aftermath of his ‘revolt’ (Account Req’d)

Same FT report as pdf