#factual-inaccuracies

#factual-inaccuracies

"Trump's new library mock-up has an American flag with 56 stars. Is he just that stupid or does he really think he's going to make 6 more states in the next 2 and a half years?"

This operation is about a set of very specific objectives; the president laid them out on the very first night of operations. I'll repeat them to you now because I hear a lot of talk about we don't know what the clear objectives are.

Chris Hayes stated, 'It was a litany of lies that he's told before about facts of the matter, that Barack Obama gave the Iranians billions of dollars. He didn't. It was repatriated assets that had been seized by the United States pursuant to that negotiated deal.'

Owens described how Infowars aimed to create a cinematic experience, stating, 'We would go out there, we would shoot videos like we were in the weeds, we were showing what was really going on. But it was nonsense. It was lies.'

The average American checks their phone over 140 times a day, clocking an average of 4.5 hours of daily use, with 57% of people admitting they're "addicted" to their phone. Tech companies, influencers, and other content creators compete for all that attention, which has incentivized the rise of misinformation. Considering this challenging information landscape, strong critical reading skills are as relevant and necessary as they've ever been.

Most days, an email lands in my inbox with the promise to amplify my growth-my newsletter subscribers, the reach of my podcasts, the number of client leads, etc. I've gotten used to random people pitching me on their services, and some of the messages expertly prey on my insecurities as a business owner ("you're leaving so much on the table," et al.). I never answer any of them, but I sometimes wonder which ones might actually be legit.

A reporter at Ars Technica, whose beat was specifically reporting on AI, was fired after it turned out that a piece he had co-authored contained quotes fabricated by the AI tools he was using. Ars Technica has subsequently retracted the original story entirely, publishing an editor's note, stating that it was 'a serious failure of our standards,' but that they believe it to be an 'isolated incident.'

In the latest sign of the times, the Economic Times - the second most widely-read English-language newspaper in the world, as of 2012 - picked the word "Kafkaesque" as its "Word of the Day " earlier this week. But even the briefest glance at the accompanying illustration reveals that the piece involved little, if any, human oversight. The issue is the image at the top of the piece - which, to be fair, is labeled as being AI-generated - that attempts to write the word on a blackboard.

"With the widespread use of social media, the global spread of 'fake news' has become a serious social issue," Masahiro Yamamoto, the documentary's director, said in an email. " In Japan as well, information of mixed accuracy is circulating widely, and the situation continues to worsen. Against this backdrop, we felt there was much to learn from PolitiFact, which has been conducting fact-checking for nearly two decades."

The industry's attempts to educate consumers "[seem] to largely have gone unheard," Amy Mitchell, then Pew's director of journalism research (she now heads the Center for News, Technology, and Innovation) said in a briefing at the time. "There's really a disconnect there between the public's knowledge and understanding about the industry and how it's functioning, compared with what we see in headlines day in and day out about budget cuts and revenue declines."

The shocking diminishment of The Washington Post, which has just announced it is cutting a third of its staff, is not just another story of a great paper succumbing to algorithms, social media, and the march to idiocracy. In their zeal to be seen as fair and evenhanded, journalists tend to accept the common criticism that they failed to adapt that, basically, they didn't produce enough viral TikTok videos. There's some truth to that, but the main problem lies elsewhere.