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The conversation surrounding misinformation, fake news, and fact-checking is constantly evolving. Here is a collection of recent readings, podcasts, and other media we’ve highlighted from around the web, fueling this conversation.
What We’re Reading:
- From the Poynter Institute: What Will Fact Checkers Find on Clubhouse?
Cristina Tardáguila and Harrison Mantas investigate the barriers presented when fact-checking Clubhouse, the new audio-only social media platform that doesn’t keep audio files or allow users to record conversations.
- From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Can a 'psychological vaccine' protect against fake news and COVID misinformation?
Technology Reporter James Purtill considers what would happen if we treat the spread of misinformation as an infectious disease itself.
- From the Los Angeles Review of Books: Fake Books and Fake News
Jessica Pressman explores the centuries-old practice of using fake books as decoration, and reviews a Twitter account that catches fake book facades in the backgrounds of television interviewees on Zoom.
- From the Columbia Journalism Review: How Fiction Can Defeat Fake News
Amitava Kumar considers fiction in literature, and fiction in the news. While fake news delivers ready-made information that often feels irresistible to viewers, novels create complex narratives that require time to absorb and understand.
What We’re Listening To:
- Podcast: You’re Wrong About
Every week, journalists Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall take on a different cultural mythology: people and events that have been miscast in the public imagination. This week’s episode tells how in the 1990s, Tipper Gore started a moral crusade against explicit lyrics in popular music.
What We’re Watching:
- From e-flux: True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artist’s Films
A film series highlights twenty films and videos that examine the boundaries between fact and fiction, nature and artifice, and objectivity and subjectivity. It runs through April 20, 2021.
- From the American Physical Society: Communicating Science to Nonscientists in Post-Election & Post-Pandemic America
A panel of top scientists and philosophers discuss the importance of communication in a time of widespread mistrust of science.
