USA: Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN)
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 199 Document Number: D09876
Notes:
Via FERN website. 7 pages., Addresses the broad issue of "fake news" through a case example focused on reporting at the "complex intersection of the meatpacking industry, immigration, the rise of fake news, and the changing face of America's heartland." The example focuses on reporting about Somali and other refugees working at a meat packing plant near Garden City, Kansas.
8 pages, Public perception about the reality of climate change has remained polarized and propagation of fake information on social media can be a potential cause. Homophily in communication, the tendency of people to communicate with others having similar beliefs, is understood to lead to the formation of echo chambers which reinforce individual beliefs and fuel further increase in polarization. Quite surprisingly, in an empirical analysis of the effect of homophily in communication on the level of polarization using evidence from Twitter conversations on the climate change topic during 2007–2017, we find that evolution of homophily over time negatively affects the evolution of polarization in the long run. Among various information about climate change to which people are exposed to, they are more likely to be influenced by information that have higher credibility. Therefore, we study a model of polarization of beliefs in social networks that accounts for credibility of propagating information in addition to homophily in communication. We find that polarization can not increase with increase in homophily in communication unless information propagating fake beliefs has minimal credibility. We therefore infer from the empirical results that anti-climate change tweets are largely not credible.
8 pages, Public opinion is shaped in significant part by online content, spread via social media and curated algorithmically. The current online ecosystem has been designed predominantly to capture user attention rather than to promote deliberate cognition and autonomous choice; information overload, finely tuned personalization and distorted social cues, in turn, pave the way for manipulation and the spread of false information. How can transparency and autonomy be promoted instead, thus fostering the positive potential of the web? Effective web governance informed by behavioural research is critically needed to empower individuals online. We identify technologically available yet largely untapped cues that can be harnessed to indicate the epistemic quality of online content, the factors underlying algorithmic decisions and the degree of consensus in online debates. We then map out two classes of behavioural interventions—nudging and boosting— that enlist these cues to redesign online environments for informed and autonomous choice.
12 pages., Authors presented an algorithm to analyze the behaviour of users of Twitter involving the environment and health care. To illustrate, they presented a concrete example of how the associated graph structure of the tweets related to World Environment Day 2019 was used to develop a heuristic analysis of the validity of the information.
International: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Paris, France.
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 166 Document Number: D11692
Notes:
2 pages., Online from organization website., In an online event, United Nations leaders and others emphasize importance of free, independent, fact-based journalism at the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, May 3, 2020."I takes journalism to communicate the findings of scientists and disseminate real and reliable information and counter fake news that is dangerous to people's lives and to efforts to contain the spread of the (COVID-19) pandemic."
8 pages., Online via UIUC Library electronic subscription., The author of this commentary argued that environmental journalism offers a conceptual model and guide to action for all journalists in the "post-truth" and "post-fact" era. "Since the specialism was formed in the 1960s, environmental journalists have reported on politically partisan issues where facts are contested, expertise is challenged, and uncertainty is heightened. To deal with these and other challenges, environmental journalism ... has reassessed and reconfigured the foundational journalistic concept of objectivity. The specialism has come to view objectivity as the implementation of a transparent method, as the pluralistic search for consensus, and, most importantly, as trained judgment."
