“Facebook, the social media giant, is going to let you rank the news you think is most valuable. What could possibly go wrong?” he writes and quotes Mark Zuckerberg,   “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today. Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them. That’s why it’s important that […]

The new system is called Reuters Tracer. It uses Twitter as a kind of global sensor that records news events as they are happening. The system then uses various kinds of data mining and machine learning to pick out the most relevant events, determine their topic, rank their priority, and write a headline and a summary. The news is then distributed around the company’s global news wire. The first step […]

How a journalism class is teaching middle schoolers to fight fake news:  Research last year out of Stanford University revealed that students – from middle schoolers to undergraduates – are easily duped by false information they find online. The study goes on to describe this as “dismaying,” “bleak” and a “threat to democracy.” These same students are the primary consumers of social media. Ed Madison, Assistant Professor of Journalism, University of Oregon, describes how he tries […]