Gardening provides a helpful metaphor to help us understand how individual and platform approaches to misinformation need to be accompanied by policy and cultural reforms.
How can moderators and social media platforms, who have no direct experience of colonisation, pick up on such culturally nuanced negativity against Indigenous people?
Priyanka Ranade, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Anupam Joshi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Bots flooding social media with fake news about politics is bad enough. Muddying the waters in such fields as cybersecurity and health care could put lives at risk.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s Twitter shutdown will be hard to enforce and could have dire consequences for Nigeria’s fragile democratic institutions and economy.
The pandemic has people spending more time online for school, socializing and work. To maintain a healthy relationship with social media, people should manage their online time and activities.
Journalists should be permitted to express themselves on social media. As this week illustrates, though, doing so can lead to a dilemma for their employers.
Politics always influences what questions scientists ask. Their intertwined relationship becomes a problem when politics dictates what answers science is allowed to find.
Users do spend some time thinking about whether information is true; the decision to share it (even if it’s fake news) depends on the topic and the type of message.