Czech Singer Dies After Deliberate Covid-Exposure, YouTube Urged to Curb Disinformation: Inoculated Newsletter (20.01.2022)
📰News of the week:
- An unvaccinated Czech folk singer died after she celebrated catching the coronavirus.
- Russian disinformation is rife in countries formerly ruled from Moscow. Some ex-Soviet states have tried to suppress it altogether by banning Russian television stations. Estonia is trying a different approach.
- Over 80 fact-checking organizations operating across more than 60 countries signed an open letter to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki calling on the company to take stronger measures to fight misinformation on the platform.
- Meanwhile, Fox News host and right-wing commentator Dan Bongino's YouTube channel was temporarily suspended over COVID-19 misinformation, specifically for his saying masks are useless in preventing the coronavirus' spread.
🔬Research of the week:
The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction - Nature Reviews Psychology
Misinformation is influential despite unprecedented access to high-quality, factual information. In this Review, Ecker et al. describe the cognitive, social and affective factors that drive sustained belief in misinformation, synthesize the evidence for interventions to reduce its effects and offer…
Ullrich K. H. Ecker
Research note: Fighting misinformation or fighting for information? | HKS Misinformation Review
A wealth of interventions have been devised to reduce belief in fake news or the tendency to share such news. By contrast, interventions aimed at increasing trust in reliable news sources have received less attention. In this article, we show that, given the very limited prevalence of misinformation…
Alberto Acerbi
📝 Longform of the week ($):
Dan Bongino and the Big Business of Returning Trump to Power
The Secret Service agent turned radio host is furious at liberals—so he’s trying to build a right-wing media infrastructure in time for 2024.
That's it for this week. As of this week, our newsletter will hit your inbox in every two weeks. Our next podcast episode – on disinformation on social audio (Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces) – is set to be released next week. Is there a story we should add to next week's newsletter? Someone we should interview on our podcast? Ping us!
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