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Friday, March 8, 2019
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Should news orgs be legally liable for the traumatic situations they put reporters in? A landmark court decision in Australia says yesA judge ruled that a newspaper, like any employer, has “a duty to take reasonable care against the risk of foreseeable injury, including foreseeable psychiatric injury,” to its staff. Will the threat of lawsuits push newsrooms to provide more support to journalists? By Matthew Ricketson and Alexandra Wake. |
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BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti: Yes to scale, yes to platforms — still“I know it's popular to quit social media or say the internet is terrible, but we can't give up.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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If Facebook goes private, where will the misinformation go?Plus: YouTube adds fact-checks (in India), and Facebook moves to combat anti-vaxxing after receiving loads of public pressure. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Recorded Future
How China exploits social media to sway American opinion →
“We assess that these Chinese state-run influence accounts did not attempt a large-scale campaign to influence American voters in the run-up to the November 6, 2018, midterm elections. However, on a small scale, we observed all of our researched state-run influence accounts disseminating breaking news and biased content surrounding President Trump and China-related issues.”
Parse.ly / Clare Carr and Kelsey Arendt
Facebook’s latest algorithm update seems to have hurt celebrity-related coverage the most →
“Articles about Arts & Entertainment, and Music in particular saw the biggest drop by percentage, 71% and 65% respectively. Stories in Arts & Entertainment tend to be around celebrities and events like the Grammys and Academy Awards.”
The Ringer / Victor Luckerson
What was the happiest day on the internet this decade? →
“I set out on a quest to recall what the internet was like before the Dark Times, back when the proliferation of social media and smartphones created an explosion of personal, bizarre, highly shareable content. When, exactly, did the internet peak?”
Digiday / Max Willens
NBC News and MSNBC expand podcast team heading into election season →
“That show will start out weekly before eventually becoming a daily show as the election season builds momentum. The long-term goal is to turn the momentum and habit the publisher builds with the election show into the foundation of a daily news show, an increasingly competitive category that's attracted news publishers including The New York Times, Vox, Slate and the Washington Post.”
Poynter / Daniel Funke
It looks as if YouTube didn’t actually hire fact-checking partners →
It’s “different than what BuzzFeed characterized as YouTube's ‘verified fact-checking partners.’ YouTube is basically just employing technology that Google is already using to surface fact checks in search results.”
CNN / Max Foster and Hilary McGann
The racist online abuse of Meghan Markle has put royal staff on high alert →
“Twenty accounts were responsible for about 70% of the tweets, sharing anti-Meghan hashtags, pictures and memes. The fact that such a small number of users generated such a large number of the tweets suggests that the accounts were created for the purpose of producing negative content about the duchess.”