Author: Mathew Ingram

Given what is happening in the U.S. election campaign, there has never been a more crucial time for fact-checking of news stories, and Facebook seems to be doing a fairly poor job of it. Now Google has waded into the fray with a new fact-checking tag for Google News.

As Google’s head of news, Richard Gingras, explained in a blog post, Google is going to be highlighting pages in Google News that fit the criteria for fact-checking.

For some time now, Google has had a series of sub-categories that it groups articles into, including “highly cited” — which is the rough equivalent of Facebook’s Trending Topics, meaning it has been linked to a lot by prominent sites, as well as “local source.”

Now there will be a “fact check” tag as well. Sites that want their articles to be eligible just have to add a certain kind of formatting to their pages, as specified by Schema.org, an open community sponsored by Google, Microsoft and other tech companies.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Regular dumps of classified documents and other internal communications have become a fixture of modern life, thanks in part to stateless — and frequently lawless — entities like WikiLeaks. But is publishing those leaks always the right thing to do?

That’s the question that is raised by the recent leak of private emails from John Podesta, the campaign chairman for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The WikiLeaks dump consists of tens of thousands of emails, sent to a wide variety of people, about a range of topics that includes both the Clinton campaign and virtually every other aspect of Podesta’s personal life.

The most interesting thing about the leak is that it appears to have been carried out with the assistance of certain shadowy characters connected to the Russian secret service, according to a statement from the U.S. intelligence department.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

If you spend any time on Facebook then you’ve probably seen them, either in your main news feed or in the “trending topics” section — clearly fake news stories designed to get you to click, many of them playing on the latest conspiracy theory surrounding the 2016 election.

These are the kind of stories that Facebook’s trending editors used to weed out, but then the site fired all the editors it was using for that purpose, after a controversy over allegations of political bias, and since then it has been using algorithms.

According to a recent experiment by the Washington Post, however, getting rid of the human beings isn’t really working that well — at least not at keeping out the fakes.

In order to see what Facebook considered a trending topic and why, the newspaper’s Intersect team started tracking what stories and links were trending every hour, and sent those links out as an email news digest, as well as keeping a record of them in a database.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

There are a lot of things we can blame Donald Trump for, but the Republican presidential candidate has accomplished at least one thing of value: By lying so repeatedly and enthusiastically, he has managed to convince the New York Times that it needed to be more skeptical.

This assessment comes from the Times‘ executive editor Dean Baquet, in a recent interview with media analyst Ken Doctor, published by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Before Trump came along, Baquet says the paper struggled with how to call out lies. “I think that Trump has ended that struggle,” he says. “I think we now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that it’s false.” Doctor suggests Trump gave the Times “the courage” to assert the truth.

Courage? If you’re not a media insider, this might strike you as a little odd. Shouldn’t the New York Times of all places be skeptical when it comes to political statements in particular?

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

The word roller-coaster doesn’t even begin to describe the ride that Twitter shareholders have been on so far this week — and it’s not over yet by a long shot.

First, the company’s share price price [fortune-stock symbol=”TWTR”] zoomed higher early in the week, on reports that the company could be a takeover target for several large tech and media companies, including Google, Disney and Salesforce. But late Wednesday, the stock collapsed after reports that poured cold water on that initial enthusiasm.

When the stock opened for trading on Thursday morning, it was almost 20% lower than it had been the day before. That wiped more than $2 billion from the company’s market capitalization.

According to anonymous sources who spoke to Recode, neither Google nor Disney are interested in making a bid for the company, although both have reportedly taken a look at doing so. Apple is also not considering an acquisition of the social network, according to similar reports.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

By all accounts, the process of selling Twitter is well under way. The company has hired an investment advisor and is expected to start receiving bids later this week from a group of interested parties that reportedly includes Google, Salesforce and Disney.

As it does in almost every case in which a once-promising technology company is about to be acquired, Twitter’s likely sale represents both a success and a failure.

But Twitter’s (TWTR) story is also a story of failure—a failure to capitalize on that early promise and a failure to properly manage the company’s growth or strategy.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once famously described Twitter as “a clown car that drove into a gold mine,” and for much of its history the clownish aspects of the company have been far more obvious than the golden parts. In a very real sense, it’s almost a miracle that the service still exists at all considering all the turmoil and upheaval in the executive suite.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

One of the most reliable things about the current election campaign is that on any given day, Republican candidate Donald Trump is almost certain to say something on Twitter that will set off alarm bells or cause some kind of controversy. And Friday morning was no exception to that rule.

Despite the fact that Trump was widely viewed as having lost the recent debate with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, and that the election itself is just over a month away, the candidate chose to tweet not about the political issues in the campaign but about his dislike of former Miss Universe contestant Alicia Machado.

After the debate, he talked at length on Fox News about how Machado allegedly gained 60 pounds, and how he tried to support her after the pageant wanted to fire her.

Then early Friday morning, Trump chose for some unknown reason to unleash a series of tweets about her allegedly unsavory past, combined with a conspiracy theory about her relationship with Clinton. He called Machado “my worst Miss Universe,” and said Clinton was duped into referring to her in the debate.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Facebook routinely denies that it is a media entity, or that it should be expected to behave like one, and yet the giant social network continues to behave in ways that have a significant and tangible impact on the news that its users see about the world, and the practice of journalism in general.

In the latest example of this behavior, Facebook recently suspended the accounts of several Palestinian journalists without providing any warning or any explanation.

According to Al Jazeera, four editors from the Shehab News Agency — which has more than 6.3 million likes on Facebook — and three executives from the equally popular Quds News Network reported that they were suddenly unable to access their personal accounts.

After the journalists complained to Facebook, their accounts were reinstated, and the company apologized for what it said was a mistake. “Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong,” a spokesman said, suggesting that the accounts were flagged by users.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

The Internet’s fact-checking engines were working overtime during Monday night’s presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Even Clinton’s home page turned into a fact-checking site to debunk the Republican candidate’s statements. But will it matter to his fan base?

As expected, given his performance so far, the Republican candidate repeatedly stretched the truth, denied making certain statements despite ample evidence to the contrary, and twisted the facts until they broke.

According to one estimate, Trump made more than 34 comments that were either lies or mis-statements of fact during the debate. Clinton, by comparison, was tagged with four. According to much of the post-debate analysis, Trump also came off looking like a bully.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

It says a lot about the state of the U.S. election campaign that one of the most hotly debated topics is whether a debate moderator should call out obvious lies by either Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton when they face each other Monday night.

To someone who hasn’t been following the circus sideshow/train wreck that is the Election 2016 campaign, this might seem like a bizarre thing to get hung up on.

After all, isn’t checking facts what journalists are supposed to do—even cable TV journalists? Isn’t that why we have journalists as debate moderators in the first place? As with many things involving Trump, it isn’t quite that simple.

Lester Holt, the NBC news anchor who is moderating the first debate Monday night, hasn’t said whether he plans to call out any untruths, but according to Politico, none of the major networks have committed to doing real-time fact checking of the debates.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

The list of potential Twitter acquirers continues to grow. In addition to recent reports that Salesforce and Google are interested in possibly buying the real-time news service, Disney is now said to be considering an acquisition bid as well.

According to a report from Bloomberg News, anonymous sources familiar with the situation said that the giant news and entertainment conglomerate is “working with a financial adviser to evaluate a possible bid for Twitter.”

In other words, Disney and an investment firm are going over Twitter’s financial data and looking at the potential benefits of combining the two companies, but that process could fall apart or be shelved at any point.

Salesforce and Google are said to be in a similar situation, according to a number of recent reports, which said Twitter is working with Goldman Sachs to consider potential takeover offers for the company.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

According to a new Gallup poll, trust in mass media in the United States is lower than it has ever been since the organization started asking that question in 1972. To put that in some kind of context, Richard Nixon was president in 1972 and the U.S. was bombing Vietnam.

Why would trust in the media be so low? There are a number of reasons, but one of the most obvious ones is that today’s media landscape looks nothing like what U.S. news consumers took for granted in 1972, or 1982 or 1992, or even 2002.

In many ways, the rise of the Internet and the social web has made things a lot better when it comes to being informed about the world, but in other ways–as with so many other things the Internet touches–it has made them much worse. And our trusted relationship with media (to the extent that we ever had one) has taken the brunt of the damage.

Instead of a handful of newspapers, TV channels and trusted journalists, we now have what amounts to the biblical Tower of Babel: Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of news sources, many of which are simply repeating whatever they think might get readers or viewers to click.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

Facebook is more than just a site where people share photos of their children or pets. It has become a crucial way in which hundreds of millions of people get information about the world around them. And the tension between those two things is becoming difficult to ignore.

In the latest controversy involving the giant social network’s news judgement, Facebook removed an iconic photo from the Vietnam War: A picture of a young Kim Phuc running naked down a road after her village was hit by napalm.

When a Norwegian newspaper editor—who posted the photo as part of a series on war photography—tried to re-post it, along with a response from Phuc herself, his account was suspended.

The editor-in-chief of the newspaper, Espen Egil Hansen, then wrote an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticizing him for doing so, entitled “Dear Mark. I am writing this to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove this picture.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

If there’s one thing that has been driving Twitter’s share price over the past year or so, it’s the repeated rumors that the company is going to be acquired. With every new rumor or speculation, the share price sees a little spike, as weary investors hope for the best.

But is an acquisition likely? And if so, who might buy it, and for how much? Those are the multibillion-dollar questions that crop up every time there is a new report about a bid.

According to a report at Recode, the company is going to consider the possibility of a sale at a board meeting later this week—although as many observers pointed out, such things are often discussed at meetings even when there is no offer on the table. Nevertheless, that report also pushed the stock up.

Unfortunately for long-time Twitter investors, the ones who have been stuck with it ever since it hit $70 in the weeks following its IPO, these rumors and the spikes they create ironically make the problem worse.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

A decade is a long time even in the real world, and on the Internet it is more like a century, especially in the life of a startup. But that’s how long it has been since Facebook launched the real-time news feed that has become the core of the service for more than 1.5 billion people.

It’s hard to even imagine the social network now without this essential feature, as early Facebook staffer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth recalled during a discussion with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and three other members of the original news-feed team on Tuesday (hosted via Facebook’s live-streaming video service, of course).

At that time, the site “was just a page with a big finger pointing at the number of new posts you had,” Boz said. Users had to click on the profiles of each of the people they were friends with, and then try to remember what their last post was, and whether anything had changed.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017