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Daily Archives: May 23, 2021

MIT study: Correcting falsehoods on Twitter makes misinformation worse in surprising ways

Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment – “A prominent approach to combating online misinformation is to debunk false content. Here we investigate downstream consequences of social corrections on users’ subsequent sharing of other content. Being corrected might make users more attentive to accuracy, thus improving their subsequent sharing. Alternatively, corrections might not improve subsequent sharing – or even backfire – by making users feel defensive, or by shifting their attention away from accuracy (e.g., towards various social factors). We identified N=2,000 users who shared false political news on Twitter, and replied to their false tweets with links to fact-checking websites. We find causal evidence that being corrected decreases the quality, and increases the partisan slant and language toxicity, of the users’ subsequent retweets (but has no significant effect on primary tweets). This suggests that being publicly corrected by another user shifts one’s attention away from accuracy – presenting an important challenge for social correction approaches.”

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 23, 2021

Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, May 23, 2021 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the… Continue Reading

The Sifter – Search the World of Food

A Tool for Food History Research – “The Sifter is a free website for searching and comparing authors, their works and the details of their works regarding food and related topics around the world and throughout history.  Browse and search through thousands of historical cookbooks and manuscripts dating back to the Middle Ages!  We have… Continue Reading

Activist Archivists Are Trying to Save the ‘Pirate Bay of Science’

Vice – Facing lawsuits and legal trouble, archivists are working to save 77TB of freely available scientific data.  It can be hard to access scientific articles, which are often hidden behind expensive paywalls. For 10 years, Sci-Hub, the “Pirate Bay of Science” has hosted scientific papers free for anyone who wanted them. But it hasn’t… Continue Reading

What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks

Columbia Journalism Review: “Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely vanished.  The fragility of the… Continue Reading

Americans and ‘Cancel Culture’

Pew – Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment: “People have challenged each other’s views for much of human history. But the internet – particularly social media – has changed how, when and where these kinds of interactions occur. The number of people who can go online and call out others for… Continue Reading

Briefing Paper – Data tracking in Research

Data tracking in research: aggregation and use or sale of usage data by academic publishers – A briefing paper of the Committee on Scientific Library Services and Information Systems of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) 20 May 2021.”In recent years, digital data markets of various kinds have emerged which can be categorised as… Continue Reading

Microsoft Academic discontinued & Semantic Scholar withdraws hosting of “Open access” papers

Musings About Librarianship – “In the last month, there were two interesting developments that caused quite a stir in my twitter feeds (see discussions here and here). Firstly, there was an interesting announcement on the Unpaywall mailing list, that Unpaywall had detected that Semantic Scholar which was one of the biggest repository sources they were… Continue Reading

UPDATE: Comparative Criminal Procedure – A Select Bibliography

Lyonette Louis-Jacques: “This bibliography lists selected English-language resources on comparative criminal procedure. It focuses on journal articles, book chapters, and treatises covering comparative criminal procedure generally, criminal procedure in multiple jurisdictions, and specialized research topics in comparative criminal procedure such as: arrest, pre-trial detention, criminal investigation, criminal evidence, interrogation, right to counsel, legal assistance for… Continue Reading

The Human Library

“The Human Library Organisation is a registered international not for profit with our administrative headquarters located in Copenhagen, Denmark…The HLO is dedicated to ensuring a global implementation of the Human Library as a learning platform. We are at current operational on six continents and we host or are involved in activities in more than 80… Continue Reading