Timo Timonen - Black Birds (Classic Mix)

In 1997, John Silveira wrote a joke classified ad in a tiny publication called Backwoods Home Magazine asking if anyone wanted to travel back in time with him. A lot of people took him seriously. What do you do when everyone wants you to fix the worst mistakes they've ever made.

#17 The Time Traveler And The Hitman

Already tired of the 2016 election? Well, you’re not alone. Social scientist Kate Krontiris tells us why Americans don’t really care about civic engagement, and how we can fix that.

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Civic Disengagement (And How To Fix It)

It turns out there are (at least) three ways to tell the secret history of podcasting: it is a story about technology, it is a story about a business model for audio, and it is also a story about the birth of a new art form.  What's really cool is that the whole thing is sort of a Rashomon narrative -  in this special edition to mark the radiotopiaforever campaign your host attempts to tell all three versions using the same people.  Visit radiotopia.fm to join the radiotopiaforever campaign.

Secret Histories of Podcasting

ToE instaserf Andrew Callaway gets invited to do a TED ALPHA Talk on the sharing economy.  Mary Gray (a real sharing economy expert) explains why we are anxious about the future of work and Ignacio Uriarte leaves his cubicle to make post-office art. 

After Work

Even before Election Day, 2016, observers of technology & journalism were delivering warnings about the spread of fake news. Headlines like “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump For President” and “Donald Trump Protestor Speaks Out, Was Paid $3500 To Protest” would pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, and spread like wildfire.

Both of those headlines, and hundreds more like them, racked up millions of views and shares on social networks, gaining enough traction to earn mentions in the mainstream press. Fact checkers only had to dig one layer deeper to find that the original publishers of these stories were entirely fake, clickbait news sites, making up false sources, quotes, and images, often impersonating legitimate news outlets, like ABC, and taking home thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue. But by that time, the damage of fake news was done - the story of the $3500 protestor already calcified in the minds of the casual news observer as fact.

It turns out that it’s not enough to expect your average person to be able to tell the difference between news that is true and news that seems true. Unlike the food companies who create the products on our grocery shelves, news media are not required by law to be licensed, inspected, or bear a label of ingredients and nutrition facts, not that they should or could be.

But the gatekeepers of news media that we encounter in the digital age - the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, search engines like Google, and content hosts like YouTube - could and should be pitching in to help news consumers navigate the polluted sea of content they interact with on a daily basis.

That’s according to Berkman Klein Center co-founder Jonathan Zittrain and Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist who researches the intersection of politics, news, and the internet. They joined us recently to discuss the phenomenon of fake news and what platforms can do to stop it.

Facebook and Google have recently instituted to processes to remove fake news sites from their ad networks. And since this interview Facebook has also announced options allowing users to flag fake news, and a partnership with the factchecking website Snopes to offer a layer of verification on questionable sites.

For more on this episode visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/radioberkman238

CC-licensed content this week:
Neurowaxx: “Pop Circus” (http://ccmixter.org/files/Neurowaxx/14234)
Photo by Flickr user gazeronly (https://www.flickr.com/photos/gazeronly/10612167956/)

Fake News & How To Stop It

Derived from this bad mutha: http://soundcloud.com/resist-the-urge/rough-cut-friction

A Nice Close |S|H|A|V|E|

Timo Timonen - Shadow

Beat Battle #200
Used the original sample, doubled the bpm, tweaked the compressions, chopped/rearranged guitar, flutes and xylo, added brass and bass synth.

Xylodrone

Interviews, conversations, and stories from the intersection of the Internet, law, and society. Produced by Daniel Dennis Jones out of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Fake News & How To Stop It

The Platform

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