🤥 Faked Up #10

Negated Notes | Dissing RT | Unlabeled

Καλημέρα

Faked Up #10 is brought to you by AI-generated barndominiums and facts that are facts. The newsletter is a ~6-minute read and contains 43 links.

I will be on holiday July 15-26 but there’s a special edition of Faked Up dropping next Wednesday reviewing three new books about digital deception. Regular programming resumes July 31.

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Top Stories

NEGATED NOTES — Clashes among contributors to X’s Community Notes are leading to fact checks being appended late or not at all on misleading tweets, according to Logically Facts.

Take the notes below a misleading post accusing Congress leader Rahul Gandhi of calling all Hindus violent. Because some raters claimed NNN (no note needed), the post lacks a visible fact check 9 days after being posted.

X’s requirement for cross-partisan agreement on notes can in theory act as an incentive for high-quality sourcing. But blocking a label from appearing introduces a juicy incentive for counter partisan brigading.

There are signs this may not be a one-off.

Mediawise director Alex Mahadevan, who is my go-to Community Notes connoisseur, told Logically that fewer than 10% of notes go live. That share shrinks to 4% for particularly controversial topics like the Israel-Hamas war. Mahadevan said Community Notes’ “biggest weakness is that it requires bipartisan agreement on facts. And that's just not how facts work, a fact is a fact. A number is a number.”

ANGRY CLUSTERS — A group of researchers at the Zhejiang University of Technology claim in a preprint that Reddit threads about false claims tend to have more back-and-forth and be more negative in tone than those about true claims. (They based their analysis on a previously published dataset of Reddit posts tied to fact checks by PolitiFact, Snopes and Emergent.info.) Not sure if this is a terribly novel finding, but this chart is pretty.