On Tuesday, the Internet Archive joined Public Knowledge, the Wikimedia Foundation and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic from Berkeley Law to brief the Congressional Internet Caucus on efforts to combat misinformation online. Misinformation is a complex issue but one of the root causes is a lack of easy, reliable ways for Internet users to distinguish good information from bad, or authoritative sources from propaganda. The panel highlighted our recent work to weave books into Wikipedia articles, giving users the ability to dig deeper and fact check assertions in just one click.
We would like to thank the Congressional Internet Caucus Academy and Representative Anna Eshoo for sponsoring this conversation.
Disappointed to see archive.org getting involved with this…
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Thank you! It’s great to know that for once some lawmakers have heard some concrete experiences on how to actually make people wiser, rather than the usual moral panics demanding totalitarian policies.
It’s great to know that for once some lawmakers have heard some concrete experiences on how to actually make people wiser
Why is your comment copied from the comment above? Thats weird.
Yes, there’s a particular family of spam bots which post copy-paste comments in order to introduce links from the comment section to whatever website they’re promoting at the moment. On this blog they usually post either generic compliments or fragments of previous comments.
I always suspected that the man who tweeted “Fake News” so much was the originator of a lot of it himself.
Knowledge is power and knowledge is founded on truth. Truth needs defenders against those who would subject the Public to « truth decay ». (My father was a dentist, so pardon the pun). If there were no Machiavellian fear-mongering politicians or constituents, there would be no need for such defenders.
My comment is in regard to duplicate copies of some volumes (often shared with BHL etc.). Originally I thought of simply having them removed but then realised that others like me have saved the URL for one version and if that disappears then there is a lot of rechecking required on my part. So keep up the good, no excellent, work against misinformation but please consider my point
It’s very much like Orwell’s 1984 when politicians and tech corporations together decide what information is “misinformation”, especially when Wikimedia, which is notorious for spreading misinformation, is involved.
Says an anon poster, giving no example and no citation to independent research.
Misinformation can be accidental, the problem we face is Disinformation – intentional and malicious.
There is a very important difference.
Spot on!
@anon – don’t worry, Internet Archive only wants to burn the *bad* books. What could possibly go wrong?
This is not the case.