Tag: social media

Time to vote and rehearse our disinformation drills

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Feb. 27, Jared Schroeder, assistant professor of journalism at SMU Dallas specializing in Free Speech/First Amendment topics, for a piece warning Texas voters to beware of disinformation on social media channels. Published in the Dallas Morning News: http://bit.ly/32x3zn7

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Our social media feeds will have more lies in them than normal this week.

While many Texans cast ballots in early voting, be assured the pipeline of misinformation and disinformation is saturating the channels ahead of Super Tuesday and the massive state and national primaries. Foreign and domestic bad actors live to tamper with our election process.

These floods of false and misleading information on election days have become as much a part of casting a ballot as getting an “I voted” sticker. We should expect and prepare for them. . .

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We all need to be deepfake detectors — but especially social media platforms

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Jan. 30, Jared Schroeder, assistant professor of journalism at SMU Dallas specializing in Free Speech/First Amendment topics, for a piece advocating that social media platforms and their users redouble efforts to thwart and halt deepfake videos. Published in The Hill: http://bit.ly/2RDtd60 

A quality deepfake video clip, released at the right time, could almost certainly swing an election result.

The technology needed to create these deceptive video clips — which convey people saying or doing things they never said or did — has peaked just as primary voters and caucus-goers register the first results of the 2020 presidential election in the coming days and weeks.

It’s obvious something should be done to safeguard our election process from such powerful disinformation, especially during a time when our social media communities are awash in intentionally false and misleading political information. . .

Continue reading “We all need to be deepfake detectors — but especially social media platforms”

Social media has failed to flag mass violence threats and that has to change

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Oct. 27, Jared Schroeder, SMU Journalism professor with free press expertise, for a piece critical of social media platforms that fail to alert law enforcement agencies in a timely manner about threats of violence discovered on their platforms. Published in the Dallas Morning News: http://bit.ly/32UUvI9

. . We should expect more from social media companies when it comes to identifying and reporting dangerous threats.

Mass shooters have made posting threats and manifestos on social media a part of the playbook for their horrendous crimes.

The El Paso shooting suspect, who was in federal court earlier this month, posted a hate-spewing manifesto on 8chan before the attack. Soon after posting his missive, 22 people were killed and 24 more were injured. . .

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Efforts to compel social media ‘fairness’ go afoul on freedom of expression

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Aug. 13, Jared Schroeder, SMU journalism professor, on a piece critiquing the Trump Administration’s executive order that attempts to compel social media platforms to be less “biased” against conservatives in their moderation efforts. Published in The Hill: https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/457297-efforts-to-compel-social-media-fairness-go-afoul-on-freedom-of

The White House’s effort to draft an executive order to limit social media companies’ alleged biases against conservative voices gets everything wrong about freedom of expression. 

News of the proposed order, which is titled “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship,” emerged late last week. The order appears to suffer from a case of First Amendment amnesia. Even the name of the order shows a misunderstanding of freedom of expression, since the First Amendment protects us from government, not corporate, censorship.

The notion that social media companies can be compelled by the White House to make their online forums fair requires that the government can force private corporations to communicate information. This would set a dangerous precedent when it comes to freedom of expression, particularly since the government would decide what “fair” means. . .

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