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conuly
One about Snopes.com
Debunkers of Fictions Sift the Net
By BRIAN STELTER
It is one of the paradoxes of the Internet.
Along with the freest access to knowledge the world has ever seen comes a staggering amount of untruth, from imagined threats on health care to too-easy-to-be-true ways to earn money by forwarding an e-mail message to 10 friends. “A cesspool,” Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, once called it.
David and Barbara Mikkelson are among those trying to clean the cesspool. The unassuming California couple run Snopes, one of the most popular fact-checking destinations on the Web.
For well over a decade they have acted as arbiters in the Age of Misinformation by answering the central question posed by every chain letter — is this true? — complete with links to further research.
The popularity of Snopes — it attracts seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in a unique position to evaluate digital society’s attitudes toward accuracy.
After 14 years, they seem to have concluded that people are rather cavalier about the facts.
In a given week, Snopes tries to set the record straight on everything from political smears to old wives’ tales. No, Kenya did not erect a sign welcoming people to the “birthplace of Barack Obama.” No, Wal-Mart did not authorize illegal immigration raids at its stores. No, the Olive Garden restaurant chain did not hand out $500 gift cards to online fans.
The Mikkelsons talk matter-of-factly about why these stories spread the way they do.
“Rumors are a great source of comfort for people,” Mrs. Mikkelson said.
Snopes is one of a small handful of sites in the fact-checking business. Brooks Jackson, the director of one of the others, the politically oriented FactCheck.org, believes news organizations should be doing more of it.
“The ‘news’ that is not fit to print gets through to people anyway these days, through 24-hour cable gasbags, partisan talk radio hosts and chain e-mails, blogs and Web sites such as WorldNetDaily or Daily Kos,” he said in an e-mail message. “What readers need now, we find, are honest referees who can help ordinary readers sort out fact from fiction.”
Even the White House now cites fact-checking sites: it has circulated links and explanations by PolitiFact.com, a project of The St. Petersburg Times that won a Pulitzer Prize last year for national reporting.
The Mikkelsons did not set out to fact-check the Web’s political smears and screeds. The site was started in 1996 as an online encyclopedia of myths and urban legends, building off the couple’s hobby. They had met years earlier on a discussion board about urban legends.
Mr. Mikkelson was a dogged researcher of folklore. When he needed to mail letters requesting information, he would use the letterhead of the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, an official-sounding organization he dreamed up. They would investigate the origins of classic tall tales, like the legend of the killer with a prosthetic hook who stalked Lovers’ Lane, for a small but devoted online audience.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, users overwhelmed the Mikkelsons with forwarded e-mail claims and editorials about the culprits and the failures of the government to halt the plot, and the couple reluctantly accepted a larger role. They still maintain a thorough list of what they call “Rumors of War.”
Less than a year later, Snopes became the family’s full-time job. Advertisements sold by a third-party network cover the $3,000-a-month bandwidth bills, with enough left over for the Mikkelsons to make a living — “despite rumors that we’re paid by, depending on your choice, the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee,” Mr. Mikkelson said.
Much of the site’s resources are spent on investigating political claims, even though the Mikkelsons say politics is the last subject they want to write about. (Barbara cannot even vote in American elections; she is a Canadian citizen.) Claims relating to President Obama are now the top searches on the site but “even when there were Republicans in the White House, the mail was still overwhelmingly anti-liberal,” Mr. Mikkelson said.
In late August, Mr. Mikkelson studied an e-mail chain letter titled “The Last of the Kennedy Dynasty” purporting to explain why the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy was unfit for acclaim. Some of its 10 bullet points were true (yes, Mr. Kennedy was cited for reckless driving while in college), but others were misleading assumptions (no, his accomplishments were not “scant”).
Mrs. Mikkelson rolled her eyes at her husband’s plans to fact-check the chain letter. “That’s ephemera,” she said.
He agreed, but the Kennedy report wound up being the Web site’s most-searched subject the next weekend.
The Mikkelsons employ two others full time to manage the enormous volume of e-mail to the site. Increasingly, curious readers are sending videos and photos as well as e-mail, requiring even more investigation. They publish on average one new article each day.
The enduring articles are the ones about everyday fears: computer viruses, scams, missing children. Some e-mail chain letters, like the one offering users $245 for forwarding the message, never fade away.
“People keep falling for the same kind of things over and over again,” Mr. Mikkelson said. Some readers always seem to think, for instance, that the government is trying to poison them: Mrs. Mikkelson said rumors about AIDS have been recycled into rumors about swine flu vaccines.
For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.
“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”
The couple say they receive grateful messages from teachers regularly, and an award from a media literacy association sits atop the TV set in Mr. Mikkelson’s home office.
It is not just the naïveté of Web users that worries the “Snopesters,” a name for the Web site’s fans and volunteers. It is also what Mr. Mikkelson calls “a trend toward the opposite approach, hyper-skepticism.”
“People get an e-mail or a photograph and they spot one little thing that doesn’t look right, and they declare the whole thing fake,” he said. “That’s just as bad as being gullible in a lot of senses.”
But even though Snopes pays the bills for the couple now, through advertising revenue, they doubt they are having much of an impact.
“It’s not like, ‘Well, we have to get out there and defend the truth,’ ” Mrs. Mikkelson added. “When you’re looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn’t stand a chance.”
Israeli Rights Groups View Themselves as Under Siege
JERUSALEM — Leaders of some of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations say they are working in an increasingly hostile environment and coming under attack for actions that their critics say endanger the country.
The pressure on these groups has tightened as the country’s leaders have battled to defend Israel against accusations of war crimes, the rights advocates say, raising questions about the limits of free speech and dissent in Israel’s much vaunted democracy.
“Over the years, in a variety of international arenas,” said Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, “it was key for Israeli officials to say, ‘Yes, there are many problems, perhaps even abuses; however, we have a strong, vibrant civil society with a plethora of voices and we are very proud of that.’
“It is inconsistent to make those statements and at the same time create a situation that colors us as traitors in the public eye.”
Governments and the watchdog organizations that monitor them have rarely seen eye to eye. But rights advocates say that to many conservatives and leaders of Israel’s right-leaning government, the allegations of war crimes against the Israeli military that followed the Gaza war in the winter of 2008-9 have turned human rights criticism into an existential threat that is chipping away at the country’s legitimacy. And officials have been blunt in their counterattacks.
The chief catalyst was the United Nations report last fall on the war in Gaza, by a fact-finding mission led by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone. The report accused Israel and Hamas of possible war crimes.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since identified what he calls the “Goldstone effect,” meaning the delegitimization of Israel abroad, as a major strategic threat.
Last summer, he attacked a leftist organization, Breaking the Silence, that published allegations by unnamed Israeli soldiers about human rights violations during the war, as selectively anti-Israel.
Some international rights groups that have been critical of Israel, like Human Rights Watch, have said Israel’s government was “waging a propaganda war” to discredit them. A senior Netanyahu aide affirmed in an interview last year that Israel was “going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups.”
Israeli rights advocates say that such comments by officials have fostered an atmosphere of harassment. While they do not accuse the government of orchestrating a campaign against them, they point to a number of seemingly unconnected dots that they say add up to a growing climate of repression.
In Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where several Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes and replaced by Jewish settlers, the police have arrested dozens of Israelis attending peaceful protests in recent months. Mr. El-Ad was detained for 36 hours in January, along with 16 other activists, after he explained to the police that their decision to break up a rally had no legal grounds. One organizer of the protests was arrested at his parents’ Jerusalem home on a night in late March, and released three days later.
Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, an advocacy group that focuses on freedom of movement for Palestinians, said her organization was harassed last year by the Israeli tax authorities. She said they questioned why Gisha should be tax exempt when that status was meant for organizations that promoted the public good. Eventually, she said, the authorities backed down.
Then an ultra-Zionist nongovernmental organization called Im Tirtzu (Hebrew for ‘If you will it’ — the first part of Theodor Herzl’s famous maxim) attacked a major organization, the New Israel Fund, which channeled about $29 million to Israeli groups in 2009, including some Arab-run, non-Zionist groups. The fund describes itself as pro-Israel and says it does not agree with all the positions of the groups it helps, but it supports their right to be heard.
Im Tirtzu published a report in January asserting that 92 percent of the quotes from unofficial Israeli bodies supporting claims against Israel in the Goldstone report were provided by 16 nongovernmental organizations financed by the New Israel Fund.
The New Israel Fund dismissed Im Tirtzu’s findings as a fabrication, saying most of the references it cited had nothing to do with Gaza during the Israeli offensive.
Still, for three weeks, Im Tirtzu plastered billboards across the country with posters featuring a crude caricature of the New Israel Fund president, Naomi Chazan. The posters depicted her with a horn attached to her forehead (in Hebrew, the word for fund also means horn) and bore the legend “Naomi Goldstone Hazan.”
Perhaps the most alarming sign to rights advocates was a preliminary vote in Parliament supporting a bill that called for groups that received support from foreign governments to register with Israel’s political parties’ registrar, which could change their tax status and hamper their ability to raise money abroad. It swept a preliminary vote in the 120-seat Parliament in February with 58 in favor and 11 against.
Proponents say the bill is needed to improve transparency. “Up until now they have enjoyed a halo effect as highly regarded human rights watchdogs,” said Gerald Steinberg, an Israeli political scientist and president of NGO Monitor, a conservative watchdog group financed by American Jewish philanthropists. “They were not seen as political organizations with biases and prone to false claims. Now, they are coming under some kind of scrutiny.”
But rights organizations say that they are already required to list publicly the sources of their funding, and that the bill is actually intended to stifle dissent.
Right-wing organizations like those encouraging Jewish settlement in Arab areas of East Jerusalem receive the overwhelming share of their financing from individuals and philanthropies whose identities are often not disclosed.
For now, the bill has effectively been blocked until its proponents reach agreement with the Labor ministers in the governing coalition, who are trying to water it down.
But Ms. Chazan said the bill could not be finessed.
“This law has to disappear,” she said. “It is the single most dangerous threat to Israeli civil society since its inception.”
For Ms. Chazan, a vibrant and diverse civil society is the bedrock of Israeli democracy, and what being Israeli is all about. “We love this country and we want it to be decent,” she said. “We believe the more decent Israel is, the better chance it has of surviving.”
But Mr. Steinberg says that organizations like the New Israel Fund, with their deep pockets and multiple petitions to Israel’s Supreme Court, have “distorted the marketplace of ideas.”
“Part of what is going on now,” he said, “is a sense that this is getting out of control.”
The last three of those math blog posts which I forgot to link to
An interview about prisons in the US
Debunkers of Fictions Sift the Net
By BRIAN STELTER
It is one of the paradoxes of the Internet.
Along with the freest access to knowledge the world has ever seen comes a staggering amount of untruth, from imagined threats on health care to too-easy-to-be-true ways to earn money by forwarding an e-mail message to 10 friends. “A cesspool,” Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, once called it.
David and Barbara Mikkelson are among those trying to clean the cesspool. The unassuming California couple run Snopes, one of the most popular fact-checking destinations on the Web.
For well over a decade they have acted as arbiters in the Age of Misinformation by answering the central question posed by every chain letter — is this true? — complete with links to further research.
The popularity of Snopes — it attracts seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in a unique position to evaluate digital society’s attitudes toward accuracy.
After 14 years, they seem to have concluded that people are rather cavalier about the facts.
In a given week, Snopes tries to set the record straight on everything from political smears to old wives’ tales. No, Kenya did not erect a sign welcoming people to the “birthplace of Barack Obama.” No, Wal-Mart did not authorize illegal immigration raids at its stores. No, the Olive Garden restaurant chain did not hand out $500 gift cards to online fans.
The Mikkelsons talk matter-of-factly about why these stories spread the way they do.
“Rumors are a great source of comfort for people,” Mrs. Mikkelson said.
Snopes is one of a small handful of sites in the fact-checking business. Brooks Jackson, the director of one of the others, the politically oriented FactCheck.org, believes news organizations should be doing more of it.
“The ‘news’ that is not fit to print gets through to people anyway these days, through 24-hour cable gasbags, partisan talk radio hosts and chain e-mails, blogs and Web sites such as WorldNetDaily or Daily Kos,” he said in an e-mail message. “What readers need now, we find, are honest referees who can help ordinary readers sort out fact from fiction.”
Even the White House now cites fact-checking sites: it has circulated links and explanations by PolitiFact.com, a project of The St. Petersburg Times that won a Pulitzer Prize last year for national reporting.
The Mikkelsons did not set out to fact-check the Web’s political smears and screeds. The site was started in 1996 as an online encyclopedia of myths and urban legends, building off the couple’s hobby. They had met years earlier on a discussion board about urban legends.
Mr. Mikkelson was a dogged researcher of folklore. When he needed to mail letters requesting information, he would use the letterhead of the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, an official-sounding organization he dreamed up. They would investigate the origins of classic tall tales, like the legend of the killer with a prosthetic hook who stalked Lovers’ Lane, for a small but devoted online audience.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, users overwhelmed the Mikkelsons with forwarded e-mail claims and editorials about the culprits and the failures of the government to halt the plot, and the couple reluctantly accepted a larger role. They still maintain a thorough list of what they call “Rumors of War.”
Less than a year later, Snopes became the family’s full-time job. Advertisements sold by a third-party network cover the $3,000-a-month bandwidth bills, with enough left over for the Mikkelsons to make a living — “despite rumors that we’re paid by, depending on your choice, the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee,” Mr. Mikkelson said.
Much of the site’s resources are spent on investigating political claims, even though the Mikkelsons say politics is the last subject they want to write about. (Barbara cannot even vote in American elections; she is a Canadian citizen.) Claims relating to President Obama are now the top searches on the site but “even when there were Republicans in the White House, the mail was still overwhelmingly anti-liberal,” Mr. Mikkelson said.
In late August, Mr. Mikkelson studied an e-mail chain letter titled “The Last of the Kennedy Dynasty” purporting to explain why the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy was unfit for acclaim. Some of its 10 bullet points were true (yes, Mr. Kennedy was cited for reckless driving while in college), but others were misleading assumptions (no, his accomplishments were not “scant”).
Mrs. Mikkelson rolled her eyes at her husband’s plans to fact-check the chain letter. “That’s ephemera,” she said.
He agreed, but the Kennedy report wound up being the Web site’s most-searched subject the next weekend.
The Mikkelsons employ two others full time to manage the enormous volume of e-mail to the site. Increasingly, curious readers are sending videos and photos as well as e-mail, requiring even more investigation. They publish on average one new article each day.
The enduring articles are the ones about everyday fears: computer viruses, scams, missing children. Some e-mail chain letters, like the one offering users $245 for forwarding the message, never fade away.
“People keep falling for the same kind of things over and over again,” Mr. Mikkelson said. Some readers always seem to think, for instance, that the government is trying to poison them: Mrs. Mikkelson said rumors about AIDS have been recycled into rumors about swine flu vaccines.
For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.
“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”
The couple say they receive grateful messages from teachers regularly, and an award from a media literacy association sits atop the TV set in Mr. Mikkelson’s home office.
It is not just the naïveté of Web users that worries the “Snopesters,” a name for the Web site’s fans and volunteers. It is also what Mr. Mikkelson calls “a trend toward the opposite approach, hyper-skepticism.”
“People get an e-mail or a photograph and they spot one little thing that doesn’t look right, and they declare the whole thing fake,” he said. “That’s just as bad as being gullible in a lot of senses.”
But even though Snopes pays the bills for the couple now, through advertising revenue, they doubt they are having much of an impact.
“It’s not like, ‘Well, we have to get out there and defend the truth,’ ” Mrs. Mikkelson added. “When you’re looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn’t stand a chance.”
Israeli Rights Groups View Themselves as Under Siege
JERUSALEM — Leaders of some of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations say they are working in an increasingly hostile environment and coming under attack for actions that their critics say endanger the country.
The pressure on these groups has tightened as the country’s leaders have battled to defend Israel against accusations of war crimes, the rights advocates say, raising questions about the limits of free speech and dissent in Israel’s much vaunted democracy.
“Over the years, in a variety of international arenas,” said Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, “it was key for Israeli officials to say, ‘Yes, there are many problems, perhaps even abuses; however, we have a strong, vibrant civil society with a plethora of voices and we are very proud of that.’
“It is inconsistent to make those statements and at the same time create a situation that colors us as traitors in the public eye.”
Governments and the watchdog organizations that monitor them have rarely seen eye to eye. But rights advocates say that to many conservatives and leaders of Israel’s right-leaning government, the allegations of war crimes against the Israeli military that followed the Gaza war in the winter of 2008-9 have turned human rights criticism into an existential threat that is chipping away at the country’s legitimacy. And officials have been blunt in their counterattacks.
The chief catalyst was the United Nations report last fall on the war in Gaza, by a fact-finding mission led by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone. The report accused Israel and Hamas of possible war crimes.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since identified what he calls the “Goldstone effect,” meaning the delegitimization of Israel abroad, as a major strategic threat.
Last summer, he attacked a leftist organization, Breaking the Silence, that published allegations by unnamed Israeli soldiers about human rights violations during the war, as selectively anti-Israel.
Some international rights groups that have been critical of Israel, like Human Rights Watch, have said Israel’s government was “waging a propaganda war” to discredit them. A senior Netanyahu aide affirmed in an interview last year that Israel was “going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups.”
Israeli rights advocates say that such comments by officials have fostered an atmosphere of harassment. While they do not accuse the government of orchestrating a campaign against them, they point to a number of seemingly unconnected dots that they say add up to a growing climate of repression.
In Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where several Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes and replaced by Jewish settlers, the police have arrested dozens of Israelis attending peaceful protests in recent months. Mr. El-Ad was detained for 36 hours in January, along with 16 other activists, after he explained to the police that their decision to break up a rally had no legal grounds. One organizer of the protests was arrested at his parents’ Jerusalem home on a night in late March, and released three days later.
Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, an advocacy group that focuses on freedom of movement for Palestinians, said her organization was harassed last year by the Israeli tax authorities. She said they questioned why Gisha should be tax exempt when that status was meant for organizations that promoted the public good. Eventually, she said, the authorities backed down.
Then an ultra-Zionist nongovernmental organization called Im Tirtzu (Hebrew for ‘If you will it’ — the first part of Theodor Herzl’s famous maxim) attacked a major organization, the New Israel Fund, which channeled about $29 million to Israeli groups in 2009, including some Arab-run, non-Zionist groups. The fund describes itself as pro-Israel and says it does not agree with all the positions of the groups it helps, but it supports their right to be heard.
Im Tirtzu published a report in January asserting that 92 percent of the quotes from unofficial Israeli bodies supporting claims against Israel in the Goldstone report were provided by 16 nongovernmental organizations financed by the New Israel Fund.
The New Israel Fund dismissed Im Tirtzu’s findings as a fabrication, saying most of the references it cited had nothing to do with Gaza during the Israeli offensive.
Still, for three weeks, Im Tirtzu plastered billboards across the country with posters featuring a crude caricature of the New Israel Fund president, Naomi Chazan. The posters depicted her with a horn attached to her forehead (in Hebrew, the word for fund also means horn) and bore the legend “Naomi Goldstone Hazan.”
Perhaps the most alarming sign to rights advocates was a preliminary vote in Parliament supporting a bill that called for groups that received support from foreign governments to register with Israel’s political parties’ registrar, which could change their tax status and hamper their ability to raise money abroad. It swept a preliminary vote in the 120-seat Parliament in February with 58 in favor and 11 against.
Proponents say the bill is needed to improve transparency. “Up until now they have enjoyed a halo effect as highly regarded human rights watchdogs,” said Gerald Steinberg, an Israeli political scientist and president of NGO Monitor, a conservative watchdog group financed by American Jewish philanthropists. “They were not seen as political organizations with biases and prone to false claims. Now, they are coming under some kind of scrutiny.”
But rights organizations say that they are already required to list publicly the sources of their funding, and that the bill is actually intended to stifle dissent.
Right-wing organizations like those encouraging Jewish settlement in Arab areas of East Jerusalem receive the overwhelming share of their financing from individuals and philanthropies whose identities are often not disclosed.
For now, the bill has effectively been blocked until its proponents reach agreement with the Labor ministers in the governing coalition, who are trying to water it down.
But Ms. Chazan said the bill could not be finessed.
“This law has to disappear,” she said. “It is the single most dangerous threat to Israeli civil society since its inception.”
For Ms. Chazan, a vibrant and diverse civil society is the bedrock of Israeli democracy, and what being Israeli is all about. “We love this country and we want it to be decent,” she said. “We believe the more decent Israel is, the better chance it has of surviving.”
But Mr. Steinberg says that organizations like the New Israel Fund, with their deep pockets and multiple petitions to Israel’s Supreme Court, have “distorted the marketplace of ideas.”
“Part of what is going on now,” he said, “is a sense that this is getting out of control.”
The last three of those math blog posts which I forgot to link to
An interview about prisons in the US
