Davey Alba | |
---|---|
Education | De La Salle University (BA) Columbia University (MA) |
Occupation | Technology journalism |
Website | daveyalba |
Davey Alba is a technology reporter who covers Big Tech for Bloomberg News, [1] after previously reporting on online disinformation for The New York Times . [2]
Davey Alba was born in Manila, Philippines, and attended De La Salle University, earning a degree in communication arts. Her father is an academic, mother an economic consultant and her sister is VP of a multi-national investment bank. She came to the United States at age 23 [3] in 2011. She studied at Columbia University and received a masters in science journalism. [2]
Alba's first job out of training was at Popular Mechanics ; she was technology editor and got to test gadgets and phones. [4] She worked as a technology reporter at BuzzFeed News , Wired and Gizmodo before joining The New York Times as a technology reporter in 2019. [2] Her area of coverage was "disinformation and all of its tentacles." [5] In March, 2022, she joined Bloomberg News, covering Google and Big Tech. [1]
In 2018, working at BuzzFeed News, she reported how Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte used Facebook to gain power in the country. [6] For the BuzzFeed News article on Duterte, Alba won two 2019 awards. She was awarded the Livingston Award for International Reporting, documenting how Facebook ignored fake news, fueled the Filipino drug war, [7] and adversely impacted a vulnerable community [3] by enabling Duterte to manipulate public opinion and win election. [8] After Duterte won, the Facebook machinery of manipulating opinion became a state-sponsored one [6] "to punish opponents, sometimes with death." [7] She won the Mirror Award for Best Story for Journalism in Peril. [9]
After reporting on videos supportive of President Trump's recommendation for the use disinfectants in the treatment of COVID-19, [10] Davey was the target of "weaponized harassment." Davey reports that she was targeted as a reporter who is an immigrant, a woman and a person of color. [11]
In September 2021, Alba interviewed incoming Wikimedia Foundation chief executive officer Maryana Iskander. [12]
Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which actors employ strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics to advance political, military, or commercial goals. Disinformation is implemented through attacks that "weaponize multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value judgements—to exploit and amplify culture wars and other identity-driven controversies."
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), formerly Brixton Endeavors, is a British-American not-for-profit NGO company with offices in London and Washington, D.C. with the stated purpose of stopping the spread of online hate speech and disinformation. It campaigns to deplatform people that it believes promote hate or misinformation, and campaigns to restrict media organisations such as The Daily Wire from advertising. CCDH is a member of the Stop Hate For Profit coalition.
State-sponsored Internet propaganda is Internet manipulation and propaganda that is sponsored by a state. States have used the Internet, particularly social media to influence elections, sow distrust in institutions, spread rumors, spread disinformation, typically using bots to create and spread contact. Propaganda is used internally to control populations, and externally to influence other societies.
Fake news websites are websites on the Internet that deliberately publish fake news—hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation purporting to be real news—often using social media to drive web traffic and amplify their effect. Unlike news satire, fake news websites deliberately seek to be perceived as legitimate and taken at face value, often for financial or political gain. Such sites have promoted political falsehoods in India, Germany, Indonesia and the Philippines, Sweden, Mexico, Myanmar, and the United States. Many sites originate in, or are promoted by, Russia, or North Macedonia among others. Some media analysts have seen them as a threat to democracy. In 2016, the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs passed a resolution warning that the Russian government was using "pseudo-news agencies" and Internet trolls as disinformation propaganda to weaken confidence in democratic values.
A troll farm or troll factory is an institutionalised group of internet trolls that seeks to interfere in political opinions and decision-making.
Fake news websites target United States audiences by using disinformation to create or inflame controversial topics such as the 2016 election. Most fake news websites target readers by impersonating or pretending to be real news organizations, which can lead to legitimate news organizations further spreading their message. Most notable in the media are the many websites that made completely false claims about political candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as part of a larger campaign to gain viewers and ad revenue or spread disinformation. Additionally, satire websites have received criticism for not properly notifying readers that they are publishing false or satirical content, since many readers have been duped by seemingly legitimate articles.
Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue. Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term fake news was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common. Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information presented as news. It has also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavorable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text. Because of this diversity of types of false news, researchers are beginning to favour information disorder as a more neutral and informative term.
Occupy Democrats is an American left-wing media outlet built around a Facebook page and corresponding website. Established in 2012, it publishes hyperpartisan content, clickbait, and false information. Posts originating from the Occupy Democrats Facebook page are among the most widely shared political content on Facebook.
Vera Files is a non-profit online news organization in the Philippines, known for its institutionalized role in fact-checking false information in the Philippines, and as one of the news organizations most prominently targeted by intimidation and censorship due to its critical coverage of the Philippine government. It is part of the International Fact-Checking Network of the Poynter Institute and is one of Facebook's two Philippine partners in its third-party fact-checking program.
Yonder, formerly named New Knowledge, was a company from Austin, Texas, that specialized in information integrity. It is most widely known for supporting the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. The company was also involved in a disinformation operation during the 2017 US Senate special election in Alabama, though the company denied any political motivation behind its research. More recently, Yonder's CEO and researchers have provided expert commentary to the New York Times, Fast Company, and Axios about 5G and COVID-19 misinformation.
Fake news in the Philippines refers to the general and widespread misinformation or disinformation in the country by various actors. It has been problematic in the Philippines where social media and alike plays a key role in influencing topics and information ranging from politics, health, belief, religion, current events, aid, lifestyle, elections and others. Recently, it has evolved to be a rampant issue against the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines and the 2022 Philippine general election.
Yaël Eisenstat is an American democracy activist and technology policy expert who has spent over two decades combatting extremism, polarization, and anti-democratic behavior both on- and offline. With experience as one the United States government's top counterextremism officials and as Facebook's former Global Head of Elections Integrity Ops, Eisenstat is best known for being a pioneering voice in shaping public understanding of the ways in which social media contributes to polarization and radicalization.
Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic has been propagated by various public figures, including officials of the United States government. The Trump administration in particular made a large number of misleading statements about the pandemic. A Cornell University study found that former U.S. President Donald Trump was "likely the largest driver" of the COVID-19 misinformation infodemic in English-language media, downplaying the virus and promoting unapproved drugs. Others have also been accused of spreading misinformation, including U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, backing conspiracy theories regarding the origin of the virus, U.S. senators and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who downplayed the virus.
The News Literacy Project (NLP) is an American nonpartisan national education nonprofit, based in Washington, D.C., that provides resources for educators, students, and the general public to help them learn to identify credible information, recognize misinformation and disinformation, and determine what they can trust, share, and act on. It was founded in 2008 by Alan C. Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau.
Erin Elizabeth Finn, known as Erin Elizabeth, is an American alternative health advocate who blogs under the name Health Nut News. She is known for propagating conspiracy theories relating to healthcare topics, like COVID-19 and vaccines. She and her partner Joseph Mercola have been called two of the "disinformation dozen" responsible for 65% of Covid-19 anti-vaccine misinformation on the internet and social media, according to a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in 2021.
Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines consists of disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic propagated by various sources.
Julia Carrie Wong is a journalist primarily reporting on labor, tech and extremism, currently for The Guardian. Her reporting on Facebook and its involvement in disinformation and misinformation campaigns that artificially promoted candidates in Azerbaijan and Honduras has raised awareness of Facebook's content management controversies, as has her reporting on the company's similar failure to act on white supremacist groups on Facebook.
Ryan Mac is a Vietnamese-American writer and journalist who works for the New York Times. He has previously worked as a reporter at Buzzfeed News and Forbes. Mac was awarded the 2019 Mirror Award and the 2020 George Polk Award for his reporting on Facebook. He is the co-author of 2024's Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.