Monday, June 25, 2018

Fear, trusting social media, inability to confirm the ‘news.’
When a text can trigger a lynching: WhatsApp struggles with incendiary messages in India
A WhatsApp text circulating in some districts of India’s central Madhya Pradesh state helped to inflame a mob of 50-60 villagers into savagely beating up two innocent men last week on suspicion that they were going to murder people and sell their body parts.
The essence of the message, written in Hindi, was that 500 people disguised as beggars were roaming the area so that they could kill people to harvest their organs. The message also urged recipients to forward it to friends and family. Police say the message was fake.
Police officers who joined several local WhatsApp groups, found three men circulating the message and they were arrested, said Jayadevan A, the police chief for Balaghat district, where the incident occurred.
This happened just weeks after a WhatsApp text warning of 400 child traffickers arriving in the southern Indian technology hub of Bengaluru led a frenzied mob to lynch a 26-year-old man, a migrant construction worker from another Indian state, on suspicions that he was a kidnapper.




Something I can pull some ideas from?
Fake News, Lies, and Propaganda: The Class
“The slides for the University of MichiganLOEX 2018 session entitled Fake News, Lies, and a For-credit Class: Lessons Learned from Teaching a 7-Week Fake News Undergraduate Library Course are here. An open Canvas version of the course is available as well. Look for a Canvas version of the course in the Commons if you are a Canvas campus. The assignments in the Canvas Commons course take advantage of the integration of Google Drive and Canvas on our campus. See the assignment materials below if the Canvas assignments are unavailable to you. A machine-readable version of the syllabus is available. A PDF of the syllabus is also available. Finally, the materials below include the lesson plans, slides, and homework assignments for each of the 7 weeks of the course. You can find the course proposal here.”




Competition.
California is creating one big online community college
Lawmakers included $100 million in this year's state budget to create an online community college that will offer certificate and credentialing programs. It will get another $20 million annually.
… The mission is to retrain workers with skills needed in high-demand jobs.
… Roughly one-third of new jobs in the state are expected to require some career technical education that goes beyond high school but not as far as a four-year degree, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
The statewide online community college will be tailored to working adults and prepare workers for jobs in growing industries, like advanced manufacturing, healthcare, the service sector, in-home support services, and child development.




Dilbert on Social Media.


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