How tech and media can fight fake news - Columbia Journalism Review

"But even as great reporters, including our political team, competed for the central, traditional campaign stories, we found ourselves strangely alone in the digital trenches. The big story of 2014 was Gamergate, the misogynistic movement championed by Breitbart and covered primarily by new media. That turned out to be a better predictor of the presidential election than any rubber chicken dinner in Iowa (or poll by a once-reputable pollster). Joe Bernstein dug into an energized white nationalist movement that owed at least as much to 4Chan as to David Duke, and Bernstein’s definitive 2015 piece on the “Chanterculture” prefigured much of what would happen in 2016. Charlie Warzel’s coverage of Twitter harassment documented organized waves of trolling, and included the first attempt to nail down the platform’s anemic response. Craig Silverman defined what has been the great post-election media story, the epidemic of fake news on Facebook. Other new voices—from the Intercept to the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci—reported and argued in and around this news space. All of it combined chewed up fewer resources than what the traditional media spent on a day of campaign travel."