2017
October
20
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

October 20, 2017
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

The war on misinformation keeps spreading.

Three US senators, reacting to evidence that Russian-linked players were behind deceptive ads ahead of last year’s US presidential election, floated a bill Thursday aimed at forcing internet firms to tell the Federal Election Commission who’s bankrolling online ads. (Paid TV, radio, and print political advertisers have long been regulated.)

The same day, Pew Research Center released a survey that asked: “Will trusted methods emerge over the next 10 years to block false narratives and allow the most accurate information to prevail?”

Respondents were almost evenly split. Pessimists held a slight edge. They worried about those with a stake in maintaining the status quo, and saw divisions rising among those who care about the quality of information and those who don’t.

Optimists saw tech coming to the rescue, with innovations that could reduce “the potency and availability of misinformation.” They envisioned successful regulation, the rise of “trust ratings,” and a rise in information literacy.

That’s likely to require a grass-roots global push. Here’s one promising precursor: In some 8,000 Italian schools beginning Oct. 31, a public/private experiment aims to teach those weaned on social media how to sort fact from fiction online, The New York Times reports.

Said Laura Boldrini, a parliamentarian champion of the effort: “It’s only right to give these kids the possibility to defend themselves from lies.”

Now to our five stories for your Friday, highlighting prudence, adaptibility, and connectedness in action. 


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Rahmat Gul/AP
US forces and Afghan commandos patrol Pandola village in the Achin district of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, Afghanistan, in April 2017.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Traders gather on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Oct. 20. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a few high this week.
SOURCE:

International Monetary Fund

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Karen Norris/Staff

On Film

Hugo van Lawick/National Geographic Creative
Jane Goodall and infant chimpanzee Flint reached out to touch each other's hands at Gombe in Tanzania. Flint was the first infant born at Gombe after Jane arrived. With him she had a great opportunity to study chimp development – and to have physical contact, which is no longer considered appropriate with chimps in the wild.

The Monitor's View

Stephen Brashear/AP Images for Amazon
An Amazon Prime truck pulls up in front of Amazon’s campus in Seattle last May. The large domes are know as The Spheres.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Finding homes for Puerto Rican dogs evacuated from Hurricane Maria

( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us today. Have a wonderful weekend and come back around next week. We’ll be watching the Sunday parliamentary elections called for by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and we'll have a report on what the results mean. 

More issues

2017
October
20
Friday
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