I was recently quoted in the New York Times‘ article “Ahead of 2020, Facebook Falls Short on Plan to Share Data on Disinformation” by Davey Alba in relation to my research on Venezuela.
While I’d have liked to expand more on the issues, it’s a good read.
Amusingly enough, Sputnik also uses a quote from me used in the New York Times in an article entitled – Facebook Stalls on Disclosing Data to Billionaire-Funded ‘Disinformation Fact-Checkers’ – but they do so in order to completely misrepresent the findings of our research team.
In the article they state the following: “Ariel Sheen, a Colombia-based researcher, claims his group has found evidence of a disinformation campaign by Venezuelan media on Facebook using fake accounts, but that the social media giant has not provided the necessary information for them to prove it.”
This is categorically false – we know that Venezuela is using fake accounts and we don’t need Facebook’s assistance to prove this.
Why would Sputnik then claim otherwise? I can think of two answers.
One, is that the unnamed person who compilied this is incompetent and was not able to distinguish between the part from the whole. Meaning in this case that we can have verifiable findings about one aspect of the project (sock-puppets) but not be able to continue other parts of the project without access to data.
Secondly, they want to seed the notion that there is doubt as to whether or not Venezuela in fact uses a large number of fake Facebook accounts to promote their worldview.
Whatever it is, the takeaway is this, in terms of fairness and accuracy in reporting, by far:
New York Times > Sputnik