Author: nick

[ad_1] In May, ultra-low-fare Spirit Airlines announced that it would ground all flights and shut down, effective immediately. That happened despite “extensive and comprehensive efforts to restructure the business” and “create a sustainable path forward,” the airline explained in a press release. Government meddling helped doom Spirit’s attempts to save itself. In July 2022, JetBlue announced that it would acquire Spirit for $3.8 billion. Spirit, which had long thrived on low fares and high profit margins, struggled since the COVID-19 pandemic, and JetBlue’s offer was a last-ditch effort. The Biden administration sued to stop the merger, fearing that a combined carrier would leave too…

[ad_1] Article Metrics0CrossRef Citations Major platforms constantly claim to fight disinformation and support the fact checking community, but their transparency reports and the empirical evidence from a survey of expert fact checkers across 21 EU countries show a different reality. This study finds that despite commitments made under EU regulations, expert fact checkers remain largely peripheral actors within the existing platform governance framework, with limited insight into how their work influences platform decisions. As Brussels rolls out its new Democracy Shield (European Parliament, 2025), our study exposes that the promise of algorithmic transparency remains largely unfulfilled, leaving frontline fact checkers…

[ad_1] Photo by Jackie Hope on Unsplash The Supreme Court has been on a partisan, right-wing rampage lately, and the results for everyone from migrants to gun-crime victims to voters swamped by corporate dark money in campaigns are disastrous. On June 25, the high court let Trump end temporary protections for Syrian and Haitian migrants, ruled that migrants couldn’t apply for asylum from Mexico, blocked thousands of suits charging the Roundup weed-killer with causing cancer and invalidated limits on public gun-carrying in Hawaii – and that was just in one day! For the environmentally and health-minded, the Roundup decision is…

[ad_1] Fact-checking has become a key response to disinformation during crises and conflicts, but its role is increasingly contested due to concerns about its effectiveness and its co-optation by different political actors. In polarized, high-choice environments, fact-checking is often embedded within partisan and state-aligned infrastructures, shaping validation and rejection of knowledge claims. Authoritarian states are increasingly active in fact-checking appropriation, a trend likely to intensify with generative AI. As debates over AI sovereignty grow, control of verification tools links to epistemic sovereignty, the authority over knowledge. National AI models risk fragmenting regimes of factual validation, undermining shared baselines. AI-supported fact-checking…

[ad_1] Hamad Ganale, photo by Nelson Pereira. As the UN warns of the imminent threat of another large-scale massacre in Sudan, activists from the Sudanese democratic movement in exile denounce a war launched to end the popular revolution that began in December 2018. They argue that the war is supported by foreign powers eager to control the country’s resources and not interested in enabling a democratic transition in Sudan. “War was the last resort chosen to crush the revolution, after several attempts to manipulate the revolutionary movement failed,” says Hamad Gamal, a Sudanese activist exiled in France. The popular protests…

[ad_1] German politicians are promising to block Volkswagen’s plan to cut about 100,000 jobs and close four factories in Germany. The automaker wants to save money and restructure to be more competitive with Chinese and American automakers, but leaders from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government and the state of Lower Saxony, which owns a big share of the company, say they will fight the layoffs. Politicians on Volkswagen’s supervisory board, which has the power to stop the plan, say they want the company to focus on becoming more competitive instead of cutting jobs. The post Brickbat: Leave the Driving to Us…

[ad_1] Article Metrics0CrossRef Citations In the October 2024 flash floods in Spain, social media posts falsely claimed authorities were concealing the number of casualties. The narrative centered on a flooded parking structure in Valencia, where hundreds of bodies were falsely claimed to be trapped. This narrative gained traction even after videos showing the premises had been evacuated. This illustrates a growing challenge for fact checkers: During crises, storylines that group isolated claims into emotionally resonant and causal arguments can prevail and persist beyond factual corrections. We explore how narrative monitoring and argument checking can complement fact-checking, shifting focus from single…

[ad_1] The Ukrainian Armed Forces were in trouble. Russian assaults and Ukrainian desertions had left a weakened force with an unsolvable manpower shortage. Weapons were running out, and America’s war on Iran had diverted the most needed military equipment, including Patriot interceptors, with no solution in sight. With a Russian summer offensive on the horizon, for the first time, collapse and defeat was a real possibility. And then, just at the crucial moment, the Ukrainian Armed Forces turned the tide. Innovations in drone technology blunted the Russian advance bringing it to a near standstill. And, for the first time since…

[ad_1] Photo by Simon Abrams The June jobs report gave a decent picture on jobs growth, even if there were somewhat fewer jobs than most analysts had predicted. At 57,000, the economy is generating enough jobs to keep pace with the growth of the labor force. However, there were other aspects to the report that were somewhat concerning, most notably the weak wage growth. Here are my big five takeaways from the report. + Wage growth is slowing and not keeping pace with inflation; + There is virtually no job growth outside of the health care and social assistance sectors;…

[ad_1] Article Metrics0CrossRef Citations Not all misinformation consequences are equal. Faced by hundreds of thousands of false claims online and offline every day, fact checkers need a robust way to identify the important ones to check. This scalable model—used by fact checkers in trials in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East since 2024—helps forecast the potential imminent and cumulative harms of different false claims and is an early warning system for society that focuses efforts on factually false claims that cause real-world harms. This is how it works. Image by Elf-Moondance on Pixabay Identifying broad and specific misinformation effects Accurate forecasting of…