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Younger generations are actually better at telling news from opinion than those over age 50

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According to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center, Americans ages 18–49 were more likely to accurately categorize factual statements as facts and opinion statements as opinions.

 
Among the opinion statements, roughly three-quarters of 18- to 49-year-olds (77%) correctly identified the following opinion statement, one that appeals more to the ideological right – “Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” – compared with about two-thirds of older Americans (65%). And younger Americans were slightly more likely than older adults (82% vs. 78%, respectively) to correctly categorize this opinion statement, one appealing more to the left: “Abortion should be legal in most cases.”
 
This stronger ability to classify statements regardless of their ideological appeal may well be tied to the fact that younger adults – especially Millennials – are less likely to strongly identify with either political party. Younger Americans also are more “digitally savvy” than their elders, a characteristic that is also tied to greater success at classifying news statements. But even when accounting for levels of digital savviness and party affiliation, the differences by age persist: Younger adults are still better than their elders at deciphering factual from opinion news statements. Beyond digital savoriness, the original study found that two other factors have a strong relationship with being able to correctly classify factual and opinion statements: having higher political awareness and more trust in the information from the national news media. Despite the fact that younger adults tend to be less politically aware and trusting of the news media than their elders, they still performed better at this task.
 
 
This corroborates the footnote of a recent American Press Institute study which found that only 43 percent of Americans thought it was easy to distinguish opinion from news on digital news sites and social media.
 
The API researchers found that 52 percent of adults under age 30 said it’s at least somewhat easy to tell them apart on social media, versus 34 percent of adults 60 and older: “The level of ease was about the same for younger adults across all media types.” The study also noted that the young folk were understandably less familiar with print jargon like “op-ed” than the older adults.
 
 
A different recent Pew study found that while 57 percent of American social media users expected the news they encountered there to be “largely inaccurate,” younger social media news consumers were — unsurprisingly — more likely to say social media has “impacted their learning for the better” (48 percent of those age 18 to 29, compared to 28 percent of those age 50 to 64).
Op-eds have been playing a much larger role in the news cycle these days, with Trump’s anonymous underling writing in The New York Times and the president’s error-ridden contribution to USA Today. Instead of fighting with terms that are quickly becoming arcane, there are a few options beyond cheering the fact that rising generations of news consumers understand the newspaper layout.
 
What is Fake News?
Fake news is in the News these days, so what is it? The term is most often used to describe completely fabricated stories, but can also be applied to a broader continuum of news. Many news outlets will exhibit some form of explicit or implicit bias while not falling into the fake news category. Assessing the quality of the content is crucial to understanding whether what you are viewing is true or not. It is up to you to do the legwork to make sure your information is good.
 
  • Fake News: Sources that intentionally fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports.
  • Satire: Sources that use humor, irony, exaggeration, ridicule, and false information to comment on current events.
  • Bias: Sources that come from a particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts.
  • Rumor Mill: Sources that traffic in rumors, gossip, innuendo, and unverified claims.
  • State News: Sources in repressive states operating under government sanction.
  • Junk Science: Sources that promote pseudoscience, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims.
  • Clickbait: A strategically placed hyperlink designed to drive traffic to sources that provide generally credible content, but use exaggerated, misleading, or questionable headlines, social media descriptions, and/or images.
 
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form to assist people in recognizing fake news.
Its main points are:
 
  • Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)
  • Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)
  • Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)
  • Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)
  • Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)
  • Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)
  • Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgement)
  • Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).
 
Read more at https://www.ifla.org/ifla-publications, including the latest IFLA journal, October 2018, is a special about Privacy, https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/hq/publications/ifla-journal/ifla-journal-44-3_2018.pdf
 

Fact-checking The sites below generally review specific news stories and claims.

  • Displays news coverage from “left”, “right”, and “center” sources. Use with caution as the categories are generated by users and reflect public perceptions of each news source rather than any actual bias in the individual articles displayed.
  • A product of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, this site is terrific for checking up on political claims.
  • Fake news database, tasked with “tracking fabricated news created to mislead”
  • The Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact researches the claims of politicians and checks their accuracy.
  • One of the oldest debunking sites on the Internet, Snopes.com focuses on widely circulating urban legends, news stories and memes.
  • Hoax-Slayer specifically focuses on email hoaxes, identity theft scams and spam.
  • Focused primarily on political stories.
 
Watch this video tutorial about how to choose your news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-Y-z6HmRgI
With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart
 
 
Illustration by Sabrena Khadija used under a Creative Commons license.
 
Curated by Mike Stuart, 1stonline.us
 

Younger generations are actually better at telling news from opinion than those over age 50

Curated by

According to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center, Americans ages 18–49 were more likely to accurately categorize factual statements as facts and opinion statements as opinions.

 
Among the opinion statements, roughly three-quarters of 18- to 49-year-olds (77%) correctly identified the following opinion statement, one that appeals more to the ideological right – “Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” – compared with about two-thirds of older Americans (65%). And younger Americans were slightly more likely than older adults (82% vs. 78%, respectively) to correctly categorize this opinion statement, one appealing more to the left: “Abortion should be legal in most cases.”
 
This stronger ability to classify statements regardless of their ideological appeal may well be tied to the fact that younger adults – especially Millennials – are less likely to strongly identify with either political party. Younger Americans also are more “digitally savvy” than their elders, a characteristic that is also tied to greater success at classifying news statements. But even when accounting for levels of digital savviness and party affiliation, the differences by age persist: Younger adults are still better than their elders at deciphering factual from opinion news statements. Beyond digital savoriness, the original study found that two other factors have a strong relationship with being able to correctly classify factual and opinion statements: having higher political awareness and more trust in the information from the national news media. Despite the fact that younger adults tend to be less politically aware and trusting of the news media than their elders, they still performed better at this task.
 
 
This corroborates the footnote of a recent American Press Institute study which found that only 43 percent of Americans thought it was easy to distinguish opinion from news on digital news sites and social media.
 
The API researchers found that 52 percent of adults under age 30 said it’s at least somewhat easy to tell them apart on social media, versus 34 percent of adults 60 and older: “The level of ease was about the same for younger adults across all media types.” The study also noted that the young folk were understandably less familiar with print jargon like “op-ed” than the older adults.
 
 
A different recent Pew study found that while 57 percent of American social media users expected the news they encountered there to be “largely inaccurate,” younger social media news consumers were — unsurprisingly — more likely to say social media has “impacted their learning for the better” (48 percent of those age 18 to 29, compared to 28 percent of those age 50 to 64).
Op-eds have been playing a much larger role in the news cycle these days, with Trump’s anonymous underling writing in The New York Times and the president’s error-ridden contribution to USA Today. Instead of fighting with terms that are quickly becoming arcane, there are a few options beyond cheering the fact that rising generations of news consumers understand the newspaper layout.
 
What is Fake News?
Fake news is in the News these days, so what is it? The term is most often used to describe completely fabricated stories, but can also be applied to a broader continuum of news. Many news outlets will exhibit some form of explicit or implicit bias while not falling into the fake news category. Assessing the quality of the content is crucial to understanding whether what you are viewing is true or not. It is up to you to do the legwork to make sure your information is good.
 
  • Fake News: Sources that intentionally fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports.
  • Satire: Sources that use humor, irony, exaggeration, ridicule, and false information to comment on current events.
  • Bias: Sources that come from a particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts.
  • Rumor Mill: Sources that traffic in rumors, gossip, innuendo, and unverified claims.
  • State News: Sources in repressive states operating under government sanction.
  • Junk Science: Sources that promote pseudoscience, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims.
  • Clickbait: A strategically placed hyperlink designed to drive traffic to sources that provide generally credible content, but use exaggerated, misleading, or questionable headlines, social media descriptions, and/or images.
 

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form to assist people in recognizing fake news.
Its main points are:
 
  • Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)
  • Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)
  • Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)
  • Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)
  • Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)
  • Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)
  • Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgement)
  • Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).
 
Read more at https://www.ifla.org/ifla-publications, including the latest IFLA journal, October 2018, is a special about Privacy, https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/hq/publications/ifla-journal/ifla-journal-44-3_2018.pdf
 

Fact-checking The sites below generally review specific news stories and claims.

  • Displays news coverage from “left”, “right”, and “center” sources. Use with caution as the categories are generated by users and reflect public perceptions of each news source rather than any actual bias in the individual articles displayed.
  • A product of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, this site is terrific for checking up on political claims.
  • Fake news database, tasked with “tracking fabricated news created to mislead”
  • The Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact researches the claims of politicians and checks their accuracy.
  • One of the oldest debunking sites on the Internet, Snopes.com focuses on widely circulating urban legends, news stories and memes.
  • Hoax-Slayer specifically focuses on email hoaxes, identity theft scams and spam.
  • Focused primarily on political stories.
 
Watch this video tutorial about how to choose your news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-Y-z6HmRgI
With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart
 
Illustration by Sabrena Khadija used under a Creative Commons license.
 
Curated by Mike Stuart, 1stonline.us
 

Referral spam is compromising the accuracy of most Google Analytics reports!

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What Google referral spam is, how to identify it in your reports, methods to clean up historical reports and prevent referral spam from effecting reports in the future.

Starting in 2014, there was a full-frontal assault of fake referral spam masquerading as legitimate website visitors compromising the accuracy of our Google Analytics reports!
While we thought Google would fix it, a solution still has not arrived, and so we are on our own.

The problem was, and still is, most marketers don’t know what referral spam is, how to spot it, or how to remove it.

  • This presents a major problem when businesses and marketers begin using these inaccurate Google Analytics reports to make conversion rate optimization decisions on A/B tests, landing page optimization, and more.
  • Worse yet, many marketers are unknowingly presenting traffic numbers to bosses and stakeholders that could be off by up to 60%!
  • There are a few proven strategies to eliminate Google Analytics referral spam.

What Is Referral Spam?

  • The majority of referral spam never actually visits your website which is why some marketers refer to it as “Ghost” spam. Even though this traffic never visits your website it still appears in your reports as legitimate traffic affecting total sessions, bounce rate, time on site, conversion rates and more.
  • On small business websites, this traffic can account for over 60% of daily sessions which causes major problems in month-to-month reporting, A/B testing, or other conversion rate optimization tests.
  • If this traffic never visits your website, why does it show up in Google Analytics?
  • The spammers use a Google developer tool called the Measurement Protocol.
     Among other legitimate uses, this allows developers and businesses to track behavior of their customers from a wide variety of different offline data sources and send that raw data to their Google Analytics account. Unfortunately, this also opens the door for crafty spammers to force raw data into Analytics accounts by randomly attacking UA tracking codes, completely bypassing the website.

referral-spam

How to Identify Referral Spam

  • There are a lot of ways to identify referral spam but the quickest is to review your traffic reports by clicking Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
  • If the referring domain URL isn’t a big enough giveaway of the traffic source being spam, simply visiting the URL should remove all doubt.

How to remove Fake Traffic From Google Analytics?


Three filters will block most future traffic from domains which are currently known to send referral spam.

First filter click the Admin tab, select your Filtered View, click Filters, and enter a name for your filter keeping in mind there will be several.
In the Filter Pattern field, copy and paste the string below:

  • dailyrank|100dollars-seo|semalt|anticrawler|sitevaluation|buttons-for-website|buttons-for-your-website|-musicas*-gratis|best-seo-offer|best-seo-solution|savetubevideo|ranksonic|offers.bycontext|7makemoneyonline|kambasoft|medispainstitute
  • Since there is a character limit to the Filter Pattern field create a second filter: 127.0.0.1|justprofit.xyz|nexus.search-helper.ru|rankings-analytics.com|videos-for-your-business|adviceforum.info|video—production|success-seo|sharemyfile.ru|seo-platform|dbutton.net|wordpress-crew.net|rankscanner|doktoronline.no|o00.in
  • Third Filter: top1-seo-service.com|fast-wordpress-start.com|rankings-analytics.com|uptimebot.net|^scripted.com|uptimechecker.com

The fourth is a Hostname Filter.
  • This can be seen in your Network report by clicking Audience > Technology > Network and selecting the Hostname tab.
  • The Hostname Filter eliminates this spam from your reports by including only the traffic that reaches your website by requesting your actual domain name.
  • The difference here is you must select Include, choose Hostname for the Filter Field and enter your hostname in the Filter Pattern.

How Do I Clean Old Google Analytics Reports?

  • While the above mentioned filters will only fight future referral spam, you can still remove spam from historical reports using a single Custom Segment.
  • Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. Once there, click + Add Segment > + New Segment and recreate the four filters above as a single Custom Segment.
  • Click Conditions, and on the first filter select Hostname > Matches Regex and enter the hostname(s) you used in your fourth filter above.

Click the + Add Filter button.

  • Source > Matches Regex and paste the same list of spam domains from the first filter you created.
  • Click the OR button and repeat this filter two more times with the respective list of spam domains.

Notice the circular graph to the right reflect a smaller amount of traffic. This is the amount of site traffic that remains after all referral spam has been removed. Once you save this filter, you can apply it to any report and any time frame.



THE EASIER ALTERNATE METHOD

Google Analytics spam shows up with bogus referrers, events, and other junk data. Referral spam in web analytics reports has been around for a long time, but it started showing up in Google around the end of 2014. Google is working on the issue and seems to be blocking some of it, but new spam continues to crop up. This method will stop current spammers, and can be re-run again in the future as new spammers arise.

This tool will automatically insert filters to block new referral spam: https://www.quantable.com/ga-filter/spam-filter.php

It uses two different methods in combination:
  • Blocking analytics calls from sites other than your own (or other hosts you select, the tool will walk you through the sites calling your GA). This eliminates most of the so-called “ghost” referrals where your site was never involved in the measurement calls.
  • Explicitly blocking other spammers that get around the hostname-limitation method. Usually these are bots that actually are hitting your site and firing the GA sensor as normal but are still junk traffic that we’d all like to filter out. If you already have existing spam filters these new filters should not conflict with them.


ANOTHER ALTERNATE METHOD WITH MORE OPTIONS

  • This tool lets you automatically create and link referral spam filters to your Google Analytics profiles.
  • The list of spam sources is derived from friends at Lone Goat and Analytics Canvas.
  • To create and link these filters, you will need EDIT access in the Google Analytics accounts you want to modify.
  • This tool will only allow you to access privileged accounts.
  • Note that any existing filters with the names sa_Spam_filter_#N will be updated if there is a mismatch.




Sources:
www.simoahava.com/analytics/spam-filter-insertion-tool
blog.kissmetrics.com/removing-google-analytics-referral-spam
www.quantable.com/analytics/google-analytics-referral-spam-filter-wizard

You do not need email confirmation

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Get more a lot more conversions!
You do not need email confirmation in your sign up flow

This email signup is overcomplicated
  1. Create an account with an email and password
  2. Thank you message: “Please confirm your account”
  3. Go to your inbox, click the “Confirm your email”
  4. Thank you message: “Please sign in”
  5. You still there? Now you can actually start using the app…

It might sound familiar to you. It is how many applications work today.

There is a much better way!


Do we need email confirmation?

I have yet to find anyone telling me they like to receive email confirmations. They are needed to verify a user is the legitimate owner of the email they used to sign up.

To make sure the user is the rightful receiver of the data and that they are not impersonating someone else. Accounting for these uses cases we set out to reduce friction in our sign up flow without sacrificing privacy or security.

What does signing up look like without email confirmation?

  1. Create an account with an email and password
  2. That’s it… you’re in!

We reduced a 4 step process to 1. Previously, the user would have to go to their inbox and often the confirmation email can take time to arrive or even end up in spam causing them to hang around looking at their inbox pressing refresh frantically, or worse – get distracted by more pressing matters waiting in their inbox and not return to the app. Now you can experience our product right away.

  • How do you access the limited features then?
  • How do you access the limited features then?

As soon as the user wants to take one of the limited actions mentioned above, prompt them with a message explaining “For your security, because we really care for security, this feature is only available once you confirm your email.”

  • Email confirmation is still painful at this point, but the user understands why we need it. It is not an arbitrary requirement that you need to go through first hand.
  • Automatically log him out after 48 hours and send him another email to let him know. This gives an extra incentive to confirm his account in a timely fashion.
  • We went from a 4 step process to 1 and we made the application resilient to email deliverability issues.

We moved the pain closer to the actual benefit. And we let the user test our application with no strings attached. It definitely was some extra work but as the data suggests, it was well worth the effort!

source visible.vc/engineering/signup-flow-without-email-confirmation/


Will Paid Links Will Destroy Good Content?

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Site-Contents-That-are-Violating-and-Can-be-Removed-From-Search-ResultsQuality is paramount to the success of content marketing; as opposed to older and more traditional forms of marketing, successful content marketing is entirely dependent on good ideas, true originality, and most importantly, giving something of value to your audience. Fantastic content grows organically, gaining exposure and momentum through coverage on blogs, websites, and social media platforms, meaning that companies don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to reach huge numbers of potential customers.

As a result, content marketing represents a sort of level playing field for marketers; small businesses and large companies can compete head-to-head regardless of their budgets, because good ideas are free and the only factor that counts is the quality of what you have to say.

  • As shady webmasters and bloggers have begun charging for links, they’ve essentially become a road block which is slowly restricting the channels through which good content gets shared. By charging for links, mentions, and content placement, these webmasters are disrupting the way good content should be shared – organically, purely on the merits of its quality.
  • If this trend continues, the deciding factor in how much exposure a brand gets will, once again, be the advertising budget attached to it, effectively putting the power back into the hands of larger companies, because smaller businesses can no longer compete purely on the merits of their work. Everything content marketing is dependent on – value, originality, and ingenuity – will no longer be the crucial factor for success, as anything with a big budget attached, no matter how mediocre, will gain more exposure.
  • As existing websites start to change their business model and chase this sort of revenue, legitimate content creators will have fewer and fewer platforms from which they can gain exposure and build links. Crucially, the customers – the sole reason why this whole industry exists – will stop caring, because the kind of content which made them care in the first place will stop getting through to them.

Top tier sites will never change, as their success is dependent on publishing and sharing the best of the best.

ACM-Setup-Use

However, as more low and mid-tier sites start selling links, it means that the lower rungs of the content marketing ladder are being kicked out for anyone who doesn’t want to risk the wrath of Google by buying links.

Via http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/Editorial/Commentary/Why-Paid-Links-Will-Destroy-Good-Content-and-How-To-Stop-It-100157.htm

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