Comments on: Fact Checking Food Advocacy https://partnews.mit.edu/2012/03/14/fact-checking-food-advocacy/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:21:26 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: Ethan Zuckerman https://partnews.mit.edu/2012/03/14/fact-checking-food-advocacy/#comment-317 Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:33:56 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=386#comment-317 Prescient choice of story, Nathan, as the pink slime issue appears to be gaining traction, perhaps because of the choice.org petition, or perhaps as part of a larger campaign. I particularly appreciated your analysis of the success of the choice.org petition – you’ve identified several elements that seem worth seeking out in analyzing other social media campaigns going forward.

I’m particularly struck by your difficulties sourcing the 70% comment. The circularity of some of these references is really interesting. It might be worth putting instances of the claim on a timeline and trying to determine whether it originates from this single source, or whether there are any other figures making the claim. This also strikes me as a space where tools might be particularly interesting to develop to detect and warn of these sorts of “facts”.

]]> By: mstem https://partnews.mit.edu/2012/03/14/fact-checking-food-advocacy/#comment-158 Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:21:26 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=386#comment-158 Mr. Zirnstein is currently “looking for a new career position in the food, biotechnology, or pharmaceutical industry.” http://www.linkedin.com/pub/gerald-zirnstein/15/221/402

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