misinformation

Part 1 of Smarter Every Day's three-part series on manipulating the YouTube algorithm. It features Renee DiResta and examples of how social media platforms can be manipulated.

A short Al Jazeera animation narrated by Amy Goodman presenting Noam Chomsky's five filters of the mass media: ownership, advertising, media elite sourcing, flak and a common enemy. It is part of the MediaTheorised series.

A video essay from the Alt-Right Playbook series that explains how extremist movements draw ordinary people in, using deniable rhetoric, bad-faith games, and gradual escalation. It draws on books about the alt-right, male radicalization, and cult-style brainwashing.

Mick West analyzes the Navy "Go Fast" UFO footage and shows with simple trigonometry and the data overlay that the object is slow and high up, consistent with a balloon. He explains how parallax makes it look fast and argues the original TV claims were wrong.

Captain Disillusion debunks a viral Chinese invisibility cloak video while parodying popular educational channels. Along the way he explains chroma keying and green screen techniques.

CGP Grey's five-minute animated explainer on how copyright terms grew from 14 years to life plus decades. It uses Disney and Star Wars examples to argue the system has gone wrong.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment on the real facts of the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, covering the severity of the burns and the corporate PR campaign that painted it as frivolous.

A filmmaker explains why the Apollo moon landing footage could not have been faked in a studio, based on the video and film technology of the late 1960s. He walks through the limits of cameras, frame rates and effects of the era.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day investigates manipulation on Facebook, interviewing the company's team about content moderation. It is the third video in his series on social media manipulation.

A Vox reporter tries to learn what his son's birth would cost before it happens and fails, showing how opaque US hospital pricing is even for the most common procedure.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day examines how bad actors and bots use Twitter, drawing on the released Russian IRA dataset and interviews. It asks why interactions on the platform turn hostile.

A Vox Borders explainer on Hong Kong's housing crisis, the least affordable market in the world, and the tiny cage homes and subdivided flats people squeeze into. It looks at why prices keep climbing and how land policy contributes.