A simple website helps donors save the most vulnerable NPR and PBS stations

The Adopt-A-Station tool helps donors find and help
the most vulnerable stations. (NPR photo)

A simple website with a focused theme has started helping NPR and PBS stations after Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, leaving both entities with unforeseen budget shortfalls, reports Bob Sillick for E&P magazine.

Alex Curley, a former public media expert, created the single-page Adopt-a-Station website that "indicates which public media stations are most vulnerable to closing," Sillick explains. Most predictions estimate that nearly 1,000 stations would be affected by the loss of CPB support, with those serving indigenous, black and rural areas facing the most severe setbacks.

Approximately 40,000 people visited the Adopt-a-Station site during its first 30 days. Curley's most recent "review of analytics showed approximately 20% of visitors were clicking on a link to a station identified as losing 50% or more of its revenue," Sillick reports. "Curley is now working to increase visitor numbers to the site."

"I estimate 15% of all public media stations are at risk of closing," Curley told Sillick. "They either relied on federal funding so much that it was tough to stay open, or some other financial indicator paired with the loss of federal funding meant they couldn't balance their finances."

What's so appealing about fake health information and how can people combat it?

Stopping to check the facts helps stem the spread of misinformation.
(World Health Organization adaptation via The Converation)

People from all walks of life can get sucked into believing and sharing fake health information from the internet. In his article for The Conversation, global health communication scholar Angshuman K. Kashyap explains why false health data can be so believable and how people can combat it.

Fake health information is written to appeal to human nature. Whether it's a sensationalized problem, more juicy details on a controversial issue, or a simple answer to a complicated problem, many people will keep reading. Kashyap writes, "Fake health information often appears to be true because it mixes a grain of truth with misleading claims."

False health information often looks professional. "In 2019, an article with the false headline 'Ginger is 10,000x more effective at killing cancer than chemo' was shared more than 800,000 times on Facebook," Kashyap explains. "The article contained several factors that make people feel an urgency to react and share without checking the facts: compelling visuals, emotional stories, misleading graphs. . ."

Not only will individuals read and not question data from a fake health story, they will share it, which "has real-world consequences," Kashyap adds. "For example, studies have found that Covid-19-related fake information reduces people’s trust in the government and in health care systems, making people less likely to use or seek out health services."

To detect false health information, researchers and public health organizations have developed three strategies to help health consumers verify health information:

• Double-check health claims with an additional search. Kashyap adds, "Never rely on a single source. Instead, enter the health claim into a reputable search engine like Google and see what trusted sources have to say. . . . Reliable fact-checking websites such as FactCheck.org and Snopes can also help root out fake information."
• Research your information source. Look at a site's "About Us" page, search for information about the author and check dates on cited research and the date of the information's publication. Kashyap writes, "Information on the internet keeps circulating for years and may not be the most accurate or relevant."
• Still don't know what's what? "Don’t share," Kashyap advises. "Forwarding unverified information can unintentionally contribute to the spread of misinformation and potentially cause harm, especially when it comes to health."

More rural states pose challenges for 'broadband for all' installations. Kentucky and West Virginia offer examples.

Spann drove thousands of miles getting 'the lay of the land.'
(Photo by Andie Corbin, Marketplace via LPR)

As the United States works to install broadband for everyone, challenges in states such as Kentucky and West Virginia are particularly tough as build-out contractors juggle reaching high percentages of rural residents and rugged topography. "The state of Kentucky was allotted $1.1 billion to get every home hooked up to high-speed internet," report Kai Ryssdal and Sarah Leeson of Marketplace. West Virginia was allotted 1.2 billion to connect its residents.

Parts of Kentucky and West Virginia are nestled in or flanked by the Appalachian Mountains, which makes for "an interesting case for broadband rollout," Ryssdal and Leeson explain. "With the Appalachian Mountains and forested hills, as well as large rural populations [to reach]. . . . About 20% of Americans live in rural areas, but in Kentucky, the proportion is double" and in West Virginia, 49.7% of the state's total population is estimated to live in a rural area.

Chip Spann is the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's program officer handling broadband] money for Kentucky and West Virginia. "A large part of Spann's role in the challenge process is getting the lay of the land," according to Ryssdal and Leeson. "Spann recounted that he's driven more than 10,000 miles around the two states. . . . In rural areas, laying fiber-optic cables might be around $50,000 per mile, according to Spann. The economics are further complicated in areas with large Amish and Mennonite populations because internet service providers (ISPs) aren't going to find paying customers in those households."

Spann said, "When you're an internet service provider, one of the things that you're trying to account for is, for every mile of infrastructure that I have, I'm hoping that I at least pass a minimum 10 households or more." Ryssdal and Leeson add, "If an ISP doesn't find that level of housing density in an area, it might not be able to generate a return on investment for a costly fiber deployment."

To find out more about how broadband financing and deployment gets done, click here.

The Affordable Connectivity Program helped millions of rural and tribal Americans gain Internet access -- now what?

ACP helped rural and tribal resident bridge the
digital divide. (Adobe Stock photo)

During the pandemic years, rural and tribal communities learned to rely on affordable internet services provided in part by the federal Affordable Connectivity Program. The more dependable and budget-friendly connection helped residents use the web for telehealth appointments, online ordering and remote learning, reports Sarah Jane Tribble of KFF Health News. In May, the ACP ran out of money, and many residents are considering what they may have to sacrifice to keep reliable internet service without the subsidy.

Although the ACP eventually enrolled around 23 million low-income households -- or one in six American families -- its funding was not renewed. "Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) challenged an effort to continue funding the program, saying during a commerce committee hearing that the program needed to be revamped," Tribble writes. Thune claimed that ACP did not reach those that "truly needed it."

Despite a hive of legislative workers trying to iron out the program's shortcomings, funding for ACP ended; however, the Biden administration "announced that more than a dozen companies — including AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast — would offer low-cost plans to ACP enrollees," Tribble reports. "The administration said those plans could affect as many as 10 million households."

Without the ACP, many rural families may be unable to bridge the digital divide. "According to a survey of participants released by the Federal Communications Commission, more than two-thirds of households had inconsistent or no internet connection before enrolling in the program," Tribble explains. "The FCC said that ending the program will affect about 3.4 million rural and more than 300,000 households in tribal areas."

Report: Former Meta employee says Instagram executives knew their platform hurt children. Now he's telling Congress.

Meta ignored its own research and continued business
as usual. (Image by Taylor Callery, WSJ)

Instagram executives knew their platform was dangerous to children and young adults, especially teen girls, long before whistleblowers came forward. "When a Meta security expert Arturo Bejar told Mark Zuckerberg that Instagram's approach to protecting teens wasn't working, the CEO didn't reply," reports Jeff Horwitz of The Wall Street Journal. "Now the former insider is set to tell Congress about the predatory behavior."

As an employee and a consultant, Bejar had a long history with Facebook, now Meta. He started with the company in 2009, and he left Facebook in 2015 for personal reasons. By then, Instagram was a powerful audience engagement arm for the company. When Bejar's 14-year-old daughter shared a vulgar Instagram posting she received, that's when "The trouble began," Horwitz writes. Bejar's daughter reported the comment to Instagram. "A few days later, the platform got back to her: The insult didn't violate its community guidelines."

"Bejar was floored — all the more so when he learned that virtually all of his daughter's friends had been subjected to similar harassment," Horwitz reports, "Instagram acted so rarely on reports of such behavior that the girls no longer bothered reporting them. Bejar began peppering his former colleagues at Facebook with questions about what they were doing to address such misbehavior. The company responded by offering him a two-year consulting gig."

Back on the company's campus, Bejar described its approach to addressing harassment complaints as almost entirely automated and "while users could still flag things that upset them, Meta shifted resources away from reviewing them," Horwitz explains. "To discourage users from filing reports, internal documents from 2019 show, Meta added steps to the reporting process. . . . statistics rules were written narrowly enough to ban only unambiguously vile material. Meta's rules didn't clearly prohibit adults from flooding the comments section on a teenager's posts with kiss emojis or posting pictures of kids in their underwear, inviting their followers to 'see more' in a private Facebook Messenger group."

Bejar was tasked with addressing some of these issues. His team "built a new questionnaire called BEEF, short for 'Bad Emotional Experience Feedback.' A recurring survey of issues 238,000 users had experienced over the past seven days, the effort identified problems with prevalence from the start: Users were 100 times more likely to tell Instagram they'd witnessed bullying in the last week than Meta's bullying-prevalence statistics indicated they should," Horwitz reports. "Among users under the age of 16, 26% recalled having a bad experience in the last week due to witnessing hostility against someone based on their race, religion or identity. More than a fifth felt worse about themselves after viewing others' posts, and 13% had experienced unwanted sexual advances in the past seven days."

Bejar was under a time crutch, "With just weeks left at the company, Bejar emailed Zuckerberg, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. . . . Blending the findings from BEEF with highly personal examples of how the company was letting down users like his own daughter," Horwitz notes. "In response to Bejar's email, Sandberg sent a note to Bejar only, not the other executives. . . . He says he never heard back from Zuckerberg."

Bejar left Meta in 2021. He told the Journal, that any effort to change Meta "would have to come from the outside. He began consulting with a coalition of state attorneys general who filed suit against the company, alleging that the company had built its products to maximize engagement at the expense of young users' physical and mental health," Horwitz adds. "Bejar also got in touch with members of Congress about where he believes the company's user-safety efforts fell short." He's scheduled to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.