In India, where fake news on Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging platform has led to violence, company executives publicly described a plan to stop the flow of misinformation. India is WhatsApp’s largest market, and WhatsApp’s announcement comes as India prepares for its biggest election. Based on machine learning, said software engineer Matt Jones, the new system will use data of past activity to bar automated fake accounts and troublemakers at three stages: when registering, while messaging and when reported by others. Read more

While Super Bowl LIII between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams experienced a drop in television viewership (Nielsen indicates the game generated an average audience of 98.2 million viewers), CBS revealed that streaming the event reached new popularity this year. According to the network, the Super Bowl was viewed by 100.7 million viewers across all platforms, including digital and streaming. CBS notes that the game was streamed on 7.5 million unique devices, marking a 20 percent jump over the previous year and a new streaming record for the Super Bowl. It was available across an array of online and mobile properties. Read more

Robot reporters are on the rise, in use at Bloomberg News, The Associated Press, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times among other news outlets. The Cyborg system helps Bloomberg reporters produce thousands of articles on company earnings and analyze/write financial reports very quickly. Not only do business reporters find this kind of writing dull, but Cyborg’s speed helps it compete with rival Reuters. The other news outlets above use robots to report on sports, although the LAT relies on them for earthquakes. Read more

In the “risk factors” section of its annual report, e-commerce leader Amazon listed counterfeit products, stating that the company may be “unable to prevent sellers in our stores or through other stores from selling unlawful, counterfeit, pirated, or stolen goods, selling goods in an unlawful or unethical manner … or otherwise violating our policies.” This is a first for the tech giant, which had never discussed the ongoing problem. In principle, it has a “zero tolerance” policy but the site is full of merchants selling knockoffs. Read more

To combat data breaches, Google has created a Chrome extension to provide a “password checkup” that compares users’ passwords with a database of four billion unique usernames and passwords that have been compromised. The extension works in the background, only showing a warning if it finds a match. That’s all it does: it is not a password manager that determines how weak or strong passwords are. Google accounts, often the key to a user’s email address, are breached mainly because people reuse passwords on multiple sites. Read more