Taylor Lorenz for WaPo:

Hundreds of political and news content creators, along with activists, meme account administrators and journalists, have signed an open letter to Meta asking the company to reverse its decision to limit the reach of accounts posting “political content” on Threads and Instagram.

Meta announced in February that it no longer would recommend content about politics and social issues on the two social media platforms, which have tens of millions of users in the United States.

The decision has alarmed users who post about social issues, including LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, racial inequality and disability. And independent journalists and content creators say they’ve struggled to reach their audiences in recent weeks since the change was rolled out. The limits, they say, have significantly affected creators who are Black, female, disabled and LGBTQ.

NYT:

Michael J. Gottlieb can never remember the exact amount — it’s $148,169,000— that a jury ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani to pay the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. But Ms. Freeman’s words after the December 2023 victory are indelible to him.

“Don’t waste your time being angry at those who did this to me and my daughter,” said Ms. Freeman, 65, who with her daughter Ms. Moss, 39, was falsely accused by Mr. Giuliani of aiding an imagined plot to steal the 2020 presidential election.

“We are more than conquerors.”

Less than a decade ago, the two women would have struggled to find a lawyer. But Mr. Gottlieb, a partner at the firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher and a former associate counsel in the Obama White House, represented them for free. Convinced that viral lies threaten public discourse and democracy, he is at the forefront of a small but growing cadre of lawyers deploying defamation, one of the oldest areas of the law, as a weapon against a tide of political disinformation.

Mr. Gottlieb has also represented the owner of the Washington pizzeria targeted by “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorists as well as the brother of Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staff member whose 2016 murder ignited bogus theories implicating his family. In the Giuliani case, Mr. Gottlieb, his law partner Meryl Governski and other members of his team worked with Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that pushes for laws and policies to counter what it sees as authoritarian threats.

Before the Trump era and the explosion of social media, though, such cases were virtually nonexistent.

“The new information landscape we’re in is a little bit like the Wild West — a lawless space,” said Ian Bassin, a co-founder of Protect Democracy. Lawyers, he said, have turned to defamation, which is legally defined as any false information, either published, broadcast or spoken, that harms the reputation of a person, business or organization. “It’s one of the most effective and only strategies for dealing with these out-and-out falsehoods,” Mr. Bassin said.

In the past few years, more than a dozen high-profile defamation cases have made their way through the courts. A majority have been brought against defendants on the right, but the right brings lawsuits too, often against media organizations.

Quite the lineup at Columbia.

NYT:

Wisconsin for the first time this year will begin requiring political advertisers to disclose the use of content generated by artificial intelligence or face financial penalties. But the battleground state, one that played a critical role in the last two elections, is not alone.

An increasing number of states have advanced A.I.-related legislation to combat attempts to mislead voters during the 2024 election, according to a new analysis by the Voting Rights Lab, a national voting rights organization.

Voting Rights Lab said it was tracking over 100 bills in 40 state legislatures, amid some high-profile cases of “deep-fake” video technology and computer-generated avatars and voices being used in political campaigns and advertisements.

One of the more glaring examples happened in New Hampshire, where a criminal investigation was opened after voters there received robocalls mimicking President Biden’s voice and urging Democrats to not vote in the state’s primary in January….

WaPo:

Hank Stephenson has a finely tuned B.S. detector. The longtime journalist has made a living sussing out lies and political spin.

But even he was fooled at first when he watched the video of one of his home state’s most prominent congressional candidates.

There was Kari Lake, the Republican Senate hopeful from Arizona, on his phone screen, speaking words written by a software engineer. Stephenson was watching a deepfake — an artificial-intelligence-generated video produced by his news organization, Arizona Agenda, to underscore the dangers of AI misinformation in a pivotal election year.

“When we started doing this, I thought it was going to be so bad it wouldn’t trick anyone, but I was blown away,” Stephenson, who co-founded the site in 2021, said in an interview. “And we are unsophisticated. If we can do this, then anyone with a real budget can do a good enough job that it’ll trick you, it’ll trick me, and that is scary.”

Maggie Severns for Notus:

Thousands of North Carolinians — mostly women — were targeted with Facebook and Instagram ads shortly before the last midterm elections that shared a dire message: A little-watched race could determine whether abortion would remain legal in the state.

“Reproductive freedom in North Carolina could come down to this fall’s elections for two seats on the state Supreme Court,” said one post from a state-based news outlet called Cardinal & Pine. Republicans in the state were nearing a supermajority in the legislature, “potentially making N.C.’s high court the last bulwark for abortion rights.”

Cardinal & Pine, which promises readers “fact-based, audience-centered journalism” on its website, boasts as many Facebook followers as the longtime North Carolina newspaper, the Winston-Salem Journal. It employs several journalists and publishes stories ranging from politics to lifestyle content.

However, key facts about Cardinal & Pine and its parent company, Courier Newsroom, go undisclosed. Courier does not disclose that the newsroom is run primarily by former Democratic operatives, including its publisher and CEO, Tara McGowan. It has received funding from groups like the pro-abortion rights Planned Parenthood, which gave $250,000 to Courier Newsroom between June 2021 and June 2022, the year it was promoting content about what the election means for abortion access.

Cardinal & Pine is one of 10 websites in political battleground states run by Courier quietly testing the limits of what a newsroom can be. Courier grew out of a series of explicitly political experiments that hinged on using paid online advertising to turn out voters. It then pivoted to being a privately owned media company that bills itself as a “pro-democracy news network” serving news and lifestyle content to the left. The project has raised and spent millions of dollars since launching its first site in 2019 and has announced plans to launch an additional newsroom in Texas.

But Courier’s undisclosed funders and glowing coverage of Democratic candidates should raise questions about its reliability, said McKenzie Sadeghi, editor at NewsGuard, which publishes trustworthiness ratings for thousands of sites.

“Courier Newsroom sites do not disclose ownership and financing, they do not disclose possible conflicts of interest, nor do they gather and present information responsibility,” Sadeghi told NOTUS.

Courier does not aim to spew misinformation, former employees say. Its articles are usually written by journalists, some of whom have years of experience covering local politics. But in many cases described to NOTUS, Democratic political operatives like McGowan call the shots for Courier….

NBC News:

After weathering a yearslong political and legal assault, researchers who study disinformation say they see reasons to be cautiously hopeful as their efforts heat up ahead of the 2024 election. 

These researchers, along with the universities and nonprofits that they work for, have been in the crosshairs of Republicans and their allies, accused of acting as government proxies in a Biden administration plot to censor conservative speech online. Since 2021, those who worked to identify and combat disinformation around the last presidential election and Covid-19 have faced lawsuits, congressional inquiries and attacks online and in right-wing media that have threatened their reputations, careers and personal safety.

But recently, those researchers have achieved quiet but significant victories that could signal a shift in the larger war against disinformation.

On Monday, during oral arguments at the Supreme Court, most of the justices voiced some support for governments and researchers working with social media platforms on content moderation, especially related to national security, emergencies and health. After a year of sensational public hearings, a Republican-led congressional committee tasked with discrediting researchers and proving their collusion with the government and tech companies has produced little. And programs under which federal law enforcement shared information with platforms, which had been paused in response to the Republican efforts, have recently resumed. 

Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, who testified and fielded “onerous” records requests last summer as part of Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s investigation into the “weaponization” of the federal government, said he was somewhat optimistic about a cooling of the ire directed at those who study online disinformation “into something that’s more reasonable.”

“I’m not overly hopeful, given the nature of our politics today,” Linvill said. “You know, hope is a trap. But I will dare to hope.”

With less than eight months until a presidential election likely to be marred by unprecedented disinformation, the loss of coordination between government, researchers and platforms over the past several years will undoubtedly be felt. The programs most targeted by recent attacks include nonpartisan partnerships between universities and research groups.

Most notably, the Election Integrity Partnership, led by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Stanford Internet Observatory, identified and tracked false and misleading information online in real time. In addition to publishing findings and analysis, the groups also forwarded potentially harmful disinformation to platforms for review. That partnership is no longer active.

But other work has continued, and researchers are closely watching the case that was argued before the Supreme Court this week as a potential sign that right-wing efforts have hit a limit.