Deep dive from BuzzFeed: In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy … Continue reading
Category Archives: cheap speech
Axios: In the second half of 2020, Donald Trump’s reelection campaign shelled out seven figures to an influencer marketing business linked to his White House’s former chief digital officer.Why it matters: The payments bought promotion from prominent conservative brands and social … Continue reading
WaPo: Nearly a quarter of former president Donald Trump’s 6,081 Facebook posts last year contained extremist rhetoric or misinformation about the coronavirus, the election or his critics, according to a new analysis by the left-leaning group Media Matters for America.The … Continue reading
New from the Covid States Project: Two-thirds of respondents believe that the election was conducted fairly, while one-third believed that it was not. However, this aggregate pattern obscures enormous partisan gaps. Fully 96% of Democrats reported that the election had … Continue reading
Tom Edsall in the NYT: A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that online behemoths like … Continue reading
Smart Steve Mazie in The Economist: The First Amendment grants plenty of room for robust debate; plaintiffs seeking damages for defamatory statements face an appropriately steep climb. On the rare occasions when libel or slander claims stick, the defamed entity … Continue reading
Steven Rosenfeld: Partisan disinformation to undermine 2020’s presidential election shadowed every step of the voting process last year but took an unprecedented turn when the earliest false claims morphed into intricate conspiracies as Election Day passed and President Trump worked … Continue reading
Eugene Volokh in Tablet Mag: In 2016, a Florida man named Douglass Mackey (using the online alias “Ricky Vaughn”) allegedly conspired to distribute a meme aimed at deceiving pro-Hillary voters.Four years later, Mackey is now being prosecuted (as to this and as … Continue reading
New letter I spearheaded from Julia Azari, Associate Professor of Political Science, Marquette University; David Kaye, Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine; Jack Lerner, Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine; Janai Nelson, Associate Director-Counsel, NAACP-LDF; Cailin O’Connor, Associate Professor of … Continue reading
WaPo: Sen. Mark Warner is set to introduce a new bill that could hold Facebook, Google and other tech giants more directly accountable when viral online posts and videos result in real-world harm.The measure is dubbed the SAFE TECH Act, … Continue reading
USA Today: Despite repeated charges of anti-conservative bias from former President Trump and other GOP critics, Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube are not slanted against right-leaning users, a new report out of New York University found.Like previous research, “False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media … Continue reading
WSJ: Facebook Inc. FB -2.52% in 2019 redesigned its flagship product to center on what it called Groups, forums for like-minded users. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called them the new “heart of the app.”Now the social-networking giant is clamping down on Groups. The effort began after Facebook’s … Continue reading
Ben Smith NYT column. … Continue reading
Big news: Today, Facebook is referring its decision to indefinitely suspend former US President Donald Trump’s access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts to the independent Oversight Board. The board was established last year to make the final call on some of the … Continue reading
Politico: The pardons went to Democrats, lobbyists and rappers, with nary a “patriot” among them. The mass arrests of Antifa campaigners never came. The inauguration stage at the Capitol, full of America’s most powerful politicians, was not purged of Satan-worshipping … Continue reading
NYT: Forgoing any appeals for healing or reflection, right-wing media organizations that spread former President Donald J. Trump’s distortions about the 2020 election continued on Wednesday to push conspiracy theories about large-scale fraud, with some predicting more political conflict in the months … Continue reading
WaPo: Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act … Continue reading
NYT: YouTube said on Tuesday that it had suspended President Trump’s channel over concern about “ongoing potential for violence,” the latest move by one of the large technology companies to limit the president online.In a post on YouTube’s official Twitter account, the … Continue reading
NPR: In the last days of the Trump administration, Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham has pressured employees at the agency to speed up the production of a data report about noncitizens, including unauthorized immigrants, the bureau’s internal watchdog group says.Dillingham, … Continue reading
NYT: Social media has played a crucial role in the support of Mr. Trump since he announced his intention to run for president five years ago. And the rioters who attacked the Capitol last week did much of their planning in the … Continue reading
Zuckerberg statement. … Continue reading
Tom Edsall NYT column: In the closing days of his presidency, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he can make innumerable false claims and assertions that millions of Republican voters will believe and more than 150 Republican members of the House … Continue reading
NYT: Two weeks ago, the conservative media personalities Diamond and Silk falsely claimed on their Facebook page that people who were not eligible to vote were receiving ballots in Georgia’s special elections next month. Their post was shared more than … Continue reading
NYT: Sidney Powell, a lawyer who was part of President Trump’s legal team, spread a conspiracy theory last month about election fraud. For days, she claimed that she would “release the Kraken” by showing voluminous evidence that Mr. Trump had … Continue reading
CNN: Around the election, social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter were praised for how quickly and widely they applied warning labels to misinformation.But President Donald Trump’s 46-minute video last week, which was riddled with election misinformation and conspiracy theories discredited by … Continue reading
CNN: Facebook failed to apply fact-check labels on some election misinformation related to Georgia, according to a report from activist group Avaaz. Facebook has relied on fact-checking and contextual labels as a centerpiece of its strategy for combating misinformation about elections … Continue reading
Renee DiResta for The Atlantic: Yet reducing the supply of misinformation doesn’t eliminate the demand. Powerful online influencers and the right-wing demi-media—intensely partisan outlets, such as One America News and Newsmax, that amplify ideas that bubble up from internet message … Continue reading
NYT: In the tense days after the presidential election, a team of Facebook employees presented the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, with an alarming finding: Election-related misinformation was going viral on the site.President Trump was already casting the election as rigged, … Continue reading
NYT: On the morning of Nov. 5, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, asked his Facebook followers to report cases of voter fraud with the hashtag, Stop the Steal. His post was shared over 5,000 times.By late afternoon, the … Continue reading
You need to scroll through these AI-generated faces at NYT. … Continue reading
NYT: Interviews with current and former Real Clear staff members, along with a review of its coverage and tax filings, point to a shift to the right within the organization in late 2017, when the bulk of its journalists who … Continue reading
BuzzFeed: The labels Facebook has been putting on false election posts from President Donald Trump have failed to slow their spread across the platform, according to internal data seen by BuzzFeed News.In the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election, … Continue reading
The Atlantic: Two issues that run deeper for Obama than Trump’s personal deficiencies concern the changes he sees in the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement. “I did not believe how easily the Republican establishment, people who had been … Continue reading
WaPo Fact Checker. News organizations have called the 2020 presidential election for Democrat Joe Biden, but that hasn’t stopped President Trump’s surrogates from sharing misleading, fake and debunked videos that cast doubt on the election results.Follow the latest on Election … Continue reading
Roll Call: Both Facebook and Twitter went into Election Day under enormous pressure from both parties, but in the end it was Trump and other Republicans whose posts were labeled most often for containing misleading or false information about the … Continue reading
NBC News: For Trump supporters intent on finding it, proof of the president’s claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” is everywhere.For some, it’s in the videos: the one in which a Colorado man claiming to be a poll worker, … Continue reading
Bloomberg: On Monday, cable outlet One America News Network posted two videos to its YouTube account titled “Trump won.” The clips echoed several others telling viewers, falsely, that U.S. President Donald Trump was re-elected and that the vote was marred … Continue reading
NYT: As President Trump and his team continue to circulate fabricated claims of a stolen election and voter fraud, their allies are flooding the internet search engines and social media with falsehoods intended to question the legitimacy of President-elect Joseph … Continue reading
WaPo: The leader of a Facebook group demanding an election recount told members this weekend he was worried about a crackdown by the social media giant.“The bigger we get, the more nervous I’m getting,” the administrator of Nationwide Recount 2020 … Continue reading
NYT: The posts proliferated on election night before anything remotely definitive was known about the results of the presidential race. “Robado,” they falsely repeated again and again in Spanish: President Trump was being robbed of a victory. He had won Arizona. George … Continue reading
Miles Parks for NPR: Even though all the major news networks, including Fox News, called the race for former Vice President Joe Biden, Saturday was the only the beginning of a long road to convincing a sizable portion of the … Continue reading
CNN Business: A viral video that purports to show about 80 “ballots,” all for Donald Trump, being burned is fake, Virginia Beach city officials say.The video, which surfaced on Tuesday, features a man with a plastic bag full of papers … Continue reading
Hidden behind a Twitter warning that “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process,” President Trump tweeted the following: The Supreme Court decision on voting … Continue reading
NYT: A video of Joseph R. Biden Jr. deceptively edited to make it appear as though he were admitting to voter fraud was viewed more than 17 million times on social media platforms, according to Avaaz, a progressive human-rights nonprofit … Continue reading
ProPublica/KQED: At least two dozen groups on the Chinese-owned social media app WeChat have been circulating misinformation that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is “preparing to mobilize” the National Guard and “dispatch” the military to quell impending riots, apparently … Continue reading
CNN: A deceptively edited video of Joe Biden making it appear the Democratic presidential nominee forgot what state he was in was viewed more than one million times on Twitter over the weekend.In the video, Biden addresses a crowd — saying,”Hello, … Continue reading
Miami Herald: In private messaging apps and social media, Spanish-speaking residents in South Florida have been exposed to a barrage of deceptive claims — a voter disinformation tactic that could last until Election Day.The latest example is an anonymous message … Continue reading
WaPo: President Trump launched into a tweetstorm in April, banging out nine retweets of the Centers for Disease Control’s account on the dangers of misusing disinfectant and other topics — two days after he himself had suggested that people could … Continue reading
NBC News: Nine month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and business … Continue reading
WaPo: A video sent to voters falsely claimed that Joe Biden wants to give “sex changes to second-graders.”A menacing directive advised Democrats to vote for Trump “or else.”And a years-old photograph newly circulated with erroneous instructions for how to blow … Continue reading