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
Category Archives: cheap speech
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
Axios reports. … Continue reading
This is a must-read. … Continue reading
WSJ: Facebook is demanding that a New York University research project cease collecting data about its political-ad targeting practices, setting up a fight with academics seeking to study the platform without the company’s permission.The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, … Continue reading
Politico: The swift action Twitter and Facebook took to stifle an unverified New York Post article and the crushing political pressure that forced them to reverse course illustrate a key reality: With just weeks until the U.S. election, tech giants have yet … Continue reading
WaPo: Elections officials in Maryland’s most populous jurisdiction held an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss a viral video alleging that an election worker attempted to tamper with a mailed-in ballot.A thorough investigation revealed no evidence of fraud or misconduct, Montgomery … Continue reading
WaPo: Authorities in Florida and Alaska on Tuesday were investigating threatening emails sent to Democratic voters that claimed to be from the Proud Boys, a far-right group supportive of President Trump, but appeared instead to be a deceptive campaign making … Continue reading
WSJ: Mr. Zuckerberg maintains an open line with Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. The two sometimes discuss Facebook policies over WhatsApp. The CEO spoke this year with Mr. Kushner and separately with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about … Continue reading
NYT: President Trump called Facebook and Twitter “terrible” and “a monster” and said he would go after them. Senators Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn said they would subpoena the chief executives of the companies for their actions. And on Fox … Continue reading
NBC News: The idea of a rigged election has already taken hold in Trump’s fervent online base, a horde of digital activists who dutifully share links from right-wing blogs and junk news sites and turn the president’s message into memes.Trump’s … Continue reading
Looking forward to reading this new Emily Bazelon in the NYT Magazine. … Continue reading
Washington Post: An account featuring the image of a Black police officer, President Trump and the words “VOTE REPUBLICAN” had a brief but spectacular run on Twitter. In six days after it became active last week, it tweeted just eight … Continue reading
Axios: Facebook users engage with content from untrustworthy outlets twice as often today as they did at the time of the 2016 U.S. election, researchers at the German Marshall Fund found, despite the many measures the platform and its competitors … Continue reading
WaPo: Facebook said Thursday it will permanently ban from its platform an Arizona-based marketing firm running what experts described as a domestic “troll farm” — in a probe of the deceptive behavior prompted by a Washington Post article last month.The firm, Rally … Continue reading
NYT: Over the past few weeks, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his lieutenants have watched the presidential race with an increasing sense of alarm.Executives have held meetings to discuss President Trump’s evasive comments about whether he would accept a peaceful … Continue reading
WSJ: On any given day over the past two years, visitors to the home page of RealClearPolitics were likely to see its famous average of political polls, a roundup of news and center-right commentary—and, near the bottom, a link or … Continue reading
AP: With just over a month to go before Americans head en masse to the polls in an extraordinarily contentious election, Facebook is expanding restrictions on political advertising, including new bans on messages claiming widespread voter fraud.New prohibitions laid out … Continue reading
Greg Sargent: The threat this time resides in a combustible combination of two factors. The first is what’s known as Facebook’s “Group recommendation engine,” which drives people to private Facebook groups. Experts have long warned that these private groups are … Continue reading
NPR reports. … Continue reading
Happy to participate in this roundtable (Disclosure: Knight is generously supporting my book leave): Midway through a year rocked by a pandemic, protests and politics, we asked leading researchers and policy thinkers: What new questions relating to technology’s impact on … Continue reading
CNN: Facebook (FB) has allowed political advertisers to target hundreds of misleading ads about Joe Biden and the US Postal Service to swing-state voters ranging from Florida to Wisconsin in recent weeks, in an apparent failure to enforce its own platform rules … Continue reading
CNN: Donald Trump Jr. is touting baseless election-rigging claims in videos posted to Facebook and Twitter asking “able-bodied” people to join an election security “army” for his father.Facebook and Twitter affixed labels to the video pointing to accurate information about voting, but neither company … Continue reading
WaPo: The Department of Justice asked Congress on Wednesday to adopt a new law that would hold Facebook, Google and Twitter legally accountable for the way they moderate content on the Web, as the Trump administration ratchets up its attacks … Continue reading
NYT: Facebook has detected limited Chinese operations intended to both help and hurt President Trump’s re-election chances, the company announced on Tuesday, the first public disclosure of Chinese efforts to influence the presidential election in November.The Chinese activity, while modest … Continue reading
Renee DiResta for The Atlantic: In the past, propaganda needed human hands to write it. Eager to create the illusion of popularity, authorities in China began hiring people in 2004 to flood online spaces with pro-government comments. By 2016, members … Continue reading
NYU: Transparency in political ads is vital to ensuring safe and fair elections, but transparency is difficult if advertisers are not required to disclose details about targeting and sources of funding. While TV broadcasters must disclose information about political ads … Continue reading
Washington Post: One tweet claimed coronavirus numbers were intentionally inflated, adding, “It’s hard to know what to believe.” Another warned, “Don’t trust Dr. Fauci.”A Facebook comment argued that mail-in ballots “will lead to fraud for this election,” while an Instagram comment amplified the erroneous claim that … Continue reading