An elucidating conversation. Watch:
Category Archives: cheap speech
Adding New Meaning to the Expression “Flooding the Zone with Shit,””Trump Posts Fake Video of Himself Flying a ‘King Trump’ Jet Over Protesters”
President Trump has posted a fake video on social media that showed him wearing a crown and flying a jet labeled “King Trump” that dumps brown liquid on protesters.
The short video, shared on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account late Saturday, was posted on the same day that protesters participated in a daylong mass demonstration, known as “No Kings,” against the Trump administration. The protests were held in cities and towns in all 50 states, with participants holding signs such as “I Pledge Allegiance to No King” and chanting slogans against the president, accusing him of acting in authoritarian ways.
The fake video, set to the song “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins, shows the plane dropping a brown liquid resembling feces onto the heads of protesters, who appeared to be gathered in a city.
The White House on Saturday also posted on social media an A.I.-generated image of Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance wearing crowns. “Have a good night, everyone,” the post said, with the crown emoji.
“How Right-Wing Influencers Are Shaping the Guard Fight in Portland”
In the fight over deploying National Guard troops to Portland, Ore., Democratic leaders in the city and state have pleaded with President Trump and the courts to trust law enforcement records, both local and federal, that describe the demonstrations as small and comparatively calm.
But in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s “hellscape” — as the White House described Portland on Wednesday — and the narrative that the Trump administration has wanted has been supplied by a coterie of right-wing influencers elevated by Mr. Trump himself.
On Thursday, the repercussions of those dueling versions of reality became clear as judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit questioned a district court’s finding that the protests in Portland were likely too minor to justify the National Guard deployment. The appeals court judges instead cited federal reports of demonstrators spitting on federal officers and shining flashlights in their eyes, behavior that has been captured, amplified and sometimes even prompted by pro-Trump personalities eager to counter local police.
“The Portland Police Chief did an interview today attacking independent journalists for exposing the violent terrorists that he allows to run the city,” Benny Johnson, a popular pro-Trump podcaster, wrote Tuesday on social media after accompanying Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, in Oregon. “He’s humiliated and knows Portland is under siege.”
To some extent, the right’s assertions of chaos in Oregon have been self-fulfilling. The administration’s close ties to a small but well-followed group of influencers and conspiracy theorists has amplified their voices, and they in turn have encouraged administration efforts to crack down on demonstrators. The portrayals of a city on fire have angered protesters.
And sometimes, left-wing activists have risen to the bait, leading to scuffles and injuries conservative streamers then promote on the internet. One right-wing commentator, Katie Daviscourt, said she received a black eye when a demonstrator hit her with a flag pole.
“Certainly over the last 10 days, the energy level has gone up, the amount of conflicting points of view have increased greatly,” Chief Bob Day of the Portland Police Bureau said at a news media briefing Tuesday. “And this has created an environment that’s equally, if not more, challenging for us.”
Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request….
Norm Ornstein: “Will Our Corporate Media Godzillas Have the Guts to Defend Democracy?”
Norm in TNR:
So I am not surprised now to see that broadcasters—in an era when there has been much more concentration of ownership, when the technology has made the business models more fraught—have shown no commitment to anything resembling the public interest or to the fundamentals of a free society. We are no longer in a world where broadcast pioneers like Capital Cities/ABC’s Tom Murphy and local community owners who believed in acting in the public interest have any role. Courage in the face of governmental criticism and governmental power is barely present. Consolidation into behemoths with interests beyond the airwaves and the digital platform now rule. Whether it is Disney or Paramount, Universal or Nexstar, it is all about the bottom line, and the fear of retribution by a thuggish regime means that every value beyond the money goes out the window.
This started early on in the Trump presidency, when Disney-ABC forked over $16 million after Trump said he would sue over a George Stephanopoulos comment that he had been convicted by a jury in a civil case of rape—something the judge in the case said was true even if it did not meet the narrow, technical nature of the term in New York law. The Trump suit would have been thrown out of court—but ABC in effect paid protection money. Paramount soon followed with another capitulation over a laughable case attacking the edit of a Kamala Harris interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes, ahead of the effort to get approval for the sale of its parent company, Paramount, to David Ellison.
Then came the Jimmy Kimmel episode, with the pending takeover by local-station behemoth Nexstar of local-station behemoth Tegna to create a super-behemoth dominance of local television, with approval needed by the Federal Communications Commission. A commission whose chair, Brendan Carr, wrote the chapter on telecommunications for radical right-wing Project 2025, and has been a leading capo in the crime family administration, using his position to threaten these companies with mayhem unless they capitulate and pay protection money, or kowtow to demands to launder coverage. No other FCC chair ever has misused the power of the office in this way. And he is likely to push to remove or deeply dilute the limit on station ownership, now at 39 percent, along with the ban on owning more than two stations in any marketplace.
The media world was vastly different when our Advisory Committee was created. High-definition television was just beginning; a 24-inch HDTV cost up to $10,000. When we asked consulting firms that focused on media trends whether and when the new technology would break through to the mass public, they predicted that it would take decades to reach reasonable prices, say $2,000 for an HDTV set. Of course, they were way wrong—you can now buy a 70-inch smart TV with ultrahigh definition for a few hundred dollars, a 24-inch one for 70 bucks at Best Buy. And of course there was no idea back then that we would have smartphones or social media.
But there is another way the media world is different. Five companies—five—now control 90 percent of the marketplace. Disney, Comcast, Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount, and Fox are the media Godzillas, and if Ellison and Paramount get their way and purchase WBD, it will be four. Add to that the fact that right-wing billionaires dominate social media, from X to Meta and now TikTok, and other billionaires with wide business interests that are affected directly by federal government action own The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, among others of our key newspapers, and we are in an extraordinarily dangerous place. And add further the evisceration via government cuts of public media like NPR and PBS, hitting rural areas especially hard.
As the internet became ever-present and universal, as digital and other technology moved rapidly in the communications sphere, the place and vibrancy—and bottom line—of the most venerable sources of news and information eroded and then collapsed. The New York Times leadership was smart enough to diversify, finding other business avenues, from puzzles to consumer information, to supplement the revenues from the newspaper, and finding other ways to promote the content of the paper. When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, it was applauded by fans of democracy and the public interest; the old business model for it and most legacy media, especially print media, had disappeared, and sustaining flagship entities like the Post, and later the L.A. Times, required benign philanthropists for whom annual losses in the tens or hundreds of millions were trivial prices to pay for the good they were preserving and enhancing. That Bezos would move from philanthropy to concern about the Post’s bottom line seemed implausible; that he would erase the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto to protect his interests in Blue Horizon and Amazon from damage done by Trump’s henchmen has been jarring.
Of course, some of this dynamic has been deliberately manipulated by those malign actors like Elon Musk, using small—by their standard—portions of their vast wealth to buy, transform, and shape key new communications avenues and tools. And it now describes Trump’s illegal actions involving TikTok, violating the law and engineering a takeover by Peter Thiel and other allies of his authoritarianism. Some of these entities have a history of turning a blind eye to manipulation of elections from Russia, China, and other foreign actors. We can expect more of that. The combination of malign actors manipulating platforms like X and Facebook and taking over TikTok, alongside billionaires and huge corporate conglomerates who will do anything to avoid authoritarian retribution, has left us with a desolate media landscape.
“Trump posts vulgar deepfake slam of Democratic leaders after White House meeting”
If a government shutdown wasn’t already exceedingly likely, President Donald Trump might have made it a near certainty Monday night.
The president posted a vulgar AI-generated deepfake video to his Truth Social slamming the top Democratic leaders — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — just hours after he hosted the two for an Oval Office meeting.
The video depicts Schumer and Jeffries as if speaking to reporters following the meeting, but the fabricated audio has Schumer saying Democrats “have no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bullshit” and that “if we give all these illegal aliens health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”…
“How Charlie Kirk’s social media machine rewired a generation’s politics”
WaPo:
Last month, as social media buzzed with news that Taylor Swift was engaged to Travis Kelce, Charlie Kirk advised one of the world’s most successful female musicians to leave “the island of the wokeys” and start having children with the star football player.
“Reject feminism,” Kirk urged the billionaire singer, in a video that has garnered 7.5 million viewson TikTok. “Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”
The video drew accusations of sexism from liberals and Swifties, but it found an enthusiastic audience among Kirk’s Gen Z fans. The clip’s viral spread illustrated how the 31-year-oldactivist and provocateur harnessed the attention economy to build a political empire credited with shattering the left’s grip on young voters….
Kirk’s tactics came under scrutiny ahead of the 2020 election, when The Washington Post revealed that Turning Point Action paid teenagers to produce messages that reflected Trump’s talking points on social media — an operation experts compared to a troll farm. Facebook permanently banned a marketing firm that worked on the campaign on behalf of Turning Point, and Twitter suspended 262 accounts associated with the campaign for what it said was “platform manipulation and spam.” The companies did not suspend accounts affiliated with Turning Point or Kirk, citing insufficient evidence.
Before Jan. 6, 2021,Kirk tweeted that his group was “sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” He later was named the 10th-biggest “superspreader” of misinformation about the 2020 election on Twitter, according to a consortium of researchers from Stanford University, the University of Washington and other organizations called the Election Integrity Partnership, which analyzed false claims about the election on social media. Kirk latercondemned the day’s violence but invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions about Turning Point’s role in the rally when he was deposed in 2022 before the House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol riots.
“Russia Steps Up Disinformation Efforts as Trump Abandons Resistance”
Since returning to the White House in January, President Trump has dismantled the American government’s efforts to combat foreign disinformation. The problem is that Russia has not stopped spreading it.
How much that matters can now be seen in Moldova, a small but strategic European nation that has since the end of the Cold War looked to Europe and the United States to extract itself from Moscow’s shadow.
The Trump administration has slashed diplomatic and financial support for the country’s fight against Russian influence, even as the Kremlin has conducted what researchers and European officials described as an intense campaign to sway that country’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for Sept. 28.
The Russians have flooded social media with fake posts, videos and entire websites that are created and spread on TikTok, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube using increasingly effective artificial intelligence tools.
One post impersonated OK!, the celebrity magazine based in New York, in an attempt to smear Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu, with a preposterous accusation involving celebrity sperm donors.
A year ago, when the country last held elections, Biden administration officials pushed back against such campaigns, urging platforms like Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to do more to identify trolls or inauthentic accounts. No more.
“The Russians now are able to basically control the information environment in Moldova in a way that they could only have dreamed a year ago,” said Thomas O. Melia, a former official at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development….
“U.S. Is Increasingly Exposed to Chinese Election Threats, Lawmakers Say”
Democratic lawmakers warned on Friday that severe staff cuts at an intelligence office that monitors foreign threats to U.S. elections would leave the country vulnerable to interference and subversion from Beijing, as Chinese companies use artificial intelligence as a new weapon in information warfare.
In a letter to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois and André Carson of Indiana cited a New York Times story about technology developed by the Chinese company GoLaxy that aims to use artificial intelligence to make influence and information operations far more effective.
The representatives, who both serve on the House China committee, said the cuts at Ms. Gabbard’s office were “stripping away the guardrails that protect our nation from foreign influence.”
In recent weeks, Ms. Gabbard announced staff reductions that all but eliminated the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which tracks efforts by adversarial countries to manipulate U.S. elections and warp American dialogue.
Documents uncovered by Vanderbilt University and examined by The Times detailed new technology developed by GoLaxy that aimed to improve China’s ability to influence public debate. GoLaxy, according to the documents, had done work in Hong Kong and Taiwan and collected information about American lawmakers.
GoLaxy, according to the documents, was using artificial intelligence to track large numbers of people in order to generate pro-Chinese propaganda that could shape public debates, promote the views of China’s government and drown out voices opposed to its policies…..
“How Elon Musk Is Remaking Grok in His Image”
Elon Musk has said Grok, the A.I.-powered chatbot that his company developed, should be “politically neutral” and “maximally truth-seeking.”
But in practice, Mr. Musk and his artificial intelligence company, xAI, have tweaked the chatbot to make its answers more conservative on many issues, according to an analysis of thousands of its responses by The New York Times. The shifts appear, in some cases, to reflect Mr. Musk’s political priorities.
Grok is similar to tools like ChatGPT, but it also lives on X, giving the social network’s users the opportunity to ask it questions by tagging it in posts.
One user on X asked Grok in July to identify the “biggest threat to Western civilization.” It responded that the greatest threat was “misinformation and disinformation.”
“Sorry for this idiotic response,” Mr. Musk groused on X after someone flagged Grok’s answer. “Will fix in the morning,” he said.
The next day, Mr. Musk published a new version of Grok that responded that the greatest threat was low “fertility rates” — an idea popular among conservative natalists that has transfixed Mr. Musk for years and something he has said motivated him to father at least 11 children….
“Newsmax pays $67 million to settle defamation case linked to 2020 election coverage”
NPR:
Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle one of the last outstanding defamation lawsuits against a news organization for airing false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems – the same voting-technology company that had received a $787 million settlement from Fox News over its election coverage – brought the lawsuit against Newsmax. A trial was scheduled to begin in October.
In the lawsuit, filed in the months after the 2020 election, Dominion accused the cable news network of spreading false claims that the company’s voting technology had been manipulated to help Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. Like other right-wing news networks, Newsmax featured Trump allies who promoted these conspiracies, including former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell and supporter Mike Lindell of My Pillow.
Newsmax announced the settlement in an Aug. 15 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the document, the network paid $27 million of the settlement on that day; the rest will be paid by January 2027.
Multiple court rulings and investigations by election officials have found no widespread fraud was present in the 2020 election; even still, these debunked claims were still being echoed by factions of Trump supporters in 2024. Dominion has said the election lies caused the company and its employees extensive harm, including death threats and lost revenue….
“Russia is quietly churning out fake content posing as US news”
A pro-Russian propaganda group is taking advantage of high-profile news events to spread disinformation, and it’s spoofing reputable organizations — including news outlets, nonprofits and government agencies — to do so.
According to misinformation tracker NewsGuard, the campaign — which has been tracked by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center as Storm-1679 since at least 2022 — takes advantage of high-profile events to pump out fabricated content from various publications, including ABC News, BBC and most recently POLITICO.
This year, the group has focused on flooding the internet with fake content surrounding the German SNAP elections and the upcoming Moldovan parliamentary vote. The campaign also sought to plant false narratives around the war in Ukraine ahead of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.
McKenzie Sadeghi, AI and foreign influence editor at NewsGuard, said in an interview that since early 2024, the group has been publishing “pro-Kremlin content en masse in the form of videos” mimicking these organizations.’“If even just one or a few of their fake videos go viral per year, that makes all of the other videos worth it,” she said.
While online Russian influence operations have existed for many years, security experts say artificial intelligence is making it harder for people to discern what’s real.
Storm-1679 developed a distinct technique in 2024 for combining videos with AI-generated audio impersonations of celebrity and expert voices, according to Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center….
Free Access to New Cambridge U Press Book: “The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times”
This is a great collection edited by RonNell Andersen Jones and Sonja West, and even better that it is open access. (Full book pdf.) I’m honored to have the final version of my chapter here, “From Bloggers in Pajamas to the Gateway Pundit: How Government Entities Should and Do Identify Professional Journalists for Access and Protection.”
Yale “MFIA Clinic Report Provides Roadmap for Attorneys to Challenge Election Disinformation”
Important report released by Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic:
Students from Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) Clinic have released a new white paper titled “Using the Ku Klux Klan Act to Combat Election Disinformation: A Guide for Practitioners.”
The guide offers a roadmap for attorneys seeking civil remedies against certain forms of digital election disinformation, such as lies about how to vote, impersonation of candidates or officials, and misinformation intended to intimidate voters.
Read the white paper: Using the Ku Klux Klan Act to Combat Election Disinformation: A Guide for Practitioners
The report focuses on two underutilized provisions of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871: the “Support-or-Advocacy” clauses of 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) and the companion “Neglect-to-Prevent” provision of 42 U.S.C. § 1986. Though originally passed to combat Reconstruction-era voter intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan, these statutes remain powerful tools for modern election protection, according to the clinic. The white paper argues that § 1985(3) can provide a private cause of action when election-related disinformation arises from a conspiracy and amounts to a common-law tort (such as intentional interference with the right to vote, misappropriation of likeness, or false-light invasion of privacy) carried out “on account of” someone’s support for a federal candidate.
Additionally, § 1986 may create liability for third parties like robocall vendors, group leaders, or public officials who knowingly fail to prevent such conspiracies when they have the power to do so.
While the First Amendment rightly shields much false speech about elections, the report outlines scenarios where challenges to election disinformation may prevail despite the First Amendment, such as when the disinformation at issue constitutes a lie about election mechanics or an impersonation of a candidate, or when it is particularly likely to undermine election integrity. Drawing on legal precedent, historical context, and real-world examples — including social media ads that promote “texting to vote” and robocalls that impersonate candidates — the report offers a path forward for legal practitioners aiming to challenge harmful election lies without infringing on protected speech….
(Disclosure: I gave feedback on an earlier version of this report as well as worked with the clinic and Protect Democracy on the amicus brief filed in the Mackey case.)
“The Fact Checker rose in an era of false claims. Falsehoods are now winning.”
Glenn Kessler’s final WaPo column as their fact checker:
In reviewing many of the some 3,000 fact checks I have written or edited, there is a clear dividing line: June 2015, the month Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator and announced he was running for president….
In ending its work with fact-checkers, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg falsely claimed that fact-checkers censored free speech by being “too politically biased,” echoing Trump administration arguments. The Washington Post did not participate in the Meta program, but any Facebook user had the option to opt out of having posts fact-checked. Many fact-checkers would liken their work to nutritional labels on snack foods — providing more information about online content. People are free to ignore the warnings, just as people can ignore nutritional labels….
In 2016, Trump’s opponents still cared about the facts. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s (R) campaign had a wall where they posted positive fact checks. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) dropped a talking point simply in response to my question for a possible fact check. Hillary Clinton’s staff worked hard to find policy experts to vouch for her statistics. (Her comments on her private email server were less defensible).
But Trump didn’t care. He kept rising in the polls and eventually won the presidency. Other politicians took notice and followed his lead.
Besides Trump, something else changed the nature of truth in the mid-2010s: the rise of social media. The Fact Checker was launched in 2007, one year after the creation of Twitter and when Facebook had only 50 million users. By 2012, Facebook had 1 billion followers; it reached nearly 1.6 billion in 2015. Trump adroitly used Twitter — where he had 2.76 million followers at the start of 2015 — and other social media to spread his message. Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States was the most talked about moment on Facebook among the 2016 candidates in all of 2015, according to Facebook data.
Social media helped fuel the rise of Trump — and made it easier for false claims to circulate. Russian operatives in 2016 used fake accounts on social media to spread disinformation and create divisive content — tactics that led companies such as Meta to begin to use fact-checkers to identify misleading content. But the political forces which benefited from false information — such as Trump and his allies — led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship. Now tech companies are scaling back their efforts to combat misinformation….
During Trump’s first term, The Fact Checker team documented that he made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims. Week after week, I would write fact checks unpacking his latest misstatements, and Trump generally earned Four Pinocchios — the rating for a whopper. But I sense that the country has gotten so used to Trump exaggerating the truth that it no longer seems surprising. I chose not to repeat the exercise in his second term…