Details: TopicPandemic Propaganda: A New Electoral CrisisDescriptionHow will the misinformation pandemic inflamed by the coronavirus crisis reshape the political landscape? And how might domestic and foreign actors weaponize rumors, conspiracy theories, and disinformation about Covid-19 against American voters in the … Continue reading
Category Archives: social media and social protests
NYT: Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s two top executives, met with civil rights groups on Tuesday in an attempt to mollify them over how the social network treats hate speech on its site.But Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and … Continue reading
Important piece: Under pressure to combat the disinformation that politicians — most notably the president of the United States — are spreading on its platforms, Facebook recently announced a new effort to combat lies geared in particular toward misleading Americans about voting.Disinformation … Continue reading
NYT: President Trump on Sunday retweeted a video of one of his supporters yelling “White power!,” once again using the vast reach of his social media platforms to inflame racial divisions in a nation roiled by weeks of protests about … Continue reading
WaPo: Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than … Continue reading
Political Wire: Second, the Trump campaign’s high expectations were fueled by an organized online prank on TikTok, which aimed to get tens of thousands to register for the rally without ever intending to show up.TikTok is a short-form video app that’s … Continue reading
NY Times: Twitter added a warning to a post from President Trump about a racist baby on Thursday, saying it contained manipulated media designed to mislead people.Mr. Trump’s tweet, which he posted earlier on Thursday, featured a video of two … Continue reading
NYT: Hundreds of Facebook employees, in rare public criticism on Monday of their own company, protested executives’ decision not to do anything about inflammatory posts that President Trump had placed on the giant social media platform over the past week.Many … Continue reading
WaPo: Top Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, spoke with civil rights leaders last night as the company confronts a wave of backlash over its decision not to moderate President Trump’s controversial posts. But the roughly hour-long call, intended to show the … Continue reading
NYT: The Trump administration is preparing an executive order intended to curtail the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for what gets posted on their platforms, two senior administration officials said early Thursday.Such an order, which officials … Continue reading
WSJ: A Facebook Inc. team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company’s algorithms weren’t bringing people together. They were driving people apart.“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it … Continue reading
Ben Smith: New: Twitter has added a "get the facts" link to a false Trump tweet about mail-in voting, which links to a moment refuting his claim. (background here https://t.co/wCQQZtq6vs) https://t.co/P1YAgDzCom— Ben Smith (@benyt) May 26, 2020 … Continue reading
Very excited about this, and grateful to Dan Blair, Chad Flanders and the folks at St. Louis U. that made this happen: Childress Lecture Deep Fakes, Bots, and Siloed Justices: American Election Law in a “Post-Truth” WorldRichard L. Hasen Truth, … Continue reading
Rantt Media reports. … Continue reading
AP: A bitterly partisan debate unfolding on whether more Americans should cast their votes through the mail during a pandemic is provoking online disinformation and conspiracy theories that could undermine trust in the results, even if there are no major … Continue reading
Yasmin Dawood has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, Ohio State Technology Law Journal). Here is the abstract: This Article argues for a multifaceted public-private approach to the challenge of protecting the electoral process from the harms of disinformation. Such … Continue reading
The Markup: Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post pledging to combat misinformation about COVID-19 circulating on Facebook.“We’ve taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that … Continue reading
WaPo: The ads on Facebook sounded populist and passionate: “The people are rising up against these insane shutdowns,” they said. “We’re fighting back to demand that our elected officials reopen America.”But the posts, funded by an initiative called “Convention of … Continue reading
NYT: An informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the White House, has been quietly working to nurture protests and apply political and legal pressure to overturn state and local orders intended to stop … Continue reading
Spencer Overton has written this article for the UC Davis Law Review. Here is the abstract: Fake social media accounts and ads did not merely polarize the American electorate in 2016 — these tactics also targeted and suppressed Black votes. … Continue reading
The Hill: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that protests against stay-at-home orders organized through his social media site qualify as “harmful misinformation” and are taken down.“How do you deal with the fact that Facebook is now being used to organize a … Continue reading
Vice: Chinese state media has been flooding Facebook and Instagram with shady political ads praising Beijing and bashing “racist” President Trump as part of a wider campaign to rewrite its part in the global coronavirus pandemic.The undisclosed political ads, from … Continue reading
NYT reports. … Continue reading
NYT: What began online more than two years ago as an intricate, if baseless, conspiracy theory that quickly attracted thousands of followers has since found footholds in the offline world. QAnon has surfaced in political campaigns, criminal cases, merchandising and … Continue reading
In the WSJ: Facebook said it would remove or label misleading videos that had been edited or manipulated in ways that would not be apparent to the average person. That would include removing videos in which artificial intelligence tools are … Continue reading
The NYT has published an internal memo written by the Facebook exec overseeing advertising during 2016. The memo touches on Russian ad spending, misinformation, Cambridge Analytica, and more. I have yet to see a headline on stories reporting the memo … Continue reading
The Wall St. Journal highlights the social media fight against disinformation ahead of the 2020 census. … Continue reading
NYT: In 2018, Lisa Kaplan assembled a small team inside the re-election campaign for Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine. Wary of how Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, it set out to find and respond to political disinformation online.The team … Continue reading
AFP: “There’s always been a divide between liberals and conservatives in the United States over opinions,” said Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at University of California, Irvine.“Where things have changed is that there’s now much more … Continue reading
NYT: The decline in confidence is particularly pronounced by party. Today about 69 percent of Democrats have a great deal of confidence in the media, compared to just 15 percent of Republicans and 36 percent of independents, according to Gallup.Conservatives are less trusting … Continue reading
Marietje Schaake oped in FT. … Continue reading
Issue One: Issue One’s latest report, “Digital Disaster: The failures of Facebook, Google, and Twitter’s political ad transparency policies,” reveals how piecemeal, voluntary approaches by the largest social media platforms to stop disinformation campaigns fail to protect our political system from foreign … Continue reading
LAT: Election officials and social media firms already flummoxed by hackers, trolls and bots are bracing for a potentially more potent weapon of disinformation as the 2020 election approaches — doctored videos, known as “deep fakes,” that can be nearly impossible to … Continue reading
Brendan Nyhan for NYT’s The Upshot: The nature of the news misinformation problem may be changing. As consumers become more skeptical about the national news they encounter online, impostor local sites that promote ideological agendas are becoming more common. These … Continue reading
NYT oped: If Facebook’s leaders were willing to level with us, they would stop defending themselves by appealing to lofty values like free speech. They would focus instead on more practical realities: Facebook is incapable of vetting political ads effectively … Continue reading
NYT: Twitter said on Wednesday that it would ban all political ads, putting a spotlight on the power and veracity of online advertising and ramping up pressure on Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to reverse his hands-off stance.Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief … Continue reading
NYT: The letter was aimed at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his top lieutenants. It decried the social network’s recent decision to let politicians post any claims they wanted — even false ones — in ads on the site. It asked … Continue reading
WaPo: Thousands of Facebook users in Arizona may have been startled to see a strange warning appear in their social feeds earlier this month.“Official records show that your voter registration is incomplete,” began the post. “Follow the link below to … Continue reading
CNN: A left-leaning PAC ran a Facebook ad falsely claiming that Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham endorsed the Green New Deal. The ad came after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this week about the company’s policy of allowing politicians … Continue reading
Sarah Haan in Slate: In his speech on “free expression” Thursday at Georgetown University, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made an important assertion: Facebook has found that its “best” speech-regulating strategy is “focusing on the authenticity of the speaker rather than … Continue reading
AP: Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election has generally been seen as two separate, unrelated tracks: hacking Democratic emails and sending provocative tweets. But a new study suggests the tactics were likely intertwined.On the eve of the release of … Continue reading
WaPo: As Trump and his allies have aimed increasingly caustic language at Schiff in recent days, the attacks have been echoed by supporters on social media who often take the message a step further — invoking physical violence against one … Continue reading
The report is here. In light of the Ukraine news, this first recommendation for the Executive Branch is notable: … Continue reading
Judd Legum: The “I Love America” Facebook page boasts 1.1 million fans, with viral content that reaches more Facebook users than some of the largest media outlets in the United States. A typical post is a celebration of the U.S. … Continue reading
WSJ: U.S. national-security officials traveled to Silicon Valley last week to forge deeper ties with big tech companies in hopes of better protecting the 2020 election from foreign intervention. It didn’t go entirely as planned.At the meeting organized by Facebook Inc. at its … Continue reading
WaPo: Federal law enforcement officials huddled with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter on Wednesday to discuss election security ahead of the 2020 presidential race, according to several U.S. and industry sources, amid heightened concerns that social-media sites are still vulnerable … Continue reading
WaPo: Russia’s Twitter campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election in Maryland began in June 2015, 17 months before Election Day, when the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency opened an account it called @BaltimoreOnline and began tweeting about local news … Continue reading
Reuters: A group of philanthropies working with Facebook Inc (FB.O) to study the social network’s impact on democracy threatened on Tuesday to quit, saying the company had failed to make data available to researchers as pledged.The funders said in a … Continue reading
NYT: A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.It is the latest … Continue reading
NYT: Each day, in an office outside Phoenix, a team of young writers and editors curates reality.In the America presented on their news and opinion website, WesternJournal.com, tradition-minded patriots face ceaseless assault by anti-Christian bigots, diseased migrants and race hustlers concocting hate crimes. Danger and … Continue reading