instagram FceBk

see tribe site

see facebook (owned by )

SEE DEEP FAKE AI // TIKTOK

see influencer as end-run around soc med filter/ deplatform

sadly primary on Qanon and boogloo (wasn't it a chick pix site?!) algorithm?

Study finds over 33 million Instagram, TikTok posts promoting harmful content to kids - Alternet.org

zuck apologized to fam testimony 1 24?

see soc media links

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10 26 apologize 4? hr block no kings 4, algo blamed?

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RWW

01/20/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Sean James @ Mediaite: Trump Proclaims ‘God Is Very Proud’ of His First Year Back in the White House

The Good Lord is smiling down approvingly at President Donald Trump — according to the president.

Ashley Parker @ The Atlantic: Trump Exhaustion Syndrome

Among the greatest tricks Donald Trump ever pulled is convincing significant portions of the population that the slow erosion of their rights is not, actually, that big of a deal.

New York Times: How Trump Has Pocketed $1,408,500,000

One year ago, Donald Trump took an oath to serve the American people. Instead, he has focused on using the presidency to enrich himself.

Alex DeLuca @ Miami New Times: Miami Club Plays ‘Heil Hitler’ for Right-Wing Influencers

The group was seen throwing up Nazi salutes inside the Miami Beach nightclub.

Andrew Kordik @ Salon: The revival of Moms for Liberty

After setbacks and scandals, the group's efforts have expanded — and its role in public education is growing.

Olivia Little @ Media Matters: Nick Fuentes’ Instagram takeover

An army of groypers is spamming Instagram with Fuentes’ content, netting millions of views.

---

How AI, TikTok, and Instagram Are Shaping the U.S. Election | Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Growing up in Taiwan, Herbert Chang '18 saw firsthand how technology and politics could be tightly intertwined.

"Because of its contentious history with China, Taiwan receives a ton of misinformation, but also boasts a high freedom-of-speech index. It's a particularly interesting space," he says, "to study how technology and democratic values come together."

Now, as an assistant professor in the Quantitative Social Science Program, Chang studies the role of technology and social networks in politics and human relationships, with a special interest in the impact of artificial intelligence.

This fall, working with a PhD student and five undergraduates as part of his lab and new course, AI and Machine Learning for Social Science, Chang led two groundbreaking studies that examine the role of AI and social networks in political engagement online. The resulting papers are under review by prestigious journals.

"This is the first U.S. election that coincides with the release of sophisticated generative AI," Chang says. This technology is being used to create images and memes, which are then uploaded to social networks like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. "This is really important to understand—especially as an analysis unbiased by the results of the elections," he says.

In the first study, the team investigated how AI-generated content influences political discussions on Instagram. With LLM-based tools, they collected more than 500,000 Instagram images and found that AI-generated content alone does not increase engagement among users—but when AI-generated content is combined with a meme, it's more likely to go viral. In other words, when an AI-generated image is overlaid with text or given some kind of cultural context, it is much more effective at stirring up discussion.

"Generative AI and the meme format produces a synergistic effect," Chang says.

"Our paper definitely challenges assumptions that AI will dominate online discourse," says Mingyue Zha '27, who took part in the research with fellow students Maya Magee '25, Sean Noh '28, Ben Shaman '26, Tracy Weener '26, and Guarini PhD candidate Chiyu Wei. "However, it also highlights the potential of meme content that is AI-generated, which does synergize and increase social media engagement."

One implication is that thanks to platforms like Instagram, where mass exposure isn't limited to politicians and legacy media, political discourse is shifting away from traditional media. "There's more opportunity for 'ground up' discussion by organizations who aren't MSNBC or Fox News," Chang says.

Another (and perhaps more sinister) implication is that AI is actually "mediating our content and information quite significantly, especially in this political context," Chang says.

Thanks to AI-powered meme-generating tools like MidJourney, users can simply type in general prompts about what kind of meme they'd like to create, and the system automatically generates one for them. But users don't have much ability to tweak the resulting meme, meaning the AI technology is ultimately responsible for it—and, therefore, for shaping the increased chatter around it.

The researchers found that about 15% of memes were generated by AI. Additionally, when considering synthetic memes versus normal memes over time, the biggest difference occurs during Donald Trump's conviction.

The second ongoing study offers a large-scale, systematic analysis of the influence of TikTok and Instagram on political discourse. The team collected more than 800,000 Instagram posts and 1 million TikTok posts curated from election-related key words, and has begun analyzing divergences across the two platforms.

Understanding their differences is important because while Instagram and TikTok are the two largest visual social media platforms, they operate in different ways. Instagram content is driven by social networks, meaning a user will be exposed to content by their online "friends" or followed accounts. TikTok, meanwhile, is algorithm driven, so users are exposed to content based on machine learning—technology chooses what they see based on a variety of datasets and past online behaviors.

"Pragmatically, this means that if you're a politician or you're trying to start a social movement, your strategies on the two platforms would be different," Chang says. "On Instagram, you might want to leverage the social network and work with big players to gain solidarity across different audiences. But that might not be effective on TikTok, where you'd want to invest more broadly in individual micro-influencers."

The team is observing that Instagram is used more for sharing breaking news from established media accounts, whereas TikTok has more in-depth commentary from individuals.

"My students are incredibly talented and come from diverse backgrounds—from pre-med to computer science to QSS," Chang says. "They are also perfect collaborators. As frequent users of these platforms, they have incredible insight into how these platforms work and strategies for generating visibility."

"We all worked on different parts of the project based on our experiences and interest, so it was super rewarding to see how everything came together to create new insights that show how this election is taking place over social media," Noh says. "It's a constant learning process, and it's been so cool to be studying something so important and relevant while it's actually happening."

This year's presidential election feels especially significant to Zha, who recently obtained her U.S. citizenship after living in the country for the past 10 years.

"Not only is this the first U.S. election where I'm able to vote, it's also one of the most pivotal elections of our lifetimes, especially since many issues on the ballot will have huge ramifications on the future of my generation," she says.

"One of the most rewarding aspects of being part of this research has been gaining a deeper understanding of how people discuss and engage with electoral issues, as well as how social media platforms influence and mediate this discourse."

Zha also found inspiration in fellow students. "We're able to support each other's work and challenge each other, achieving far more as a team than we could alone," she says. "Herbert's mentorship and encouragement have been instrumental in making this collaborative environment possible."

Chang will continue live-tracking the U.S. presidential election using a dataset curated for his course this fall. "I want students to know that their projects at Dartmouth are directly relevant to the world right now," he says.

At the end of the day, the irony that he wouldn't be able to conduct this research without machine learning, and that there also wouldn't be any research to conduct without AI, isn't lost on Chang.

"AI can be used to generate fake content or misinformation, but it can also be used as a form of civic engagement, and to help identify malicious trends," he says. "It's a technological arms race I'm excited to continue navigating with my students."

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/social-media-platforms-are-backsliding-paving-way-chaos-2024-0

aha note bail on moderation (big layoffs)

mma 6 23 badish code box size

social media companies Meta, YouTube, and Twitter are backsliding on their efforts to combat misinformation, capitulating to right-wing pressure and allowing the same sort of dangerous content that has previously led to real-world harm.

Social media platforms’ failures to moderate false and dangerous content during the 2020 election contributed to the January 6 insurrection. Following the violence at the Capitol, platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube suspended former President Donald Trump from posting and developed new policies to curb dangerous falsehoods. The platforms have regularly struggled to enforce moderation policies, but the changes helped prevent some of the spread of harmful misinformation during the 2022 midterm elections.

Both before and since platforms made these changes, right-wing figures have repeatedly and relentlessly claimed that there is an unfair bias against them online. Media Matters and others have repeatedly debunked this claim, with a recent study showing that right-leaning Facebook pages earned more engagement than left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages in 2020 and 2021.

Despite this reality, platforms have actually bent their rules and given preferential treatment to right-wing media and politicians. In the lead up to another presidential election and amid recurring election misinformation and conspiracy theories, platforms are further capitulating to right-wing pressure — loosening content moderation policies, downsizing content moderation and safety teams, and reinstating accounts known for pushing misinformation.

Meta is deprioritizing content moderation and user safety

Since the start of 2022, Meta has gradually reverted its policies and practices to how they were prior to the insurrection. The company has restored the previously banned accounts of political candidates and vowed not to fact-check them, withTrump regaining access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts.More recently, Meta has restored access to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was banned for spreading dangerous COVID-19 misinformation.

Meta has also laid off about a quarter of its workforce since November, cutting teams focused on site security, privacy and integrity.

Below is atimeline of key developments since the start of 2022:

June 22, 2022: Meta considers eliminating its COVID-19 misinformation policies, asking its oversight board to advise the company on whether to maintain its policies against dangerous COVID-19 misinformation, claiming that “the COVID-19 situation has evolved.”

July 26, 2022: Meta's oversight board accepts the company’s request to revise its COVID-19 misinformation policy, kicking off its advisory process and requesting public comments to inform its recommendations. (The oversight board’s policy advisory opinions are not binding; they require only that Meta provide a public response and follow-up actions.)

September 22, 2022: Meta global affairs president Nick Clegg indicates in an interview with Semafor that Facebook might end Trump’s suspension in January 2023 without considering the accuracy of (or the risk posed by) his content.

November 9, 2022: Meta announces that it will eliminate more than 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce, choosing to sink more money into its efforts to build the “metaverse.”

January 17, 2023: The Washington Post reports that House January 6 committee investigators found — but ultimately did not publish — mountains of evidence demonstrating that social media companies “like Facebook and Twitter” provided “megaphones” for right-wing extremists ahead of the Capitol insurrection and refused to enforce their own content moderation policies out of fear of conservative backlash.

January 25, 2023: Meta announces that it will be reinstating Trump’s account in the coming weeks, along with a new “Crisis Policy Protocol,” and “Restricting accounts of public figures during civil unrest” policy. With this decision, Meta gives Trump the green light to push harmful misinformation and extremism on its platforms, reportedly telling CNN’s Oliver Darcy that “posts attacking 2020 will be allowed, but posts attacking 2024 are a different story.”

February 9, 2023: Meta reinstates Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

March 14, 2023: Meta announces a second round of mass layoffs, cutting another 10,000 people from its workforce including those focused on site security, privacy, and integrity.

March 17, 2023: Trump posts on Facebook for the first time since his account was reinstated.

March 30, 2023: After news broke that a Manhattan grand jury had voted to indict Trump for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, Trump posts a full copy of his misinformation-filled statement to his newly reinstated Facebook page.

June 4, 2023:Instagram reinstates the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is one of the most prominent anti-vaccine figures in the U.S. Kennedy was banned from the platform in 2021 for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies, but since “he is now an active candidate for president of the United States,” Meta decided to reinstate his account.Kennedy had been pressuring the platform to do so on Twitterin the days leading up to the decision. Right-wing media, meanwhile, have the platform announced that it will reverse its policy against election misinformation and no longer remove content that “advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.” While Trump was seemingly avoiding livestreaming on YouTube to avoid being banned for violating the platform’s election policies, he may use the feature now that his election lies will be tolerated.

Right-wing media figures and outlets have credited Twitter and owner Elon Musk for “moving the needle” around election misinformation, implying that his actions influenced YouTube’s decision.

Here’s a timeline of key developments since the start of 2022:

November 5, 2022: The New York Times reports thatYouTube “may have misinformation blind spots” and that its election integrity policy prohibits election misinformation only during presidential elections, not during midterm elections. In the Times piece, Media Matters President Angelo Carusone described the policy as tantamount to building “a sprinkler system after the building is on fire.”

January 20, 2023: Google CEO Sundar Pichai announces that parent company Alphabet will be laying off 12,000 employees, or 6% of the company’s global workforce. This includes more than 100 YouTube employees.

February 1, 2023: YouTube begins sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators on the platform, providing a new form of monetization. This means right-wing influencers who litter the platform with anti-LGBTQ vitriol, racist and misogynistic rhetoric, and COVID-19 misinformation may stand to gain financially from their harmful content.

March 17, 2023: YouTube announces that it will be immediately lifting Trump’s suspension on the platform and allowing him to upload new content. Though the platform claims that it “carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence,” the decision fails to account for Trump’s propensity to push extreme rhetoric and the platform’s weak misinformation policies and haphazard enforcement.

June 2, 2023: YouTube reverses its policy to allow 2020 election lies, claiming: “Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today's changed landscape. … With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections." Right-wing media celebrate the decision.

Twitter has devolved into a dysfunctional cesspool of conspiracy theories and bigotry, losing half of its advertising revenue since Musk took over in October 2022<... zzz Elon Musk’s leadership has plunged Twitter into chaos, with his misguided “free speech” crusade transforming the platform into an engine of radicalization and a steady source of harmful content. He had driven away half the site’s top 100 advertisers after a month as CEO and recently admitted to having reduced its revenue by half.

The platform now has minimal content moderation, minimal staff, and paid (and unreliable) verification. Musk has caved to authoritarian governments and reinstated previously banned accounts of extremists (including Trump, who has yet to tweet).

A timeline of key developments since the start of 2022:

April 4, 2022: News breaks that Elon Musk had purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the largest shareholder.

April 5, 2022: Twitter's then-CEO Parag Agrawal announces that Musk has been given a seat on Twitter’s board, prompting right-wing media to ask Musk to end Twitter's nonexistent censorship and bring Trump back to the platform.

April 10, 2022: Musk decides not to join Twitter’s board.

April 14, 2022: Musk offers to buy Twitter for about $44 billion.

July 22, 2022: A Twitter spokesperson confirms that the targeted use of “groomer” as a slur against another user “based on their perceived membership in a protected category” violates the platform’s hate speech policies. They further identified its use “in context of discussion of gender identity” as prohibited under Twitter’s Hateful Conduct policy. (Enforcement was extremely uneven and use of the term skyrocketed after Musk acquired the platform.)

October 3, 2022: Musk offers to buy Twitter at the original share price of $44 billion. Right-wing media celebrate.

October 27, 2022: Musk completes the $44 billion deal and takes control of Twitter, tweeting “the bird is freed” after firing former Twitter executives and sending out an email to staff saying that layoffs were set to begin. Per a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Musk also dismisses Twitter’s board, making himself the sole leader. Previously banned Twitter users celebrate, and QAnon supporters make clear that they see the takeover as a green light to rejoin the platform.

October 28, 2022: Musk flexes his new power by issuing a directive, without any context or rationale, to change the page logged-out users see when they go to Twitter.com to the “explore” page, which shows trending tweets and news stories, rather than a sign-up form.

November 3 and 4, 2022: Twitter undertakes mass layoffs, firing over 3,000 people — or around 50% of Twitter’s workforce — including the entire ethical-AI team and most of the company’s communications team.

November 6, 2022: Reportedly without informing the policy team, Musk tweets, “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended,” after some users mimicked Musk’s account.

November 7, 2022: Musk tweets out a link to “The Twitter Rules” with the caption “Twitter rules will evolve over time, but they’re currently the following.” This leads to confusion about whether misinformation violates Twitter’s policies. (The platform has a separate page on Twitter’s Help Center website that addresses misleading information.)

November 9, 2022: Twitter launches Twitter Blue, which asks users to pay for a blue verification check mark for $7.99 per month. QAnon influencers use the service to try to regain a foothold on the platform, and other right-wing extremists begin using their newly purchased check marks to spread hate.

November 10, 2022: Six Twitter executives resign: Yoel Roth (head of moderation and safety), Lea Kissner (chief information security officer), Marianne Fogarty (chief compliance officer), Kathleen Pacini (head of human resources and talent management), Damien Kieran (chief privacy officer), and John Debay (director of software engineering). Several other members of the site’s privacy and security unit resign as well, prompting “a rare warning from the Federal Trade Commission.”

November 11, 2022: Just days after Twitter Blue launched and caused mayhem — with subscribers impersonating numerous users and brands — Musk reportedly pauses the program, but allows users already subscribed, including extremists, to keep their subscriptions.

November 12, 2022: Twitter undertakes a second wave of mass layoffs, impacting about 4,400 contractors.

November 14, 2022: Musk fires about a dozen employees — including multiple longtime Twitter engineers — seemingly for criticizing him.

November 15, 2022: Musk fires roughly two dozen more employees, seemingly for expressing sympathy for those fired the day before.

November 16, 2022: Musk sends a midnight email ultimatum for remaining Twitter employees: either commit to being “extremely hardcore” or quit and receive three months of severance pay. Reuters reports that hundreds of employees resigned following this email.

November 18, 2022: Musk tweets, “Freedom Fridays … ,” seemingly to announce the beginning of reinstatements of formerly banned accounts, starting with comedian Kathy Griffin, The Daily Wire’s Jordan Peterson, and conservative satire site The Babylon Bee.

November 19, 2022: After launching a poll about whether Twitter should reinstate Trump’s account — which was permanently suspended following the January 6 Capitol insurrection “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” — Musk tweets, “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated.”

November 24, 2022: After Musk posts another poll, Twitter begins granting “amnesty” to previously suspended accounts that had “not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.”

November 29, 2022: Twitter stops enforcing its COVID-19 misinformation policies, providing no further details beyond a note on its site reading, “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”

December 12, 2022: Twitter Blue relaunches, with the stipulation that accounts will be reviewed before getting a blue check. Additionally, gold checks are rolled out for some businesses. Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council is also disbanded because, according to an email obtained by CNN, Twitter is “reevaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work. As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this.” The dissolution of the council comes less than an hour before members were scheduled to meet with Twitter executives, according to The Washington Post.

December 14, 2022: Twitter launches a new policy that users “may not publish or post other people's private information without their express authorization and permission. We also prohibit threatening to expose private information or incentivizing others to do so.” The new policy is used as justification to ban an account, @ElonJet, that tracked the location of Musk’s private jet, and those of journalists whom Musk accused of “doxxing” him by reporting on the @ElonJet account.

December 16, 2022: Musk briefly disables the Twitter Spaces feature after some of the suspended journalists were still able to access the feature and press him about why they were targeted. Twitter also announces that it is reinstating a number of accounts “where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules.”

December 17, 2022: Musk reinstates most of the journalists he accused of “doxxing” him after issuing a poll that asked if they should be brought back to the platform. Later that day, Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz is suspended for allegedly violating a policy that was not yet introduced. Twitter also removes the feature that showed from which type of device a tweet was sent.

December 18, 2022: Twitter announces — and then revokes — a policy that prohibited users from promoting other social media platforms. Later in the day, Lorenz is reinstated and Twitter Safety launches a poll to see if an altered version of this policy should be reintroduced.

January 3, 2023: Musk announces that he will revoke Twitter’s years-old policy against political and issue-based advertisements. Politico later reports that in the two months following that reversal, no paid political ads were taken out on the platform.

February 3, 2023: Journalist Matt Navarra confirms that corporate Twitter accounts would have to pay $1,000 a month to keep their previously free verification status, leading a number of media organizations to reject the new verification scheme.

February 8, 2023: Musk oversees the expansion of a tweet’s size limit from 280 up to 4,000 characters for Twitter Blue subscribers to end the practice of posting screenshots of longer statements, which he called an “absurdity.” Upon implementation, users report that Twitter’s main functions had crashed, leaving them unable to tweet, retweet, follow users, or send direct messages.

February 9, 2023: Following an announcement that Twitter would end free access to its application programming interface (API), journalists, researchers, advertisers, and users raise concerns over the ramifications that removing API access would have on user experience, including important and potentially lifesaving public service announcements. Despite Twitter delaying when access to API would be rescinded, multiple organizations are still unable to provide automated updates about issues including weather and transportation alerts.

February 14, 2023: After Musk’s own Super Bowl tweet earns lower engagement than President Joe Biden’s, he directs engineers to artificially inflate his presence on users' feeds to correct an “engagement issue.” This comes after Musk reportedly fired top engineers because of his declining views and supposedly threatened to fire others unless they would show more people his tweets.

March 10, 2023: After stating that it would no longer be granting free access to Twitter’s application programming interface on February 2, Musk announces that users of Twitter’s then-free API service would have to pay $2.5 million per year to retain full access.

April 2, 2023: After learning that The New York Times would not pay to keep its verification status, Musk reportedly orders that Twitter engineers remove the paper’s verification mark. Musk's decision to target the Times, one of Twitter's largest accounts, is seemingly made in response to prodding by a meme account and resulted in the Times operating several accounts under conflicting verification standards simultaneously.

April 4, 2023: Musk changes Twitter’s corporate identity to “X Corp.” as part of his still-unclear plan to have the social media platform serve as a hub for crypto exchanges, stock trading, and social media.

April 5, 2023: Musk’s Twitter falsely brands NPR and BBC accounts as “state-affiliated media” and “government-funded media,” respectively, leading to NPR leaving the platform and the BBC having its designation removed after significant protest.

April 6, 2023: Amid Musk’s personal feud with the newsletter site Substack, Twitter begins limiting accounts from engaging with tweets featuring links to Substack.

April 17, 2023: After quietly removing its hate speech policy against the “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals,” Twitter announces that it will no longer remove certain tweets that “potentially” violate its rules against hateful conduct. Instead, it will merely apply warning labels to such tweets.

April 20, 2023: Twitter begins removing blue check verification badges from the profiles of celebrities, news outlets, and other high-profile accounts across the platform, making it difficult for users to determine which sources are reputable. As those legacy blue checks expired, Twitter continues to sell verification badges to just about anyone willing to pay a monthly fee. A couple of celebrities, including LeBron James who said he would not pay for Twitter Blue, receive a “complimentary subscription … on behalf of Elon Musk.”

May 9, 2023: Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announces that he plans to relaunch his show on Twitter, sending a shockwave through the U.S. political and media class.

May 12, 2023: A day after proclaiming that a new Twitter CEO would be starting in roughly six weeks, Musk announces Linda Yaccarino would be filling the role. Hours earlier, NBCUniversal had announced that Yaccarino, formerly the company’s chairman for Global Advertising and Partnerships, was leaving “effective immediately.” Musk continues to use the platform to push dangerous conspiracy theories and racist dog whistles.

May 24, 2023: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces his 2024 GOP presidential campaign during a disastrous Twitter Spaces event with Musk and right-wing investor David Sacks.

June 5, 2023: Yaccarino officially becomes CEO, after lawyers for the company admitted in a June 1 federal court filing that her hiring “will not result in a different content-moderation strategy” — contradicting the notion that the new CEO will solve the platform’s advertising issues.

June 8, 2023: Musk hosts a Twitter Spaces event with anti-vaccine influencer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and admits that Twitter revenue is down by half since his takeover.

June 21, 2023: Musk tweets a new Twitter policy, claiming that “cis” or “cisgender” are “considered slurs on the platform,” and that “Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.” The new policy comes as Musk has repeatedly claimed in response to questions about moderation of hateful content that he is adamant about defending free speech.

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-considers-eliminating-its-covid-19-misinformation-policies-even-dangerous-content

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/anti-vaccine-accounts-instagram-are-using-link-bio-loophole-monetize-their-content-and

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-profited-ads-promoting-white-supremacist-great-replacement-theory

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/network-hate-fueled-accounts-thriving-instagram

no lnx pix

media Matters has identified a network of Instagram accounts that collaborate and coordinate activity to remain on the platform and promote overt racism. These accounts -- some of which self-identify as “racistgram” -- coalesce around white supremacy and are fueled by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that has inspired multiple racial attacks, including the deadly, racist mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, over the weekend.

Media Matters has reported on hate speech on Instagram before. One of the accounts identified in our previous reporting on Instagram’s poor moderation is affiliated with a website that was cited repeatedly in the alleged Buffalo shooter’s online writings. As of publishing, the account remains on Instagram -- where it has been since at least June 2020 -- with over 18,500 followers. Many of the accounts identified within this “racistgram” network follow this larger account, which pushes the “puppet master” conspiracy theory.

How these accounts operate

While the theme and tone of each node of this network varies, they generally layer their commentary in satire, irony, and in-group jokes, often to the point where the true meaning would be lost on an outside viewer. Other accounts openly discuss strategies to increase the white population, lament supposed Jewish control, and discuss the role of their Instagram posting in the larger movement.

The accounts in this “racistgram” network typically make minimal effort to tailor their content to avoid moderation by Instagram and are repeatedly removed from the platform. But the users behind these accounts are able to return to Instagram by simply making a new account, and having their new handle circulated through the community, using the existing network to promote themselves and regain lost followers. One account Media Matters identified in this network claimed that it has reemerged on Instagram at least 15 times under new handles.

Three screenshots of Instagram accounts sharing a post from a new account to promote it to their followers]

These accounts do not just ambiently fester on Instagram -- they use the platform and its many features with intention. Instagram Live and Stories allow for more ephemeral, and therefore harder to moderate, content. Additionally, accounts sometimes include links in their bios or use the link sticker in order to organize on other platforms, link to back up Instagram accounts, and even sell merchandise. (Link sticker is a feature that allows users to put hyperlinks in Instagram Stories and has a track record of misuse.)

three screenshots showing users commenting on their use of Instagram Live, link-in-bio, and the Stories link sticker feature]

While these features are undoubtedly helpful for creators and influencers, the app’s appeal for these racist accounts likely lies in a more core component of the platform -- the recommendation algorithms. Meta claims that its “Recommendations Guidelines are designed to maintain a higher standard than our Community Guidelines,” but Media Matters has reported on how features like suggested accounts and the “Explore” page recommend violative content.

When discussing the best way to “race pill” other Instagram users, two accounts within the racistgram network noted that, while Instagram tries to prevent its algorithms from leading people to their content,they can circumvent this effort by developing connections with more palatable accounts: “The way the algorithm works, we just have to make these connections,” one said. “Once we start making these connections to them, and we basically just link ourselves to them and the algorithm. … We just pretty much have to tie ourselves into them on the algorithm, but once we do, it's gonna be a trailblazer, because it's not hard.”

Their strategy relies on using the “infrastructure” they have created through this Instagram network, and they acknowledge that “it's going to take multiple pages” to introduce other users to their ideology.They describe the need for pages that have a wide range in how they project racist sentiments, saying they all have a role in the migration of users to the most overtly racist pages in their network.

Coordinated campaigns

In addition to sharing racist and antisemitic content, these accounts work together to orchestrate coordinated campaigns through Instagram. In April, one of the accounts spearheaded an “anitsemite pride month,” during which the network conducted coordinated harassment, sometimes referred to as “raids,” on social media accounts belonging to Jewish users and Jewish organizations. They also worked to spread antisemitic content and celebrated the birthday of Hitler.

screen shots of an account directing its followers to spam posts with antisemitic comments

Media Matters reported to Instagram the initial post announcing the racist intentions for the month -- a post which the account owner later noted was their most popular to date. Instagram reviewed the report and responded, stating that the company did not remove the post because the “photo likely doesn’t go against our Community Guidelines.”

a screenshot of the response to a report of the violative content stating that it would not be removed

We then requested an appeal to this decision. As of publishing, there has been no response to this appeal, and the request is still in the “received” stage.

a screenshot of the request to review the decision to not remove the violate content

Later in the month, Media Matters attempted to report the account leading the “antisemite pride month.” Instagram again decided not remove the reported content.

a screenshot of the response to a report stating that the violative account would not be removed

In early May, after the “antisemite pride month” campaign had been allowed to flourish on the platform, the account finally disappeared from Instagram, though the cause of its disappearance is unclear.

The coordinated harassment, or “raids,” performed by this network is not isolated to “antisemite pride month.” These users repeatedly share posts from other accounts to their stories and direct their followers to “spam” or raid the comments with racial slurs and other forms of hate speech.

screenshots of an Instagram story in which a user is directing their followers to harass another user by leaving racist comments on their photo

The accounts also collaborated to develop content around the brief #DarkMAGA online trend, which celebrates the idea of former President Donald Trump returning to politics with more anger and violence toward enemies of his supporters.

a screenshot of a story showing all of the users who had Dark MAGA profile photos]

Instagram has long claimed that it is working to address issues of hate speech and violent rhetoric on its platform. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, even went as far as to say in an interview last summer, “I don't think it's good enough, for instance, for us just to remove hate speech and racism from our platform as much as possible. I think we should be a force to reduce racial inequality in the world.” And yet, the company continues to roll out new features in an attempt to maintain relevance while clearly failing to protect its users by upholding its own policies.

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John Eastman’s latest legal filing reveals the “dual role” of Fox News hosts in service of the conservative legal movement

05/23/22 9:00 AM EDT

Angelo Carusone and MSNBC's Yasmin Vossoughian discuss how the great replacement theory reflects Tucker Carlson organizing the GOP around extremists

05/22/22 6:18 PM EDT

On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone explains how Lachlan Murdoch gave Tucker Carlson “a green light” to “intensify his reliance on the great replacement theory”

05/21/22 9:35 PM EDT

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh is using a trans man’s shirtless photo without permission to promote an anti-trans documentary

05/20/22 5:13 PM EDT

Fox guest demands the US deny migrants from “special interest countries” like Cuba

05/20/22 4:56 PM EDT

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Facebook profited from ads promoting white supremacist “great replacement” theory

05/20/22 10:00 AM EDT

Media Matters demands oversight and accountability at Meta

05/17/22 10:31 AM EDT

Hate speech and misinformation proliferate on Meta products, with 13,500 policy violations documented in the past year alone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram

Instagram - Wikipedia

Search domain en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Instagram

Instagram is an American photo and video sharing social networking service founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.In April 2012, Facebook Inc. acquired the service for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers.

SUBSTX --> NYT

Emily Sanders is the Center for Climate Integrity’s editorial lead. Catch up with

...Just days after the Big Oil hearing, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an international nonprofit that “seeks to disrupt the architecture of online hate and misinformation,” released areport finding that posts linking to content from just ten publishers account for 69 percent of Facebook users’ interactions with climate denial content.

Dubbed the “Toxic Ten,” those publishers are:

Breitbart
The Western Journal
Newsmax
Townhall Media
Media Research Center
The Washington Times
The Federalist
The Daily Wire
Russian State Media
The Patriot Post

Examples of viral climate denial content included aWashington Times article claiming there is a “cult of ‘climate change’” whose “worship” is based on unproven science, a Breitbart piece promoting conspiracy theories that climate legislation involves “lockdown decrees,” and a Newsmax article telling readers not to “worry too much about CO2 baking the planet.”

This type of content didn’t emerge on its own. CCDH’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, said the fossil fuel industry has “shown its willingness to embrace new technologies and every tool available to it to create harm — and climate denial is harm.” Social media, he says, is the last frontier for Big Oil to cultivate opposition against climate action that might threaten their bottom line.

“If they can’t win the battle on legislation, they’re going to seek to undermine the consensus, the self-preservatory consensus that underpins the push for legislation. They know that you can’t possibly get political agreement if we can’t even agree on the basic facts,” Ahmed said. “And all they have to do is simulate the appearance of dissent, of debate.”

According to the report, Facebook and Google, which have portrayed themselves as “green” and allies in the fight for climate action, are doing business with denial. CCDH’s research found that Facebook failed to label 92 percent of the Toxic Ten’s climate disinformation, despite the company’s pledge to start placing information labels on posts about climate change. It found that eight of the Toxic Ten have received a combined $5.3 million in revenue from Google ads in the last six months alone. Google promised to stop attaching ads to climate denial content in October, setting its own deadline of November 9 — but it hasn’t acted on that promise yet.

[twt]

...CCDH isn’t alone in calling this out: online climate disinformation has been identified as an urgent and emerging issue in pieces published in The New York Times, The Conversation, and The Nation within the past week.

CCDH’s research was released during COP26, this year’s United Nations climate summit, where at least 503 fossil fuel lobbyists — more than any country’s delegation — were present, according to an analysis by Corporate Accountability and other advocacy groups.

Go figure: the industry’s attempts to halt climate action through third parties have been simultaneously occurring online, where, thanks to internet trolls, right-wing publications, and the cooperation of social media platforms, they can now reach exponentially more members of the public. At least two of the Toxic Ten have historic ties to funding from ExxonMobil:

Media Research Center, a self-described watchdog against “leftist bias in the news media and popular culture,” received at least $50,000 from ExxonMobil directly in between 2000 and 2003, and another $50,000 in 2009, along with more than $4.5 million from the Scaife Foundations, which themselves are financed in large part by the oil industry.
Townhall, a right-wing media group originally founded by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has received at least $870,000 in grants from ExxonMobil, according to the Climate Investigations Center.

Digital platforms make that particularly easy through frequency bias — a fundamental psychological characteristic that causes humans to believe that something must be true or at least popular if we see it frequently enough. And disinformation, whether about vaccinations or climate change or electoral processes, is “sticky,” or “chewy,” in Ahmed’s words — it gets people talking.

Ben Decker, CEO of Memetica, a firm that works to investigate disinformation across digital media platforms, called climate disinformation “the legacy disinformation narrative plaguing America,” and fossil fuel companies the “historical purveyors” of that disinformation.

“The content itself becomes a space where fossil fuel companies can advertise themselves,” said Decker, who says policies to address climate change, not necessarily the science itself, are now the greatest target for these kinds of attacks.

Both Decker and Ahmed referred to the “asymmetry” of these so-called debates, which are manufactured with the help of the fossil fuel industry’s immense resources, and enabled by social media platforms that profit from publishers who advertise climate denial content on their sites.

So how do we tackle the climate disinformation crisis?

CCDH’s report calls on social media companies to stop monetizing and profiting from climate denial, and to comprehensively label climate disinformation on their websites. “It is amazing that the regulatory framework for a bodega in Manhattan is more onerous than that for a company like Facebook, which has literally caused at least one genocide,” Ahmed said, in reference to the violence in Myanmar.

In Decker’s view, it’s important for social media companies to codify exactly what images and words constitute climate disinformation if they’re going to prevent its spread. “They’re coy and smart around the words that they use,” he said of publishers and bad actors that facilitate harm over these platforms.

Growing wells of academic and journalistic research on evolving climate disinformation, and now the ongoing House Oversight investigation, could help define and identify harmful content. But if you ask Ahmed, the problem goes deeper than a lack of consensus or standards.

“We get too tied up in the technology of algorithms, automated moderation, AI and machine learning,” Ahmed said. “It’s a moral choice to gaslight the earth, and that’s what social media companies are doing. They’re making a moral choice to do business with climate denial. These are rapacious companies willing to sell out their communities, nations, and the planet, for their own wealth.”

ICYMI News Roundup

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/opinion/climate-change-facebook-glasgow.html

GREG BENSINGER

Social Media Is Polluted With Climate Denialism

Nov. 12, 2021

Greg Bensinger

Mr. Bensinger is a member of the editorial board.

This fall, Exxon Mobil started targeting New Yorkers with Facebook advertisements that warned about a proposed law that would require electric-only appliances in some buildings. “If your household was required to go full electric, it could cost you more than $25,600 to replace major appliances,” one ad reads.

But the ad doesn’t tell the whole story: The law would apply only to new buildings, making Exxon’s cost claims specious at best. Other advertisements, among roughly 1,200 placed by the fossil fuel giant found by the artificial intelligence outfit Eco-Bot.Netthis year, claimed oil pipelines are necessary to keep “energy affordable and accessible” and that natural gas helps customers “meet their environmental goals.”

These are examples of so-called greenwashing, or corporate attempts to underplay companies’ true impact on the environment. Along with other climate misinformation on social media, such ads have become a potent threat to efforts to combat global warming.Researchers for the environmental group Stop Funding Heat found that climate misinformation is viewed as often as 1.36 million times daily on Facebook.

Social media companies simply aren’t rising to the challenge of rising sea levels. Climate change is an urgent threat, but the companies are treating misinformation around it with far less urgency than other issues like political conspiracy theories, hate speech and lies about Covid vaccines. Climate content can be considered opinion and is therefore exempt from standard fact-checking procedures, which climate change deniers have seized on to push misleading information onto the sites.

The largest social media firms demonstrated in last year’s presidential election that they can effectively combat some misinformation by appending warning labels, using algorithmic suppression and adding links to more reliable news sources. But such work requires sustained effort, and Facebook, for one, dismantled its well-intentioned civic integrity group overseeing election misinformation shortly after the 2020 presidential vote.

“The results from the American presidential election show that the social media companies have the capacity to address misinformation on a broad scale,” said John Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University who is advising Facebook on its climate misinformation efforts. “But they’ve not put the resources or effort behind this that are necessary.”

Even with the rapid shift in public opinion and the outward signs of global warming in recent years, social media companies have been slow to adapt, allowing sometimes blatant disinformation to flourish unchecked on their sites. Under Facebook company guidelines, climate content may be categorized as opinion and subject to no more scrutiny than peer-reviewed scientific research.

Social media companies have a standard playbook for addressing many online falsehoods: add warning labels, push them lower in an algorithmically driven news feed, remove them or penalize their creators by suspending or barring them from using the site. But often misleading posts, such as one that claims combating climate change “involves Americans giving up their freedom and way of life,” carry an incongruous and wishy-washy Facebook label about local average temperatures. Compare that to the labels appended to former President Donald Trump’s voting misinformation posts, which Facebook called “disputed” or “misleading.”

Posts featuring conspiracy theories around Texas’ February power grid failure that left many residents freezing in the dark racked up millions of views on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, particularly ones falsely suggesting that frozen wind turbines or President Biden’s energy policies were to blame. The companies did little to intervene. Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, falsely alleged in a tweet that Mr. Biden’s energy policies were “leaving millions of Texans freezing to death.” Twitter never appended a clarifying label.

Employees at Facebook have wrestled internally with how to approach climate change misinformation since at least 2019, according to documents released by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. According to one exchange, an employee seemed flummoxed by the company’s refusal to remove posts featuring climate change denial, because global warming is not a matter of opinion. Another employee said Facebook removes posts when “content may lead to imminent harm against people offline.”

[Opinion Conversation The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?

What does climate change look like around the world?

From “Postcards From a World on Fire,” these 193 stories show how climate change is reshaping reality.

What should our leaders be doing?

Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency.

What are the worst climate risks in your country?

Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces.

Where are Americans suffering most?

Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S.]

Facebook said its policy of not fact-checking or labeling posts from politicians was justified because the company doesn’t “want to limit political speech on the platform” — despite evidence it has that politicians are more likely to be believed than regular users and their posts are more widely shared.

Facebook, which has called climate change the “greatest threat we all face,” has established only a sparsely visited section on its main site, known as the Climate Science Center, with occasional articles addressing rising global temperatures.

Climate skeptics are simply altering tactics from outright climate change denial to discrediting evidence and shifting blame from corporations to individuals, said Michael Mann, the author of “The New Climate War.”

On YouTube, the nonprofit Heartland Institute, known for attacking climate science, has backed the German influencer Naomi Seibt, who has posted videos denying climate change “hysteria” and encouraging viewers to live carefree lives. But YouTube rarely appends warning labels directing users to more reliable information, even as her videos garner thousands of views.

YouTube says it uses software to make debunked climate content less likely to show up in people’s recommendation feeds, but the climate activism nonprofit Avaaz found last year that the algorithm still prompted millions of views of questionable videos. The group also found that YouTube was selling ads to run alongside them.

As a result, Google, YouTube’s parent company, recently took a baby step, announcing it will no longer allow websites and YouTube creators to make money off advertising that denies humans’ contributions to climate change or denies global warming. Similarly, Facebook said climate change and global warming were on a list of topics that could no longer be used by marketers to target advertising, starting next year.

But spreading false information on the sites remains as easy as making a few keystrokes.

With the public shifting toward acceptance of climate change, corporate strategies are also evolving, including companies’ use of paid influencers on Instagram and TikTok who embark on idyllic road trips to Joshua Tree National Park using Shell gasoline or who snack on chips from Phillips 66 stations. In an effort to combat legislation to ban natural gas hookups, the fossil fuel industry also is paying Instagram stars to post videos of anodyne tasks like cooking tacos over gas stoves. The aim is to conjure good feelings about the brands, known to be significant contributors to carbon emissions, and perhaps even to convince consumers that they are stylish.

Elsewhere on the web, pages have sprung up with names like Climate Change Is Crap and Climate Change Is Natural to spew denialism on social media — no targeted ads needed. One headline from Climate Realism: “Evidence Indicates Climate Change Doesn’t Threaten Human Health.”

Social media could be a forum f or healthy debate about climate action, but the companies’ flimsy policies around policing climate change misinformation stand in the way. Automated software systems are simply not enough to combat misinformation about an unalterably changing Earth.

Facebook, YouTube and other companies have shown they have the power to amplify facts and suppress lies — will they use that to help protect Earth from its most dire threat?

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/instagrams-suggestion-algorithm-promoting-accounts-share-misinformation

no lnx many pix

Instagram’s suggestion algorithm is promoting accounts that share misinformation

WRITTEN BY SPENCER SILVA

PUBLISHED 10/20/21

An Instagram feature that recommends accounts for users is pushing them down the misinformation rabbit hole.

A Media Matters analysis found that Instagram’s “similar account suggestions” feature, a drop-down widget that appears on users’ profiles and suggests accounts to follow, reliably shepherds users who show an interest in anti-vaccine misinformation and other harmful content (some of which the platform claims to ban) toward similar types of content.

Like other algorithm-driven features designed by Facebook, which owns Instagram, the feature steers users toward content they’re likely to interact with — thus keeping them on the platform longer. If a user follows NBA superstar Lebron James, for instance, the feature will suggest following other basketball stars like Stephen Curry or entertainers like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or rapper Cardi B.

[pix]

Benign, right? Not so much.

In order to test how Instagram’s “similar account suggestions” works when users click on pages with less savory content, Media Matters created a new Instagram account and navigated to the pages of several well-known bad actors and scrutinized Instagram’s suggested follows. These bad actors included members of the “Disinformation Dozen,” influencers identified in a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as the originators of an estimated 65% of vaccine misinformation spread on Facebook and Twitter.

The result: The platform’s algorithm repeatedly urged us to follow accounts spreading dangerous misinformation, including content that seems to violate Instagram’s stated policies against vaccine misinformation. It also led us to content it doesn't ban but supposedly does not promote, such as posts featuring exaggerated health claims.

For instance, when we demonstrated interest in anti-vaccine accounts by clicking on pages known to feature such content, Instagram suggested pages containing more anti-vaccine propaganda, including posts that the platform itself labeled as false. The same was true of pages hawking weight loss products and “natural cures for every disease.”

Instagram is recommending anti-vaccine accounts to its users

Despite Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s claims that the company removes anti-vax content — “we just take it off the platform entirely,” he said in a July interview — Instagram remains awash in anti-vaccine misinformation.

Anti-vaccine merchandise is widely available via Instagram Shopping. Influencers spreading health misinformation boast hundreds of thousands of followers. And when the platform does take action against these accounts, they usually return within days.

What’s more, Instagram is not only allowing anti-vaccine content to remain on the platform, but also actively promoting it.

Take, for instance, the account of osteopathic physician and anti-vaccine advocate Sherri Tenpenny, who has been removed from Instagram several times for spreading vaccine misinformation and hawking other dangerous ideas. In just the past few weeks, she’s promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that Microsoft founder Bill Gates once proposed deadly vaccines as a way to reduce the global population. Tenpenny has also recently been fearmongering about toddlers dying from the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine — although the Pfizer vaccine isn't approved for children under 16.

When we followed her, the top recommended account was an anti-vaccine account that promotes any number of false claims about COVID-19 vaccines, including the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips at Gates’ behest.

Earlier this summer, Media Matters documented Instagram’s suggestions when we followed accounts associated with seven members of the “Disinformation Dozen.” The top three most-recommended accounts included an anti-vaccine influencer who’s been removed from the platform several times and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s organization, Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine activist organization that is now banned on Instagram.

The “similar accounts suggestions” feature is also enabling local chapters of global anti-vaccine activist organizations to recruit members and fundraise via Instagram. For example, if a user follows the page for Freedom Keepers United, a popular anti-vaccine organization that has planned rallies against mask and vaccine mandates, Instagram guides them to dozens of local chapters of the organization. Many of these chapters use link-curating services like Linktree to sell merchandise and organize against vaccine mandates and other state-level policies.

“Similar account suggestions” feature is leading users to diet and weight loss gimmicks

In addition to promoting anti-vaccine pages, the “similar account suggestions” feature is also leading users to diet and health misinformation.

While most health misinformation isn’t explicitly banned from Instagram, the platform claims that it tries “to avoid recommending” “sensitive or low-quality content about Health or Finance.” This includes “content containing exaggerated health claims, such as ‘miracle cures’” and “content attempting to sell products or services based on health-related claims, such as promoting a supplement to help a person lose weight.”

Media Matters has previously shown that the platform recommends weight loss gimmicks through the “Explore” page. When we followed accounts that fit Instagram’s description of pages publishing low-quality health content, the platform recommended several pages selling “natural cures for every disease.”

Compared to other features on Facebook platforms, it’s easy to fix Instagram’s suggestions feature: Just get rid of it. In fact, users can already opt out of the feature in the app’s settings, which makes it clear that suggesting similar accounts isn't an essential function of the platform. But as The Wall Street Journal’s reporting has shown, the company will always choose profits over curbing misinformation.

THE LATEST

...

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04/28/21 12:59 PM EDT

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aha: do they just scan metrics and do whatever to boosts own numbers? even unconsciously? in a loop w/ Algo? instant gratification/fame/$

what happens when infl 1 likes/ retweets infl2? does that escalate to even bigger infl lije trump picks up? a congr cand like greene? recall trump launched /rallies of distilled reycled talk radio crap/memes

recall that pedophile was gateway red pill for women into RW wacko

this is basically influencer THREE (i forget what lifestyle aspect was, goop paltrow?)

aha 920 thus is just the latest wave of ideol entre, driven by soc med, no longer trying to move up into party GOP hierarchy?

accel /[amp] just metaphor?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trumpism--young-earth-flat-earth-anti-vax-qanon/

no lnx anti-vaX mama meme pink bkgd graf // stop steal to vax

anti-vax advocacy groups online are helping to radicalize the QAnon movement

The unhinged QAnon conspiracy cult has become a ‘new constituency’ for the Republican Party: report

]

Meaghan Ellis November 28, 2020

The alliance between anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers is rapidly increasing as they continue their plight to spread massive amounts of disturbing misinformation amid the pandemic. One glaring example centers around one incident that occurred last week.

Facebook opted to nix a massive anti-vaccination propaganda group with more than 200,000 members last week. However, the group was not shut down for the dangerous public health misinformation its members posted, but rather, the disturbing promotion of QAnon, reports Huffington Post.

On Monday, Larry Cook, the founder of the "Stop Mandatory Vaccination" movement took to Facebook in his final Facebook Live video before the group was removed to warn that vaccines were a plot "to literally enslave every human on the planet," In the video, Cook also included the QAnon hashtag #WWG1WGA in the upper left corner and the QAnon logo in the upper right corner.

"The purpose of vaccination is to literally slaughter the population and dumb everyone down and render them helpless," Cook said. "It is a global plan to literally enslave every human on the planet."

As he spoke, comments poured in from viewers who expressed gratitude for the "truth" and "awakening" he shared in his video. Like Cook, other anti-vaxxers including David Wolfe along with Ty and Charlene Bollinger have all begun to expose their large followings to the QAnon rhetoric.

Laura Muhl, one of Instagram's most popular anti-vax influencers has also shared relatively dangerous claim insisting the government "engineered" many of the problems currently plaguing the United States. In a meme, she criticized the media with a comparison of covering up the so-called "rigged election" to an attempt to cover up "the truth about vaccines."

"The virus is engineered. The pandemic is engineered. The second wave is engineered. The need for a vaccine is engineered," said the mother of five.

Now, the anti-vaccination pushback and in misinformation rapidly circulating on social media hasacceleratedwith groups joining forces with QAnon. The result is accelerating the effort to discredit science and the integrity of public health.

Facebook Cracks Down on 'Boogaloo' Accounts

the trace 720

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/conservative-journalist-caught-on-tape-pretending-to-board-up-a-business-for-instagram

an 620

As protests continue nationwide, some volunteers are coming together to clean up and rebuild areas affected by looting, arson, and vandalism. Worldwide, social media is being used to share images, resources, and views on the issues of racial injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement. Unfortunately, some people are using this time to gain social media popularity and pose as contributing to efforts to rebuild and care for the community.

A video of a woman in California pretending to help board up a store window went viral Monday after it was shared on Twitter. “This lady stopped someone boarding up a store in Santa Monica so she could hold the drill for a picture, then drove away. Please don’t do this,” the post read. Commenters including a staff member from The New York Times identified the woman as Fiona Moriarty-McLaughlin, a writer for the conservative Washington Examiner.

In the video, Moriarty-Mclaughlin can be seen taking a drill from a volunteer, posing with it to have her photo taken, then proceeding to run into her Mercedes-Benz. The video prompted extreme backlash, resulting in her deleting her social media account. Viewers are calling it an example of “performative activism,” a form of activism in which individuals post or pretend to support a cause in order to gain a following or make themselves look better to others. It’s a form of hypocrisy, because these people don’t actually care about the cause....

https://www.fastcompany.com/90464712/michael-bloomberg-wanted-ironic-internet-cred-but-he-wont-like-these-anti-bloomberg-memes

[his co does data, hired a wicked smart pol op team, 100's of offices kpfa]

ref

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/13/how-mike-bloombergs-meme-blitz-was-engineered-to-go-viral.html

Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign is taking a page out of President Donald Trump’s book and trying to meet voters where they are. In this case, in the Instagram posts of accounts like “TrashCanPaul” or “S***headSteve.”

A slew of popular Instagram accounts unleashed a blitz of sponsored Bloomberg posts on Wednesday in the form of satirical messages between the Democratic candidate and the various account holders asking for help promoting his campaign.

“Can you make a viral meme to let the younger demographic know I’m the cool candidate?” one on the @sonny5ideup account reads. Some of the posts refer to the sponsored nature of the posts (i.e. “yes this is really #sponsored” by the Bloomberg campaign).

The stunt drew widespread and immediate attention. A post on one of Jerry Media’s popular accounts, @F***Jerry, had drawn nearly 384,000 likes by Thursday afternoon, while Mike Bloomberg’s Instagram account had drawn more than 47,000 new followers on Thursday -- the first time that daily growth figure had topped 7,000 this month, according to social media analytics site Social Blade.

Bloomberg’s campaign has been playing in new spaces to reach younger consumers. The candidate’s Twitter account made waves last month during a Democratic debate with a slew of “weird” posts, like one reading “SPOT THE MEATBALL THAT LOOKS LIKE MIKE” with a photo of Bloomberg’s face transposed onto a meatball. The Daily Beast also recently reported that his campaign had been pitching to “micro-influencers” with between 1,000 to 100,000 followers to create sponsored content.

As traditional TV is losing dominance, it makes sense for candidates to try and reach potential voters where they are. As Trump’s campaign found a receptive audience on Facebook in 2016, this is Bloomberg’s way of finding its audiences and trying to speak their language -- in this case on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

“While a meme strategy may be new to presidential politics, we’re betting it will be an effective component to reach people where they are and compete with President Trump’s powerful digital operation,” a Bloomberg spokesperson told CNBC.

How it all came together

The Bloomberg campaign worked with Meme 2020, a project formed by people running influential accounts.

Doing Things Media, an Atlanta-based company that owns and operates 20 viral accounts including @animalsdoingthings, @nochaser and @neatdad, was one of the groups posting the memes. The company said it was connected to the effort by Meme 2020 lead strategist Mike Purzycki of Jerry Media, which runs other popular accounts like @F***Jerry and @Kanyedoingthings.

Doing Things CEO and co-founder Reid Hailey said his company’s accounts now have a combined 50 million followers since starting about three years ago. Hailey had started his own account, @S***headSteve, and grew it to a million followers in less than a year, he said. Twelve of the company’s pages ran Bloomberg memes, Reid said....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/be-honest-passionate-and-be-yourself-bloomberg-is-paying-social-media-influencers-to-post-fake-messages-to-make-him-look-cool

no lnx

‘Be honest, passionate and be yourself!’: Bloomberg is paying social media influencers to post fake messages to make him look ‘cool’

Written by Igor Derysh February 14, 2020

theverge.com/2014/9/28/6859993/instagram-reportedly-blocked-in-mainland-china-following-hong-kong-protestsSep 28, 2014 - Instagram reportedly blocked in mainland China as protests in Hong ... of the protests flooded the image sharing service under the hashtag ...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/be-honest-passionate-and-be-yourself-bloomberg-is-paying-social-media-influencers-to-post-fake-messages-to-make-him-look-cool

no lnx

‘Be honest, passionate and be yourself!’: Bloomberg is paying social media influencers to post fake messages to make him look ‘cool’

Written by Igor Derysh February 14, 2020

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s campaign is paying social media influencers and a social media firm to flood Instagram with fake messages purportedly sent by the billionaire.

Bloomberg’s campaign is offering social media influencers a fixed $150 fee to create content that “tells us why Mike Bloomberg is the electable candidate who can rise above the fray, work across the aisle so ALL Americans feel heard & respected,” The Daily Beast reported last week.

The campaign is using Tribe, a “branded content marketplace” that allows brands to reach “micro-influencers” with 1,000 to 100,000 Instagram followers.

“Are you sick of the chaos & infighting overshadowing the issues that matter most to us? Please express your thoughts verbally or for still image posts please overlay text about why you support Mike,”the campaign’s Tribe page said. “Show+Tell why Mike is the candidate who can change our country for the better, state why YOU think he’s a great candidate.”

“Be honest, passionate and be yourself!” the paid listing urges.

Bloomberg has also contracted Meme 2020, a new company that houses some of Instagram’s most-followed accounts, The New York Times reported Thursday. The company is headed by Mick Purzycki, the head of Jerry Media, a social media marketing firm that came under fire last year for reportedly stealing memes without crediting creators.

Some accounts affiliated with Purzycki’s companies have already posted memes promoting Bloomberg. All the memes are fake direct message exchanges in which Bloomberg purportedly reached out to influencers to “make me look cool.”

All the posts reviewed by The Times included disclosures that they are ads. “Yes this is really #sponsored by @mikebloomberg,” one account said.

George Resch, a director of influencer marketing at Brandfire who created the popular @Tank.Sinatra account, told The Times that the ads are successful because they fool people into believing they are real.

“It’s the most successful ad that I’ve ever posted and I think a lot of it came from people being confused whether or not it was real,” he said.

Bloomberg’s campaign acknowledged the arrangement on Thursday.

“Mike Bloomberg 2020 has teamed up with social creators to collaborate with the campaign, including the meme world,” spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told The Times. “While a meme strategy may be new to presidential politics, we’re betting it will be an effective component to reach people where they are and compete with President Trump’s powerful digital operation.”

The report added that the campaign also hired Eric Kuhn, who dubbed himself Hollywood’s first “social media agent,” to help with their outreach efforts.

A campaign aide argued that the strategy could be a foil to Trump’s reach on social media.

“We’re trying to be innovative with how we’re translating the campaign message on social, trying to do it how the internet actually works. Tweeting from @mikebloomberg is a very 2008 strategy,” an aide told The Times. “The way Trump’s campaign is run is extremely social first. We’re trying to break the mold in how the Democratic Party works with marketing, communication and advertising, and do it in a way that’s extremely internet and social native.”

Bloomberg’s campaign also tried to steal the thunder during last month’s Democratic debate by posting ironic memes poking fun at the billionaire.

The social media strategy is part of Bloomberg’s plan to try to hijack the Democratic primary by flooding media with ads.

Bloomberg has spent $31 million on Facebook and Instagram ads since January 1, according to Facebook data, and has averaged $1 million per day in Facebook ad spending over the last two weeks. Bloomberg also spent $10 million to air an ad during the Super Bowl and has spent more than $350 million total on advertising, according to CNN. Aside from fellow billionaire Tom Steyer, no other candidate has spent more than $37 million on ads.

But while Bloomberg’s attempt to flood the country with television and radio ads appears to be paying off in the polls, the campaign’s social media strategy could backfire.

The paid memes quickly became a point of mockery on social media. Some Twitter users posted parody memes of the Bloomberg direct messages, taking aim at his racist policing policies during his time as mayor and his unbridled ad spending in the Democratic primary.

The Fat Jew, a popular Instagram account with more than 11 million followers that has also come under fire for stealing memes, said he was also asked to participate but refused.

“They asked me to do it, I said no,” he wrote. “I grew up n New York City so I can tell you firsthand, Bloomberg is a colossal sh*tbag. From the subjugation of minorities through stop and frisk policies to his hardline anti-marijuana stance.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/facebook-took-down-posts-regarded-as-too-sympathetic-to-soleimani-free-speech-advocates-must-fight-back/

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Facebook took down posts regarded as too sympathetic to Soleimani. Free speech advocates must fight back

Written by Ari Paul / Common Dreams January 15, 2020

Instagram, and its parent company Facebook, took down posts regarded as too sympathetic to Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated January 3 in a controversial US airstrike. The news website Coda (1/10/20) was credited with breaking the news, and Newsweek (1/10/20) also reported that:

Iranian journalists have reported the censorship of their Instagram accounts. Posts about Soleimani have disappeared from Instagram, which is currently the only operational international social media site within Iran.

According to the Facebook corporation, as quoted by CNN (1/10/20), removal of such posts is required by US sanctions; the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, of which Soleimani was a commander, was designated as a terrorist organization by the US government in April:

As part of its compliance with US law, the Facebook spokesperson said the company removes accounts run by or on behalf of sanctioned people and organizations.

One might rightly ask: What constitutes a post supportive of the late military commander? According to the CNN report, merely posting a photo of the general could get the Facebook authorities to take a post down.

The International Federation of Journalists condemned the censorship:

The measures have gone even further, and some accounts of Iranian newspapers and news agencies have now been removed from the social media platform. This poses an immediate threat to freedom of information in Iran, as Instagram is the only international social media platform currently still operating in the country.

The Washington Times (1/11/20) reported:

Ali Rabiei, a spokesperson for the Iranian government, complained from his Twitter account on Monday this week about the disappearance of social media discussions about Soleimani, accusing Instagram of acting “undemocratic and unashamed.”

Much of the coverage has centered on the fact that Instagram is one of the few social media networks not widely restricted in Iran—thus, the blackout serves as a way of censoring information going into Iran. In fact, the US government news agency Voice of America (1/7/20) reported that the Iranian government was clamping down on social media posts too critical of Soleimani, and NBC News (8/21/19) reported on how Iranians used networks like Instagram to skirt government regulation. (The irony here is thick.)

But this news has also gotten journalists and press advocates worried about what this means for free speech and the First Amendment in the United States. On the one hand, as a private company, Facebook is free to make its own rules about acceptable content. Yet if the network is removing content because it believes it is required to do so by law, that is government censorship—and forbidden by the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press.

Shayana Kadidal, a senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told FAIR that while it was possible for the US government to restrict media companies from coordinating with sanctioned entities and providing “material support” to the IRGC, the US government cannot restrict Americans from engaging in what he called “independent advocacy.”

“Independent advocacy, as the law stands, can’t be banned,” he said. “For [Instagram] to remove every single post would mean it was pulling posts that are protected.”

The Washington Post (1/13/20) reported that free speech advocates were worried, with the director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation calling it “legally wrong.” Others concurred:

Eliza Campbell, associate director at the Cyber Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, [said] that the existing laws had failed to keep up with online speech, calling it a field of law “that hasn’t been written quite yet.”

“The terrorist designation system is an important tool, but it’s also a blunt instrument,” she said. “I think we’re walking down a dangerous path when we afford these platforms—which are private entities, have no oversight, and are not elected bodies—to essentially dictate policy, which is what’s happening right now.”

Emerson T. Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, [said] that Facebook and Instagram are taking “a very aggressive position and it may not be sustainable.” He said it could result in Facebook removing any speech of any Iranian mourning Soleimani’s death and could represent a “harsh new precedent.”

Regardless of whether the government directed Facebook to take this action, the fact that a media company felt the need to do so is proof of a chilling effect on speech. Who, specifically, is to decide what is so unabashedly pro-Soleimani material that it violates US sanctions? Is an article that merely acknowledges that many Iranians mourned Soleimani and denounced his killing a violation? Is an anti-war editorial that doesn’t sufficiently assert Soleimani was “no angel” constitute such a crime? Could satirical material that facetiously supported the Tehran regime get censored? (The last item isn’t so hypothetical: A Babson College professor was fired for jokingly encouraging Iran to follow Trump’s lead by targeting US cultural sites.)

All of these questions, and all this ambiguity, should be enough evidence that this kind of censorship would be capricious and unfairly applied, and thus inappropriate in the face of free speech protections.

Free press advocates in the United States should think seriously in the coming days about how to respond. If sanctions can be invoked by a social media network to take down certain content, what is next? In order not to find out, we’ll need a concerted pushback to Facebook’s censorship from journalists and civil libertarians.

Instagram Won’t Pull These Racist, Russian-Inspired Accounts

ADAM RAWNSLEY,

CASEY MICHEL

===

https://www.thedailybeast.com/instagram-wont-pull-these-racist-violent-russian-inspired-accounts?ref=home

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Instagram Won’t Pull These Racist, Violent, Russian-Inspired Accounts

HATEFEST

Neo-Confederates are posting murderous scenes and racist memes—when they’re not reusing material from Kremlin trolls. But Instagram says the accounts don’t violate its rules.

Adam Rawnsley

Casey Michel

Published Dec. 16, 2019 5:12AM ET

EXCLUSIVE

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

American racists are reusing some of the ugliest elements of Russia’s election interference operation.

Memes published by some of the worst Kremlin-backed trolls of the 2016 campaign are being echoed online by American neo-Confederates. The Russian accounts, overseen by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have since been taken down. But American parrot accounts running some of the same racist crap—and worse—are still live on Instagram, an investigation by The Daily Beast and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found. At least one of these live accounts claims to belong to a Russian network persona.

The accounts—which hail the Confederate flag as “Protecting Us From Tyranny Since 1861” and claim that “The Civil War was not about slavery”—highlight the blurry and politically charged boundaries between domestic and foreign trolling. The American racists didn’t need Russia’s help to hate, of course. But the Kremlin supplied a well of ready-made memes for lazy neo-Confederates to post online.

“I think the similarities between these accounts and those of the IRA highlights how complex the IRA operations around elections have been. It is possible that memes originally created by the IRA have found new or renewed life on social media,” Kanishk Karan, a research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Daily Beast. “The way they camouflaged within the political conversations is also a fascinating detail: We’ve reached a point where it is harder to verify whether an online social or political movement is astroturfed or from grassroots participants.”

When Russian trolls went hunting for targets and content during the 2016 election, race was their “preferred target,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee study.

Instagram

South United, a Russian Facebook and Instagram persona that featured in the IRA’s 2016 meddling campaign, took this theme and ran with it, plastering followers with all kinds of racist, bigoted appeals to the Confederacy.

During the 2016 election, South United was one of the “10 most active IRA-administered Facebook pages,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. It was also undoubtedly Russian. The ads that South United ran were paid for in rubles using a Russian payment processor, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller cited the page as the work of the IRA in a 2018 indictment of 13 IRA employees and officials.

Some of the images published by South United included racist memes of former President Obama dressed as a Nazi with the caption “Don’t support illegals, support own people.” One meme published by the IRA’s account showed a picture of Black Lives Matter protesters next to the question “Black lives or black thugs?” These memes can still be found on active Instagram accounts that pose as state chapters of the original South United page.

The accounts also published the same racist and neo-Confederate images originally published by Russian trolls, such as one with a Confederate flag middle finger bidding viewers to "Say hi to the Yanks” and another wondering, “How many likes can this battle flag get?” The IRA’s South United watermark can still be viewed on these posts.

It’s unclear when the IRA’s South United Facebook and Instagram accounts were first created, but Twitter users were reposting material from the accounts as early as November 2015. Facebook ad data shows that the IRA’s @South_United Instagram page started running ads that same month. By contrast, the earliest post from among the dozen American-run echo-chamber mimic accounts was in May 2016.

In August of that year, the operators of some of these state chapter Instagram accounts also promoted a Russian-organized pro-Trump rally. As The Daily Beast first reported, the IRA announced a “patriotic state-wide flash mob” in support of Trump’s candidacy on a separate Facebook page it ran called “Being Patriotic” using an image of Hillary Clinton in a prison cell. Two of the state chapter Instagram accounts, @south_united_fl and @south_united_il, promoted the rally using the Hillary image taken from an IRA-run Facebook page.

The accounts still live on Instagram also share considerable overlap with the original Russian page in other ways. All of the accounts, for instance, claim to be state chapters of the original South United page, with names like “South United Iowa” and “South United Tennessee.” They all use a similar logo to the IRA Facebook account, and some posts even use memes with stilted phrases like “History is written By victor...” and “Can it be any simple?”—language reminiscent of the non-native English used in some IRA propaganda memes.

Some of the accounts on Instagram even claim to be directly related to the original Russian page. “South United Louisiana” says it’s “the South United page for the state of Louisiana,” while the “South United Georgia” page says it’s the “@south_united page made for the great people of Georgia.” (The latter was taken down at some point prior to The Daily Beast’s discovery, although the Louisiana page remains live.)

The parrot accounts used not just IRA memes but other inflammatory content from outside the South United network. The accounts reposted a variety of memes along the same lines of Southern political and cultural resentments, including pro-Confederacy, pro-gun, anti-Islam, and anti-Hillary Clinton content. In one particularly egregious example, the @south_united_florida account posted an image of four bodies with gunshot wounds to the heads and the words “King Barrak, Queen Michelle, Usurper Hillary, George Soros” above each corpse.

The Daily Beast made repeated attempts to contact the owners of the Instagram accounts still up but received no reply.

Nathan Gleicher—head of security policy at Facebook, which owns Instagram—said the accounts, for now, haven’t violated company policies aimed at helping users distinguish between “inauthentic behavior and authentic speech.” So they're staying online.

“When we take down influence operations, we take action based on the behavior we see on our platforms, not the content they post,” Gleicher told The Daily Beast. “We’ve seen these manipulation campaigns reuse content created by innocent people.Most of the content shared by coordinated manipulation campaigns isn’t provably false, and would in fact be acceptable political discourse if shared by real people. That’s why content alone is not a strong signal for identifying these operations.” To disinformation researchers at the DFRLab, the Instagram accounts that are still live show signs of being dedicated to amplifying IRA material.

DFRLab researchers found evidence that someone may have used engagement-for-hire services to interact with the American Instagram amplification accounts.A few accounts with defunct jewelry and crystal storefronts posted generic comments on the state chapter network accounts’ images.

Not that the IRA needed much help in amplifying its neo-Confederate content. The IRA’s South United Facebook page reached a height of 138,000 followers and harvested a total of 1.5 million likes and 2.3 million shares before it was shut down in 2017. Of the dozen American state chapter Instagram accounts, none have more than 1,000 followers and most have just a few dozen.

Facebook told The Daily Beast that the parrot network accounts appeared to be authentically American. "It appears that these accounts belong to real people in the United States whose content was likely mimicked by these operations we removed in the past," Gleicher told The Daily Beast.

Instagram

DFRLab researchers found some evidence that the IRA’s neo-Confederate persona may have copied organic memes created by authentic American bigots outside the state chapter network. The IRA’s South United Instagram account published a picture of a Confederate stick person attacking an LGBT pride flag stick person in late 2016—a meme copied from an unrelated American Instagram account posted in 2015.

In other words, the Russians copied the American racists. And the racists copied the Russians. It’s a circle of hate.

During 2016, the Kremlin’s sophisticated understanding of the United States led its propaganda to amplifyit. They invented memes to exploit racism, secure in the knowledge that the memes would find wide purchase in America. But while the larger social-media firms purged the accounts that promoted them, the memes have achieved exactly what the Russians wanted: persistence.

And sadly, material aimed squarely at Confederate sympathizers apparently remains a popular topic for Russian trolls: Facebook announced just two months ago that it had removed dozens of Instagram accounts that originated in Russia, some of which published pro-Confederate material targeted at American audiences.

Adam Rawnsley

adam.rawnsley@thedailybeast.com

Casey Michel

@cjcmichel

mma

In the past 24 hours, both Alex Jones and Laura Loomer have taken to Instagram to promote white nationalism

Within a 24-hour span, anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones both posted videos on their Instagram stories that violate Instagram's hate speech and bullying content policies.

Facebook and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) recently implemented a new policy supposedly banning "praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism." But this banapplies only to explicit mentions of white nationalism and separatism, not to content that features "implicit and coded white nationalism and white separatism."

On Instagram, this policy has resulted in prominent white nationalist accountscontinuing to use the platform to promote their bigotry.

Far-right troll Laura Loomer, who has been banned from Twitter,regularly posts anti-Muslim content on Instagram, including frequent bigoted attacks against Rep. Illhan Omar (D-MN). Loomer posted a multi-part story this week ranting against Omar and calling Islam a "cancer," stating, "Muslims should not be allowed to seek positions of political office in this country."

Alex Jones, who has been banned from every other major social media platform, has posted white nationalist, anti-LGBTQ, and conspiracy theory Infowars videos on Instagram. Jones posted a video on his Instagram story promoting the white nationalist campaign "It's OK to be white" that originated on the message board 4chan. In the video, a man identified as part of the "Infowars army" keeps asking a woman if it's "OK to be white." As she gets visibly upset, the person behind the camera tells her to "jump off the bridge" that the woman was standing next to. This call for self-harm violated Instagram's community guidelines, which prohibit content that encourages violence and self-injury.

What has Instagram done about this? Absolutely nothing. An Instagram spokesperson told The Daily Beast's Kelly Weill that "Loomer's Instagram story violated its policies against hate speech, which prohibit attacks on people based on their religion, but it declined to ban Loomer over her violation. Instead, Instagram said it would ban accounts that repeatedly violated their rules." It defies belief that anyone could make a good faith effort to review these two accounts and not see multiple violations.

An Instagram account associated with Alex Jones' Infowars is using the platform to promote Jones' conspiracy theories about the death of Jeremy Richman, whose daughter Avielle was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, CT.

Richman died of an apparent suicide on March 25. He was part of a group of Sandy Hook families who are suing Jones for defamation, arguing that false claims Jones made about the 2012 shooting spurred harassment and threats against them.

Instagram account @thenewswars is followed by Infowars' main Instagram account and exclusively posts Infowars content. On March 25, the account posted a video about Jones' comments on Richman, with the description "MSM Uses Tragic Suicide Of Sandy Hook Dad To Smear Alex Jones."

In the full video, Jones complains that Richman's reported suicide means that Jones won't get a "fair trial" in the defamation lawsuits he's facing. He also questions the known facts of Richman's death, speculating that he was murdered and that his death was timed to distract from the release of the Mueller report.

As Media Matters previously reported, Jones' primary Instagram account, @real_alexjones, regularly posts content that includes hate speech and conspiracy theories and features other extremist figures who have been banned by the platform. While Facebook, which owns Instagram, banned Jones and his outlet, he's increasingly making a home for himself on Instagram.

Also: The New York Times' Charlie Warzel wrote about the deposition of Jones in the Sandy Hook case: "For anyone familiar with his broadcasts and style, the deposition is a jarring piece of evidence. It is also perhaps the most revealing portrait of Mr. Jones — one that strips bare the bloviating host to expose a huckster. Amid his heavy sighing and wincing, the hours of out-of-court testimony show the real Alexander Jones: a man caught between the desire to defend his conspiracy empire and a legal system that threatens to bring it all crashing down. ... The deposition highlights a troubling reality: The legal system may be the only way to defang a well-known conspiracy theorist at the height of his powers."

ff spent 2m$ soc net ads 2o18? election

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/03/22/paris-oil-exxon-chevron-bp-total-shell-billion-climate-lobbying-advertising-influencemap

Social Influencers

InfluenceMap also dives deep into how companies used social media to influence Americans during the mid-term elections last year.

“During this time ExxonMobil was by far the most prolific spender, racking up over $400K in four weeks on over 360 individual political ads,” InfluenceMap wrote. “The ads urge rejecting specific ballot initiatives whilst promoting the benefits of increased fossil fuel production. Facebook’s data indicates that ExxonMobil’s ads made over 10 million ‘impressions’ in this time with users in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana.”

Alex Jones has found a new home on Instagramafter being largely removed from the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is the only major platform that continues to permit Jones and Infowars to publish content. Jones gained a massive amount of Instagram followers after his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, which is increasingly a magnetfor the far right.

Jones has used his Instagram account -- which has about 314,000 followers -- to post videos featuring hate speech, conspiracy theories, and various extremist figures who have already been banned from the platform.

On his account, Jones posted an Infowars clip claiming that "globalists" in the U.N. are "flooding nations with millions of foreigners who have no intention to assimilate and who are not held accountable for their criminal actions." This white supremacist talking point -- that migrant caravans are evidence of a Jewish plot to replace white people -- was embraced by the shooter who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh, PA synagogue last October.

Another post featured anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant extremist Katie Hopkins describing immigrants "snaking their way" through Europe and pushing out "white Christians" and "Christian culture."

Since publication of this Media Matters report on Jones' move to Instagram, three videos containing anti-LGBTQ speech and three videos containing white nationalist content have been removed from Jones' account. They appear to have been removed by Jones. In addition, six posts and one IGTV video featuring Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes have been removed from Jones' account. These videos appear to have been removed by Instagram for violating their community guidelines.

Also: Alex Jones and Infowars had a secondary YouTube channel where they pushed conspiracy theories. In one of the videos, Jones even alleged that the New Zealand mosque shootings were a false flag. After Media Matters reported on the channel, YouTube removed it, citing violations of YouTube's terms of service.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/before-annapolis-capital-gazette-shooting-milo-yiannopoulos-said-he-wanted-to-see-people-shoot-journalists.html

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Yiannopoulos Posted a Threatening Instagram About Journalists, and the Social Network Left It Up for Hours

By APRIL GLASER

JUNE 28, 201810:24 PM

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - NOVEMBER 29: Milo Yiannopoulos speaks during a press conference on November 29, 2017 in Sydney, Australia. Yiannopoulos is in Australia for his Troll Academy Tour. (Photo by Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

Milo Yiannopoulos, probably saying something offensive.

Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Over the past week, infamous internet far-right provocateur, onetime friend of Steve Bannon, and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos sent threatening messages to multiple reporters, according to Davis Richardson of the New York Observer. “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight,” Yiannopoulos texted Richardson when asked for comment on a story about a restaurant Yiannopoulos frequents.

Yiannopoulos sent the same message to the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer in an email, which Sommer included in a story he published Tuesday about how Yiannopoulos is joining forces with far-right YouTube personalities to attempt a “soft coup” of the conservative party. Under a screenshot of the story posted to his Instagram account, Yiannopoulos added the caption, “where is the lie,” confirming, and in a sense even bragging, that he told Sommer he was excited for journalists to get gunned down by vigilante shooters.

That Instagram post received more than 7,000 likes, according to a screenshot tweeted by BuzzFeed reporter Joe Bernstein, who shared the image Wednesday, before news broke Thursday afternoon that a gunman—in what appears to be a completely unrelated event—visited the offices of the Capital Gazette, the daily newspaper chain that covers Annapolis, Maryland, and killed at least five people; several others were seriously injured. The shooter was reportedly male, acting alone, and is now in police custody. There is no current connection known between Yiannopoulos’ quote and Instagram post and the tragedy in Annapolis.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Joe Bernstein

@Bernstein

A reader tells me that he reported Milo's @instagram post threatening journalists with gun violence, and the company found it did not violate their community guidelines

7:58 AM - Jun 27, 2018

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Yiannopoulos has more than 348,000 Instagram followers and a verified account. Bernstein noted in his Wednesday-afternoon tweet that although Yiannopoulos’ threatening post was reported to Instagram, theFacebook-owned social media photo-sharing sitedecided that the post didn’t violate its community guidelines. The person who reported Yiannopoulos’ photo shared a screenshot of Instagram’s decision not to remove it. The screenshot shows that more than 19 hours after the post went up, Instagram said they were keeping it up.

According to Instagram’s community guidelines, hate speech may be allowed when it’s “being shared to challenge it or to raise awareness,” but the company has explicit policies against “serious threats of harm to public and personal safety.” Nevertheless, Instagram offers some leeway if the post is coming from someone with a strong following. “We do generally allow stronger conversation around people who are featured in the news or have a large public audience due to their profession or chosen activities,” the guidelines read. It’s not clear whether the Yiannopoulos post wasn’t considered to be a serious threat or if it was read as an expression of his professional persona, or whether Instagram had some other reason for deciding to let it stay up. But whatever Instagram’s rationale was for not taking the post down, it’s hard not to read the photo and caption as an incitement to violence. Bernstein later tweeted that a representative from Instagram later told him that the decision not to take the post down was a mistake and that it had been removed.

Social media websites provide a platform for people with controversial, and sometimes violent, views to reach large audiences without needing to rely on the popular press. That dynamic can be a very good thing, offering people who may have important perspectives and stories the opportunity to be heard. But if the companies that own these platforms don’t also take care to properly uphold community safety standards and quickly ferret out bad behavior, people with a hateful agenda can use their tools to promote harm—or even violence. And that’s why it’s important for these powerful companies to take action and respond to reports of dangerous activity, even when a journalist doesn’t call them out.

Venmo, the PayPal-owned peer-to-peer money-sharing service, kicked Yiannopoulos off its services on Thursday, according to multiple reports, after he used the platform to send Talia Lavin—a former fact checker at the New Yorker—$14.88. Lavin is Jewish, and “14/88” is a common neo-Nazi and white-nationalist reference.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Sergio Quintana

@svqjournalist

Here is the official statement from Venmo/Paypal about booting Milo Yiannopoulos from the payment platforms.

4:51 PM - Jun 28, 2018 · San Francisco, CA

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