SOCIAL MEDIA 2 bak

1019

html Grobman

fb "news" is "curated" b/c it depends

on the "friends" you pick [or who pick you?!]

covid increases isolation filter bubble, so if algo finds your 1st, or no corrrective --> qanon?

SEE BRASIL BOLSONARO AND SONS HATE GP

see insurrection, its devil spawn

clarence is gunning for big tech?

https://www.protocol.com/policy/thomas-clerk-hawley

no lnx vid 2021

during the Supreme Court's most recent term, Justice Clarence Thomas fired two very public warning shots at Big Tech. First, in an unprompted statement last fall, he called for Section 230 to be reined in, saying the law had been interpreted too broadly by the courts. He followed that up months later with a concurring opinion that suggested Facebook and others ought to be regulated as common carriers.

The two pieces of writing didn't escape the notice of tech policy watchers. What did go relatively unnoticed, though, was just who was working in Thomas' chambers at the time: a clerk named Josh Divine, who was coming off of a stint working for one of Big Tech's biggest critics and a vocal proponent of Section 230 reform, Senator Josh Hawley.

Tucker Carlson is helping Alex Jones evade his TikTok ban | Media Matters for America

much disinfo influencer 12 23

amplify/accelerate --> radicalization

aha echo is the opposite of correction,[WELL THERE'S A SORT OF CORRECTION BUT IN THE WRONG DIRECTION BY A SMALLER AND SMALLER SUBSET OF WACKOS THAT IS IRONICALLY GETTING LARGER AND LARGER AND FINDING/MAKING EACH OTHER [[CRAZIER]]; and algo gives incremental DOSE of crazy that builds on previous slightly less crazy:--> earth2 delusional break from reality is phase shift/level up/ tip pt? doom spiral?

12 21 an salon https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/tucker-carlson/

the TV was talking to me. I was in the midst of a delusion that the news anchors on CNN were operatives of a shadow government run by the Clintons. Every time I crossed the living room of my father's dingy basement apartment, their heads followed me and the news anchors interrogated me about my role in the Russia investigation. I believed "Russia investigation" was really code for a global conspiracy to enslave humanity through mind control. President Donald Trump and the Republicans were secretly working to overturn this shadow government and end the deep state programs. Targets of torture like me would be set free.

I turned the channel to FOX News. They repeated over and over that Hilary Clinton was a criminal. Even though I was a Democrat and had voted for Bill Clinton twice, I mailed in the form to join the Republican Party. Then I faxed evidence to the Russian consulate and sent a letter to the CIA offering to cooperate in the investigation.

What I didn't know I was that I was in the advanced stages of untreated paranoid schizophrenia. I was experiencing a psychotic break from reality.

It all seemed so real.

When I was eventually treated, my psychiatrist explained to me, "With paranoid schizophrenia it's just like "The Bourne Identity" — there are people for you, people against you, and somebody always has to be the villain."

I know what you're thinking — thank God they have medication for these people.Now, I wonder, is the average American so different from me? Are we all susceptible to paranoid thoughts, conspiratorial thinking and bias when executive function in the frontal lobes and our ability to reason are disabled by fear?

Terrified by a global pandemic, there are people who believe Bill Gates is an evil mastermind who engineered the coronavirus, with plans to depopulate and microchip the world's population, while profiting in the process. Antivaxxers refuse to take a vaccine they think will alter the structure of human DNA. Our brains seek to impose order. Conspiracy theories can provide answers to people who feel overwhelmed. But ideally the frontal lobes should step in to challenge strange thoughts by asking the question: Is what I am perceiving based in reality?

Dr. Oliver Freudenreich, Co-Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychosis Program, states that there is no generally agreed-upon definition on what constitutes a delusion. From a psychiatric or biological perspective, delusions are driven by excessive amounts of the neurotransmitter dopamine. There is a biological basis to them, and treatment can correct this abnormality. A person with such delusions (e.g., somebody with schizophrenia) is expected to respond to being treated with an antipsychotic medication which blocks dopamine. In other words, one can take a pill and think rationally.

However, many people can't do that if their delusional thinking is part of a worldview that is more an ideology. According to Dr. Freudenreich, when people create their own insular groups — where delusional ideas are never corrected, but simply bounce around in an echo chamber — it is much harder to fight those types of delusions.

Policy divides are now often framed as a battle between good and evil.The most obvious consequence of overheated partisan rhetoric is that someone with an untreated psychiatric illness can go on to commit an act of violence against a person or group that they believe is a perpetrator of their suffering. This is rare. More common is the normal person who goes down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and finds a world that makes sense to them.

On January 6th, 2021, incited by President Trump and believing the election had been stolen, a mob attacked the Capital building. Some in the crowd showed up for the "Storm," which is a QAnon conspiracy theory that posits that Trump was planning mass arrests of a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles and coup plotters, headed by Hilary Clinton and George Soros. Capitol police described the scene as being like fighting a medieval battle.

Social dynamics can propagate conspiracy-based thinking that mimics biologically triggered delusions. But there is no medication that will stop mass violence fueled by conspiracies.

I was a forty-six-year-old filmmaker when I suddenly began to have paranoid thoughts that people were following me. When I lost my day job due to bizarre behavior, I lost my excellent health insurance. I was dumped into America's broken mental health care system that offers substandard psychiatric care to patients on Medicaid, while spending vast amounts of taxpayer money. Misdiagnosed and neglected at the county hospital, I got sicker and sicker … until the TV started talking to me.

Years of my life are now gone. I try not to be bitter that I ended up unemployed, bankrupt and almost homeless, when all I needed was proper medical care. Every day I am grateful that I didn't wind up living on the streets or locked up in prison, like so many people with schizophrenia.

It's easy to mock people who think Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in them with the coronavirus vaccine. But it's much harder to separate conspiracy theorists' larger existential fears from our own. We're approaching the second year of a global pandemic, which is causing mass anxiety and depression. The internet routinely displays images of future roads in major cities as gushing rivers due to climate change. Billions of fish were boiled in the American Northwest and Canada during an unprecedented heatwave this summer. If someone's mind starts spinning with their wildest fears and finds solace in a conspiracy theory, can you really blame them?

Television is a powerful medium. CNN and FOX News repeat the same headlines, the same phrases, over and over in the same news day. Back then, these read to my unhinged mind as coded speech; to the unsuspecting public, it is more akin to propaganda. When I was psychotic, I thought a shadow government had a ministry of propaganda and they colluded across networks. I worry about living in a country where the two major political parties are always at war, unable to get anything done, and the public is fed a delusional world by networks and social media companies competing for viewers.

People with paranoid schizophrenia see patterns that don't actually exist. Just like conspiracy theorists, they are constantly scanning the news for pieces of information to connect the dots about unseen forces controlling events. Both groups believe they are being persecuted by others. I had grandiose beliefs that I was at the center of every news story on TV. My mind was looking to cast a villain to account for the symptoms of a brain disease. The media handed me a culprit to blame. [q or trump sent me]

Dr. Anthony Fauci has complained about the extraordinary divisiveness surrounding the public health crisis created by the pandemic. The current battle is over masks and vaccines. FOX News paints the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy that has invented domestic enemies, such as the unvaccinated, to desperately cling to power. News anchors across CNN repeat the phrase "viral blizzard" to warn the public and scare the unvaccinated about the new variant. Fear mongering is psychologically destabilizing to the most normal person. But this media environment can be toxic to someone with an untreated psychiatric illness. I wish politicians and their media allies would stop contributing to the collective unraveling of the American mind.

yikes omg sys ampl fdbk? lack of diversity? not possible w/o SOC MED

an 10 21

Ron Watkins, the guy most QAnon experts believe is on half of the duo — with his father Jim Watkins — to be the infamous Q of QAnon (He denies it) is now running for Congress. Watkins has relocated to Arizona from Japan, where he was believed by most QAnon researchers to have written the "Q drops" — along with his father — by pretending to be a high-placed D.C. official in the Donald Trump administration. He's planning to run as a Republican against Democratic incumbent Rep. Tom O'Halleran.

Watkins didn't pick Arizona's 1st district out of any real connection to the area, or even the state. The district has become a hot commodity because, after a robust bout of gerrymanderingby the GOP-controlled state legislature, it's believed that that the congressional seat will likely turn over to a Republican.Subsequently, the race is a magnet for a lot of Republicans with congressional dreams and a better base of donors than the denies-he-is-Q guy.

GOP political consultants are quick to downplay the possibility that Watkins could win. Arizona Republican political consultant Stan Barnes told Will Sommer of the Daily Beast that a guy "who's allegedly related to the QAnon phenomenon has no chance of winning." But as Sommer pointed out, "QAnon connections haven't proved disqualifying" for Republicans like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.Indeed, Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol that was manned heavily by QAnoners, and he is the current favorite to win the 2024 election. Watkins is squirrelly, will likely be outspent, and his sleazy history includes giving an interview in a brothel — so I wouldn't bet in his favor. Still, he's not crazy to think that he's got a shot.

Blame gerrymandering.

Across the country, Republicans — who already control the majority of state legislatures — are working swiftly to redraw election maps to marginalize Democratic voters and create as many non-competitive Republican seats as possible. Most of the political coverage of this, for understandable reasons, is focused on how this will further enshrine the Republican power, giving them what could very well be permanent control of the federal government, despite the fact that most voters actually cast their ballots for Democrats.

But another, less intended consequence of gerrymandering is that it will speed up the Republican race to the bottom.

GOP gerrymandering empowers an ever-larger cast of idiots, conspiracy theorists, con artists, and open white nationalists to win national office. The situation is bad now, with Congress home to characters like Taylor Green, Boebert and Florida's Rep. Matt Gaetz, currently under federal investigation for sex trafficking of minors.But it's about to get much worse. Very soon the clown car will unload its passengers into primary campaigns for all of these newly safe Republican seats created by gerrymandering.

Here's how it happens: In districts with safe seats for one party or another, the election that counts is not the general, but the dominant party's primary election. This lack of general election competition creates all sorts of problems, but it's less of an issue in Democratic districts, where the diversity of the coalition at least creates real ideological debate in primaries. For Republican candidates, however, the incentives are completely skewed.

The kinds of people who vote in Republican primaries are ... well, not America's best. Without having to worry about running candidates who have to compete against Democrats for moderate voters, GOP primary voters can just go with whatever candidate excites them the most. And what speaks to Republican primary voters is sadism, racism, and a deep commitment to wild conspiracy theories. Gerrymandering makes it so that America's worst voters also happen to be the only voters who count at all in an increasing number of districts.

This is how we got Gaetz, who won with nearly 65% of the vote in his staunchly Republican district, Taylor Green, who drew nearly 75% of the vote, and Rep. Paul Gosar, who flaunts his white nationalist yearnings and got nearly 70% of the vote in his deeply conservative Arizona district. Having a heavily Republican district is an open invitation for the worst people to run, secure in the knowledge that as long as they can win over the Newsmax-addled, Facebook-meme-sharing hard right nuts that vote in GOP primaries. After that, it's a red carpet straight to national office.

Gerrymandering is not just a problem on the district level, either.

We can see from statewide offices what happens when Republicans don't feel they need to compete with Democrats in general elections. In both Florida and Texas, the incumbent Republican governors — Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbot, respectively – are running on what can be fairly described as a pro-COVID-19 platform. Both have waged all-out war on any effort to stymie the virus's ability to spread to as many bodies as possible, with a doggedness that is indistinguishable from what they'd do if they were trying to get their own constituents killed.

They aren't doing this to win any popularity contests in their states. On the contrary, polling shows repeatedlythat the majority of Americans want leaders to fight the virus, not help it spread. In fact, their actions are causing Abbott and DeSantis to see big dips in their approval numbers. But neither of them cares because both states passed draconian voter suppression laws that shield Republican politicians from having to answer to the majority of their state residents. Having secured what they likely see as an easy GOP win through voter suppression, both Abbott and DeSantis are focused instead on pleasing Republican primary voters. Doing that means maximizing the sadism and the plain old nuttiness. As Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic, Abbott is "too afraid of his own base to act responsibly."

Such fear-based governance will only become more and more the norm as Republicans shut Democrats out of the ability to compete in general elections, meaning that Republican primaries loom ever larger as the only elections that count. The only way to win in many Republican primaries is to show you can out-crazy the other candidate.

So it's no wonder the guy who is alleged to be Q is running for office in Arizona. When all the political incentives favor a race to the bottom, the people who are already living in the sewer have a strong advantage.

see sov citizen me vs we; VXR: bodily integrity is last stand/refuge // virgin not penetrated totemic for safety of castle vs invaders?!

body is last thing i have control of, not my city, country b/c POC gt replacement, my econ future/membership in middle class precarious, factory jobs outsourced overseas to chicom and POC peasants.

rugged indiv me vs we BUT ironically there is a social component,i am not alone/crazy, i'm part of atribeof patriots who love god and country // brave founding fr/minutemen STORY 1

soc media lets isolated ppl find each other, validate crazy but also amplify it see radicalization of alt rt --> manifestos and mass shooting

aha: recall origins in Heartland reverse engineer: if AGW real, world gov't no capitalism

also fork 1 origin // sununu collectivist jackboots story 1 threatened

vax everywhere = neg?

gw denial eroded faith in sci for decades and made us vuln to vaxxer BS --> civil war?!

fox murdochs burn down the world for money and power (vax and AGW) ; koch gopanti-gubmint erode norms,

fox briefly forgot trump TV hacks and acted like a news org and reported FACT that trump lost AZ, immediate threat from oann newsmax reb mercer soc media play

no lnx

Black flag:Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021

It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply....

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/trumpists/

clark County officials pass resolution declaring the spread of COVID misinformation a 'public health crisis’

Meaghan Ellis

September 22, 2021

Officials in Clark County, Nevada have expressed deep concern about the rapid spread of COVID misinformation campaigns while declaring the issue a "public health crisis."

an 621

fBI warns Congress of more possible QAnon violence targeting Democratic lawmakers

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement June 15, 2021

The FBI has briefed members of Congress that QAnon "digital soldiers" may become violent and engage in more acts of domestic violent extremism, like the January 6 insurrection. In an unclassified version of the threat assessment delivered to top lawmakers in April the Bureau warns that Democrats may be targeted.

Rather than walking away from the far right wing conspiracy movement that paints some top Democrats as part of a dark cabal of cannibalistic Satan-worshipping pedophiles being fought by Donald Trump, some QAnon cultists think "that individuals need to take greater control of the direction of the movement than before," CNN reports in an exclusive.

The shift is fueled by a belief among some of the conspiracy's more militant followers that they "can no longer 'trust the plan" set forth by its mysterious standard-bearer, known simply as "Q," according an unclassified FBI threat assessment on QAnon sent to lawmakers last week, which was obtained by CNN.

This might lead followers to seek to harm "perceived members of the 'cabal' such as Democrats and other political opposition — instead of continually awaiting Q's promised actions which have not occurred," according to the assessment.

CNN also reports FBI Director Christopher Wray "made clear the bureau is not investigating" the QAnon movement, but only crimes committed by its adherents.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'An idiocracy based on a digital prophet': QAnon longs for a fascist ... ›

How Fox News is now defending QAnon - Alternet.org ›

This QAnon supporter and Capitol rioter now says he was a 'victim ... ›

With Trump’s potential reelection just weeks away, he and his supporters have ramped up disinformation efforts well aware that there’s no one willing to stop them.

In March, for the first time, Twitter slapped a “manipulated media” label on something tweeted by White House social media director Dan Scavino and retweeted by Trump. The tweet included a video of Democratic nominee Joe Biden making what seemed to be an accidental endorsement of Trump.

“Excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump,” Biden says in the edited clip, omitting the second half of his statement. “Excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s got to be a positive campaign,” he says in the full video.

On August 29, Trump ally and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) shared a video on Twitter that edited the words said during an interview with Biden by activist Ady Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and uses assistive technology to speak. Scalise added the words “for police” to a question Barkan asked about funding things that might mitigate crime such as social services and mental health counseling. The goal of Scalise’s deceptive editing was to make it seem as though Biden was in favor of defunding the police, a position he has repeatedly said he does not support.

Twitter again added a “manipulated media” flag to Scalise’s tweet following backlash. Scalise later took the post down, but stood by the video.

On August 30, Scavino shared another edited clip. In this one, the clip superimposed an image of Biden over footage from a 2011 interview between a Bakersfield, California-based news show and actor Harry Belafonte. This was edited together with a snoring sound effect to make it look as though Biden had fallen asleep in the middle of a TV appearance, though this obviously was not true. Twitter again applied the “manipulated media” flag to the post, leaving it up. It wasn’t until the video’s copyright holder filed a takedown request that Twitter removed the post altogether.

Belafonte said of Scavino’s use of that clip, “They keep stooping lower and lower. A technical glitch in an interview I did 9 years ago now becomes another one of their lies, more of their fake news. I beg every sane American-please vote them out. I knew many who gave their life for the right to vote. Never has it been so vital to exercise that right.”

On August 31, Trump’s campaign tweeted a clip of Biden saying, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” a complete distortion of what Biden actually said: “Since they have no agenda or vision for a second term, Trump and Pence are running on this, and I find it fascinating. 'You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America.’ And what's their proof? The violence we're seeing in Donald Trump's America.”

Yet again, Twitter slapped the “manipulated media” label to the post, but not before the video had racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Later, the campaign defended the post, tweeting, “To all the triggered journalists who can’t take a joke about their candidate, it’s not our fault Joe Biden was dumb enough to say this on camera.”

The press and tech companies need to incentivize truthfulness, and that means ensuring that the political and social cost of lying outweighs the benefits.

Would the Trump campaign have posted the deceptively edited clip of Biden if there was a chance that its entire account would be suspended from the platform? Would Trump have repeatedly claimed that just 6% of COVID deaths were actually because of COVID if newspapers and nightly news broadcasts insisted on doing more than just quickly noting that what he said wasn’t true and moving on?

It used to be treated as a scandal when the public learned of an instance of the president lying to the American people, but now it’s just an accepted fact of daily life that something the president says to us today will likely turn out to be untrue. If the press had taken Trump’s candidacy seriously, holding him to the same standards as other candidates, it’s possible he wouldn’t have ever become president. Had journalists stopped offering Trump the benefit of the doubt, he would have been forced to either lie less often or face a barrage of nonstop criticism for his dishonesty. Fact-checking is important, but we’re beyond the point of simply being able to correct our way out of the situation the world is in. Fact checks can’t simply be something brought up in a single segment squeezed between hours of uninterrupted lies, and it cannot be something that gets siloed into its own separate section of news coverage.

The many lies of Trump’s presidency have been enabled by the press and by social media companies afraid to take real action to stop the spread of false information. As November’s election approaches, it’s become clear that disinformation is no longer a tactic for his campaign, but the tactic. The extent to which that tactic will be successful will depend on whether the press is willing to cover his campaign the way it should have all along, and if tech and social media companies are willing to hold him and his allies to the same standards as every other user.

In July, Trump wrongly claimed that Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) issued a document outlining a plan “to abolish our police departments.” In June, he shared a deceptively edited video made to look like a CNN segment. In May, he lied about a “rogue Secretary of State” in Michigan sending 7.7 million absentee ballots to voters across the state. This is who he is, who he’s always been, and who he will always be.

Trump and his allies keep telling lies, and they will continue to do so as long as the benefits of lying outweigh the costs. It’s because of a deferential news media and timid social media companies that the cost of telling blatant lies remains so low. If the worst thing to come of a manipulated Twitter video is a tiny label applied to a tweet long after its engagement has already peaked, it makes perfect sense to continue to spread increasingly brazen false claims and deceptive footage in hopes of influencing voters’ actions.

Once you’ve hit 20,000 lies, what are a few more on the pile?

David Atkins / Washington Monthly August 16, 2020

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/why-the-gop-cant-control-qanon-the-party-was-already-becoming-a-conspiracy-cult/

at long last, mainstream reporters are starting to take the QAnon conspiracy cult seriously. With at least one QAnon devotee about to be elected to Congress, millions of online followers and several big stories in major publications, the cult has come into its own. Pushback against it has come too little, too late. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok only recently started deactivating major QAnon promoters and groups, even as those accounts engage in coordinated ban evasion and continue to peddle lies on other platforms.

I (as others have) use the word “cult” here very intentionally. QAnon is not a political movement centered around an ideology or policy platform: it is a freewheeling grab bag of mostly far-right but also non-partisan conspiracy theories from flat-earthers to believers in lizard people to those who believe that JFK Jr is still alive and coordinating the arrests of a massive global pedophile and Satanic child sacrifice ring. Its adherents demand not allegiance to a specific orthodoxy, but only blind faith in the leader: an anonymous online figure nicknamed “Q” who began posting on 4chan during the early days of the Trump Administration, claiming to be a member of the administration withtop “Q” level security clearance (no such clearance actually exists.) Members spend countless hours analyzing specific “drops” from Q, using numerology and other hokey deep reading techniques to parse misspelling in Trump tweets for hidden messages and patterns, fitting them into bizarre and hopelessly complicated “calendars” and “clocks.”

The key catchphrases of the movement are typical of cultic in-groups with political overtones. “Trust the Plan.” “Patriots Are in Control.” “Where We Go One We Go All.” It provides a built-in community of fellow believers, and a chiliastic all-encompassing spiritual battle against both human and supernatural enemies. As with an adventist cult, Q followers are supposed to beessential team members laying the groundwork for the exposure of the “truth”: a giant global ring of child-eating Satanist pedophiles restricting access tofree energy, debt jubileesand world peace.

Central to all of this is the figure of Donald Trump, who will supposedly one day bring “the pain”: the mass arrest and summary execution of all the cult’s enemies, ranging from standard right-wing targets like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to celebrities like Tom Hanks and Chrissy Teigen. (The fact that President Trump, leader of the Executive Branch of the United States, has supposedly allowed this ring to exist unhampered for nearly four years while an anonymous 8chan user spreads the gospel is dismissed as a minor inconvenience.) All of it is overlaid on existing white supremacist and anti-semitic themes, as the enemy is supposed to be a “globalist” cabal using minorities to overwhelm majority-white Christian nations.

QAnon followers are also suffering the same sorts of social isolation and estrangement from family and friends that is typical of new cult members. QAnon leaders, for their part, offer a substitute family for them in replacement. As QAnon influencer Martin Geddes once tweeted before his account was suspended:

'Part of the struggle of being “awake(ish)” is that many of your normal sources of support become flimsy or even can attack. Your preacher, teacher, therapist, mother, lover etc can be under the spell of false narratives or devious doctrines. Requires building a whole new network.”

This is not a political movement. It is a :{novel form of :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{online religion:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}: enabled by social media algorithms. And it is deeply dangerous, not just because of its capacity for catapulting all sorts of misinformation but also because of its natural tendency toward political violence. After all, if you believed that such things were true and such people existed, what would you do to stop them?

One would think that the Republican Party would see the danger of this phenomenon and try to nip it in the bud, as surely as any political entity would try to quell a cult growing like a cancer within it. But it hasn’t. House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has come under fire for not doing enough to stop QAnon within Republican circles and hewing too close to Trump, but he is unlikely to be seriously threatened for leadership. Trump himself refuses to try to squelch the conspiracy group, seeing any supporter as a good supporter.

The problem is that Republican Party has been relying on only slightly milder forms of conspiratorial politics for years now. It’s staggering to ponder the implications of modern Republican ideology all at once, but consider a few examples. To be a modern Republican you have to believe that thousands of climate scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data for grant money, while oil executives are victims trying to expose the truth. You have to believe that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are engaged in coordinated voter impersonation fraud, abetted by hundreds of local elections officials in both blue and red areas, and no one has ever leaked it or been caught. You have to believe in a massively coordinated effort to take away guns not to protect children from being shot in schools and movie theaters, but to leave white people defenseless in a race war or implement a Stalinist state tyranny. You have to believe that social services are a racket to keep racial minorities voting for Democrats, rather than an attempt to mitigate the inequities of brutal capital markets in a society riddled with horrific structural racism. And so on.

These (among others) are truly bizarre beliefs, but they are preached from the Fox News pulpit 24-hours-a-day on America’s most-watched cable news network. They have become part of our daily political existence, such that we barely stop to remark anymore on just how outlandish and nonsensical they are when given a moment’s thought.It’s a deeply conspiratorial worldview that depends on its adherents remaining ensconced in a bubble of alternative misinformation.

So it’s not a huge logical leap from these conspiracy theories into even more fantastical QAnon territory. It’s not a big step, for instance, from ridiculously claiming that climate scientists are all lying for grant money–which lacks real credibility as a motive–to speculating that they’re lying for deeper, more nefarious ends. In some ways the Republican tropes actually gain more credibility the more villainous the opponents’ motives are claimed to be. If you’re going to claim that Democrats want to offer universal childcare as an evil scheme to gain power to do vague unspecified things, why not go all the way to claiming that they want to keep patriots subdued so they can harvest babies for adrenochrome? If you’re going to vilify your enemies with absurd claims and keep your followers in a tightly controlled information bubble, why stop at a partially enraptured cable news/AM radio audience? Why not go all the way?

This is why the GOP can’t control QAnon. Once the Republican Party handed over control of its messaging to cable news and radio hosts, and once it began to depend on an alternative universe of conspiracy theories promulgated on social media to prop itself up, it was only a matter of time before these things started to take on a life of their own.

Now we are all paying the price as this toxic cult threatens to infuse American politics with even more extremism, misinformation and violence. But it was the “mainstream” Republican Party and its allies that laid all the groundwork for it.

nicholas carr 2010 update bk

2/3 kids prefer social interaction online vs f2f

The Shallows

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-august-10-2020/

sean parker admit addiction engr in from git?

affects us even when we don't use (we think about use or try to suppress use)

~ crit think: req slow thinking thru a larger context

rn: info --> __ -->intell --> wisdom

// slot machine, unpred reward

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127370598

2010

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle, and that, says author Nicholas Carr, is what you're doing every time you use the Internet.

Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption -- and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.

Chronic Distraction

Carr started research for The Shallows after he noticed a change in his own ability to concentrate....

i'd label fail but BS persists:

But other stings outlined in the Keynote file did materialize. The presentation, for example, teased an inside man at Pinterestwho was “increasingly worried” about the platform’s “expanding community safety restrictions.” Sure enough, two months later, an ex-Pinterest Android app developer named Eric Cochran came forward with (later debunked) allegations in a series of Project Veritas and a *Newsweek*op-ed claiming that the platform was censoring anti-abortion Christian advertisers. The pitch deck also promised an exposé from a “CNN Insider” named Cary Poarch, a bombshell that fizzled in October 2019 when Poarch’s hidden recordings, taken while working as a freelance satellite truck operator for the news network, failed to expose more than the personal opinions of a few random employees.

aha authoritatian dic wants/needs to use force to win, bonus turmpista base will reward him for WINNING over THEM; thus photoshop gunman into BLM seattle;

trump tools are Fox and twitter; soc med optimizes fear and anger: he makes base afraid of THEY will use violence.[they are irrational, inferior, so the only way they can win is to take our stuff/jobs.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-has-no-grand-strategy-and-hes-going-all-in-with-losers/

ms 13 // antifa// new blk panthers

aha 620: i have blamed soc med for dissemination of BS, but just realized how much relies of manipulation of words (god/devil term, POV, selection is deflection of reality, but even more pix and video).

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/propaganda-fox-news-photoshops-gunman-into-stories-about-seattles-autonomous-zone

no pix url

Propaganda’: Fox News photoshops gunman into stories about Seattle’s autonomous zone

Image via Screengrab.

Written by The New Civil Rights Movement June 14, 2020

Legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern noticed that Fox News added a man carrying a military-assault rifle into images of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) on Friday. The CHAZ is a police-free area currently occupied by protesters police violence.

Fox News featured the images on their website without any mention that they had been altered. They placed the exact same gunman in two different photos. In one, the gunman’s left arm had been weirdly cut off in a straight line from the shoulder to the elbow.

Fox claimed that the image of a shattered window in the CHAZ was taken this week, but it seems it was actually taken on May 30.

Mark Joseph Stern

@mjs_DC

Fox News, a totally normal and respectable media outlet, digitally manipulated photos of Seattle’s “autonomous zone” by photoshopping in a gunman. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-runs-digitally-altered-images-in-coverage-of-seattles-protests-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone/ …

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

“Given how vigorously Fox News personalities have argued that men toting assault weapons in public are not inherently threatening,” Stern wrote, “it’s curious the outlet digitally inserted a man toting a gun to make the autonomous zone seem more threatening and scary.”

Fox News eventually issued the following editor’s note:

A FoxNews.com home page photo collage which originally accompanied this story included multiple scenes from Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’ and of wreckage following recent riots. The collage did not clearly delineate between these images, and has since been replaced. In addition, a recent slideshow depicting scenes from Seattle mistakenly included a picture from St. Paul, Minnesota. Fox News regrets these errors.

Here are some reactions to the news of Fox’s photoshopping from Twitter:...

aha: has bs myth rhet allowed trump to do dick-tatorial XO? or just raise transaction cost

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-a-notoriously-stupid-fox-news-host-inadvertently-let-slip-trumps-corrupt-plan-media-reporter/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4673

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-a-notoriously-stupid-fox-news-host-inadvertently-let-slip-trumps-corrupt-plan-media-reporter

twt vid]

although President Donald Trump has used Twitter incessantly to promote himself, he has been furious with the social media outlet this week for fact-checking two of his tweets — so furious that on Thursday, he issued an executive order targeting social media companies and claimed that he did so to “defend free speech.” Twitter hasn’t removed any of Trump’s tweets, but flagged or hidden them as inaccurate or violent. While legal scholars have been asserting that the order cannot withstand legal scrutiny, Media Matters’ Matt Gertz stresses that it serves a useful purpose for Trump nonetheless — and that purpose has been identified by the “notoriously stupid” Fox News host Steve Doocy.

“President Donald Trump capped off a multi-day tantrum at Twitter for appending a mild fact-check to one of his false tweets by retaliating with the power of the federal government,” Gertz explains. “The executive order he signed Thursday is slapdash and incoherent, rooted in a false premise, hypocritical and potentially unconstitutional, legally unenforceable yet dangerously authoritarian, with sections that read like a Fox News screed. But to analyze the executive order’s flaws is to miss the point entirely.”

That purpose, according to Gertz, is “raising the cost of defiance until his perceived enemies break” — and the executive order “forces Twitter to expend resources fighting it, but if the company bends to Trump and does what he wants, maybe it will just go away.”

“Steve Doocy of all people — the notoriously stupid ‘Fox & Friends’ host who is one of the president’s favorite cable news personalities — (inadvertently) nailed it on Wednesday,” Gertz notes. “Social media companies would face ‘a big headache’ if Trump tried to repeal the section of federal law that the executive order targets, he exclaimed, so ‘they might think twice about putting a footnote on a tweet from the president of the United States.’”

Gertz emphasizes that with his executive order, Trump is “drawing a line between companies that defy him and are punished and those that work to benefit him and receive praise.” Trump, Gertz observes, “lauded Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for criticizing Twitter’s decision to fact-check him.”

“Zuckerberg is the poster child for what Trump wants from the head of a social media company,” according to Gertz. “The Republican political operatives he hired to run Facebook’s policy wing have carved out exemptions from the site’s rules for Trump and his media allies. Trump is making clear that it is in the interests of other social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube to adopt that same corporate strategy — and he will continue to raise the temperature until they do.”

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ref

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/04/17/hate-groups-and-racist-pundits-spew-covid-19-misinformation-social-media-despite-companies

Hate groups and racist pundits have pushed misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic on mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube throughout the crisis, despite companies pledging to fight fake news about the virus.

Among some of the false claims propagated on social media include the notion – based on unproven race science – that persons of East Asian descent were predisposed to suffer from COVID-19, erroneous assertions that the virus was originally designed to be a bioweapon and arguments supporting the idea that racism can protect against global pandemics.

Hatewatch has chosen to repeat some of these posts in full to demonstrate the nature of the problem.

This deluge of COVID-19-related misinformation cuts against a pledge made by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in February 2020, when representatives from some of the world’s largest tech companies convened with members of the World Health Organization (WHO) to discuss tampering the spread of false information related to the virus. The group was gathered, in part, in response to what a representative from the WHO dubbed an “infodemic” in an interview with CNBC – the new wave of false information on major social media platforms.

Groups such as Change the Terms, a coalition of civil rights organizations including the Southern Poverty Law Center, have pushed to bridge this gap. Change the Terms advocates for social media companies to adopt a reasonable standard of care regarding regulation, which aims to constrain hate activity without stifling communities arbitrarily. But there is work yet to be done. Companies, as the 2019 “Year in Hate” report found, still struggle “to prioritize public safety over the freedom of their users to post extremist content.” The moderation of hate groups across all platforms is often inconsistent as well. Some groups, such as white nationalist publication American Renaissance, have been banned from Twitter and Facebook for hate speech for years, but have nevertheless continued to operate on YouTube.

As Hatewatch found in a survey of numerous hate groups tracked by the SPLC’s Intelligence Project across three major social media platforms – YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – racism and disinformation has continued to fester. In addition to spreading racist memes and fake news about Asian Americans and other minority groups, hate groups have used all three platforms to boost a slew of conspiracy theories, fake cures (including one that has resulted in a death in Arizona) and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

When considering the real-world threat posed by social media companies’ inability to enforce their own guidelines on misinformation and fake news, Chloe Colliver, the head of digital policy and strategy at ISD, told Hatewatch that “three main risks came to mind.” These included the risks posed not only to public health by the proliferation of fake cures, but also to institutions as a result of a preponderance of conspiracy theories. She also cited the danger of “target attacks” against minority groups and others.

“None of which are new,” she added. “They fit the patterns of platforms’ inability to deal with [these] specific kinds of attack and disinformation content.”

Most, if not all, of the groups spreading this content have been given a pass to do so under existing social media policies.

“Obviously, the historical reticence of these companies to promote evidence-based or expert information above other kinds of information has come back to bite [them] now, as we’ve seen,” Colliver continued. “The platforms themselves acknowledged that their policies aren’t up to scratch in a crisis like this.”

Facebook

VDARE, a white nationalist site that has had a promotional page on Facebook since 2012, has seized upon this climate of instability to push its racist agenda. More than 50 posts on its promotional page referred to the epidemic in some capacity.

“There is now scientific evidence that Africans (and Whites) are more resistant to [COVID-19] than Asians and that this is for genetic reasons,” one post from March 5 said. It included a link to an article from pseudonymous New York-based contributor “Lance Welton,” titled “Chinese Scientists Find MORE Evidence That Coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19) Discriminates By Race.”

“I’m sure the health authorities do have this information,” VDARE editor Peter Brimelow contended in an article posted to the site on March 12 as a follow up to “Welton’s” piece. Using debunked race science, Brimelow posited that COVID-19, as well as its predecessor, SARS, were “Oriental-specific.”

“Are some racial groups more prone to catching the Chinese pathogen – and are some races more severely affected when they do?” asked another Facebook post from March 31 – the same day officials announced that deaths in the United States had officially surpassed those of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The same post included a link to an article featuring a section titled “Coronovirus [sic] and the Mexican Race.”

VDARE, which has often referred to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan flu” (or “Wuflu”), defended Trump’s own use of the term on March 17 as well, arguing in a March 17 post that any opposition to such nomenclature was born out of a world where “white people are blamed for all . . . problems.”

Fake cures, not to mention misinformation regarding the source of the virus and government efforts to contain it, have been featured on a number of pages belonging to hate groups and extremist groups monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

WorldNetDaily (WND), a conspiracy-minded outlet and active antigovernment extremist group with over 840,000 likes on Facebook, has boosted a number of articles featuring antisemitic dog whistles, fake cures and other disinformation. Recent WND headlines include: “Coronavirus is being weaponized by Soros, others behind anti-Trump ads”; “Clyburn: Democrats must use Chinese virus to restructure America ‘to fit our vision’”; and “Newt Gingrich’s question for Biden exposes Obama’s undeniable role in N95 mask shortage.” Another proclaimed that a three-drug cocktail promoted by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko had a “100% success” rate in treating 350 patients with COVID-19. The article, which was shared to WND’s Facebook on March 24, includes an embedded video from Dr. Zelenko himself, which has since been removed by YouTube for violating community guidelines.

Though the particular combination of drugs – which includes hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment – has been used by some doctors, the rapid spread of misinformation regarding the drugs’ use has raised some concern, especially for patients who may attempt to administer them themselves.

On March 31, WND published an article titled “‘Cover-up’: Chinese researched bat virus near Wuhan market,” which posited that the virus may have originated in a research lab near Wuhan.

Several antigovernment groups, including militias, peppered their pages with misinformation implying that the virus would result in a communist takeover of essential industries and/or attacks on the Second Amendment. These fears are central to the antigovernment movement’s opposition to the “New World Order.” This far-reaching conspiracy theory, which features prominently in antigovernment and other far-right circles, posits that a small, secretive cadre of elites are behind a rising totalitarian, one-world government.

“We’re not going down the road that leads to tyranny, and that’s what this whole crisis is about,” James Stachowiak, otherwise known as “Johnny Infidel,” said on a video on Facebook that sought to inspire “lone wolves” to take action.

“KLAYMAN: LEFT USING COVID-19 TO INSTALL GOV’T DICTATORSHIP!,” screamed a post on Freedom Watch’s page – a group run by far-right extremist Larry Klayman – in a post from March 25.

Still others encouraged users to view the virus as a vast “globalist” conspiracy. This antisemitic euphemism is frequently used by groups such as WND and Infowars, and has its roots in the centuries-old antisemitic image of Jews as “puppeteers” in complete control of society. One post from anti-LGBTQ extremist Scott Lively, published on March 22, claimed that the coronavirus outbreak had been “orchestrated” by the elites. Their goal, he contended, was to target “small business because it is a cornerstone of American self-sufficiency and serves as a barrier to the complete Marxist takeover of our society.”

Twitter

“Now think of a country the size of China . . . and think of its multi-thousand-year habit of eating some very strange creatures – basically a zoo is a menu in China, it seems. What are the odds that coronavirus just happened to emerge within a stone’s throw – in a giant country – of its only level four bioweapons lab?” asked white nationalist YouTuber and self-proclaimed philosopher Stefan Molyneux in a video clip posted to his Twitter on March 30.

“The odds, of course, are virtually zero,” he said. He claimed the virus appeared to be “engineered,” possibly for “transmission and lethality.”

Molyneux – who runs a verified account on Twitter with over 450,000 followers – has spread racist or pseudoscientific disinformation about COVID-19 for weeks.

“Open borders guy reaps fruit of open borders,” he tweeted on March 7, after the head of Italy’s Democratic Party tested positive for the virus.

Then, on March 25, Molyneux released a video accusing the media of turning “attention away from the mass infiltration of academia, of media, of Hollywood, [and] of real estate [by] Chinese citizens, often with illicit money from the criminal actions of the Chinese government.”

Finally, when asked by a follower why German hospitals weren’t “overwhelmed,” Molyneux encouraged followers on March 26 to “go look up average IQ by country.”

Molyneux, a well-known proponent of scientific racism, has as recently as Oct. 7, 2019, stated that the “average IQ in Syria is 83. Turkey is 90. They will never ever be like the West.” In 2018, he also cited “racial IQ differences” as a method to “push back against Third World immigration without succumbing to racism.”

Molyneux has made his affinity for a white “monoculture,” to borrow his term, widely known. In late 2018, Molyneux said he had endeared himself to white nationalist beliefs after visiting Poland, which he referred to as “an all-white country,” according to a Right Wing Watch report from Dec. 21, 2018.

Other prominent far-right accounts have sought to downplay the threat posed to Americans by the virus in various ways.

Far-right social media personality and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe produced a series of videos featuring him driving to different COVID-19 testing sites and hospitals in the New York City metro area on March 27. The videos, which were published on both O’Keefe’s personal Twitter with over 710,000 followers, as well as Project Veritas’s verified account with some 460,000 followers, include O’Keefe pressing a national guardsman to call the media coverage of the crisis “overblown.”

Though one of the videos was removed from O’Keefe’s Facebook on April 1, they remain on Twitter.

VDARE, which has evaded waves of Twitter bans targeting white nationalists, advertised on April 3 that they had created a “special archive” for posts related to COVID-19 and race. According to the white nationalist site, the “race-denying ruling class” – as one author called them in a March 28 article quoted on Twitter on April 1 – has supposedly denied the role of pseudoscientific racial differences in the spread of the disease.

“Ruling Class concedes it’s ok to Notice that Coronavirus discriminates by gender, but NOT that it discriminates by race. Why?” the account tweeted on Feb. 21.

VDARE also pushed the same anti-Asian rhetoric that has led to a wave of hate crimes across the country. “575,000+ Chinese call NYC home,” it posted on March 22, along with a link to an article titled “Is NYC Coronavirus Ground Zero Because Massive ‘Be Strong Wuhan’ Feb 9th Chinese New Year’s Parade Helped Spread the Chinese Virus?”

Twitter has, at times, cracked down on disinformation on the platform. On March 25, Twitter removed a post from the far-right site the Federalist, which advocated for spreading the virus through “chickenpox parties.” A March 27 tweet from Turning Point USA head Charlie Kirk, which echoed the president’s endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, has since been removed from the platform for a terms of service violation. Two tweets from the far-right populist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, were removed on March 30 for spreading misinformation.

YouTube

“We actually have sound, instinctive reasons to be xenophobes,” American Renaissance head Jared Taylor told viewers in a YouTube video posted on March 12. He continued:

Everyone knows about the body’s immune system, which fights disease. We also have a behavioral immune system. All people everywhere instinctively avoid certain things that could make us sick. Piles of feces. Rotting flesh. People with running sores. Part of this behavioral immune system is an instinctive fear that people who act or look strange could be carrying disease.

“Xenophobia,” Taylor concluded, “can save your life.”

Taylor followed up on March 27, noting in a video titled “What the Virus Means for Us” that “everything teaches ‘identitarian’ lessons, including the coronavirus.”

“Professor Giorgio Palu, former president of the European Society of Virology, says that early on there was a proposal to isolate people coming from China, but they didn’t do that because people would’ve said that was ‘racist.’ Professor Polu believes that a large level of the devastation [in Italy] was caused by that: fear of being called racist,” Taylor said later in the same video.

Though Palu did acknowledge that a proposal to “isolate people coming from China” was shot down in a statement to CNN on March 18, he also explained that the breadth of Italy’s outbreak arose from the government lagging on both testing and enforcing lockdowns.

Despite being banned from Twitter since 2018, American Renaissance’s YouTube channel and its 126,000 subscribers have remained.

Jason Köhne, a white nationalist podcaster and vlogger known online as “No White Guilt,” blamed “anti-whiteism” not only for coronavirus spreading throughout the United States, but also for ensuring that many medicines and medical products were produced abroad.

“This is an anti-white issue,” he said in a video posted on March 24. “You can say there’s an economic component to it, but the bottom line is that the . . . incentivization structures have been put in place to capitalize on the harm inflicted on Western kind.”

Molyneux, meanwhile, used his channel to flesh out the idea, also propagated on his Twitter, that the virus was a “bioweapon.”

“[COVID-19] is kind of like the perfect virus from a weaponization standpoint, and if it was related to eating bats, it’s not like people in China started eating bats last October,” he said in a podcast from Jan. 25.

In a live stream aired March 27, Molyneux, along with his guest, Dr. Paul Cottrell, who received his Ph.D. in finance from the online, for-profit school, Walden University, discussed whether “the Wuhan virus is the bioweapon” that Cottrell contended had leaked out of a lab near Wuhan in 2015. Molyneux later pondered whether the virus’s spread throughout the world ought to be considered an act of “manslaughter” or even “homicide,” presumably on China’s part.

A day later, in a now-unlisted YouTube video linked to on Molyneux’s Twitter he declared a sort of victory for the racist, anti-immigrant right.

“All the people who were called ‘xenophobic’ and ‘racist’ for wanting to talk about immigration – who said that it was possible to stop it relatively easily – they’ve all been proven right,” he said in the March 28 video.

“Now the walls go up because it affects those in power,” he said

dorr bros grift

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/conservative-activist-family-behind-grassroots-anti-quarantine-facebook-events-n1188021

tufts

As we practice social distancing, our embrace of social media gets only tighter. The major social media platforms have emerged as the critical information purveyors for influencing the choices people make during the expanding pandemic. There’s also reason for worry: the World Health Organization is concerned about an “infodemic,” a glut of accurate and inaccurate information about COVID-19.

The social media companies have been pilloried in recent years for practicing “surveillance capitalism” and being a societal menace. The pandemic could be their moment of redemption. How are they rising to this challenge?

Surprisingly, Facebook, which had earned the reputation of being the least trusted tech company in recent years, has led with the strongest, most consistent actions during the unfolding COVID-19 crisis. Twitter and Google-owned YouTube have taken steps as well to stem the tide of misinformation. Yet, all three could do better.

As an economist who tracks digital technology’s use worldwide at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, I’ve identified three important ways to evaluate the companies’ responses to the pandemic. Are they informing while simultaneously curtailing misinformation? Are they enforcing responsible advertising policies? And are they providing helpful data to public health authorities without compromising privacy?

Tackling the infodemic

Social media companies can block, demote or elevate posts. According to Facebook, the average user sees only 10% of their News Feed and the platforms determine what users see by reordering how stories appear. This means demoting and elevating posts could be as essential as blocking them outright.

Blocking is the most difficult decision because it bumps up against First Amendment rights. Facebook, in particular, has recently been criticized for its unwillingness to block false political ads. But Facebook has had the most clear-cut policy on COVID-19 misinformation. It relies on third-party fact-checkers and health authorities flagging problematic content, and removes posts that fail the tests. It also blocks or restricts hashtags that spread misinformation on its sister platform, Instagram.

Twitter and YouTube have taken less decisive positions. Twitter says it has acted to protect against malicious behaviors. Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, told Axios that the company will “remove any pockets of smaller coordinated attempts to distort or inorganically influence the conversation.” YouTube removes videos claiming to prevent infections. However, neither company has a transparent blocking policy founded on solid fact-checking.

While all three platforms are demoting problematic content and elevating content from authoritative sources, the absence of consistent fact-checking standards has created a gray area where misinformation can slip through, particularly for Twitter. Panic-producing tweets claimed prematurely that New York was under lockdown, and bots or fake accounts have slipped in rumors.

Even the principle of deferring to authoritative sources can cause problems. For example, the widely read @realDonaldTrump has tweeted misinformation. Influential figures who are not officially designated authoritative sources have also managed to circulate misinformation. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted a false assertion about the coronavirus to 32 million followers and Twitter has declined to remove his tweet. John McAfee, founder of the eponymous security solutions company, also tweeted a false assertion about the coronavirus. That tweet was removed but not before it had been widely shared.

Harnessing influence for good

Besides blocking and re-ordering posts, the social media companies must also ask how people are experiencing their platforms and interpreting the information they encounter there. Social media platforms are meticulously designed to anticipate the user’s experience, hold their attention and influence actions. It’s essential that the companies apply similar techniques to influence positive behavior in response to COVID-19.

Consider some examples across each of the three platforms of failing to influence positive behaviors by ignoring the user experience.

For Facebook users, private messaging is, increasingly, a key source of social influence and information about the coronavirus. Because these groups often bring together more trusted networks – family, friends, classmates – there is a greater risk that people will turn to them during anxious times and become susceptible to misinformation. Facebook-owned Messenger and WhatsApp – both closed platforms in contrast to Twitter – are of particular concern since the company’s ability to monitor content on these platforms is still limited.

For Twitter, it’s essential to track “influencers,” or people with many followers. Content shared by these users has greater impact and ought to pass through additional filters.

YouTube has taken the approach of pairing misleading coronavirus content with a link to an alternative authoritative source, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or World Health Organization. This juxtaposition can have the opposite of the intended effect. A video from a non-authoritative individual appears with the CDC or WHO logo beneath it, which could unintentionally give viewers the impression that those public health authorities have approved the videos.

Responsible advertising

There is money to be made from ads offering products related to the outbreak. However, some of those ads are not in the public interest. Facebook set a standard by banning ads for medical face masks and Google followed suit, as did Twitter.

Social media companies are giving the CDC and WHO free advertising to promote coronavirus-related messages like this WHO Facebook post. World Health Organization, CC BY-NC

All three companies have offered free ads to appropriate public health and nonprofit organizations. Facebook has offered unlimited ads to the WHO, while Google has made a similar but less open-ended offer and Twitter offers Ads for Good credits to fact-checking nonprofit organizations and health information disseminators.

There have been some policy reversals. YouTube initially blocked ads meant to profit from content related to COVID-19, but then allowed some ads that follow the company’s guidelines.

Overall, the companies have responded to the crisis, but their policies on ads vary, have changed and have left loopholes: Users could still see ads for face masks served by Google even after it had officially banned them. Clearer industry-wide principles and firm policies can help keep businesses and people from exploiting the outbreak for commercial gain.

Data to track the outbreak

Social media can be a source of essential data for mapping the spread of the disease and managing it. The key is that the companies protect user privacy, recognize the limits of data analysis and not oversell it. Geographic information systems that build on data from social media and other sources have already become key to mapping the worldwide spread of COVID-19. Facebook is collaborating with researchers at Harvard and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan by sharing data about people’s movements – stripped of identifying information – and high-resolution population density maps.

Search and location data on YouTube and its parent, Google, are invaluable trend-trackers. Google hasn’t offered its trends analyses for COVID-19 in any systematic manner to date, perhaps out of reluctance because of the failure of an earlier Google Trends program that attempted to predict the paths of transmission of influenza and completely missed the peak of the 2013 flu season.

Think with Google, the company’s current data analytics service for marketers, offers a powerful example of insights that can be gleaned from Google’s data. It could help with projects for contact tracing and social distancing compliance, provided it’s done in a way that respects user privacy. For example, as users’ locations are tagged along with their posts, the people they’ve met and the places they’ve been can help determine whether people on the whole or in a location are complying with public health safety orders and guidelines.

Moreover, data shared by companies – stripped of identifying information – could be used by independent researchers. For example, researchers could use Facebook-owned Instagram and CrowdTangle to correlate travelers’ movements to COVID-19 hotspots with user conversations to locate sources of transmission. Research teams I direct have been analyzing coronavirus-related Twitter hashtags to identify the primary misinformation sources to detect patterns.

The expanding footprint of the pandemic and its consequences are evolving quickly. To their credit, the social media companies have attempted to respond quickly as well. Yet, they can do more. This could be their time to rebuild trust with the public and with regulators, but the window to make the right choices is narrow. Their own futures and the futures of millions may depend on it.

Social media companies are taking steps to tamp down coronavirus misinformation – but they can do more

Bhaskar Chakravorti, Tufts University

Facebook, Google and Twitter are stepping up to block misinformation and promote accurate information about the coronavirus. Their track records on self-policing are poor. The results so far are mixed.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/twitter-deletes-right-wing-outlets-post-suggesting-americans-get-intentionally-infected-with-covid-19

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Twitter deletes right-wing outlet’s post suggesting Americans get intentionally infected with Covid-19

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement March 25, 2020

Twitter has finally stepped in and deleted a post from The Federalist that links to their article suggesting a program intentionally infecting healthy Americans with the coronavirus. The highly-controversial article which runs counter to medical experts’ advice effectively suggests coronavirus parties as a “social activity,” a database of every person in the U.S. and their COVID-19 infection status, and wonders: “Will we allow parents to make these sorts of infection decisions for both themselves and their children?”

“This Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules,” is the message social media users trying to access The Federalist’s tweet now receive.

Facebook has not deleted The Federalist’s post promoting its article. NCRM will not link to it but our original reporting on the article is here.

The article itself, penned by an Oregon dermatologist, has not been taken down, but it has been removed from the front page and does not appear in the website’s list of most popular stories, which given the controversy surrounding it, likely is.

“Twitter initially added a warning to the link stating that the post might be ‘unsafe,’” Mediaite reports. Twitter then “temporarily locked” The Federalist’s account, but it is once again active, sans the offensive and dangerous tweet, which read: “It is time to think outside the box and seriously consider a somewhat unconventional approach to COVID-19: controlled voluntary infection.”

“Twitter has taken aggressive measures to crack down on misinformation surrounding the coronavirus,” but there is still a tremendous amount of user-generated bad information on the platform.

As NCRM reported earlier, aside from the obvious problems with the article itself, the author ignores the fact that there is no proof re-infection would not happen after the coronavirus parties. There is sufficient anecdotal information to suggest at least some can “catch” the virus after recovery.

The Federalist is a right wing website whose secret finding has been the source of much online speculation. It advocates increasingly extremist viewpoints, and was co-founded by Ben Domenech, who is a regular on NBC’s and MSNBC’s “Meet the Press.”

has solutions

jANUARY 29, 2020

The Reality Game

Samuel Woolley discussed the origins of online disinformation and laid out a plan to combat it in the future.

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ethnographer

https://www.c-span.org/video/?468349-1/the-reality-game

...I WOULD LIKE TO WELCOME YOU ALL, WE ARE THRILLED TO HAVE SAMUEL WOOLLEY WITH US HERE TONIGHT. CELEBRATING A VERY IMPORTANT NEW BOOK CALLED "THE REALITY GAME". HOW THE NEXT WAVE OF TECHNOLOGY WILL BREAK THE TRUTH. IT'S FROM OUR FRIENDS AT PUBLIC AFFAIRS BOOKS, DOCTOR WOOLLEY IS A WRITER AND RESEARCHER SPECIALIZING IN THE STUDY OF A.I., EMERGENT TECHNOLOGY, POLITICS, PERSUASION AND SOCIAL MEDIA. HE'S AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND PROGRAM DIRECTOR FOR PROPAGANDA RESEARCH AT THE CENTER FOR MEDIA ENGAGEMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN. PROFESSOR WALLY FOUNDED AND DIRECTED THE DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE LAB AT THE INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE WHICH IS A 50-YEAR-OLD THINK TANK BASED IN THE HEART OF SILICON VALLEY. ALSO COFOUNDED AND DIRECTED RESEARCH TEAM AT THE COMPUTATIONAL PROPAGANDA PRODUCT AT OXFORD INTERNET INSTITUTE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXNARD. HE'S WRITTEN ON POLITICAL MANIPULATIONS TECHNOLOGY FOR A VARIETY OF PUBLICATIONS INCLUDING WIRED, THE

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bloomberg paying private citizens $2500 a month to tweet his praises from their personal social media accounts

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement

frontrunner out of iowa, thus flak serenghetti (chris matthews?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-myth-of-bernie-bros-how-a-misunderstanding-of-social-media-is-driving-media-elites-to-psuh-an-easily-disprovable-stereotype/

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The myth of ‘Bernie Bros’: How a misunderstanding of social media is driving elites to push an easily disprovable stereotype

Written by Keith A. Spencer February 9, 2020

The nature of punditry makes it hard to tell which myths media personalities earnestly believe in, and which they perpetuate in bad faith. Consider the “welfare queen,” a villainous trope popularized by Ronald Reagan in stump speeches in the 1970s, and which never actually existed. Despite being a clear fiction, the idea was tantalizing both to politicians and pundits, and hence the welfare queen became embedded in culture. Pundits and politicians today still invoke the racist caricature, often through dog-whistles.

Why do some myths persist, or remain uncorrected by the media, while others dissipate? The short answer seems to be that when they serve a media narrative, or play on existing stereotypes, they grow to possess a power that goes beyond fact or truth. To this list of indefatigable myths, one might add the pernicious “BernieBro” — so ubiquitous a concept that it has its own Wikipedia article. The self-explanatory neologism was coined by Robinson Meyer in an Atlantic article in 2015 before being distorted by the Twittersphere and the punditry — something that Meyer later came to regret, as he felt the term he reified suffered from “semantic drift.”

But that was five years ago, before we had as much data on Sanders’ support base — which, as it turns out, should be sufficient to debunk the stereotype that Sanders’ support base consists entirely of a mythic tribe of entitled, pushy young millennial men. To wit: young women make up more of Sanders’ base than men. He polls especially high with Hispanic voters, far more so than with white voters; Hispanic voters also donated more money to him than any other Democratic candidate. Polls consistently show that nonwhite voters prefer him over the other candidates. Notably, the demographic group that likes Sanders the least is white men.

Moreover, of all the candidates, Sanders has taken in the most money from women.Many of Sanders’ female supporters bemoan how they are ignored by the mainstream press. “The ‘Bernie Bro’ narrative is endlessly galling because it erases the women who make up his base,” writer Caitlin PenzeyMoog opined on Twitter. “To paint this picture of sexism is to paint over the millions of women who support Sanders. Do you see how f**ked up that is?”

And yet. Even with all this demographic data on Bernie Sanders’ support base, many intelligent pundits and politicians persist with the myth. How do they justify it? They just know, apparently. But specifically, they feel it on Twitter.

Just one week ago, New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens published a column with the headline “Bernie’s Angry Bros.” The column did not contain a shred of the aforementioned demographic data about Sanders’ support base, but rather was driven by a series of anecdotes supposedly proving his point about the irascible fans of the Vermont senator. Stephens’ main evidence, aside from social media anecdotes, was a story about Sanders supporters getting angry during or after the 2016 Nevada caucuses, believing they had been rigged against their candidate. (The idea that people might grow angry at being disenfranchised is horrifying to Stephens, probably because he is a well-insulated upper-middle class pundit for whom political decisions have no real material impact on his life — unlike the people in Nevada he disparages.)

The Daily Dot has a long feature listing pundits who have helped perpetuate the BernieBro narrative long after demographics showed his support base to be a multiracial, working-class coalition. Hillary Clinton apparently still believes that Sanders is tailed by a horde of “online Bernie Bros” who issue “relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women,” as she said in a Hollywood Reporter interview just last month.

What could compel otherwise intelligent people to perpetuate a false and harmful narrative that essentializes Sanders supporters and erases their real and diverse identities?

Again, the answer to that is Twitter. Specifically, how Twitter is understood by journalists and pundits, and how it is wielded by angry people online.

The skewed demographics of Twitter

Twitter, unfortunately, informs the worldview of many of the country’s most elite pundits, and some of its politicians too. Opinion columnists like David Brooks and Bret Stephens (both of the New York Times) are excellent examples of pundits who, at various times, seem to see the world as refracted through the bluebird’s drinking glass.

The problem is, Twitter is very much not a representative sample of the world. It is not a zeitgeist; it is not a cross-section of the population.

It is hard to understand this, even for very smart people, because the corporation that runs Twitter tries very hard to make it seem like Twitter is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of every cultural and political conversation.

But it is not true. However, the eponymous corporation behind Twitter profits from this perception of its platform as a zeitgeist. After all, the president is on it! Still, Twitter (the company) promotes this narrative of itself as where the conversation lives. They make money off of the lie that it is a representative cross-section of the world’s opinions and thoughts.

But a study of Twitter demographics say otherwise.

Pew Research polls from 2019 found that about 22% of the US population is on Twitter, and 44% of users are in the 18-24 age range. Linger on that for a second: a substantial proportion of the people getting in Bret Stephens’ mentions and making him upset may be scarcely older than children. Interestingly, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine — a pundit with whom I rarely agree — is on the mark here.

“It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the platform shapes the minds of professional political observers,” he wrote in a recent column. “Part of Twitter’s allure to insiders is that it creates a simulacrum of the real world, complete with candidates, activists, and pundits all responding to events in real time. Because Twitter superficially resembles the outside world’s political debate — it does, after all, contain the full left-to-right spectrum — it is easy to mistake it for the real thing.”

But a study of Twitter demographics say otherwise.

Demographics and “real” users aside, Twitter — like most social media sites — has a huge number of accounts that aren’t even individuals. A great deal of Twitter users are instead are brands, spam accounts or bots who behave like actual people.

Because of this, getting in arguments with “people” on Twitter — or even just seeing Twitter as the so-called public sphere — is akin to arguing politics with a clown in a funhouse mirror. It is so heavily distorted — by corporate PR and marketing, by the way that people behave differently online, and even by powerful bad actors (whether state or individual) who can wield Twitter armies quickly and easily — as to be effectively useless as any sort of gauge of public opinion. It is a terrible place to gauge human behavior, or make broad pronouncements of what humans are like. And it’s an even worse place to get a sense of a politician’s support base.

I have a modest proposal for my peers in the journalism world: I would like to propose that anyone writing about a Twitter “mob” of any political ilk be required to include the previous paragraph in an asterisk at the bottom of their story. We should all be forced to include a disclaimer to clarify that it is impossible to make any kind of quantitative assessment of human behavior on Twitter because of how deeply skewed it all is — by hackers, PR professionals, paid influencers, intentional government or corporate misinformation campaigns, and the way the online disinhibition effect makes people act.

The reactionary mind at work

After reading all this, someone with a personal story of a (purported) Sanders supporter being cruel to them online might still object. The Bernie Bro is real! This anecdote proves it.

But to say “a single candidate’s follower was mean, therefore I don’t support this candidate’s policies regardless of their actual political implications,” is a rhetorical fallacy. There are definitely individual assholes out there. Likewise, assholes can believe in good causes, and nice people can support terrible causes. It is a reactionary mistake to oppose a candidate — who represents a set of specific political positions poised to help or harm different social classes — on the basis of another’s individual behavior.

That means that the normalization of the BernieBro also diminishes the experience of those who are bullied by other candidates’ supporters. A video went around of an Elizabeth Warren supporter accosting two Sanders fans at the Iowa caucus; yet it didn’t get a lot of play because it didn’t reinforce existing stereotypes that we have about Warren’s supporters. Plenty of stories about online bullying by other candidates’ supporters are ignored because we lack a comparable stereotype to bundle them.

It would be one thing if Bernie Sanders — or any popular politician — told their supporters to be angry and menacing and threatening online, and then that behavior was reified on Twitter and in real life. But that has not happened with Sanders, nor with anyone else among the current crop of Democrats. You cannot draw a line from Sanders’ rhetoric to any of the stereotypes of BernieBros, because his rhetoric and voting records speaks to him being an egalitarian, a civil rights advocate and a compassionate progressive voice.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/youre-probably-more-susceptible-to-misinformation-than-you-think/

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You’re probably more susceptible to misinformation than you think

Written by The Conversation January 11, 2020

Online misinformation works, or so it would seem. One of the more interesting statistics from the 2019 UK general election was that 88% of advertisements posted on social media by the Conservative Party pushed figures that had already been deemed misleading by the UK’s leading fact-checking organisation, Full Fact. And, of course, the Conservatives won the election by a comfortable margin.

Internet firms such as Facebook and Google are taking some steps to limit political misinformation. But with Donald Trump aiming for reelection in 2020, it seems likely we’ll see just as many false or misleading statements online this year as in the past. The internet, and social media in particular, has effectively become a space where anyone can spread any claim they like regardless of its veracity.

Yet to what degree do people actually believe what they read online, and what influence does misinformation really have? Ask people directly and most will tell you they don’t trust the news they see on social media. And a landmark study in 2019 found 43% of social media users admitted to sharing inaccurate content themselves. So people are certainly aware in principle that misinformation is common online.

But ask people where they learned about the “facts” that support their political opinions, and the answer will often be social media. A more complex analysis of the situation suggests that for many people the source of political information is simply less important than how it fits with their existing views.

Spurious thinking

Research into the UK Brexit referendum and 2017 general election found that voters often reported making their decisions based on highly spurious arguments. For example, one voter argued that Brexit would stop the takeover of the British high street by foreign companies such as Costa Coffee (which was British at the time). Similarly, a Remain voter spoke of mass deportations of any non-UK born resident if the country left the EU, a much more extreme policy than anything actually put forward by politicians during the campaign.

During the 2017 election, various claims were made by survey respondents that unfairly questioned Conservative leader Theresa May’s humanity. For example, some falsely argued she enacted laws that led to flammable cladding being placed on the exterior of Grenfell Tower, the London block of flats that caught fire in June 2017, killing 72 people. Others called her Labour opponent Jeremy Corbyn a terrorist sympathiser, or a victim of a conspiracy to discredit him by the military and industrial elites. The common thread was that these voters gained the information to support their arguments from social media.

How do we explain the apparent paradox of knowing social media is full of misinformation and yet relying on it to form political opinions? We need to look more widely at what has become known as the post-truth environment. This involves a scepticism of all official sources of news, a reliance on existing beliefs and biases formed from deeply held prejudices, and a search for information that confirms bias as opposed to critical thinking.

[Read more:

Why people vote for politicians they know are liars]

People judge information on whether they find it believable as opposed to whether it is backed by evidence. Sociologist Lisbet van Zoonen calls this the replacement of epistemology – the science of knowledge – with “i-pistemology” – the practice of making personal judgements.

A lack of trust in elite sources, in particular politicians and journalists, doesn’t fully explain this large-scale rejection of critical thinking. But psychology can provide some potential answers. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky developed a series of experiments that explored under what conditions humans are most likely to jump to conclusions about a specific topic. They argue intelligence has little impact on making ill-informed judgements.

Intelligence tests demonstrate the capacity to perform logical reasoning, but cannot predict that it will be performed at every moment it is needed. As I have argued, we need to understand the context of people’s decisions.

The average undecided voter is bombarded with arguments from political leaders, especially in marginal seats or swing states that can make a difference to the outcome of an election. Every politician offers a redacted account of their or their opponents’ policies. And voters are aware that each of these politicians is trying to persuade them and so they retain a healthy scepticism.

The average voter also has a busy life. They have a job, perhaps a family, bills to pay and hundreds of pressing issues to address in their daily lives. They know the importance of voting and making the right decision but struggle to navigate the contested election communication they receive. They want a simple answer to that age-old conundrum, who most or who least deserves my vote.

So instead of conducting a systematic critical analysis of every piece of evidence they encounter, they look for specific issues that they see as driving a wedge between the competing politicians. This is where fake news and disinformation can be powerful. As much as we like to think we’re good at spotting fake news and being sceptical of what we’re told, we’re ultimately susceptible to whatever information makes it easiest to make a decision that seems right, even if in the long term it may be wrong.The Conversation

Darren Lilleker, Associate Professor of Political Communication, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

extended: $ https://www.risingupwithsonali.com/2019/10/24/doreen-dodgen-magee-discusses-her-book-deviced-balancing-life-and-technology-in-a-digital-world-extended-interview/

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https://www.risingupwithsonali.com/2019/12/26/deviced-balancing-life-and-technology-in-a-digital-world/

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:{:{doreen:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: dodgen-:{magee:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, psy.d. is an award winning author, speaker, & psychologist. she has traveled the globe researching and speaking about how technology ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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About · ‎Resources · ‎Shop · ‎Speaking

Deviced!: Balancing Life and Technology in a ... - Amazon.com

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:{Deviced!: Balancing Life and Technology in a Digital World and millions of other books are available for instant access. ... Deviced!: Balancing Life and Technology in a Digital World Hardcover – October 8, 2018. ... Start reading Deviced!: Balancing Life and Technology in a Digital World ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-january-1-2020/

rt is mc/upper middle class, has access to WWW 24/7 vs work 2 jobs, boss takes phone when punch in, have to go to public library, have to worry your boss sees post; indep biz small w/ same low income less barriers; favors hierarchy and __; so ~ hippie comp lib 1 to many to many-many, www structurally favors conservative ideas; [TP goal is always electoral (vs Occupy)?]

The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors ...

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:{:{The Revolution That Wasn’t:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives Hardcover – May 1, 2019.... From the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, digital activism seemed cheap, fast, and open to all.... While hashtag activism captures headlines, conservative ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of ...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › pubmed

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by S Mcbrearty - ‎2000 - ‎Cited by 2629 - ‎Related articles

J Hum Evol. 2000 Nov;39(5):453-563. The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Mcbrearty S(1), Brooks AS.

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The Revolution That Wasn't: why conservatives are winning ...

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:{Jun 3, 2019 - A new book explains why digital activism helps conservatives more than liberals.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

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https://theintercept.com/2019/11/06/shutterstock-china-censorship-tech/

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio addressed a group of conservatives at the Leadership Institute this morning in Arlington, Virginia, for the organization’s Wednesdays Wake-Up Club breakfast series, where he advised those in attendance to avoid talking about socialism and instead frame conversations that would otherwise involve the topic around “the loss of freedom.”

Jordan is a member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, which was responsible for pushing former speaker John Boehner from power, and has evolved as a group that reliably attacks those who challenge President Donald Trump.

The Leadership Institute is a Washington, D.C., organization that trains right-wing activists, often college-aged or younger, on messaging and activism for conservative causes, and recruits future candidates for elected office with training on how to run a campaign. Scheduled workshops for the month of May include sessions on fundraising, grant writing, communications, debate, and media appearances. The group aims to train mainstream conservative groups, but occasionally far-right activists have enrolled in its training workshops and used those lessons for their own causes. Among those who have received training from LI are James O’Keefe of Project Veritas and Ralph Reed, the Republican political operative who leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

Leadership Institute president Morton C. Blackwell opened up the event by talking about ongoing conflicts in Venezuela, where the United States has voiced its support for forces in the country that oppose the embattled President Nicolas Maduro.

“I choose not to predict what is going to happen, but if I had to bet, I would put my money on Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton,” Blackwell said.

Bolton claims that “key figures” in the Maduro regime “committed to support ousting Maduro,” and has been calling on them to “fulfill their commitments.”

After reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and listening to remarks by an intern and a program director at the Leadership Institute, audience members heard from Jordan. The Ohio congressman began his remarks by praising the Leadership Institute, where he said he received media training there early in Congressional career. He went on to say that policies being pushed by prominent figures in the Democratic Party—measures on immigration and voting rights—were among “some of the most radical positions” he had ever seen.

“The reason I think the left is so crazy—they don’t start from the same premise we do. They really don’t, and I think this is important to understand. I think everyone in this room believes that we live in the greatest nation in history. The left doesn’t start there. They think America is just one of the 190-some countries on the planet,” Jordan said. “And when you start from the wrong premise, I think that leads to all kinds of problems.”

Then Jordan told Leadership Institute attendees that the message from the right, when you boil it all down, is: “Freedom is under attack right now in this country.” He cited the debunked notion that conservatives were being “shadow banned” by the social media platforms of technology companies, the rise of “politically correct” environments on college campuses, and Democrats advocating for “big government” and using that power to attack conservatives. Jordan went on advise that conservatives find ways to re-frame their critiques of socialism.

“Don’t talk about socialism. Talk about the loss of freedom,” Jordan told Leadership Institute.

He continued, “It’s about a system that takes away freedom. When you don’t have capitalism, free markets, free enterprise, liberty, freedom, fundamental rights protected, bad things happen, and we are seeing it play out on TV right now in Venezuela. So, our charge is talk what the loss of freedom looks like and how great we’ve had it in this country. If we do that, we’ll be just fine.”

Tags: Jim Jordan Leadership Institute

===

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russia-troll-2020-election-interference-twitter-916482/

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POLITICS

POLITICS FEATURES

NOVEMBER 25, 2019 9:02AM ET

That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It

Here’s what Russia’s 2020 disinformation operations look like, according to two experts on social media and propaganda.

By DARREN LINVILL & PATRICK WARREN

Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.

Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously.

On August 22, 2019, @IamTyraJackson received almost 290,000 likes on Twitter for a single tweet. Put in perspective, the typical tweet President Trump sends to his 67 million followers gets about 100,000 likes. That viral tweet by @IamTyraJackson was innocent: an uplifting pair of images of former pro football player Warrick Dunn and a description of his inspiring charity work building houses for single mothers. For an anonymous account that had only existed for only a few months, “Tyra” knew her audience well. Warrick’s former coach, Tony Dungy, retweeted it, as did the rapper and producer Chuck D. Hundreds of thousands of real users viewed Tyra’s tweet and connected with its message. For “Tyra,” however, inspiring messages like this were a tool for a very different purpose.

The purpose of the Tyra account, we believe, was not to spread heartwarming messages to Americans. Rather, the tweet about Warrick Dunn was really a Trojan horse to gain followers in a larger plan by a foreign adversary. We think this because we believe @IamTyraJackson was an account operated by the successors to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted the IRA for waging a massive information war during the 2016 U.S. election. Since then, the IRA seems to have been subsumed into Russia’s Federal News Agency, but its work continues. In the case of @IamTyraJackson, the IRA’s goal was two-fold: Grow an audience in part through heartwarming, inspiring messages, and use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt.

We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact. Working from data Twitter has publicly released, we’ve read Russian tweets until our eyes bled. Looking at a range of behavioral signals, we have begun to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns and have worked with Twitter to suspend accounts. In the process we’ve shared what we’ve learned with people making a difference, both in and out of government. We have experienced a range of emotions studying what the IRA has produced, from disgust at their overt racism to amusement at their sometimes self-reflective humor. Mostly, however, we’ve been impressed.

Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.

Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.

As good marketers, professional trolls manipulate our emotions subtly. In fall 2018, for example, a Russian account we identified called @PoliteMelanie re-crafted an old urban legend, tweeting: “My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.” This tweet, which suggested conservative Christians are not only homophobic but also ignorant, was subtle enough to not feel overtly hateful, but was also aimed directly at multiple cultural stress points, driving a wedge at the point where religiosity and ideology meet. The tweet was also wildly successful, receiving more than 90,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.

This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.

Accounts like @IamTyraJackson have continued @PoliteMelanie’s work. Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with. The professionals don’t push you away, they pull you toward them. While tweeting uplifting messages about Warrick Dunn’s real-life charity work, Tyra, and several accounts we associated with her, also distributed messages consistent with past Russian disinformation. Importantly, they highlighted issues of race and gender inequality. A tweet about Brock Turner’s Stanford rape case received 15,000 likes. Another about police targeting black citizens in Las Vegas was liked more than 100,000 times. Here is what makes disinformation so difficult to discuss: while these tweets point to valid issues of concern — issues that have been central to important social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — they are framed to serve Russia’s interests in undermining Americans’ trust in our institutions.

These accounts also harness the goodwill they’ve built by engaging in these communities for specific political ends.Consistent with past Russian activity, they attacked moderate politicians as a method of bolstering more polarizing candidates. Recently, Vice President Biden has been the most frequent target of this strategy, as seen in dozens of tweets such as, “Joe Biden is damaging Obama’s legacy with his racism and stupidity!” and “Joe Biden doesn’t deserve our votes!”

The quality of Russia’s work has been honed over several years and millions of social media posts. They have appeared on Instagram, Stitcher, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Meetup, and even Pokémon Go, demonstrating not only a nihilistic creativity, but also a ruthless efficiency in volume of production. The IRA has been called a “troll farm,” but they are undoubtedly a factory.

While persona like Melanie and Tyra were important to Russian efforts, they were ultimately just tools, interchangeable parts constructed for a specific audience. When shut down, they were quickly replaced by other free-to-create, anonymous accounts. The factory doesn’t stop. They attack issues from both sides, attempting to drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme directions.

...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/twitter-bans-political-advertisements-jack-dorsey-905957/

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twitter Says It Will No Longer Run Political Advertisements, Trolls Facebook

“This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach.”

By RYAN BORT

[Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey leaves after his talk with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in ParisTwitter, Paris, France - 07 Jun 2019

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced on Wednesday that the platform will no longer host political advertisements, a major shift in the social media giant’s policy ahead of the 2020 elections. “We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally,” he wrote. “We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought.”

jack ??????

@jack

We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…??

Dorsey posted a lengthy explanation of his rationale, threaded over several additional tweets. “A political message earns reach when people decide to follow an account or retweet,” he wrote. “Paying for reach removes that decision, forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people. We believe this decision should not be compromised by money. While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions.”

The announcement comes amid heightened scrutiny of how social media platforms regulate political advertisements. Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg struggled to explain his platform’s policy while testifying before Congress, indicating that political advertisements will not be fact-checked. “Congresswoman, in most cases, in a democracy, I believe people should be able to see for themselves what politicians they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character for themselves,” Zuckerberg said when asked by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) whether Facebook will take down political advertisements that contain false information.

Dorsey appeared to throw in a jab at Zuckerberg in his explanation of Twitter’s decision. “[I]t‘s not credible for us to say: ‘We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well…they can say whatever they want!” he wrote, throwing in a winking emoji

Billy Jensen

How to be a Social Media Sleuth

Far-Right 'Memesmith' Carpe Donktum Suspended From Twitter, Then Reinstated Following Censorship Cries

jack ??????

@jack

Replying to @jack

These challenges will affect ALL internet communication, not just political ads. Best to focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings. Trying to fix both means fixing neither well, and harms our credibility.

jack ??????

@jack

For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! ??”

Dorsey noted that Twitter will lay out the specifics of the new policy on November 15th, and that the ban on political advertisements will include some exceptions, such as ads in support of voter registration. The new policy will go into effect November 22nd.

“This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach,” he concluded. “And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.”

In This Article: Social media,

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Trolls, conspiracy theorists, hoaxers and Trump have twisted Facebook, YouTube and the news to toxic levels — and it’s only getting worse

Written by October 14, 2019

It may be getting harder and harder to figure out the truth, but at least this much is clear: It’s a good time to be a liar.

We’ve spent three years arguing if fake news swung the 2016 election — debating whether the hordes of Russian bots, hoax Facebook pages and inflammatory, dishonest tweets tipped the democratic balance to elect Donald Trump as president.

Yet in those same years, we’ve learned that the stakes in the fight against truth, in a muddy world of social media platforms, go beyond politics.

In Brazil, public health workers were attacked after far-right activists lied on YouTube that they were spreading the Zika virus. In Myanmar, government soldiers used fake Facebook accounts to drive an ethnic cleansing, full of incendiary claims and false stories about Muslim minorities raping Buddhist women. Gunmen radicalized by false white-supremacist conspiracies on internet forums like 4chan and 8chan shot up a synagogue in California, a Walmart in Texas and mosques in New Zealand.

Elections have consequences. So do algorithms.

So now, heading into the 2020 election, experts are warning that trolls, hoaxers and dishonest politicians are arming themselves with a whole new arsenal of weapons of mass deception. New technology is making it easier to hoax audio and video, while advances in artificial intelligence are making it all the more difficult to weed out computer-automated “bot” accounts.

And there’s a deeper risk, beyond figuring out the inaccuracy of any one article.

The deluge of misinformation — full of Trump tweets, deepfakes, InfoWars videos, Russian bots, 4chan trolls, that Washington Post correction, those out-of-context memes and your great aunt’s latest questionable Facebook post — has become so overwhelming that some of us may simply give up trying to make sense of it all.

A lie doesn’t need to be believed. It just needs to create enough doubt that the truth becomes polluted. With enough pollution, it’s impossible to see what’s right in front of you.

“When you’re flooded with so much bullshit,” New York Times media columnist Charlie Warzel says, separating fact from fiction becomes so difficult that “the task of trying to do it becomes, you know, tiresome, so you just stop.”

It’s the sort of thing your college philosophy professor might call an “epistemic crisis.” We don’t know what to believe. Truth is hazy. Reality itself becomes irrelevant. It’s a phenomenon that has already happened in places like Russia and the Philippines — and experts say that in the past few years, the United States has suddenly found itself on the same path.

“And that, to me, is one of the scariest things to think about,” Warzel says. “It feels like we’ve come incredibly far since 2015.”

THE WEB OF CONSPIRACY

History has a pattern.

An advancement in communications technology hands liars the means to lie louder and spread those lies further.Look at the 1830s, when the invention of the steam printing press and other paper-making technologies produced the rise of the “penny press.” Newspapers became cheaper, more independent, more widespread, more competitive, and eager publishers found the power of the 19th-century version of clickbait. The New York-based Sun put out a series of entirely fictional stories that purported that “man-bats” and other exotic creatures were scurrying around on the moon.

Soviet-born British TV producer Peter Pomerantsev, author of This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, argues that when tech rips open the floodgates of communication, the bad guys always find a way to exploit it. Dictators quickly harnessed the power of radio. Joseph McCarthy, as a U.S. senator in the ’50s, used television to spread his anti-Communist conspiracy theories.

Yet for decades, the internet was heralded as a new frontier that allowed “citizen journalists” to take on the stodgy media elite.In 1998, the Drudge Report, a right-wing news-aggregating website, broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal when Newsweek got cold feet. In 2004, when Dan Rather and 60 Minutes put out a 1973 memo purporting to show that President George W. Bush had received special treatment while in the Texas Air National Guard, Drudge elevated the conservative bloggers who persuasively argued the memo was a fake written in Microsoft Word.

An “Army of Davids” — as some bloggers dubbed themselves — swarmed to debunk flawed media accounts, trying to counter bias wherever they saw it. The gatekeepers were being overthrown, the drawbridge had been flung open and the villagers could storm the castle.

But the villagers had their own standards for newsworthiness. Drudge also sent his readers to darker corners, where sketchy websites claimed Barack Obama wasn’t an American citizen and Bill Clinton had a secret love child. Drudge even provided fuel for “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy that drove a man in 2016 to fire an AR-15 inside a pizzeria, because the internet told him that they were harboring child sex slaves.

Conspiracy theorists used to spread their gospel through books, newsletters, public access television shows, and by standing on street corners and handing out fliers. But the web gave every community a niche — no matter how fringe — and allowed them to spread their message in only a few keystrokes. On the internet, the corkboard is infinite and the spool of yarn used to connect pictures of shadowy figures never runs out.

The internet, Warzel says, handed fringe figures like Alex Jones of InfoWars a powerful new megaphone.

“He was one of the early pioneers of internet radio and video,” Warzel says. “It was a way to get around the notion that it was hard to sell advertising around some of his kooky ideas.”

An audience of millions repeatedly tuned into Jones’ red-faced rants about 9/11 being an inside job, Obama chemtrails turning frogs gay,and the Sandy Hook shootings being faked. Drudge repeatedly linked to him.

Social media sites only accelerated the spread of misinformation. It’s easier than ever for a single comment, particular an untrue one, to go viral. In ancient times, the opinions of quacks were largely quarantined to a newspaper’s page of letters to the editor.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman and racist Twitter randos with names like “@WhiteGenocideTM” are all simmering in the same stew together. Both, after all, get retweeted by the president.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study published last year took a look at over a decade of Twitter posts and found that tweets about false news went viral six times faster than tweets about true news. After all, lies are often more sensational, tapping into human emotions of shock, fear and disgust.

It wasn’t just that humans were more likely to share these kinds of stories. It was that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube developed algorithms to elevate certain types of content into your social media feed. It usually didn’t matter if they were true — social media sites didn’t want to become the truth police. It mattered that the stories drew people in.

“The way they keep people clicking and sharing and commenting is prioritizing things that get your heart pumping,” says Andrew Marantz, author of Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. “It’s like stocking a huge grocery store, but all of the visible aisles are Oreos and rat poison.”

Hell, YouTube actually started rewarding conspiracy theories above popular content. YouTube used to have what they internally called the “Gangnam Style” problem, where YouTube’s autoplaying recommendation engine would eventually send every viewer to the 2012 South Korean pop hit. In response, YouTube changed their algorithm in 2015, turning down the recommendation dial for merely popular videos and cranking up the preference for videos that led people down rabbit holes. Conspiracy-theory videos flourished.

Simultaneously, the internet had handed brand-new weapons to pranksters, vandals and assholes — “trolls” who could use misinformation and harassment to make life hellish for chosen targets. Image boards like 4chancombined anonymity and a near-total absence of moderation to become a frothing hive of racists, trolls and trolls pretending to be racists.

The boards delighted in pulling hoaxes — creating fake Jewish Twitter accounts to sow discord in the Jewish community, publishing coupons claiming black people were getting free coffee at Starbucks, and attempting to trick journalists into identifying mass shooters as the wrong person.

Sometimes the hoaxes became reality. A 4chan scheme to trick mainstream media outlets into reporting that the “OK” hand gesture was a white-supremacist sign resulted in white supremacists actually adopting the signal.

One particularly pernicious trolling tactic was to call 911 from a spoofed number and report a horrific crime, in hopes an armed SWAT team would descend on that location.

Marantz says he spent three years embedded in this world.

“There are people who just want to watch the world burn,” Marantz says. “And that’s a phrase I returned to again and again.”

The motivations vary. In Macedonia, Warzel says, there are clickfarms filled with teenagers pumping out hoax news stories for fake publications, buying Facebook likes, all as a way to make money.

“It’s essentially just like a lemonade stand for them,” he says. But there are also foreign governments trying to influence global trends, politicians trying to game power, and true believers who spread falsehoods because they think it’s the truth.

“To some degree, it doesn’t matter as long as there’s power to be gained and money to be made,” Warzel says.

And you don’t get much more powerful than the leader of the free world.

ART OF THE LIE

Politicians are known to lie. It’s what they do. Presidents lie, whether about WMD or keeping your health care or not having sexual relations with this or that woman. But there used to be limits.

“There were unwritten rules or norms about spin,” Jeb Bush’s former campaign spokesman, Tim Miller, tells the Inlander. “You exaggerated for your candidate. You used hyperbole. You tried to muddy the waters.”

But there were unspoken, unwritten lines, implicit walls that mainstream candidates didn’t try to breach. But then came Trump.

“Trump has been the Kool-Aid Man who bashed through the wall,” Miller says. And the GOP drank the Kool-Aid.

Misinformation comes in a hundred ways from a hundred different sources. And yet Trump is somehow all of them.

Trump is America’s top troll. Other primary contenders nitpicked Sen. Ted Cruz’s policy record — Trump called him “Lyin’ Ted,” insulted his wife’s appearance and suggested Cruz’s dad helped assassinate JFK.

Trump is America’s chief conspiracy theorist, building his political brand on the lie that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

Everyone expected Trump to claim the election was rigged if he lost — but Trump one-upped the cynics. He claimed the election was rigged when he won, falsely charging that thousands of illegal votes had been cast in the election.

Trump is America’s preeminent liar.At the Toronto Star, fact-checker Daniel Dale tallied over 5,200 false statements from the president since his inauguration, dealing with everything from tariff policy to payoffs to a porn star.

“I was flabbergasted by the frequency and the triviality of many of them,” Dale told the Los Angeles Times. “Trump was simply making things up about everything, for no apparent reason, about the smallest things.”

And now, as House Democrats pursue an impeachment inquiry into whether Trump inappropriately pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rival Joe Biden, America gets to watch, once again, how powerful Trump’s misinformation machine is.

A September Monmouth University poll shows that only 40 percent of Republicans believe that Trump mentioned an investigation into Joe Biden during his call with Ukrainian president, ignoring both the rough transcript of the call and Trump’s own words. Indeed, in March, a Quinnipiac University poll found that two-thirds of Republicans believe Trump is honest.

Some of that’s simple partisan psychology. Whether you voted for Trump because of immigration, judges, abortion or tax rates, your mind needs to continually justify your vote. You wouldn’t vote for a liar. You voted for Trump, so Trump must not be a liar. Besides, have you seen those wild claims the Democrats are making?

“At this stage it’s less about defending Trump,” writes columnist Peter Wehner in the New York Times, quoting a conservative psychologist friend. “They are defending their own defense of Trump.”

It’s the same principle that drove feminists to attempt to justify President Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades.

Trump has a legion of staffers and supporters willing to lie for him. He ordered his press secretary to lie about his inauguration crowd size. He pressed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to defend his inaccurate statements about Hurricane Dorian.

“I have no obligation to be honest to the media,” former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski told Congress in September, speaking under oath. “Because they’re just as dishonest as anybody else.”

And today, Trump has a loyal media apparatus willing to run interference for his falsehoods. The moment a negative story about Trump goes up, Fox News, the Federalist and a horde of Trump Twitter acolytes fire back with a mix of spin, falsehoods and irrelevancies.

The speed of that response, Miller says, makes it impossible for the truth to get a foothold.

“It prevents the ability for the facts to make it out at all,” Miller says. “People are hearing the alternate story at the same time they are hearing the story.”

So on the right, Trump’s Ukrainian scandal quickly became a story about the motivations of the anonymous whistleblower, the dishonesty of House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, and the purported corruption of Biden and his son.

The Robert Mueller-led special counsel’s investigation into whether Trump’s team colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election turned into a story about the malfeasance of the “deep state,” about Trump-hating FBI agents concocting a scheme to undo the American’s actual election.

And for those seeking clarity, the firehose of factually shaky information on Twitter from all sides didn’t help matters. It wasn’t just from Trump fans.

Self-proclaimed members of the anti-Trump #Resistance rack up hundreds of thousands of followers hawking anti-Trump conspiracies and assurances that Trump’s downfall was always imminent.

It’s made social media stars of guys like Ed and Brian Krassenstein — who put out a children’s book featuring a muscled, shirtless Mueller — and former British member of Parliament Louise Mensch.

“My sources say the death penalty, for espionage, being considered for [former Trump campaign manager] @StevenKBannon,” Mensch tweeted in 2017, just a few months after she’d written an op-ed about Russian hacking for the New York Times. “I am pro-life and take no pleasure in reporting this.”

In the meantime, the media outlets charged with sorting out the messy truth were being hammered from all sides. Republicans charged that journalists were clearly biased against Trump — just look at all the negative stories they wrote about him! — while Democrats slammed journalists for “false balance” for failing to call Trump’s falsehoods outright lies.

Millions of eyes watched every Trump story, ready to send a barrage of tweets attacking every misstep.

“You could get away with a lot more in the old days,” Miller says. “If you had an error on A17 on the LA Times, people weren’t going to see it.”

The vast majority of media reporting on the Russia scandal was proved to be accurate by the Mueller report. But some bombshells — like reports about former Trump attorney Michael Cohen visiting Prague, a Trump computer server communicating with a Russian bank or WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange meeting repeatedly with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort — turned out to be irrelevant or entirely bogus.

Each big mistake plays into Trump’s hands. And since most national media outlets rely on anonymous sources, it’s relatively easy for Trump aides to intentionally trick reporters into making a mistake.

“In some cases, they’re actually trying to put out disinformation this way,” Miller says. “The media reports it, the White House dunks on them for being incorrect.”

In this environment, where liars are everywhere and the truth is almost too strange to be believed, journalists are constantly second-guessing themselves.

“It leads to exhaustion. It leads to burning out,” Warzel says. “And then those mistakes are a breeding ground for more potential misinformation.”

In 2016, BuzzFeed reported that in the last three months before the election, 20 fake news stories from hoax sites — Clinton sold weapons to ISIS! The Pope endorsed Trump! — received more engagement on Facebook than the top 20 stories on actual news sites.

But Trump hijacked the phrase — “FAKE NEWS!” — and twisted it into his own catchphrase, a way to disparage any story he didn’t like. It was a joke, but the sort of joke that everyone repeats until it burrows into the national psyche.

If all news is fake news, anything can be true. Everything is a lie and nothing is. In the fight over truth, the fog of war is thick. It’s the perfect environment for an enemy to attack.

“As the credibility of the mainstream media continues to deteriorate, it’s only going to embolden bad faith actors,” Miller says.

DEEPFAKE IMPACT

In the video footage back in May, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sounded drunk. Her words seemed artificially slow, like a drawling slur.

“What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi?” Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani tweeted. “Her speech pattern is bizarre.”

In reality, the video itself had been doctored, slowed down to make Pelosi sound like she was slurring. Giuliani later deleted the tweet but refused to apologize.

“How could I have figured out that it was inaccurate?” he told the New York Times.

If an altered video that simple could get shared millions of times, experts worried, what could a more sophisticated hoax look like?

In 2017, a Reddit user named “deepfakes,” using Google’s open-source artificial intelligence software, developed a technique to take footage of one face and overlay it onto video footage of someone else. As is typical with new technologies, the internet immediately harnessed it for both pornography and Nicolas Cage memes. The faces of pop stars were imposed on the bodies of porn stars, while the face of the Face/Off actor was swapped onto footage of Gollum and Yoda.

At the same time, another piece of a deceptive puzzle is clicking into place. Audio-editing products like Adobe Max give editors the option to go beyond cutting and splicing sentences, to editing individual sound fragments to make it appear like a speaker said things they never said. Mix and match the sounds, and with a large enough audio library of a politician, you could make them say anything. Combine it with video? It doesn’t take a Black Mirror script-writer to predict how the technologies can undermine confidence in the truth.

Just imagine that a week before the 2020 election, a video is leaked. It appears to be Trump, engaged in criminal and/or sexually explicit acts. Trump denies it. Maybe the video is a deepfake hoax. Or maybe it’s real, and Trump is just using the existence of deepfakes to deny it. Now imagine experts are divided on which is which. When you can’t believe your lying eyes or your lying ears, you’re left to trust your lying gut.

Now, at least, government officials and technology companies are aware of the chaos that these hoaxes could cause. The House Intelligence Committee has already held hearings on the issue.

“The tech companies aren’t ready,”Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chair, said on a Vox podcast in June. “The government isn’t ready. We don’t have the technologies yet to be able to detect more sophisticated fakes. And the public is not ready.”

In August, the Pentagon started talking to partners for their new Semantic Forensics program, intending to develop technologies “to help to identify, understand and deter adversary disinformation campaigns.”

The private sector’s pushing for similar measures.

Last month, Facebook, Microsoft and a slew of research institutions announced they were joining forces for the “Deepfake Detection Challenge,” a contest to better understand the little clues that give even sophisticated deepfakes away. Deepfakes rarely blink in the right way. The heads might have a strange tic. The eye color might be off.

Facebook chipped in $10 million to the effort. But those trying to create hoaxes are innovating, too, trying to think of ways to outthink the detection system.

“Networks of bots are behaving more and more like you and me,” Warzel says.

Ultimately, he says, it may come down to two different artificial-intelligence systems trying to outthink each other.

“You basically have two sets of computers playing war games with each other,” Warzel says.

The fight isn’t just about technology. It’s about corporate policies. In the last two years, tech companies have tried to change their policies, ditching their laissez-faire libertarian approach to try their hand at benevolent censorship.

White supremacists and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones got banned from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. YouTube shifted viewers away from straight-up conspiracy theory videos in its recommendation stream — although liberals may be unhappy to learn they often landed at Fox News instead.Twitter banned the #Resistance-tweeting Krassenstein brothers in June, citing rules that prohibit “operating multiple fake accounts and purchasing account interactions.”

Right now, both major political parties are calling for regulation, including raising the prospect of forcing Facebook to shrink in size. But Republicans and Democrats want different things. While liberals complain about lax regulation allowing “Nazis” to run wild on the site, conservatives fret about overregulation, worried that conservatives could be censored for their political opinions.

But the lack of censorship is dangerous, too, argue some experts. Whitney Phillips, author of the forthcoming book You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Network Pollution,points to YouTube and Facebook’s recent announcement that since political statements were newsworthy, the sites would rarely take down posts from politicians, even if the posts broke the rules.

“At every turn, at every conceivable opportunity, despite how loud the chorus might get, these technology companies made a choice to protect their bottom line over protecting the democratic process,” Phillips says.

Facebook’s motto for its developers was “move fast and break things.” Phillips thinks they were successful.

“Yeah, they’ve broken democracy,” Phillips says. “There’s no more simple way to describe it.”

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

Phillips wants to make it clear that it’s not just Facebook or Twitter’s fault. It’s not just the fault of Alex Jones or Donald Trump or 4chan. It’s your fault, too.

“A lot of the misinformation being spread is not the result of bad actors,” Phillips says. “It’s everyday people doing everyday things.”

She thinks of it in terms of an ecological metaphor, where pollution is the accumulation of a billion little actions from individuals. All of the tweeting, retweeting and Facebook posting adds up.

“We’re sort of at the whims of everyday folks, disinformation agents, algorithms, white supremacists, all jockeying to win the attention economy,” Phillips says. “The result is an air that is so clogged that we can barely breathe.”

In that environment, with so many different competing and contradictory claims, people “don’t even necessarily trust there is such a thing as truth.”

But Phillips doesn’t necessarily agree that more information is the answer. Journalists like to say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But Phillips argues that sometimes thesunlight simply heats up the petri dish and spreads the disease— especially when people are liable to believe a hoax is true because a journalist says it isn’t.

“The truth can contribute to pollution as much as falsehood can,” Phillips says. “It is easy to feel like you are pushing back against a story when you are saying, ‘This story’s terrible.’ But the algorithm doesn’t care about your righteous indignation. The algorithm cares that you’re engaging with content.”

She urges journalists and everyday people to shift the lens, focusing less on the liars and more on how lies and ideologies have impacted communities.

Warzel, meanwhile, also urges social media users to slow down. Be wary about clicking that retweet button. If a story seems too perfect, doubt it. If a crazy news story doesn’t come from an established media outlet, wait until at least one outlet covers it — ideally two.

Marantz, the expert on online trolls, says the long-term solution to the disinformation crisis is a deep and philosophical one that he’d explain at length with phrases like “reaffirming our commitment to epistemic depth.” But for now, the simpler way to react to disinformation is to rely a little bit more on the old gatekeepers.

“If you read the New York Times or the BBC or the alt-weekly in your town or the New Yorker, you’re going to be better informed than if you read Facebook,” Marantz says.

Not because they’re perfect — there’s a billion reasons to complain about mainstream journalists, he says — but because, for all their flaws, right now they’re the best we’ve got.

“It’s the best short-term solution,” he says, “as opposed to just living a world where no one knows anything.”

A version of this article first appeared in the Inlander, a weekly based in Spokane, Washington.

BAK

socialmedia1019

see SOCIAL MEDIA 2 for newer 1019

see social networks for main, this is 3/19 for disambig but also removing ppl/orgs

see media bias (~ conserv BS)

promote primary 519 on caravan escalator effect

1st was retaliation on wikileaks on cable leaks?

more typical recently is post 2016 trump win, trying to damp down conspiracy theory and hate speech

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trolls-conspiracy-theorists-hoaxers-and-trump-have-twisted-facebook-youtube-and-the-news-to-toxic-levels-and-its-only-getting-worse

gorka sez RW duty to use

https://boingboing.net/2019/10/11/facebook-and-twitter-say-they.html

Trump has been buying ads with false content that run on Facebook and Twitter, and the two social media platforms both say they will continue to accept paid ads that contain lies.

From Technology Review:

Last month, Facebook communications chief Nick Clegg said Facebook will not fact-check politicians’ ads, a stance the company has reiterated. In a letter to Biden’s campaign, Facebook’s head of global elections policy, Katie Harbath, said that “if a claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third-party fact checking program.”

The letter goes on to say: “These policies apply to organic and paid content from politicians—including the ad by President Trump you reference in your letter.”

In other words, even if the content is false, the fact that it is being said by a politician, or a campaign on the politician’s behalf, means it is considered newsworthy, making it exempt from certain standards. (Facebook says that things like viral hoaxes that are shared by a politician would be demoted, displayed alongside fact-checking information, and banned from ads.) This disparity in the policy is confusing, to say the least.

Meanwhile, Twitter told The Verge that the ad is “not in violation of our policies,” without clarifying further.

919

‘Digital colonialism’: Why some countries want to take control of their people’s data from Big Tech

The Conversation

reported on Monday that YouTube had removed at least four YouTube channels that produced white nationalist and racist content from its platform, including channels used by The Right Stuff, American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Evropa), VDARE, and James Allsup. On Tuesday night, VDARE tweeted that its YouTube channel had been reinstated.

after banning the white nationalist publication VDARE from YouTube yesterday, YouTube appears to have reversed course.

VDARE announced that their YouTube channel is back online tonight.

[twt]

We asked YouTube for comment via email on its reinstatement of VDARE TV on Wednesday, but we did not receive a response.

Yesterday, Boing Boing noted that YouTube reinstated two other far-right YouTube channels, “The Iconoclast” and a channel used by far-right activist Martin Sellner, and that YouTube told reporters it made the “wrong call” when it decided to remove those channels but failed to elaborate further. BuzzFeed reports:

YouTube’s reactivation of Sellner’s channel comes two months after the video platform joined with Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter to make a commitment they called the “Christchurch Call to Action”. YouTube and the other tech companies said they were committed to “fight the hatred and extremism that lead to terrorist violence.”

The Iconoclast has more than 200,000 subscribers on YouTube. In an interview with Defend Europa last year, the YouTuber spoke extensively about the white nationalist conspiracy theory of “ethnic replacement.” He describes himself as a “British nationalist” who is “anti-mass migration.”

The decision comes a few days after YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki posted her quarterly letter to YouTube creators, which talked about how the company sometimes would leave up “controversial or even offensive” videos.

After Buzzfeed published its story, YouTube spokesperson Farshad Shadloo released a statement, claiming that although “many may find the viewpoints expressed in these channels deeply offensive,“ that YouTube had “determined the videos on their channels do not violate our Community Guidelines and so the channels were reinstated.”

Yesterday, Motherboard reported that YouTube had briefly reinstated and then re-banned the Infowars show “War Room” from its platform. Infowars was banned across nearly all tech platforms last year after we documented the numerous blatant violations of community guidelines committed regularly by Infowars personalities on social media platforms.

YouTube has shown itself to be particularly susceptible to pressure campaigns organized by the far-right. Last year, the site apologized and retracted strikes against far-right “philosopher” Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube account after he urged his fans to contact YouTube on his behalf.

Tags: social media Identity Evropa The Right Stuff VDARE YouTube

Walmart asks gun owners not to open-carry and announces plan to limit ammunition sales

David Badash / The New Civil Rights MovementSeptember 3, 2019

In response to two in-store shootings at its stores and the subsequent strong social media campaigns Walmart has just announced it will cease selling handgun and military assault rifle ammunition.…

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/exclusive-disinformation-is-catalyzing-the-global-spread-of-authoritarianism/

no lnx

Disinformation is catalyzing the spread of authoritarianism worldwide

This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.

Written by Joshua Holland August 31, 2019

There’s a segment of the American left that believes we’re in no position to be outraged over Russia’s multifaceted campaign to swing the 2016 election to Trump because the U.S. has meddled in its share of elections in other countries. Setting aside the fact that this is a prime example of the tu quoque fallacy, it ignores the specific context of that intervention. The Kremlin didn’t help elect a generic Republican who is sympathetic to their interests–they worked on behalf of a clownish and corrupt narcissist who has no clue whatsoever about how to govern and has emboldened an ethno-nationalist movement that’s ripping the country apart.

But that argument also fails to grasp that this isn’t just about us. As I wrote for The Nation in 2017, long before Trump descended on that gaudy golden escalator to announce his candidacy with a rant about Mexico sending us their rapists, Russia had honed its tactics in Estonia, followed soon after by attempts, with varying degrees of success, to disrupt the domestic politics of Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Finland, Bosnia and Macedonia.

While those efforts were on behalf of politicians and parties that were seen as advancing the Kremlin’s interests, and weren’t strictly ideological, in most cases they resulted in support for far-right ethno-nationalists.

More recently, Russia appears to have assisted the Yes campaign leading up to the UK’s Brexit referendum and is alleged to have offered financial and other assistance to a whole string of far-right, anti-immigrant parties across Western Europe.

But just as this isn’t about the U.S. alone, it also isn’t about Russia. As The New York Times reported earlier this year, researchers have “discovered numerous copycats, particularly on the far right. Those groups often echo Kremlin talking points, making it difficult to discern the lines between Russian propaganda, far-right disinformation and genuine political debate.”

Last month, The Washington Post reported that, “as reporters, propaganda experts, and government officials ponder where the next plot to manipulate an election using social media will emerge, one country on the map appears to be blinking red: the Philippines.”

If that comes as a surprise, consider that Filipinos spend on average 10 hours a day online, that almost everyone older than 13 uses social media, and that Facebook is accessible on smartphones without paying data charges. The Philippines is a place where troll armies duke it out across the country and where an increasingly sophisticated web of public relations firms and social media contractors is emerging.

The disinformation industry in the country got a jump start when President Rodrigo Duterte employed a so-called keyboard army of paid trolls and supportive volunteers to help pave his way to an election victory in 2016.

In Brazil, another clownish demagogue whom nobody thought would win, Jair Bolsonaro, has given his countrymen tacit permission to torch the Amazon. He, too, can probably thank disinformation campaigns on social media for his unlikely victory.

As Zack Beauchamp wrote for Vox shortly after Brazil’s election:

At the inauguration of Brazil’s new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in early January, a crowd of his supporters began a surprising chant. They weren’t cheering for Bolsonaro or his running mate or their party; instead, they were reciting the names of social media platforms.

“Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!” the crowd yelled. “WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp!”

They were crediting the platforms with their man’s victory, and they aren’t entirely wrong. During the campaign, a conservative pro-business interest groupfunded a massive disinformation campaign on WhatsApp (the popular messaging app owned by Facebook). False and damaging information about Bolsonaro’s left-wing opponent, including fake news mocked up to look like neutral fact-checks, spread like wildfire in the runup to the October 8 vote. This deluge, according to one Brazilian expert, played a role in Bolsonaro’s victory.

The glee Bolsonaro’s supporters exhibited points to a troubling development, one familiar to many Americans: Social media, once seen as a profoundly democratic technology, is increasingly serving the needs of authoritarians and their allies.

The reality is that the true agendas of far-right “populists” tend to be quite unpopular. Around the world, they seem to have grasped that in order to claim and then hold onto power, they have to not only demonize their political opponents, but also discredit democratic institutions–especially the independent press–and their best tool for doing so is with coordinated disinformation campaigns disseminated largely through social media.

In this, they have a structural advantage over those who remain invested in pluralistic democracy. It is anathema to most of them to fight fire with fire–to stoop to using similar tactics–and as we know, a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can put on its boots.

Unless this asymmetry is addressed in some fashion–and it’s not an easy nut to crack–historians may look back at the early 21st century and conclude that this was the time when it became apparent that liberal democracy is fundamentally incompatible with the internet and it’s free-wheeling information infrastructure.

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/despite-bias-claims-facebook-not-censoring-conservatives

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-august-13-2019/

0:08 – Sandra Cuffe (@Sandra_Cuffe) is a freelance journalist based in Central America, contributing to Al Jazeera and the Washington Post. She joins us now from Guatemala, where she’s covering the presidential elections and the immigration.

0:34 – Noah Greenwald (@Noah_Ark_757) is the Endangered Species Director with the Center for Biological Diversity.

0:48 – Chip Gibbons (@ChipGibbons89) is a journalist whose work has been featured in Jacobin, In These Times, and the Nation. He is also the policy and legislative counsel for Defending Rights and Dissent, an organization founded by victims of the House Un-American Activities Committee that works to protect the right to engage in political expression. His latest piece for In These Times: “Expanding the Powers of the FBI Is Not the Solution to White Supremacist Violence.”

1:08 – Jen Schradie (@schradie) is a sociologist and Assistant Professor of the Observatoire sociologique du changement at Sciences Po in Paris. Her latest book is “The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives.”

The Revolution That Wasn't — Jen Schradie | Harvard University Press

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674972339&content=bios

May 13, 2019 - Jen Schradie is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at the Observatoire sociologique du changement at Sciences Po in Paris. Her work has been featured on CNN and the BBC and in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, ...

The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors - Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-That-Wasnt-Activism.../dp/0674972333

The Revolution That Wasn't: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives [Jen Schradie] on ... The Revolution That Wasn't and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. ..... Jen Schradie is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at the Observatoire sociologique du changement at Sciences Poin Paris. Her work ...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/leaked-draft-of-trump-executive-order-to-censor-the-internet-denounced-as-unconstitutional-edict/

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Leaked draft of Trump executive order to ‘censor the internet’ denounced as unconstitutional edict

Written by Jon Queally / Common Dreams August 11, 2019

Civil liberties groups are warning of a major threat to online freedoms and First Amendment rights if a leaked draft of a Trump administration edict—dubbed by critics as a “Censor the Internet” executive order that would give powerful federal agencies far-reaching powers to pick and choose which kind of Internet material is and is not acceptable—is allowed to go into effect.

According to CNN, which obtained a copy of the draft, the new rule “calls for the FCC to develop new regulations clarifying how and when the law protects social media websites when they decide to remove or suppress content on their platforms. Although still in its early stages and subject to change, the Trump administration’s draft order also calls for the Federal Trade Commission to take those new policies into account when it investigates or files lawsuits against misbehaving companies.”

While Politico was the first to report how the draft was being circulated by the White House, CNN notes that if put into effect, “the order would reflect a significant escalation by President Trump in his frequent attacks against social media companies over an alleged but unproven systemic bias against conservatives by technology platforms. And it could lead to a significant reinterpretation of a law that, its authors have insisted, was meant to give tech companies broad freedom to handle content as they see fit.”

Following reporting on the leaked draft, free speech and online advocacy groups raised alarm about the troubling and far-reaching implications of the Trump plan if it was put into effect by executive decree.

The ¦¦¦¦¦¦ White House just ¦¦¦¦¦¦ leaked a draft executive order ¦¦¦¦¦¦ that would ¦¦¦¦¦¦ give the government the power ¦¦¦¦¦¦ to censor the Internet. ¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦ We have to stop it before it’s ¦¦¦¦¦¦. https://t.co/mQCoL86ifA

— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) August 11, 2019

“It’s hard to put into words how mind bogglingly absurd this executive order is,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, in a tweet. “In the name ofdefending free speech it would allow mass government censorship of online content. In practice, it means whichever party is in power can decide what speech is allowed on the internet.”

PEN America, which defends the free expression for writers, journalists, and others, warned that any executive order based on this draft rule would be an unconstitutional “anti-American edict.”

If this accurately reflects resulting EO, it’s an anti-American edict that would empower FCC & FTC to be viewpoint-based arbiters of online speech. Thankfully, 1st Amendment forbids that. It’s regrettable that this Administration doesn’t seem to know that. https://t.co/uKNqE6UKD4

— PEN America (@PENamerica) August 9, 2019

As detailed in an action alert put out by Fight for the Future over the weekend:

[The] leaked documents show that the Trump administration is drafting an executive order that, if upheld by the courts, could essentially end free speech on the Internet. The draft order would put the FTC and the FCC, headed by its notoriously corrupt chairman Ajit Pai, in charge of monitoring and policing online speech on social media platforms, online forums, and more.

It would give these bureaucratic government agencies unprecedented control over how Internet platforms moderate speech by allowing them to revoke the essential protections Congress laid out in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). CDA 230 is the basic law that makes it possible for online platforms to let users post our own content, and to make basic decisions about what types of content they as private entities want to host. Every meme, every social media post, every blog and user-created video on the Internet has been made possible by this crucial free speech protection.

In practice, this executive order would mean that whichever political party is in power could dictate what speech is allowed on the Internet. If the government doesn’t like the way a private company is moderating content, they can shut their entire website down.

“These leaks about a potential Executive Order from the White House are troubling on many levels, from the order’s potential to violate the First Amendment, to its apparent disregard for the independence of agencies like the FCC and the FTC, to its intent to unilaterally limit Section 230 which promotes moderated online communities free of hate speech and misinformation,” said Chris Lewis, president and CEO of Public Knowledge.

“If these reports are a trial balloon from the White House,” Lewis added, “then it’s time to pop it.”

While the Trump administration has tried to argue the new order is a tool to keep web platforms from censoring online speech, Fight for the Future warns “this plan would create terrifying new censorship powers for the government to do just that.”

While Fight for the Future acknowledged the serious and legitimate concerns about the behavior and outsized power of the major tech giants, it said the draft rule is a simply unacceptable way to address those issues:

Look, we’re also concerned about the growing power that mega-platforms like Facebook and Twitter have to control online speech.

But this draft Executive Order would make that situation SO much worse, by opening a pandora’s box of government censorship.https://t.co/mQCoL86ifA

— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) August 11, 2019

Despite loud and continued claims from right-wing forces that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are biased against them, Public Knowledge’s Lewis said the new White House proposal is yet another reason to push back against this unfounded mantra that Trump himself has helped proliferate.

“Political bias by digital platforms remains unproven. In fact, an independent study by The Economist points towards search platforms having a bias towards virality and attention, not political ideology,” said Lewis. “This matches reports from books like Tim Wu’s “The Attention Merchants” and others that study social media addiction. It is this sort of algorithmic bias towards virality that foreign adversaries use to sow disinformation and mistrust in our country.”

Given how much power the proposed would place in the hands of the FCC and FTC, Lewis said it is crucial for the heads of those agencies—including FCC chair Ajit Pai, a former telecom industry lobbyist and Trump appointee—to come forward and make clear their commitment to First Amendment protections.

“It is all the more important to hear from FCC commissioners given Chairman Pai’s strong condemnation of public positions taken by past administrations on net neutrality violating the independence of the FCC,” said Lewis. “If these reports are true, this Executive Order serves as a direct order to the FCC that if left unchallenged, could threaten the independence of these agencies altogether.”

As part of its effort to halt such an executive order in its track, Fight for the Future people urged people—”regardless of your politics”—to oppose the measure.

“Regardless of how you feel about the president,” the group said, “this is a terrible idea that will have the exact opposite impact of its stated purpose of protecting free speech.”

newest version/ incarnation of myth of libral press is social media bias:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-preps-order-forcing-social-media-sites-to-give-conservatives-special-rights-as-sons-attack-twitter/

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Trump preps order forcing social media sites to give conservatives special rights as sons attack Twitter

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement August 8, 2019

One Trump Son Starts Following Alt-Right Social Media Site Popular With Extremists

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are attacking the social media site their father says helped put him in the White House, as President Donald Trump appears to be following through on a promise to go after social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. That promise is based on false and debunked claims that “Big Tech,” from Google to social media sites, are biased against conservatives.

Politico reports the Trump White House is circulating several different drafts of what would become an executive order that would somehow regulate free speech on social media platforms, which are publicly-traded private companies. Trump last month promised conservatives he would explore “all regulatory and legislative solutions” to try to control social media companies and other Silicon Valley “Big Tech” corporations, like Google.

“If the internet is going to be presented as this egalitarian platform and most of Twitter is liberal cesspools of venom, then at least the president wants some fairness in the system,” a White House official told Politico.

What the White House and President Donald Trump are ignoring is conservative extremists are the ones more often engaging in politically motivated and white supremacist domestic terror attacks, like the one in El Paso this weekend that left 22 people dead. Just recently FBI Director Christopher Wray told a U.S. Senate committee that the “majority of the domestic terrorism cases we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”

Any claims of anti-conservative bias also are not taking into account the offensive behavior by some conservatives, including violating the social media platforms’ terms of service, which apparently lead to them being suspended or removed from those sites.

As for Twitter being a “liberal cesspool,” as the White House called it, the fact is the President has an extremely low approval rating.

Meanwhile, both Trump sons in what appears to be thinly-veiled support for their father’s impending executive order, blasted Twitter this week, while Eric Trump started following the alt-right and far right social media platform Gab. Gab is known to be more friendly to extremists, the alt-right, anti-Semitism, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and white supremacists, as NBC News’ Ben Collins noted Thursday morning:

Ben Collins

Great. https://twitter.com/trumpsalert/status/1159454232082206720 …

Trump Alert

@TrumpsAlert

EricTrump appears to be following @getongab. (This bot cannot tell if it was a new follow or the result of the account being reactivated.)

Ben Collins

@oneunderscore__

A reminder that Gab is where the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter posted mountains of anti-Semitic screeds, convinced the “migrant caravan” was an “invasion” plotted by a Jewish cabal, before writing “Screw the optics, I’m going in.”https://twitter.com/trumpsalert/status/1159454232082206720?s=21 …

Trump Alert

@TrumpsAlert

EricTrump appears to be following @getongab. (This bot cannot tell if it was a new follow or the result of the account being reactivated.)

Eric Trump does not appear to have joined Gab, at least not under his name, although there are several parody accounts that appear when searching the site. He did, however take to Twitter to call the popular social media site “an absolute mess.”

Days earlier Eric shared an article from Breitbart, which is known as a home to the alt-right, titled “Former Google Engineer: Google Will Try to Prevent Trump from Being Re-elected.”

This is just one of several tweets Donald Trump Jr. has posted or retweeted in recent days:

Donald Trump Jr.

@DonaldJTrumpJr

Yea, no bias at all from big tech and the social media masters. Truly sick. https://twitter.com/chuckrossdc/status/1159220292906078209 …

Chuck Ross

@ChuckRossDC

NEW: Twitter says it locked @Team_Mitch's account for violating its "violent threats policy" by posting a video of protesters calling for violence against McConnell.

McConnell campaign manager notes that Twitter allowed "Massacre Mitch" to trend. https://dailycaller.com/2019/08/07/twitter-suspends-mitch-mcconnell-account-protest-video/ …

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/qanon-conspiracists-appear-at-trump-rally-only-hours-after-fbi-warning-on-far-right-conspiracy-group/

no lnx ah

Far-right proponents of the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory — which claims that an alliance of Hollywood actors and Washington, D.C. politicians, among others, have been engaging in an international child sex ring — are not only unhinged; they are also potentially dangerous, according to the FBI. And this week, the Washington Post reports, some QAnon proponents turned up at a rally for President Donald Trump on the same day the FBI issued a bulletin warning that the group could be dangerous.

According to the bulletin, proponents of QAnon as well as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory have the potential for violence. In 2016, Pizzagate proponents claimed that Democrats were using a Washington, D.C. pizzeria for child sex abuse.

The bulletin reads, “The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts. And it goes on to say that reports “of a sudden rise in threats and unfounded accusations against a given individual or business may indicate impending conspiracy theory-driven crime or violence.”

On Thursday at a Trump rally in Cincinnati, according to the Post, a supporter named Brandon Straka used a QAnon slogan: “where we go one, we go all.” And other QAnon proponents were seen at the rally as well.

In the cultish QAnon community, Trump is held in high regard: QAnon theorists believe his presidency is meant to help carry out a worldwide battle against a child sex ring — and Q is an anonymous figure who sends sporadic messages on the battle.

NB RHET: note that we have the same kind of one up escalation as in 4chan gab but on FB in the open, either b/c they are not worried about being public or older demo bit luddite?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/texas-border-militiaman-is-now-a-federal-fugitive-vowing-to-make-himself-a-martyr/

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Texas border militiaman is now a federal fugitive vowing to make himself a martyr

Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos July 30, 2019

A Texas militiaman who led a border-watch operation and was later convicted in 2015 on federal weapons charges has announced that he is becoming a fugitive after a warrant was issued for his arrest—and is vowing that he won’t be captured again.

Kevin Lyndel “KC” Massey, a 53-year-old from Quinlan, is the subject of a Federal Marshals Service warrant issued last week naming him “Most Wanted,” and warning that he is “armed and dangerous,” and moreover “has reportedly made threats to kill law enforcement that attempt to arrest him.”

It appears he intends to make himself a martyr to the “Patriot” cause in the mold of LaVoy Finicum, the Utah man shot in January 2016 by Oregon State Patrol officers after he refused arrest related to the armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

On his Facebook page, Massey posted a warning:

KC is done playing the game of unconstitutional courts that already cost him 3+ years in federal prison for not even violating the law as written. The judge said in his statement, that the conviction was based on court precedent not on the written letter of the law. The feds continued to subject KC to their tyranny after release from prison, while serving a double jeopardy sentence of 3 years probation. KC is NOT going to allow himself to be kidnapped again. Death before dishonor!

Massey was arrested in 2015 by federal agents at the Mexico border, where he had been involved in an ongoing effort by a group of “Patriot” militiamen to prevent crossings by would-be immigrants at the Rio Grande. The group—who called their operation “Camp Lonestar”—was among the first such militias to actually detain border crossers with wrist ties and hold them for detention by Border Patrol.

The first arrest at the camp occurred when a participant named John Frederick Forrester, also a convicted felon, had an encounter in the brush with a Border Patrol officer that drew the agent’s gunfire. When more federal agents arrived to pursue a tip that Forrester was not the only armed felon in the camp, they found Massey—who had a 2003 conviction on his record—also in possession of a gun.

Massey had become the chief media spokesman for Camp Lonestar, which had begun operating initially under a veil of secrecy. As is inevitably the case with such operations, rather than actually clamping down on illegal crossings, the group’s presence actually just complicated an already difficult situation. It also fairly dripped with conspiracist paranoia.

Camp Lonestar was particularly notable for its harassment and detention of would-be border-crossers. In one video, the militiamen could be seen rounding up a group of immigrants and holding them for Border Patrol. Massey posted an explanation on Facebook afterwards: “Sorry we had to ‘Detain’ them,” he wrote in a comment. “[B]ut they were wore out and just fell down and gave up while the other 7-8 ran like gazelles!”

As the post explained, the militiamen detained the people—described as Honduran, Guatemalan, and Mexican—after they encountered a group of about 11 border crossers, most of whom took off through the brush. The three men they kept were “ziptied, debriefed, and given water,” and U.S. Border Patrol officers eventually arrived and took them away.

“WE DO NOT AIM TO DETAIN, we would much rather send them back into the river into Mexico and dissuade them and the cartel from crossing on the property we patrol,” the post explained. “All encounters were conducted in a humanitarian, professional fashion. Stay vigilant. Thank you for your support.”

But behind the guise of humanitarian treatment was a not-so-subtle smirking contempt. “One of the guys pissed himself!” remarked Massey. Another chimed in, “Dude pissed himself bad.”

Massey, the camp’s “commanding officer,” had appeared in numerous videos posted on Facebook and elsewhere that showed the activities involved in Camp Lonestar.They also featured their rationalizations for harassing people at the border: “I’m not anti-immigration,” he told reporters. “I have no problem with immigrants. I have a problem with terrorists. I have a problem with people who are coming to this country to hurt my fellow Americans and to destroy my fellow Americans’ property and livelihood.”

After Massey’s arrest, Camp Lonestar largely crumbled apart and ceased operation. The landowner whose property they operated from, Cuban “Rusty” Monsees, later told reporters that the experience “wasn’t that great.” “They jeopardized my safety and some other people’s safety by what they were doing,” Monsees said.

Massey pleaded guilty in September 2015 to the federal weapons charges and served three years in prison. After his release, he remained on parole, but continued to claim that he had been unjustly prosecuted. The conditions of that parole appear to have led him eventually to revolt, which in turn brought the most recent warrant for his arrest.

One of Massey’s supporters penned a blog post suggesting that Massey was now following Finicum’s example of deliberate martyrdom:

One thing I do know, like LaVoy, he will live to his last day out in the open, not in a cage…I don’t know about anyone else reading this but I don’t want another good patriot killed because the government didn’t want their dirty secrets revealed or the “virus” known as the Constitution spreading. I refuse to lose another good friend. I will do everything in my power to keep that from happening.

Commenters on Facebook not only supported this view, but suggested that Massey’s case might inspire a larger revolt. “10s of thousands doing the same thing only way this stops is if any and all moron parasites and workers for them are removed every attempt they make to steal lifes time or property they should at no time ever be allowed past to do it to another,” one of them wrote.

Another suggested that a team armed militiamen should intervene on Massey’s behalf, saying that “a team of solid mother fuckers need to grow a pair and hear his story and decide if they will help if not he will be killed in cold blood or put in prison its that simple a facebook set of balls will do nothing,” he wrote.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/facebook-algorithm-changes-suppressed-journalism-and-meddled-with-democracy/

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Facebook algorithm changes suppressed journalism and meddled with democracy

July 24, 2019 7.07am EDT

Jennifer Grygiel

Assistant Professor of Communications (Social Media) & Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, Syracuse University

[Disclosure statement

Jennifer Grygiel owns a small number of shares in the following social media companies: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Alibaba, LinkedIn, YY and Snap. Grygiel also owns nominal amounts of the following cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum.]

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm determines what users see on its platform – from funny memes to comments from friends. The company regularly updates this algorithm, which can dramatically change what information people consume.

As the 2020 election approaches, there is much public concern that what was dubbed “Russian meddling” in the 2016 presidential election could happen again. But what’s not getting enough attention is the role Facebook’s algorithm changes play, intentionally or not, in that kind of meddling.

A key counterpoint to the Russian misinformation campaign was factual journalism from reputable sources – which reached many of their readers on Facebook and other social media platforms. As a social media researcher and educator, I see evidence that changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm suppressed users’ access to credible journalism in the run-up to Trump’s election.

Political operatives know Facebook serves as a gatekeeper of the information diets of more than 200 million Americans and 2 billion users worldwide. Actions and abuse by others on the platforms have generated much concern and public discussion, including about how much disinformation and propaganda Americans saw before the election. What has not been talked about enough is the effect that Facebook’s algorithmic shifts have had on access to news and democracy.

Changing the system

In mid-2015, Facebook introduced a major algorithm change that pivoted readers away from journalism and news, to deliver more updates from their friends and family. The change was couched in friendly language suggesting Facebook was trying to make sure users didn’t miss stories from friends. But social media data shows that one effect of the change was to reduce the number of interactions Facebook users had with credible journalism outlets.

A few months before the 2016 election, an even bigger algorithm change toward friends and family posts took a second toll on publisher traffic. A wide range of news publishers found that their content was significantly less visible to Facebook users.

Examining the numbers

In my research, I looked at Facebook engagement for mainstream news outlets surrounding the 2016 election. My findings support others’ conclusions that Facebook’s algorithm greatly suppressed public engagement with these publishers.

Data from CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring company, shows that Facebook traffic dropped noticeably at CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, The New York Times and The Washington Post after the company updated its algorithms to favor friends and family in June 2016.

That proves the algorithm worked the way it was designed to work, but I am concerned that major U.S. publishers were suppressed in this way. Voter interest in the presidential election was higher in 2016 than in the previous two decades, and misinformation was rampant. Facebook’s changes meant that key news organizations across the political spectrum had a harder time getting the word out about credible election news and reporting.

Alarm bells

Facebook was aware of concerns about its algorithm even before the election happened. One of Facebook’s own engineers flagged these potential effects of Facebook’s algorithm changes in July 2015. Three months later, Zuckerberg’s mentor, Roger McNamee, also attempted to alert Zuckerberg and Facebook executives that the platform was being used to manipulate information about the election.

Just after the election, reporter Craig Silverman’s research at BuzzFeed showed that fake election news had outperformed “real news.” In late 2018, Facebook’s own company statement revealed issues with how its algorithm rewarded “borderline content” that was sensational and provocative, like much of the hyperpartisan news that trended in advance of the election.

More recent research by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center shows that Facebook traffic continued to decrease significantly for publishers after a further Facebook algorithm change in January 2018.

Prof. Grygiel calls for algorithmic transparency on MSNBC.

Algorithmic transparency

To date, research on how Facebook’s algorithm works has been limited by the lack of access to its proprietary inner workings. It’s not enough to investigate the effects of the changes in Facebook’s News Feed. I believe it’s important to understand why they happened, too, and consider Facebook’s business decisions more directly and how they affect democracy.

Recent insight into the company’s internal processes suggest that Facebook is beginning to understand its power. In July 2019, Bloomberg News revealed that the company had deployed software on its own platform to look out for posts that portrayed Facebook itself in potentially misleading ways, reducing their visibility to safeguard the company’s reputation.

Some international legal scholars have begun to call for laws to protect democracies against the possibility that algorithmic manipulation could deliver electoral gain. There’s no proof that Facebook’s changes had political intentions, but it’s not hard to imagine that the company could tweak its algorithms in the future, if it wanted to.

To guard against that potential, new laws could bar changes to the algorithm in the run-up periods before elections. In the financial industry, for instance, “quiet periods” in advance of major corporate announcements seek to prevent marketing and public-relations efforts from artificially influencing stock prices.

Similar protections for algorithms against corporate manipulation could help ensure that politically active, power-seeking Facebook executives – or any other company with significant control over users’ access to information – can’t use their systems to shape public opinion or voting behavior.

tags: Facebook

Google

Mark Zuckerberg

2016 US Presidential Election

Peter Thiel

2020 US Presidential Election

Social media and democracy

Algorithm transparency

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-disinformation-hurricane-is-coming-in-2020-as-other-adversaries-emulate-russias-model/

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A ‘disinformation hurricane’ is coming in 2020 as other adversaries emulate Russia’s model

This article was paid for with reader donations to Alternet 2020.

Written by Matt Osborne July 16, 2019

Shortly after the first debate between Democratic presidential contenders, trolls from the message board 4Chan boosted Tulsi Gabbard to the top of some online polls, earning credulous press attention with this sudden surge of support. At the same time, real and fake Andrew Yang supporters complained of supposed unfairness to their candidate, trending #LetYangSpeak on Twitter. While this is unlikely to make either longshot candidate the nominee, anyone looking to disrupt the Democratic Party has two new potential wedges.

After the 2016 primaries were decided, Russia exploited discontent among Bernie Sanders’ supporters to divide and distract Democrats. In 2020, there are several failing candidates whose supporters can be targeted with memes and fake news promoting conspiracy theories about party apparatchiks secretly conspiring against them. The potential scale of the spoiler problem is therefore much bigger and more fractured this time around. Gabbard is already a clear Kremlin favorite for this strategy, as her foreign policy leanings are quite friendly to Russia’s interests, but why stop at just one foil to the eventual nominee? Why not turn Joe Biden supporters against Elizabeth Warren, or Warren supporters against Sanders?

As the experts predicted months ago, adversaries are already hard at work attacking the 2020 election, and this time it won’t only be Russia that we have to worry about. The early signs of interference are already visible, and as we get deeper into the campaign, these threats are almost certainly going to come from new directions. Having seen Russia intervene in 2016, and win, and then get away with it, everyone from North Korea to China to Saudi Arabia will want to shape American electoral politics to their liking.

China has clearly ramped up their electioneering capabilities. In Taiwan, celebrity businessman Han Kuo-yu was elected mayor of Kaohsiung last year with help from Facebook groups “created, managed, and nurtured by what looks very much like a professional cybergroup from [mainland] China,” according to reporter Paul Huang at Foreign Policy. Now a favorite to run for Taiwan’s presidency in 2020, Han Kuo-yu is everything that Beijing could want in a Taiwanese politician. Would they hesitate to insert themselves in an American election in the midst of a high-stakes trade-war?

It is likely that these new players will attack from both sides of an issue the way Russia did in 2016 when, for example, Americans saw “separate ads, launched simultaneously, [that] would stoke suspicion about how police treat black people in one ad, while another encouraged support for pro-police groups.” About half of all the Facebook material put out by the Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-backed “troll farm” in St. Petersburg, in 2016 was aimed at stoking racial animus this way. Then after the election, the IRA tried to organize simultaneous pro- and anti-Trump rallies in New York City. This is a standard element of all information warfare doctrine: always pit both sides against the middle.

We can also expect to see an even higher level of Twitter bot activity than ever before, as every new player will have their own army of fake accounts. They will do this because the evidence shows that these tactics are effective. A new study released earlier this month found that Russian bot activity had a greater impact than Trump’s own tweets in 2016, driving up his support among undecided voters in the last, critical days of the race. It is important to note that these activities did not reduce support for Clinton. Instead, they drove negative partisanship among potential Trump voters, appealing to baser emotions and stirring antagonism towards the Democrat in order to boost his turnout.

This is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of what Russia’s Internet Research Agency did in 2016. Much of the material uncovered by congressional investigators was not explicitly political; instead of calls to vote, there was a lot of symbolism—eagles and flags and patriotic quotes. Yet there was an insidious program at work in those seemingly non-partisan materials. By promoting memes designed to appeal to right wing voters, the IRA created large echo chambers that amplified their messages on Facebook. Rather than change minds, they wanted people to ‘dig in’ and get whipped into a fury, making them more likely to turn out and vote.

Some have a hard time understanding that individual persuasion, while possible, is rarely an effective communications strategy. It’s much easier to turn out your own voters than convince new ones, and studies show that social media pressure is even more effective at firing up your base than organized canvassing or other traditional, in-person techniques. It is also far cheaper, and because social media incentivizes negative partisanship, such messages are much more “viral” than the positive messaging that Democrats prefer. Psychologists have long observed that people tend to be more responsive to bad news than good — they call it “negativity bias.”

The Clinton campaign made an error in 2016 by trying to persuade moderate Republicans rather than focusing on turning out her base. We’ve seen other examples of it since then. For example, when Beto O’Rourke challenged Ted Cruz in the 2018 midterm elections, his Facebook ad targeting was simplistic, and designed mainly to maximize views and clicks instead of drawing anyone into a community. Cruz, on the other hand, used Facebook ads to radicalize his base with disinformation and build on a set of shared values contrary to O’Rourke’s liberal message. Whereas O’Rourke disdained the Clinton campaign model of “triangulation and data-driven microtargeting,” he fell into the exact same trap of emphasizing positivity and “going high” in a medium that simply does not reward this type of material. Beto may have captured Democratic hearts but the Cruz campaign, which has always had a sophisticated digital GOTV machine, eked out a narrow victory thanks to high conservative turnout.

Russia has also played a major role in the Texas disinformation game. One secessionist Facebook group, Heart of Texas, reportedly received 4.8 million shares by November 2016—the most of any IRA account–through precision targeting and by emphasizing negative partisanship. The IRA is just one of a dozen The Kremlin’s campaign to influence US elections, known as ‘Project Lakhta,’ has been operational since 2014and Texas is a favorite target. Between these foreign and domestic disinformation schemes, there’s little hope for anyone to win a major election with a purely-positive, issues-based campaign on social media.

Unfortunately, we can’t expect Facebook or Twitter to take any effective actions to stop the flow of divisive content. Such measures as they have already taken are unlikely to stop anyone from abusing their platforms in new ways, or with new variations of the same techniques used in 2016. According to Robert Mueller’s indictments, more than a dozen Russian disinformation agents broke the law by purchasing identities to use within the United States. Now that there are Trump supporters who understand what happened and fully approve of the outcome there is nothing to stop the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, or anyone else from laundering their social media activity through willing, paid accomplices found in the United States.

And as The New York Times reported last year, during the 2018 midterms there was “a shift in the flow of online disinformation [and] falsehoods meant to mislead and inflame,” with more homegrown American groups emulating the model Russia demonstrated in 2016.

Neither Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg nor Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will detect or prevent this activity because it is not in their interest to be proactive. The Federal Elections Commission will not get ahead of it either, defanged as they are by decades of Republican regulatory capture. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has systematically quashed all attempts to shore up American cyberdefenses, and Donald Trump is openly hostile toward any mention of beefing up our election security.Because there is no one in Washington tasked with this enforcement job, it simply will not happen. Multiple players will seek new avenues to hit Americans from all sides with the objective of reelecting Trump and keeping the Senate in Republican hands and there will be few cops on the beat to stop them.

Democrats are not ready to weather this storm. There are some free counter-disinformation tools available out there, but campaigns are too afraid of potential campaign finance violations to use them. The paid tools available are often unproven, inspiring little confidence that they will work. Vendors who offer to build up counter-disinformation capacities tell me that their proposals are often misconstrued as voter suppression, which of course is anathema to Democrats. So in the face of what is sure to be a disinformation hurricane in 2020, they seem resigned to their fate.

https://thinkprogress.org/trump-believes-google-is-trying-to-rig-the-election-project-veritas-video-cb82f03caee3/

During a 45-minute monologue on Fox Business Wednesday, President Donald Trump vented his concerns about tech companies like Twitter and Google, going so far as suggesting that he believes they are “trying to rig the election.”

Trump complained that Twitter was somehow preventing him from gaining more followers on the platform, including claiming that random people have told him they’re somehow unable to “join” him on Twitter. He made the same claim back in October (even though his follower growth was actually increasing at the time), and this spring, he reportedly voiced his frustration when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey visited the Oval Office. Dorsey tried to reassure the president that the followers he had lost were bots and spam accounts.

Trump is reportedly preoccupied by the fact former President Barack Obama has more followers on Twitter.

“It’s amazing I won the election, because you saw what happened yesterday with Google,” Trump said on Fox. “Google is totally biased to the [Democrats]."

Host Maria Bartiromo tried to clarify that they were talking about a Project Veritas video, released Monday, in which a “Google insider” allegedly made comments about avoiding a similar situation as what happened in 2016.

“They’re trying to rig the election! That’s what we should be looking at,” Trump insisted.

He went on to suggest “they should be sued” because of their alleged bias, suggesting that a Google executive expressed “hatred for the Republicans” this week.

Like all Project Veritas videos, the latest undercover video is heavily edited, exaggerates the seniority of the target, and distorts her words to try to fit a conservative conspiracy theory. Specifically, the video claims that Google is trying to affect the 2020 elections to “prevent” the next “Trump situation.” Even with the context left in the edit, it’s clear she is discussing foreign interference in the election.

The target of the video, Jen Gennai, responded to the video in a Medium post. “Project Veritas has edited the video to make it seem that I am a powerful executive who was confirming that Google is working to alter the 2020 election,” she wrote. “On both counts, this is absolute, unadulterated nonsense, of course.” She confirmed that she was discussing Google’s very public work to protect from future election interference.

As U.S. intelligence and special counsel Robert Mueller’s report have made clear, the Russian government interfered in the election to help Trump. The president has welcomed foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Trump says he’d collude to win in 2020, after years of claiming ‘no collusion’

As Google’s “Head of Responsible Innovation,” Gennai explained that she doesn’t even work on any of the products or topics the undercover spy baited her into discussing in a casual conversation held under false pretenses. “I was having a casual chat with someone at a restaurant and used some imprecise language. Project Veritas got me. Well done.”

The Project Veritas video dropped a day before Maggie Stanphill, Google’s director of user experience, testified Tuesday to the Senate Commerce subcommittee on technology. Republicans on the committee grilled her about whether Google uses “persuasive technology” to try to influence users’ political views. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), in particular, accused Google of censoring conservatives, citing the Project Veritas report. “Do you think it’s Google’s job to ‘prevent the next Trump situation’?” he asked.

Stanphill rejected the various claims from the report. “We build for everyone, including every single religious belief, every single demographic, every single region, and certainly every political affiliation,” she responded. Cruz refused to believe the company was unbiased.

Simultaneous with Trump’s rant on Fox Business Wednesday morning, Fox News was interviewing Dennis Prager, founder of the site PragerU. Prager has sued Google, claiming that it has censored its conservative videos on YouTube. Last year, a federal judge tossed out a nearly identical PragerU suit, noting that as a private company, YouTube can make its own decisions about how to regulate content on its site. Prager insisted that all the major tech platforms simply hate conservative content, taking no responsibility for the hateful people and views that have been featured in PragerU videos, including various racist and anti-LGBTQ messages.

What appears to be happening is that some conservatives are massively distorting tech companies’ attempts to protect against foreign election interference or restrict the distribution of hateful views, stirring up conspiracy theories that the companies are demonstrating blanket bias against conservatives. The president then repeats these totally unfounded accusations on national television as if they are fact. They are not.

#BIG TECH, #DONALD TRUMP, #FOX BUSINESS, #FOX NEWS, #GOOGLE, #POLITICS,#PROJECT VERITAS, #TED CRUZ, #TWITTER

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OPINION

I BLEW THE WHISTLE ON PINTEREST CENSORSHIP | OPINION

ERIC COCHRAN

ON 6/24/19 AT 9:14 AM EDT Eric Cochran

00:50

Melania Trump Praises Twitter, Facebook As 'True Partners'

OPINION

ABORTION

INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY

I worked as an Android app software developer at Pinterest for nearly two years. I spoke at tech conferences around the world. I worked on open-source code that runs in most major apps. I wanted to do good in the world with my career in technology. I thought Pinterest could be different from its sibling tech giants. I hoped Pinterest might be a tech company that respected its users and was honest with them.

My illusions vanished when I saw Pinterest fall in line with the other Big Tech companies in its crackdown on content that went against the social agenda of my colleagues in Silicon Valley. I saw the normalization of censorship.

Pinterest's covert censorship of pro-lifers, Christians and conservatives has been exposed. Live Action, one the nation's largest pro-life organizations, has been blocked by Pinterest. Users cannot make posts that link to Live Action and are not given a clear error message when they try. Go ahead and try it yourself on Pinterest. Other conservative sites, like ZeroHedge.com and PJMedia.com, have also been kept off Pinterest.

When the Project Veritas exposé about my findings was released earlier this month, Pinterest was faced with a choice: Correct the behavior and pledge to be a neutral platform or double-down and declare these pro-life organizations and websites peddlers of bannable misinformation. Pinterest chose the latter.

Not only are users still unable to link to Live Action, but Live Action's Pinterest account is now permanently suspended. The reason Pinterest gave is that the company does not allow content "that may have immediate and detrimental effects on a Pinner's health or on public safety," according to a screenshot Live Action shared.

By its treatment of Live Action, Pinterest has drawn a hard line in the sand on what it believes about pro-life content. This comes at a critical time in the abortion debate, as bills tightening or loosening restrictions on abortion are being passed across the country.

American culture relies on social trust. Americans have assumed that we all agreed on issues like freedom of speech. This trust is now broken, and Big Tech companies have played no small part, as censorship of conservatives becomes normal. Censorship is done in secret, as is the case at Pinterest.

Since the Project Veritas report, the entire Project Veritas exposé video has been removed by YouTube, Tim Pool's video covering the report has been removed by YouTube, and Steven Crowder's video interviewing Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe and myself has been flagged by YouTube for privacy violations. Big Tech is moving in unison to stifle this story and protect its own.

Until now, YouTube has never removed a Project Veritas video report.

The leaked Pinterest documents speak to the worldview of the leadership of Big Tech. This worldview is not just leftist; it is one of un-American censorship and belief that users cannot be trusted to hear from any other viewpoints but their own. Censorship behind the dark doors of Silicon Valley is an imminent threat to our democracy. The public must be informed, and we must be able to trust one another to live together in this nation.

Abortion Protest Supreme Court

A pro-choice supporter, second from left, argues with a pro-life supporter in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 21.

ANNA GASSOT/AFP/GETTY

The users of these social media sites have a right to know about this increased censorship. Big Tech companies have advertised themselves as neutral on big ideological issues, like abortion, but it's clear they have chosen a side.

This is the watershed moment. This story struck a nerve with Big Tech because it forces Pinterest to declare its opinion publicly on pro-life groups like Live Action. The abortion issue is hot. The tech companies are scurrying to protect their Big Tech friends, but they can no longer do it in secret. With Project Veritas' reveal, the public now knows.

RELATED STORIES

Why Youtube Censored My Educational Video About the Holocaust

Alabama Lawmakers Pass Campus Free Speech Bill

It remains to be seen if the public will demand a fair playing field from social media companies for pro-life and other mainstream American views.

Eric Cochran is a former Android app software developer for Pinterest.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own. Pinterest and YouTube have denied these allegations of censorship in previous reports.

REQUEST REPRINT, SUBMIT CORRECTION OR VIEW EDITORIAL GUIDELINES

https://www.c-span.org/video/?460121-1/super-mad-time

APRIL 25, 2019

Super Mad at Everything All the Time

Alison Dagnes talked about her book, Super Mad at Everything All the Time: Political Media and Our National Anger, in which she looked at the connections between political media and political polarization in the United States.

THIS IS A VARIANT OF LIBERAL MEDIA MYTH

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Republican humiliates himself at Senate hearing as his attempt to nail Instagram for liberal bias falls flat

Republican humiliates himself at Senate hearing as his attempt to nail Instagram for liberal bias falls flat Image via Wikimedia Commons.

written by Brad Reed / Raw Story June 25, 2019

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Tuesday fell flat on his face when he tried to get technology experts to admit that major social media platforms were biased against conservatives.

While talking with assorted experts on artificial intelligence and algorithms, Johnson said that he had his staff members go to Politico’s Instagram account and record what other recommendations the app gave to them after following it.

According to Johnson, the vast majority of recommendations that came back were for news websites like the Washington Post or progressive outlets like Huffington Post, and none were for right-wing websites such as Breitbart.

Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the founder and chief executive officer of Wolfram Research, scoffed at Johnson’s claim of bias and said it was more likely that Instagram delivered liberal recommendations to Politico followers because those followers were more likely to follow neutral or progressive political news websites in the first place.

“The thing that will happen is, if there’s no other information, it will tend to be just where the most content that people on the platform in general have clicked,” he said. “It may be a statement, in that case — I’m really speculating — that the users of that platform tend to like those things.”

Johnson also complained that many conservative news groups were having their articles removed from social media feeds — but Ms. Rashida Richardson, the director of policy research at the AI Now Institute, said that research shows most of those removals came because those articles contained demonstrably false information.

“That’s more of a content moderation issue,” she said.

“OK, anyway,” Johnson replied.

Watch the video below.

eh fun

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/heres-what-its-like-to-go-on-a-conservative-dating-app/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/the-informational-arms-race-why-social-media-disinformation-is-a-threat-to-public-health-and-democracy/

Arms races happen when two sides of a conflict escalate in a series of ever-changing moves intended to outwit the opponent. In biology, a classic example comes from cheetahs and gazelles. Over time, these species have evolved for speed, each responding to the other’s adaptations. A host of weirder examples come from the biology of sex, where males and females evolve bizarre adaptations to control reproduction, ranging from sperm plugs in bats, to cork-screw penises in ducks, to vaginas filled with deceptive dead-ends (also ducks).

One hallmark of an arms race is that, at the end, the participants are often just where they started. Sometimes, the cheetah catches its prey, and sometimes the gazelle escapes. Neither wins the race because, as one gets better, so does its opponent. And, along the way, each side expends a great deal of effort. Still, at any point, the only thing that makes sense is to keep escalating.

Arms races happen in the human world too. The term arms race, of course, comes from countries at war who literally amass ever-more sophisticated and powerful weapons. But some human arms races are more subtle.

The philosopher of science Bennett Holman has argued that the interactions between pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory bodies that seek to determine if drugs are safe and effective constitute an arms race. Pharmaceutical companies deploy an ever-evolving set of tactics to influence medical knowledge. As regulators identify these tactics, and seek to neutralise them, pharmaceutical companies find new ways to shape research.

We might call this an informational arms race. One side attempts to mislead the public over a key issue – the safety of a drug, whether climate change is real, or whether vaccines are dangerous, for example. At the same time, the other side works to combat this misinformation campaign. (Please note, this would often be referred to as a disinformation campaign, because it is purposefully intended to mislead. I use the term misinformation in this article since it is often tricky to figure out whether something is misinformation or disinformation, and since disinformation often ends up being shared by true believers with no political motives.) Of course, this is precisely the sort of interaction that social-media companies such as Twitter have found themselves engaged in.

As detailed in the Mueller report – but widely known before – in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the Russian government (via a group called the Internet Research Agency) engaged in large-scale efforts to influence voters, and to polarise the US public. In the wake of this campaign, social-media sites and research groups have scrambled to protect the US public from misinformation on social media.

Twitter, for example, has employed algorithms aimed at identifying bots and shutting down shady accounts. By their accounts, they have recently rid Twitter of 1 million such accounts per day. But when Twitter gets smarter, so do the bots. A recent report noted a new bot network on Twitter specially designed to outwit detection algorithms. (Another new trend – pernicious actors hijacking real accounts.)

What is important to recognise about such a situation is that whatever tactics are working now won’t work for long. The other side will adapt. In particular, we cannot expect to be able to put a set of detection algorithms in place and be done with it. Whatever efforts social-media sites make to root out pernicious actors will regularly become obsolete.

The same is true for our individual attempts to identify and avoid misinformation. Since the 2016 US election, ‘fake news’ has been widely discussed and analysed. And many social-media users have become more savvy about identifying sites mimicking traditional news sources. But the same users might not be as savvy, for example, about sleek conspiracy theory videos going viral on YouTube, or about deep fakes – expertly altered images and videos.

What makes this problem particularly thorny is that internet media changes at dizzying speed. When the radio was first invented, as a new form of media, it was subject to misinformation. But regulators quickly adapted, managing, for the most part, to subdue such attempts. Today, even as Facebook fights Russian meddling, WhatsApp has become host to rampant misinformation in India, leading to the deaths of 31 people in rumour-fuelled mob attacks over two years.

articipating in an informational arms race is exhausting, but sometimes there are no good alternatives. Public misinformation has serious consequences. For this reason, we should be devoting the same level of resources to fighting misinformation that interest groups are devoting to producing it. All social-media sites need dedicated teams of researchers whose full-time jobs are to hunt down and combat new kinds of misinformation attempts.

Likewise, the US government needs to take social-media misinformation seriously as a threat to public health, and to our democracy. This means devoting significant government resources to combatting it, especially since the character of an informational arms race means that there are no easy patches. It is beyond alarming that the current administration is taking a see-no-evil approach to online misinformation – ignoring pleas from the (now resigned) homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to pay attention to increasingly sophisticated Russian efforts to sway US politics. (The European Union has done much better with its East StratCom taskforce, created in 2015.)

The arms-race character of online misinformation means that we must also think of creative ways for broader social-media usership to get involved in efforts to protect public belief. Twitter, for instance, has added a bot-reporting function. This leverages the full range of abilities that humans can use to detect potential bots – abilities that can adapt as the opposition does.

Could we implement prizes or prestigious contests for independent research teams that identify new attempts at social-media misinformation? Or who come up with the best new ideas for fighting these attempts? Instead of growing victory gardens, the patriots of today can hunt down bots. We shouldn’t expect to win the informational arms race, but if we want to protect our democracy, we have to keep fighting new threats as they emerge.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/right-wing-groups-are-training-young-conservatives-to-win-the-next-meme-war/

april 2019

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POLITICS

APRIL 2, 2019

“The Left Can’t Meme”: How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors

Memes helped elect Donald Trump. Now well-funded conservative groups are using them to proselytize.

STORY BY STEPHANIE MENCIMER, VIDEO BY MARK HELENOWSKI

Benny Johnson took to the stage at the convention center in Palm Beach, Florida, before an audience of cheering young Trump supporters in December to lead a session titled “How to Own the Libs.”

“I ask myself every day: How do we own the libs?” said Johnson, at the time a reporter for the right-wing Daily Caller. “How do we do it in a way that makes a difference? Because these people deserved to be wrecked.”

According to Johnson, the answer to that question is memes. These bits of humor or political propaganda—generally images overlaid with a caption designed to go viral—are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump. Or as notorious internet troll Chuck Johnson has said, “We memed the president into existence.”

Following that unexpected meme-driven success, well-funded conservative groups are making a more organized push to train young internet-savvy right-wingers in the art of meme-making, enlisting a growing army in what they see as the coming meme war of 2020. Turning Point USA, the conservative campus group that organized the conference, is merely one of these organizations seeking to sway hearts, minds, and elections via meme trainings. And it’s clear that when it comes to political memes, the left—which has never taken them very seriously—is trailing the right badly, and falling even further behind.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which did a study of Facebook memes last summer. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry. What you’re looking at here with memes is storytelling around the bend, and what you’re seeing is the future.”

Memes are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump president.

Trump’s presidential campaign keyed into the power of memes early on, monitoring obscure meme sites and boosting pro-Trump images and videos onto mainstream platforms like Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms favor images and videos over more nuanced text posts or links to news articles, so pro-Trump memes quickly went viral. During the campaign, memes also helped spread misinformation about Hillary Clinton’s health and the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that prompted an armed North Carolina man to show up at a DC pizza parlor to break up a nonexistent child sex ring supposedly led by Democratic Party operatives.

Perhaps no one understood the effectiveness of memes better than former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who had served as executive chairman of the far-right publication Breitbart News. In 2016, only 5 percent of Breitbart‘s posts were of images, but those images accounted for half of the site’s most-shared posts on Facebook.

Jeff Giesea, a consultant who has worked with venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers, is a self-described “memetics” expert. During the 2016 campaign, he joined with men’s rights agitator Mike Cernovich to organize MAGA3X, a grassroots army of online trolls who worked to meme Trump to the White House. The effort produced tens of thousands of social media accounts, all working in concert to promote Trump, with a heavy emphasis on iconography. They even created a flash-mob meme generator to make it easy for Trump supporters to hook up in real life.

Giesea has long argued that memes are such a powerful tool they should be used as cyberwarfare to combat propaganda from ISIS and other foreign threats. In 2015, he wrote in a NATO journal on information warfare that “it seems obvious that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies…Memetic warfare is about taking control of the dialogue, narrative, and psychological space. It’s about denigrating, disrupting, and subverting the enemy’s effort to do the same.”

The same could be said of memes in politics. Cheap, subversive, and designed to provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information guerrilla warfare. Republicans have gotten Giesea’s message, while Democrats have all but ignored it.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Media Matters president Angelo Carusone. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry.”

Johnson’s skill in this area launched him to Washington media fame for a while, until he was ousted from BuzzFeed and then the Independent Journal Review after being accused of plagiarism. He seems to have found his calling with Turning Point USA, the conservative campus activist group that sponsored the student convention in Palm Beach and is itself something of a meme factory.

Founded in 2012, TPUSA got its startup funding from Foster Friess, a wealthy Republican donor, and it has since raked in donations from the oil and gas industry and organizations affiliated with the Koch brothers. With a budget of more than $8 million last year, TPUSA amplifies its campus presence by churning out endless “Big Government Sucks” memes on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Turning Point USA

Like most memes, a few of TPUSA’s are clever and spread far, and many more have been trashed by internet trolls, who have created a whole meme subgenre they call “Toilet Paper USA.” Johnson was on hand in Florida to help TPUSA members up their game.

Johnson started his tutorial with “based Lindsey Graham,” a video montage of the South Carolina senator’s angry performance during the contentious confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in high school. “That is a special moment,” he explained, noting that Kavanaugh was confirmed in spite of the allegations. “In your lifetime, there has never been a culture war that conservatives have won except for this.”

He proceeded to walk the audience through the evolution of Graham memes that went viral during the hearing and may have helped change public opinion on Kavanaugh. On the big screen, Johnson showed photos and a video he had taken of Graham coming out of the Capitol after a day of hearings. In the video, Graham is coolly adjusting his tie and smiling, while in the background, a police officer restrains a hysterical-looking woman who’s screaming at him about Kavanaugh. Johnson tweeted that he had just taken “the most thug life @LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.”

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Benny

@bennyjohnson

I hate to brag.

I just took the most thug life @LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.

[Story soon]

From there, the internet took care of the rest. “Did this sucker meme?” Johnson asked, laughing. The answer was yes. Creative internet users tweaked and photoshopped the image, both still and video, as it spread. Johnson showed one meme of the tie-adjusting Graham superimposed on the burning Twin Towers. Then one featuring Joe Biden planting a kiss on the screaming woman. And finally, one that turned Graham into a “thug life” rap video star.

Embedded video

Benny

@bennyjohnson

???? MUST WATCH: SOUND ON ????

???? MUST WATCH: SOUND ON ????#kavanaugh

2,539

8:16 PM - Oct 7, 2018

818 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

“This is how you know you’ve made it in this profession,” Johnson told his audience. “When memes take life.”

In February, TPUSA hired Johnson to do this sort of thing full time as its chief creative officer, a sign of just how seriously well-funded pro-Trump organizations are taking the business of memes.

The TPUSA conference also included a second, more interactive session on memes, hosted by two minor Instagram stars, Rogan O’Handley (Instagram handle DC_Draino) and Grant Godwin (the_typical-liberal), who got into the nuts and bolts of the art form—or, as Godwin explained, how to get your Pepe the Frog memes to go viral.

Two weeks earlier, meme training got top billing at the American Priority Conference, which billed itself as an “America First,” pro-Trump political gathering.Speakers included Roger Stone, the longtime Trump associate who was indicted the next month for obstruction and false statements in the special counsel investigation, and Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted less than a week as White House communications director. The conference featured a session on memetics by Tom Shadilay, a producer for Mike Cernovich. (Shadilay’s name may itself be a meme: It’s a popular hashtag on Gab, the social media site favored by the far right, and a code word for trolls on 4chan. Shadilay is the name of a 1986 Italian disco song by a band called P.E.P.E., whose album art featured a cartoon frog that resembles Pepe the Frog. Tom Shadilay does not appear to have any internet presence before his Twitter account was created in May 2017. He stopped responding to my emails after I asked whether that’s really his last name.)

In January, Liberty Con, a national convention of libertarian students, offered advice from David Gay, a libertarian activist who runs the Facebook group Liberty Memes, which has nearly a half-million followers spreading his political message through memes. (Until late 2016, Giesea, the meme expert, was on the board of Students for Liberty, which sponsored the conference.)* Johnson has four events scheduled this month on college campuses on “winning the meme wars.”

Boston University professor Gianluca Stringhini studies memes for a living. When I told him that well-funded right-wing organizations were specifically training activists for the next great meme war, he was surprised. Typically, he says, memes are seen as organic, emerging from the dark corners of the internet, not propaganda directed by people in politics. “Memes are tools for information warfare,” he says. “Probably this is a new way of doing politics. A new weapon that campaigns can use.”

It’s not clear exactly whether memes do, in fact, change public opinion, but conservative groups working to train grassroots troops seem to think so. So do the Russians. In the 2018 report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that meddled in the 2016 presidential election, researchers discovered that the IRA was especially fond of memes put out by TPUSA. Using accounts that it created to look like ordinary Americans and spread misinformation and propaganda, the IRA gave TPUSA memes a boost across multiple social media platforms. But the researchers couldn’t determine exactly what the impact of all those memes was.

Last year, Stringhini and six colleagues published a study on the origins of memes, analyzing more than 2 billion social media posts on Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, and Gab, tofigure out where the most popular memes get their start. Stringhini says the most trafficked memes start on right-wing internet forums, places like 4chan’s politically incorrect /pol/ channel and Reddit’s /r/the_Donald/ subreddit. From there, the far right has been extremely successful in getting its stuff to take off on mainstream platforms. Stringhini notes that after the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, tweeted her thanks to 4chan and Reddit users for making it all happen, putting a sharp point on how much people on the right believe that memes are influencing public opinion.

As a result, conservative groups seem to be incorporating memes into their training arsenal for grassroots activists in a way that has no parallel on the left. In fact, “the left can’t meme” is itself a subgenre of memes, reflecting an idea accepted on both ends of the political spectrum that progressive activists are really bad at this form of political warfare.

One potential exception is long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has recently catapulted to fame thanks to memes. But those memes are coming from the same sources, on Reddit and 4chan, that promoted Trump, not from liberal groups, creating a bizarre movement of Yang fans among white nationalists.

Media Matters’ Carusone says people on the left are more concerned with nuanced facts and gray areas that can’t always be boiled down accurately into a photo with a caption. On the left, he says, “every meme has to have a million qualifiers, so that it’s no longer a meme. It’s a Medium post.” Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to communicate their ideas “in ways that are very reductionist. They’re also much more comfortable lying, and their audiences are much more likely to accept it.”

Benny Johnson has his own take on what makes a good political meme. The first step for successful lib ownership, he told the students assembled in Palm Beach, is to “challenge the culture,” as Graham did during the Kavanaugh hearings. Second, “join the conversation” by creating an interaction, but be sure it will “demonstrate the superiority of conservative ideas.”

As an example, he played a goofy video he made with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. In the video, Pai is dressed like Santa Claus, wielding a light saber, and he defends his plan for “internet freedom” in response to criticism of the Trump administration’s move to end net neutrality. “We were trolling the internet,” Johnson said. And it worked.

He flashed through a host of viral memes that took off after the video was posted. In the video, there’s a shot of Pai in front of a screen eating popcorn and watching a movie. Meme-makers have swapped in clips to make it look like Pai is watching Hitler rallies or the burning Twin Towers. Even Luke Skywalker weighed in:

View image on Twitter

Mark Hamill

@HamillHimself

Cute video Ajit "Aren't I Precious?" Pai ??-but you are profoundly unworthy 2 wield a lightsaber-A Jedi acts selflessly for the common man-NOT lie 2 enrich giant corporations. Btw-did you pay John Williams his royalty? @AjitPaiFCCorpShill #AJediYouAreNOT

The third step in successful lib ownership, Johnson instructed the crowd, was critical: “Have more fun than the left.” He played a video he had made in 2015 of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz cooking bacon on a machine gun. “Can you think of three thing libs hate more?” he exclaimed with a laugh. “Ted Cruz, bacon, guns.” All the ingredients for a good meme.

Finally, Johnson concluded: “Smile. You’re on the winning side.”

david kay? policing speech

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-18-2019/

https://www.counterextremism.com/the-extreme-right-on-facebook

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Neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and far-right groups and online businesses maintain a presence on Facebook. Facebook is the third most visited website on the Internet and is also the world’s largest social media network, with over 2.2 billion regular users as of February 2018.* According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of U.S. adults use Facebook, with 81% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 using the platform.* Because of its popularity, Facebook has become an important tool for political or community organizations and commercial brands—including, unfortunately, for far-right extremists.

Even though the company explicitly bans hate speech and hate groups in its Community Standards,* Facebook appears to have a reactionary approach to removing neo-Nazi and white supremacist content from its platform. For example, Facebook deactivated a page belonging to the Traditionalist Workers Party, a neo-Nazi group, only after it was revealed that the group participated in the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. The page was reported to the company prior to the event.* In another instance, a Huffington Post investigation in summer 2018 found that four neo-Nazi and white supremacist clothing stores were able to operate on Facebook. The tech giant finally removed the pages once it was faced with negative press.* Despite seeing astronomical revenues of approximately $40.7 billion in 2017, Facebook is failing to enforce its own Community Standards in a proactive manner.*

In September 2018, the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) identified and monitored a small selection of 40 Facebook pages belonging to online stores that sell white supremacist clothing, music, or accessories, or white supremacist or neo-Nazi groups. Pages were located through searches for known white supremacist or neo-Nazi keywords. CEP researchers recorded information for each page such as the number of likes, date of creation, and examples of white supremacist or neo-Nazi content. After two months, CEP reported the pages—only 35 of the 40 remained online—to Facebook and found that only four pages were ultimately removed. Clearly, Facebook’s process for reviewing and removing this content-which violates its own Community Standards-is inadequate.

What Content is Allowed on Facebook?

Facebook is a private company that is able to restrict certain types of content that does not fit its mission statement, business model, or ethos.* The site’s Community Standards state that Facebook prohibits organizations or individuals involved in “organized hate” from maintaining a Facebook presence, as well as content “that expresses support or praise for groups, leaders, or individuals involved in these activities.”* Facebook defines a hate organization as:

Any association of three or more people that is organized under a name, sign, or symbol and that has an ideology, statements, or physical actions that attack individuals based on characteristics, including race, religious affiliation, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, serious disease or disability.*

An unidentified Facebook spokesperson further clarified their policies towards hate groups on their platform, telling a journalist, "It doesn’t matter whether these groups are posting hateful messages or whether they’re sharing pictures of friends and family…as organized hate groups, they have no place on our platform."*...

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/heres-who-fox-news-considers-prominent-conservative-voices/

Laura Ingraham took to her primetime program on Fox News last night to defend conspiracy theorists, extremists, and an unabashed neo-Nazi as “prominent voices” in the conservative movement that have been supposedly “censored on social media.”

A graphic produced by Fox News featured eight people who have been suspended or claim to have been throttled on social media platforms. The figures featured were dubbed “prominent voices censored on social media."[nice grfx]

Here’s who Fox News considers a “prominent” conservative figures.

The graphic featured first Alex Jones, the creator and leading voice of the conspiracy theory outlet Infowars. Jones is currently facing multiple defamation lawsuits regarding his insistence that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, which resulted in the families of slain children being harassed and traumatized by Jones’ viewers. Jones’ intentional spread of disinformation, harassment, and bullying of victims of tragedies and his regular distribution of offensive content broke enough community guidelines on social media platforms to result in a wide-scale deplatforming of his operation online. Infowars has regularly provided a safe space for extremists to recruit to their efforts.

Next on the graphic was Milo Yiannopoulous, a disgraced right-wing hate monger who stirredharassment and vitriol online and violated the community guidelines of many social media sites, resulting in his accounts being permanently suspended. His comments online after the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, where a white supremacist slaughtered practicing Muslims in two mosques, resulted in him being banned from entering the country of Australia. Yiannopoulous was once a prominent figure in the right-wing movement, thanks in large part to flush funding from the conservative mega-donor Mercer family. The Mercer family funding and Yiannopoulous’ spotlight was dimmed after BuzzFeed News published leaked emails showing Yiannopoulous’ collaboration with white supremacists and his attempt bring them into the mainstream. After audio surfaced of Yiannopoulous appearing to endorse pedophilia, Yiannopoulous was effectively designated persona non grata among conservatives.

Beside Yiannopoulous is Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim activist whose targeting of Islamic worshipers (and any random person whose appearance led her to believe they are Muslim) violated social media rules against hateful content and resulted in her removal from major tech platforms. Loomer has had numerous affiliations with members of the white nationalist movement and endorsed Faith Goldy, who recited the white supremacist “14 Words” in her bid to become mayor of Toronto. Loomer, a former Project Veritas operative, has collaborated with Infowars on disinformation campaigns surrounding shootings in Florida and Las Vegas.

Candace Owens, who began her career in conservative media using the moniker “Red Pill Black,” joined Ingraham in-studio for the segment and was also featured on the graphic. She was briefly suspended by Facebook earlier this month after one of her posts had been flagged for violating community standards, but she currently uses the site freely. Owens got an early boost in her career from Alex Jones and has continued to advance in conservative circles despite her early affiliations. Owens was recently filmed saying that the problem with Adolf Hitler was that he was too ambitious and took his plans beyond Germany.

Michelle Malkin, who argued in a 2004 book that the United States was right to displace and intern 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry in America during World War II, was another “prominent” voice Ingraham featured. Malkin frequently parrots white nationalist rhetoric on immigration; at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, she likened immigration to an “invasion” that “endangers” Americans. She closed that speech by saying, “diversity is not our strength,” and followed her speech by giving an interview to the racist website VDARE.

Actor and ardent Trump supporter James Woods, who is not banned from Twitter, but rather has refused to delete a post on his Twitter profile with the hashtag “#HangThemAll” that would result in his account being unlocked, was also featured as a “prominent” censored conservative voice. Before being locked out of Twitter, Woods also shared a meme of the Christchurch shooter depicted as a clown, part of a push by white supremacists to find a new way to launder their voices into relevance.

Fox News deemed Paul Nehlen as another “prominent” conservative voice. Nehlen is a failed state congressional candidate in Wisconsin who pivoted his campaign message to explicitly target Jews and then funneled the money he made to his wife and neighbor. He was banned from social media for being an explicit Nazi and is so aggressive that even the white supremacist internet haven Gab decided to boot him. Angry White Men recently reported that Nehlen and his likewise-failed neo-Nazi counterpart Patrick Little had been debating the best way to start a race war in the United States. And as Right Wing Watch reported earlier this week, Nehlen has promoted the writings of neo-Nazi James Mason, which advocate terrorism to fulfill a white supremacist agenda.

Dan Scavino, White House social media manager, was also featured on this list because he accused Facebook of censoring him for replying to a comment. Platforms are known to throttle accounts if software suspects an account may be spamming and there is no evidence that Scavino was targeted for restriction otherwise.

It’s for segments like these that Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren rejected an invitation to appear on Fox News for a town hall interview, calling the network a “hate-for-profit” scam and drawing criticisms from conservatives. Figures like Meghan McCain insisted that Warren’s refusal to subsidize Fox News with her appearance were off-base and cut her off from conservatives.

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/28/study-right-wing-sources-dominate-abortion-related-news-facebook/223680

In 2019, right-wing media have dominated abortion-related coverage with sensationalized anti-choice rhetoric and harmful misinformation. And on Facebook, anti-abortion misinformation is consistently outperforming all other coverage of abortion-related news.

A Media Matters study of top-engaged U.S. abortion-related coverage on Facebook in the month of April found that 63% of links with the most Facebook interactions came from right-leaning websites, and 72% of the Facebook page posts with the most interactions came from right-leaning pages. Two anti-abortion websites, LifeNews.com and Live Action, made up almost 30% of viral links, and the two main Facebook pages affiliated with these sites made up more than a quarter of the most popular Facebook posts.

Top-engaged content from right-leaning sources often pushed anti-abortion misinformation. Twenty-three percent of links from right-leaning websites reviewed in this study pushed for six-week bans on abortion (also inaccurately referred to as “heartbeat bills”) based on the anti-choice claim that abortion should be banned as soon as fetal cardiac activity is detected, typically by six weeks. Medical experts, however, say "cardiac activity isn't a credible measure of fetal viability." Right-leaning websites and pages also shared false stories about Democrats supporting “infanticide” (they don’t) and anti-conservative censorship by social media platforms (there is none).

Sixty-three percent of the top links related to abortion news on Facebook came from right-leaning websites.

Media Matters reviewed 278 top links related to abortion news which collectively earned 13.6 million interactions on Facebook. Right-leaning websites had 175 links (63%), which earned over 8.6 million interactions (63.6%). Websites that aren’t politically aligned had 80 links (28.8%), which earned 3.8 million interactions (27.8%). And left-leaning websites had just 23 links (8.3%), which earned 1.2 million interactions (8.6%).

...much more, grafs

Right-wing outlets spread bogus video of Nancy Pelosi on social media to say she’s drunk MSNBC

written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos May 23, 2019

Right-wing groups are circulating deceiving videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s remarks Wednesday at a Center for American Progress event. In the video, posted to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter accounts, Pelosi’s speech has been subtly slurred, suggesting she’s drunk, by slowing down the video to about 75% of its actual speed, according to The Washington Post.

As with all things on social media, the bogus video is ripping through at lightning speed. A version posted by the right-wing Facebook page Politics WatchDog has already been viewed more than 1.6 million times. Thanks, Facebook. (By the way, be careful out there—so much misinformation.)

This is clearly intended to be a knock on Pelosi’s competence and credibility. She keeps besting Trump, and since Trump can’t beat her without getting outside help, right-wing forces are swooping in to provide a meme about Pelosi that can run wild on social media. Remember when the National Enquirer continually fanned the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was sickly? This is most likely the beginning of a conspiracy theory that Pelosi drinks. It’s interesting that they’re using slurred speech to go after her when Trump is constantly slurring his words, likely due to some form of mental deterioration.

If you want to see the real Pelosi at the real speed, below is at least part of the section of that bogus video delivered in real time by CNN. Not drunk—very very very sober in the midst of Trump’s wild emotional outbursts.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says today’s five-minute meeting with President Trump was “very, very, very strange” https://t.co/fUdnQwAaD2 pic.twitter.com/cx2teRVUF6

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 22, 2019

You can listen to all of Pelosi’s comments at the event below, courtesy of C-SPAN. Also, you can click here and go to the C-SPAN site, where the comments in question start at about 6:00 minutes in. Compare that to the bogus video at the link above: It’s remarkably different.

nice case study: escalator effect

ref no lnx twit

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2018/10/31/george-soros-and-migrant-caravan-how-lie-multiplied-online/1824633002/

How a lie about George Soros and the migrant caravan multiplied online

USA TODAY followed the rapid spread of a social media conspiracy theory about George Soros and migrants that grew from obscurity to the political mainstream.

Brad Heath, Matt Wynn and Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY

Updated 12:27 p.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

How a George Soros conspiracy theory spread from online to cable news

USA TODAY followed the spread of a social media conspiracy theory about George Soros and migrants that grew from obscurity to the political mainstream.

This is the life of a lie.

Three weeks ago, a caravan of Hondurans began walking nearly 2,000 miles to the United States. Their ranks grew as they inched north and, along with them, falsehoods grew, too. But one stands out: a conspiracy theory that liberal billionaire George Soros, a Jewish immigrant, is paying the migrants to make the journey – or even orchestrating it.

Members of Congress and the president’s son both repeated it. Conservative celebrities, too.

It also may have resonated in darker places. Cesar Sayoc, the man charged with mailing pipe bombs to Soros and other prominent critics of President Donald Trump, dwelled at length online about conspiracy theories involving the Hungarian-American philanthropist.

Robert Bowers, charged with killing 11 people worshiping in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, used his social media accounts to post extensively about the caravan, including circulating an image of refugees in Guatemala purportedly climbing into a truck with a Star of David on the side.

But it began with a handful of posts in the caravan’s early days.

One of the first was from a North Carolina writer who goes by the screen name “lorettatheprole.” Loretta Malakie has more than 6,000 followers on Twitter, to whom she directs frequent posts about “white genocide,” Jews and the “invading force” approaching the border.

On Oct. 14, Malakie posted a link to an article about the caravan, with a single word of commentary: “Soros.”

That same day, identical posts appeared over the course of 20 minutes in six pro-Trump Facebook groups. Combined, those six groups had 165,000 members. A user who gave the name Philip Balzano, a Trump supporter from Chicago, wrote to the Trump Train group: “Here Comes ANOTHER Group of Paid for New Demoncratic Voters Just in Time for the Primaries... The Financier aka ‘Win at All Costs’ ‘Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste’ the Evil George Soros and His 140+ Orgs, Should Be Classified as Terrorist and Terrorist Orgs.”

Malakie declined to comment, though on Twitter she panned the USA TODAY reporter who called her as “evil.” Balzano did not respond to an interview request sent through Facebook.

The Soros theory was not new – it had made the rounds during previous caravans in the spring and again in August. In fact, one Facebook user posting in October provided as evidence a video of Glenn Beck discussing the spring caravan’s alleged connections to Soros.

GEORGE SOROS WEBSITE

This time, though, the theory snowballed, gaining political purchase as the caravan became a flashpoint in the final weeks of a contentious midterm campaign.

“It’s really significant how these memes can go from feverswamp-ish places to be amplified by lawmakers, even the president," said David Carroll, associate professor at The New School's Parsons School of Design in New York. “From there, the impact on world events can’t be underestimated.”

Lies, of course, are not new either. But social media can turn a breeze into a hurricane. It carried this falsehood to millions with a few taps on a screen. It also left a distinct trail that makes it possible to follow how lies spread and who told them, a map of their trajectory from the darker corners of the internet to the political mainstream.

USA TODAY followed that path by examining tens of thousands of social media posts on three major mainstream social media sites: Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

Over the next three days, a few louder social media voices weighed in. By Oct. 16 – four days after the caravan departed – the combined following of accounts mentioning both Soros and the caravan had reached 2 million, still a pebble in the flood tide of social media. (The total includes some duplicates because people follow more than one account.)

On Twitter, someone with the username “LibertyBell1000” warned about 42,000 followers that Soros had “manufactured yet another immigrant caravan ‘crisis.’ ” Another, using the name “WhoWolfe,” asked “Anybody else think Soros and the Dirty Dems are behind this?”

More posts spread across Facebook. Trump supporter Randy Penrod posted in a group called “The Deplorable's,” with about 186,000 members, “Our stable leader just called out the Soros conspired invasion of new Democrat voters in a tweet just moments ago.”

Tap, tap, tap.

It took just one more day for the theory to reach critical mass, breaking through into widespread public consciousness.

The evening of Oct. 17, a Republican member of Congress posted a video on Twitter of what he said was people in Honduras handing out small sums of money to migrants.

“Soros? US-backed NGOs? Time to investigate the source!” he wrote.

Rep. Matt Gaetz would later concede that he was mistaken about where the video was shot (it was Guatemala). But by then his message had metastasized, spreading far beyond the 153,000 people who follow the north Florida congressman’s tweets.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter retweeted it to her 2 million followers. So did Sarah Carter, a journalist who’s a frequent guest on Fox News.

Jack Posobiec – a correspondent for conservative cable news television channel One America News Network – got more specific, implying Soros was renting RVs for the migrants.

Posobiec was among the early proponents of “Pizzagate,” a social-media conspiracy that falsely claimed then-candidate Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were running a pedophile sex trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. It drew a man with a gun to Comet Pizza, where he intended to rescue the children.

The next day, even more influential voices repeated it.

One was the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who retweeted Gaetz’s post to his 3.1 million followers. The younger Trump has been actively campaigning for Republicans on television and the campaign trail in the lead up to the midterm elections. A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. declined to comment.

On Twitter alone, at least 43,000 accounts with a combined 127 million followers carried some message linking Soros to the caravan over those two days; most fanning the conspiracy, a few seeking to knock it down.

On Reddit, where users share and comment on news and memes, the lie exploded. Five posts in The_Donald subreddit tied Soros to the caravan. Within a week, there would be 10 times more. The_Donald has 675,000 members.

Ten days after the caravan began in Honduras, police started intercepting what appeared to be pipe bombs – PVC tubes packed with what the FBI later called “energetic material,” wrapped with tape and attached to a clock – that had been sent to Soros and other prominent critics of President Trump.

By the time police found the first of those bombs in Soros’ mailbox in Westchester County, New York, the lie about his involvement with the caravan had been posted by 20,000 more users on Twitter – to a combined audience of 117 million – and more weighed in on Facebook, Reddit and other sites.

It was like a runaway train. Unstoppable.

Another member of Congress, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, said in a Fox News interview that he couldn't “help but think that Democrats, perhaps Soros and others, may be funding this thinking it will help them.”

By then, the lie also was at an inflection point. Online, the biggest voices were those debunking it. The day before the bomb was found at Soros’ house, the most prominent people mentioning the theory on Twitter had no longer been conservative commentators but instead New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Chelsea Clinton.

But researchers say repetition is repetition. Even exposing a lie plays a central role in mutating fantasy into fact, or at least a matter of debate. Here, news coverage – including this story – play a significant role.

“The choices reporters and editors make about what to cover and how to cover it play a key part in regulating the amount of oxygen supplied to the falsehoods, antagonisms, and manipulations that threaten to overrun the contemporary media ecosystem,” Syracuse University professor Whitney Phillips wrote in a paper this year on disinformation.

Attention alone can lend credence to the very information critics mean to undermine.

By Oct. 22, posts debunking the theory also emerged. One from Arizona Christian conservative Joshua Feuerstein was among Facebook’s most-viewed videospushing the Soros-caravan connection. Feuerstein is best known for characterizing Starbucks’ shift to generic red holiday cups as a war on Christmas.

His video purported to show Honduran migrants on a truck. Accompanying text popularized a direct connection not just to Soros, but to the midterms: “They are not coming on foot as CNN #FakeNews says! George Soros is paying for them to show up at the border by mid term elections!”

The video and text drew 137,000 views.

Exactly how far the lie linking Soros to the migrant caravan has traveled is impossible to measure in full. Messages on 4chan and other sites where conspiracies germinate disappear quickly. Gab – a social media site that attracted right-wing figures banished from more mainstream platforms – itself was on the verge of disappearing this week. Even on mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram, many messages are private.

Still, by the morning of Oct. 27, it had spread to hundreds of millions of users on mainstream social media, and found its way to many more on cable news.

That morning, federal prosecutors allege that trucker Robert Bowers stormed into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot 11 worshipers to death. The authorities have offered few details about what might have motivated him to attack, but online Bowers left his own trail of grievance and conspiracy.

Using the handle OneDingo on Twitter, Bowers shared anti-Jewish content and criticized President Trump. Since January, he was a regular on Gab, too, where his bio read: “Jews are the children of Satan.” The image on his Gab account referred to a white supremacist meme. His last message read: “Screw your optics, I'm going in.”

And by the next day, he did.

In the aftermath, as the news media rushed to cover the killings and to explain the internet conspiracies that might have precipitated such a massacre – the lie spread anew.

Originally Published 6:54 a.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

Updated 12:27 p.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

Facebook announced on Thursday that it had removed several extremists from social networks Facebook and Instagram, including neo-Nazi sympathizer Milo Yiannopoulos, anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer, far-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (again), and white supremacist Paul Nehlen , while also removing Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan for his record of anti-Semitic rhetoric.

This is a step in the right direction for Facebook that opens doors to make the platform safer, and inspires some optimism that the tech company might be capable of taking responsibility for the ways its platforms have empowered extremists. But there is more to do.

Taking definitive action against some of the toxicity that's thrived on its platforms is long overdue, especially considering Facebook's record of struggling to enforce policies aimed at curbing the reach and influence of extremists. The company's recent attempt to ban white supremacist content from its platforms proved insufficient, and allowed extremists to continue posting racist content as long as it wasn't too explicit.

Some achievable measures that could help curb extremism while protecting users who experience oppression include:

Follow through. Facebook's already banned Alex Jones before -- this time it is saying it's for real. A bad sign is that there is still a slew of Jones-linked pages on the platform.

Refuse to back down. On Saturday, Trump threw a fit about the bans on Twitter, retweeting Watson multiple times. Trump also retweeted white nationalist Canadian Lauren Southern. Trump's goal is obviously to force concessions or even a reversal from Facebook. It's never a bad time to finally grow some backbone.

Committing to enforcing standards against codified white nationalism by more effectively pairing automated and human reviews to better identify violating content.

Proactively limiting the visibility of content when its traffic is being directed from toxic sources like anonymous message boards 4chan and 8chan.

Extending anti-discrimination policies currently applied to ads to include event pages and groups. Event pages and private group pages are often used as tools to help extremists organize and mobilize.

Reassessing the fact-checking partnership with Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller website, which has ties to white supremacists and anti-Semites.

Increasing transparency in metrics for third-party auditors. While it might save Facebook some bad press, some of the company's privacy limitations hinder outside researchers in their efforts to identify security concerns.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/2/18527357/facebook-bans-alex-jones-louis-farrakhan-infowars

Months after he was kicked off Twitter, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is off Facebook and Instagram, too. So are a host of other right-wing extremists and Louis Farrakhan, a Nation of Islam leader who has espoused anti-Semitic views.

Facebook on Thursday announced that it was banning Jones, Farrakhan, Paul Nehlen, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, and Infowars, which Jones runs, from both its platform and Instagram, which it owns. The company says the decision has been made under its policies against dangerous individuals and organizations.

This is a big move for Facebook, which (like many social media companies) has been criticized for lax oversight of individuals and groups that spread hateful messages and vitriol its platforms, but has thus far attempted to toe an awkward line on the matter. While civil rights groups and some Democratic lawmakers have been pushing them to clean up their platform, conservatives have been eager to pounce on the Menlo Park, California-based company with claims of bias each time they do so.

“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.”

Nehlen is a white supremacist who ran an unsuccessful primary challenge for then-House Speaker Paul Ryan’s congressional seat in Wisconsin in 2016 and 2018. Yiannopoulos is a far-right provocateur. Watson is a far-right YouTube personality, and Loomer is an activist who is often considered to be part of the alt-right but rejects the characterization over anti-Semitism.

Being banned from social media isn’t a new development for some of these figures. Jones and Infowars, for example, were permanently banned from Twitter in September. Loomer was kicked off Twitter for her criticism of newly elected Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and her Muslim faith in November. She subsequently handcuffed herself to the front doors of Twitter’s New York office in protest of the decision.

None of the people listed will be allowed on Facebook or Instagram. Additionally, Facebook will remove any pages, groups, and accounts set up to represent them and Facebook events where they’re participating. Users will still be able to praise them on Facebook and Instagram and share content related to them.

As Taylor Lorenz at the Atlantic notes, Infowars has the strictest ban:

Any account that shares Infowars content will see it removed; unless the post is explicitly condemning Infowars. Facebook and Instagram will remove any content containing Infowars videos, radio segments, or articles, (unless the post is explicitly condemning the content) and Facebook will also remove any groups set up to share Infowars content and events promoting any of the banned extremist figures, according to a company spokesperson. (Twitter, YouTube, and Apple have also banned Jones and Infowars.)

This appears to be a sign that Facebook is becoming more aggressive about enforcing its policies on hate speech and messages that have the potential to incite violence. Its criteria includes individuals and organizations that proclaim violent or hateful missions, that are self-described or followers of hateful ideologies, or that carry out or call for acts of violence against people based on race, ethnicity, and nationality.

Kelly Weill at the Daily Beast points out Facebook has in the past been pretty squishy about this, including when it comes to some of the figures it’s banning now. Instagram in April admitted a video Loomer posted attacking Rep. Omar violated its policies but didn’t remove her from the platform. It has also acknowledged Yiannopoulos had glorified violence on its platform.

It’s not clear why Facebook is doing this now, but pressure for it to take action has been mounting for quite some time, and the decision is probably at least in part an effort to get some positive PR.

This is probably a good step for Facebook — and one that is likely to face blowback

Facebook’s decision is likely a positive development and a sign it’s taking the potential real-world consequences of the content it hosts seriously. But the social media giant still has a long way to go with reckoning with the ways it’s shaped the world we live in. Facebook and the platforms it owns, including Instagram and WhatsApp, are often weaponized as forums for spreading misinformation and hate and inciting violence all over the globe.

But Facebook will also have to deal with criticism from conservatives that they’re being unfairly targeted yet again, since most of the people banned on Thursday are part of the far right.

Conservatives have for quite some time complained that they’re being censored by social media, and Facebook has struggled to respond. Part of that stems from a 2016 Gizmodo story citing a former Facebook journalist who said workers at the company routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers. Since then, Republicans and Silicon Valley have engaged in a back-and-forth where conservatives accuse platforms of bias and companies bend over backward to show that’s not the case. After the Gizmodo story broke, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with conservative leaders to discuss how the social network handles conservative content.

President Donald Trump has seized on the narrative and in the past has even come to Jones’s defense. After Jones was temporarily banned on Twitter in 2018 (prior to the permanent ban), Trump tweeted that social media was “totally discriminating” against Republican and conservative voices. And just last month Trump complained about his Twitter followers and got the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, to go to the Oval Office to discuss it.

Each time Facebook and Twitter try to cater to the right, they face a blowback from more mainstream outlets and observers. Case in point: the controversy surrounding Facebook’s decision to partner in fact-checking with a website owned by conservative outlet the Daily Caller.

Facebook will likely field more complaints with this latest decision, even though it’s impossible to dispute that Jones, Loomer, Nehlen, and the others often do spout hateful rhetoric. This ban doesn’t mean they’ll disappear — they’ll just find other places to go on the internet. But it does mean their voices will be a little harder to find.

mma

Over the past several years, conservatives and right-wing media have commonly accused tech giants of censoring right-wing content on their platforms. These critics frequently cite anecdotal evidence that can often be explained away by the technical limitations or rules of the platform. Media Matters' Cristina López compiled many recent examples of right-wing media criticisms and how they've influenced tech companies decision making.

While the social media companies will often address and provide a reasoning for the occurrences in short order, conservatives and right-wing media use the window of opportunity to push a full-force media blitz, in a larger bad faith effort to "work the refs."

This strategy has been employed successfully by conservatives for more than half a century. They've used this strategy for decades on mainstream media, and now they're doing it with tech companies. Just this week, Sen. Ted Cruz [R-TX] held a hearing in the Senate about the topic.

The Twitter account for anti-abortion movie Unplanned was briefly suspended and then reinstated. This was because it was linked to an account that had violated Twitter's rules: If accounts are linked and one account violates Twitter's rules, both accounts will face consequences. Fairly straightforward, and all explained in Twitter's FAQ. In fact, the account was reinstated before almost anyone noticed it was suspended -- but it took roughly 24 hours for follower counts to go to where they were before.

But instead of dealing with this calmly, or even making a reasonable request like asking for more transparency from Twitter, conservatives had a full on meltdown, accusing Twitter of making them unfollow the Twitter account as some sort of ideological vendetta. These complaints went on for a week, and were even brought up during Cruz's hearing.

Here's a more simple example: a right-wing group complained that it could not run ads on Facebook depicting abortions. Facebook disallowed the ads because they do not allow ads featuring images of any medical procedure. Conservatives again accused Facebook of censorship.

The thing is, this right-wing pressure campaign is working. Social media companies have made a distinct effort to employ right-wing figures to placate conservative users. In the meantime, hate, harassment, and conspiracy theories have flourished on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. These social media networks are now a hotbed for far-right radicalization and recruitment in America -- and instead of dealing with it, the companies are more concerned about appeasing conservatives who complain that their dumb video didn't get more views.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/03/facebook-just-announced-plans-to-ban-white-nationalists-and-separatists/

meh

facebook took down more than 500 pages?

copwatch, RT reporter "political spam"

In the Now got put back

https://kpfa.org/episode/project-censored-march-22-2019/

cf nyt 8 russian __(memes?)

some small indep sites have lots of ads b/c they need $, but cut as "ad farms?" by FB?

https://fair.org/home/facebook-wants-you-to-know-if-youre-getting-your-news-from-the-wrong-government/

GoFundMe bans antivax fundraisers as tech companies finally crack down on medical disinformation

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-work

8/18

The dust is still settling after Alex Jones’s InfoWars was more-or-less simultaneously banned by YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and Facebook. The move has spawned thousands of takes about whether deplatforming Jones was the right move or a slippery slope toward more censorship. But just as important to consider: Will it work?

This is called "deplatforming" or "no platform,"—social media companies (sans Twitter, which says he hasn’t broken its rules) have decided to stop being complicit in spreading Jones’s conspiracy theories and hate. And we’ve seen no indication Jones will stop. But will his business remain viable and will his influence wane?

The knee-jerk reaction, among Jones and some parts of the conservative movement, is that banning Jones will only make him stronger. InfoWars noted (correctly) that “Google searches for ‘InfoWars’ skyrocket after tech purge,” and added that Silicon Valley’s “censorship campaign backfires as interest in InfoWars goes through the roof.” The Ringer, meanwhile, noted that “the paradox of Alex Jones, Infowars, the alt-right, and this whole unfortunate orbit of web-taught, forum-dwelling eugenicists: They are nothing without YouTube, and yet they’re nothing without getting banned, dramatically, from YouTube (or wherever else).”

It’s true that Silicon Valley’s lethargy on the far-right, aided by endless press coverage, helped amplify their message and turned the far right into a real, powerful political force in the United States. And the “Streisand Effect” is definitely a real thing: Trying to censor something—even if that censorship is warranted—is only going to drive interest in it.

But the belief among people who have studied deplatforming is that, in the long term, it does work, though it may have some unintended consequences that have not been fully understood yet.

“We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.”

There’s not a ton of research on this, but the work that has been done so far is promising. A study published by researchers at Georgia Tech last year found that banning the platform's most toxic subreddits resulted in less hate speech elsewhere on the site, and especially from the people who were active on those subreddits.

Early results from Data and Society sent to an academic listserv in 2017 noted that it’s “unclear what the unintended effects of no platforming will be in the near and distant future. Right now, this can be construed as an incredibly positive step that platforms are making in responding to public complaints that their services are being used to spread hate speech and further radicalize individuals. However, there could be other unintended consequences. There has already been pushback on the right about the capacity and ethics of technology companies making these decisions. We’ve also seen an exodus towards sites like Gab.ai and away from the more mainstream social media networks. ”

There are lots of examples of people who have been deplatformed and have seen their power wane. After he lost his Fox News show, Glenn Beck couldn’t sustain his influence—The Blaze reaches only a fraction of the people he used to. Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart personality, was permanently banned from Twitter for inciting targeted harassment campaigns against actress Leslie Jones, and he resigned from Breitbart over comments he made about pedophilia on a podcast. His general prominence in public discourse has waned ever since.

“I think the anecdotes are what makes a difference here—each individual, when you add them up, you get a net effect. You don’t need much data behind it to point out that with Milo, he lost Twitter, and the result was he lost a lot,” Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, which monitors conservative media and is studying deplatforming, told me on the phone. “He lost his ability to be influential or at least to project a veneer of influence.”

Deepfakes, the AI-assisted technology used to create fake celebrity porn, grew in popularity after Motherboard reported on it. When Reddit, Pornhub, Gfycat, and others banned it, there were brief cries of “censorship,” and a brief spike in interest. But today, deepfakes are only being made and shared on the margins, in private forums and smaller, 4chan-like image boards.

"Yes, we must take away the kinds of coordinative power they’re able to gain on platforms"

One of the most important things to keep in mind when predicting what may happen to InfoWars is to consider how most people consume media these days. These platforms are so powerful for a reason: the vast majority of Americans use them every single day, and many people use social media as their only source of news. Social media is designed to be habit forming and many thousands of hours of research have been put into making sure these platforms are a daily habit; the question is whether Alex Jones and InfoWars is going to remain a daily habit after the initial Streisand Effect spike.

“A lot of Jones’s programming is impromptu, where he’s doing emergency broadcasts drunk in his house at 1 AM,” Carusone said. “Without YouTube’s push notifications or algorithms, there’s no way anyone would be watching that.”

Of course, getting banned from his major platforms won’t make Jones disappear, just like it hasn’t made Milo or Beck completely disappear. As platforms have begun to ban certain types of content, alternative platforms like Gab.ai and Voat have popped up, where more-or-less anything goes. These platforms, too, were hyped as potentially powerful alternatives to the big social media players, but are largely struggling and arguably no more relevant than standard message boards that have been used by the far-right to organize for decades.

Nonetheless, the concern among academics is that, as hate moves to the darker corners of the internet, that some of their old followers may move with them and become further radicalized.

“The good that comes with deplatforming is, their main goal was to redpill or get people within mainstream communities more in line with their beliefs, so we need to get them off those platforms,” Robyn Caplan, a PhD student at Rutgers University and Data and Society affiliate, told me on the phone. “But now we’ve put them down into their holes where they were before, and they could strengthen their beliefs and become more extreme.”

The question is whether it’s more harmful to society to have many millions of people exposed to kinda hateful content or to have a much smaller number of ultra-radicalized true believers.

Donovan believes that, ultimately, it’s important to deplatform people when their rhetoric is resulting in negative, real-world consequences: “The way Jones activates his audiences has implications for people who have already been victimized,” she said. “We have always had groups of white supremacists, misogynists, and violent insurrectionists joining message boards. But social media has made these tools much more powerful. So yes, we must take away the kinds of coordinative power they’re able to gain on platforms.”

"Alex Jones is not the only person being deplatformed or who has been deranked"

There are a couple other things worth mentioning. First, Jones has been deplatformed before, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he lost his radio shows. Jones was able to build something of a dedicated, organic audience long before YouTube in part by executive producing and distributing the 9/11 conspiracy theory documentary Loose Change. InfoWars was streaming video on its own website before it was streaming on YouTube. He is nothing if not persistent.

Second, the people who will stay on YouTube but won’t follow Jones are not suddenly going to be earnestly consuming the New York Times. Jones became popular on social media because he was vitriolic, and because social media algorithms favor vitriolic, high-velocity content.

“Not only did Jones threaten and pantomime shooting Robert Mueller, the reason he did is because he said Mueller’s a ‘demon,’” Carusone said. “If you’re already plugged into the ‘demon’ algorithm on YouTube, there’s plenty of other people spewing demon stuff for you there.”

Most importantly, we need to remember that Jones’s banning, and to a lesser extent Milo’s, only became major national news because it fits into a false narrative that Silicon Valley censors only conservatives, which has been posited by Ted Cruz, Congressman Jim Jordan, and, recently, Donald Trump.

Deplatforming works “best” when the people being deplatformed don’t have any power to begin with. Nor are we talking about people from marginalized communities who have self-censored or left social media because of far right harassment and hate campaigns (and could, in theory, come back with more proactive moderation by large platforms.)

“Alex Jones is not the only person being deplatformed or who has been deranked,” Caplan said. “We need to puncture this myth that it’s only affecting far-right people. Trans rights activists, Black Lives Matter organizers, LGBTQI people have been demonetized or deranked. The reason we’re talking about far-right people is that they have coverage on Fox News and representatives in Congress holding hearings. They already have political power.”

rationalwiki hmnn

No platform is the practice of of preventing someone—either through policy or through protest—from spreading their ideas through a particular event or website. The term is mostly used to refer to rescinding an invitation to someone asked to speak at an event (such as a guest lecture at a college). The concept apparently originates from a policy used by the British National Union of Students to prevent people they disagree with from giving speeches on UK college campuses. The concept is similar to the political action of cordon sanitaire, where a politician or political party is either unconditionally excluded from coalitions or other forms or cooperation, or even completely ignored. "No platform" is typically invoked for issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, Holocaust denial, and so forth. As what is and is not acceptable by society changes with the times, so do the targets of "no platform", with 2015 seeing protests of speakers seen as transphobic or Islamophobic who consider themselves progressive as they are feminists or atheists, respectively. No-platforming is, at best, an attempt to prevent a balance fallacy, with protesters refusing to allow tacit endorsement of reactionary views.

Depending on the circumstances, the tactic can be controversial, and has been compared to book burning.[1] Ignoring a person (or group) also means that no one is directly refuting their arguments. Some have criticized the action as a form of censorship and a violation of the principles of freedom of speech and critical thinking. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education maintains a database of hundreds of incidents[2] in which invited speakers have been no-platformed on college campuses, showing that the phenomenon has been "steadily increasing over the past 15 years" and is used more often by left-wingers than right wingers.[3]

Advocates of no-platforming counter that the speaker's message has already been heard by protesters and venue holders, and they have decided not to extend the speakers the right to an audience that has already rejected them. The protests are generally meant to raise awareness of the target's views and not a call to place a blanket ban them; the reaction from many protested is arguably censorial itself, considering they're refusing to acknowledge the right to demonstrate opposition to their views.[4] Apparently, both sides believe that their speech is more free than others'.

1 Freedom of speech concerns

2 Effectiveness

3 National Union of Students

4 See also

5 References

Freedom of speech concerns

In most liberal democracies, the right to publish your own newspaper, and the right to speak in a public space where speaking is permitted, are inalienable. However, private venue holders themselves also have the right to free speech and to exercise it by not promoting speech they dislike, something which is continually ignored by the people who complain about not being heard. Further, at public universities, student groups and academic departments are under no obligation to provide a platform for any particular viewpoint. Too many don't understand that their voices have been heard, but that other rights-bearing people have just decided not to give them the time of day."No platforming" as adopted so far is not a violation of freedom of expression rights; there is no right to have a ready audience. Individuals do not have a right to speak wherever and whenever they want. For instance, newspapers are not obligated to publish every, or any, letter to the editor they receive.

An unfortunate result of "No platforming" is even more contentious debate over what exactly constitutes hate speech, and whether or not it counts as free speech. There is a contingent of people online (and sometimes even offline!), usually right-wing types and 4chan-style trolls (though some are, indeed, genuine), who are dead set on trying to hand-wave their racism, homophobia, sexism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, etc. as "Not actually hate speech", rallying behind mischaracterizations of "no platforming" as censorship to bolster their arguments.[citation needed]

Definitions of what constitutes hate speech have expanded in recent years; this has had the effect of making people with transphobic stances (e.g. Germaine Greer[5]) or who allegedly express Islamophobic ideas (e.g. Maryam Namazie[6]) targets for protests. These experiences ruffle the feathers of those whose approach to liberalism is out of step with the current mood of campus activists, which has led to a proliferation of editorials attacking millennials for being "coddled" in "safe spaces" or accusing them of being "anti-democratic" and "censorial".[7]

Observe how Milo Yiannopoulos, no stranger to firestorms such as Gamergate, and having coordinated an online harassment against Leslie Jones,[8] was given a chance to speak at DePaul University as part of his "Dangerous Faggot" tour, but when the event actually went forth, he was driven out by the students and security was forbidden from helping him, as school officials were well aware of his history.[9] When he was actually given the opportunity to speak unmolested at the University of Milwaukee, he singled out and harassed a trans student using her name and photo,[10] thereby justifying his treatment at DePaul.

He was later given an opportunity to speak at Berkeley under the dubious name of the "Free Speech Week", but was again shut down by student rioting due to his former abuse of his platform.[11] He often characterized such backlashes as not being a chance to be heard and that if someone can change his mind then he'll tone it down, blatantly both ignoring his inflammatory nature, with the added unpleasant caveat that if someone cannot change his mind for whatever reason, then it's his opponents' fault and he'll go on with his hate speech without a care in the world.[12] It wasn't until he was found to have made remarks supporting pedophilia that he was barred from CPAC and resigned from Breitbart in disgrace.[13]

Ironically enough (or not so unironically) it's not hard to find the same people who create narratives of triggered college kids whining whenever they're called out on their bigotry. Trump's campaign ran on the premise that he was not afraid to tell it like it is whenever he made racist and sexist remarks, yet as soon as Hillary Clinton referred to these same people who ate up his hateful rhetoric as "deplorables", they were quick to jump on her for being intolerant and after she lost the election, suggested she take up knitting. All the while 45 was quick to constantly make inflammatory remarks about her on Twitter despite having won the election, and none of his followers batted an eye.

Effectiveness[edit]

“”What an extremist needs more than anything else is an enemy

—Alex Grobman[14]

In 1994 some university papers decided to run Bradley Smith's advertisement promoting Holocaust denialism, but printed a refutation on the opposition page.[15] This was somewhat controversial, but is quite probably a more effective way to refute Holocaust denialism than ignoring them and hoping they go away. As mentioned in the free speech section above, these people will get their message out, and people uninformed of the refutations will be convinced by this. There is a caveat to refutations, however: the backfire effect, which would strengthen problematic viewpoints if they were challenged, which is among the reasons deplatforming is supported.

In a similar vein, some have also argued that it can lead to more extremism. For example during the 1980s and 1990s Hans JanmaatWikipedia's W.svg had a seat in the Dutch parliament, but was excluded from most public discourse by cordon sanitaire in both parliament and the media due to his views on immigration (which weren't even that extreme, certainly not by today's standards). Parliament members would just get up and leave whenever he spoke. This, in part, led to the rise of Pim FortuynWikipedia's W.svg in the early 2000s, who was significantly more vocal on these issues than Janmaat was, and later Geert Wilders in the mid 2000s, who was even more extreme.

National Union of Students

The British National Union of StudentsWikipedia's W.svg has an officially drafted policyWikipedia's W.svg on no platforming, which is explicitly meant to prevent far-right speakers (defined as racists, fascists, and antisemites) from being allowed an audience at British universities in order to refuse to give their political stances credence and possibly endanger the lives of students. They also detail how this is not a restriction on anyone's freedom of speech, as the student unions are democratically deciding who they want to be allowed to talk on campus, and this in no way impinges on their ability to speak their mind elsewhere.[16]

As of September 2014, the NUS had a blanket ban on only 5 organizations:[17] the terrorist group Al-Muhajiroun, the racist British National Party and English Defence League, the Islamist pro-Caliphate organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the anti-Semitic Muslim Public Affairs Committee. The NUS enforces this by not funding speeches by these groups and not allowing their officers to share a stage with members of these groups. Individual colleges' student unions can decide to ban other speakers should they wish with internal votes.