Stanford bak
bak est 6 24
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promoted primary 818
bak 6 24
see internet res lab ~ disinfo benghazi bs target
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anne w democ inst bremer assclown?
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msn wapo
The Washington Post
500.9K Followers
Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure
Story by Joseph Menn
Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure
/For The Washington Post
The Stanford Internet Observatory, which published some of the most influential analysis of the spread of false information on social media during elections, has shed most of its staff and may shut down amid political and legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation.
Just three staffers remain at the Observatory, and they will either leave or find roles at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, which is absorbing what remains of the program, according to eight people familiar with the developments, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The Election Integrity Partnership, a prominent consortium run by the Observatory and a University of Washington team to identify viral falsehoods about election procedures and outcomes in real time, has updated its webpage to say its work has concluded.
Two ongoing lawsuits and two congressional inquiries into the Observatory have cost Stanford millions of dollars in legal fees, one of the people told The Washington Post. Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda.
Related video: Stanford will again require SAT, ACT (KTVU FOX 2 San Francisco)
Is joining a growing list of colleges and universities that
Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer who founded the Observatory five years ago, moved into an advisory role in November. Observatory research manager Renée DiResta’s contract was not renewed in recent weeks.
The collapse of the Observatory is the latest and largest in a series of setbacks for the community of researchers who try to detect propaganda and explain how false narratives are manufactured, gather momentum and become accepted by various groups. It follows Harvard’s dismissal of misinformation expert Joan Donovan, who in a December whistleblower complaint alleged that the university’s close and lucrative ties with Facebook parent Meta led the university to clamp down on her work, which was highly critical of the social media giant’s practices.
“The Stanford Internet Observatory has played a critical role in understanding a range of digital harms,” said Kate Starbird, who led the University of Washington’s work on the Election Integrity Partnership and continues to publish on election misinformation.
Starbird said that while most academic studies of online manipulation look backward from much later, the Observatory’s “rapid analysis” helped people around the world understand what they were seeing on platforms as it happened.
Brown University professor Claire Wardle said the Observatory had created innovative methodology and trained the next generation of experts.
“Closing down a lab like this would always be a huge loss, but doing so now, during a year of global elections, makes absolutely no sense,” said Wardle, who previously led research at the anti-misinformation nonprofit First Draft. “We need universities to use their resources and standing in the community to stand up to criticism and headlines.”
Stanford University spokesperson Dee Mostofi said in a statement that much of the Observatory’s work would continue under new leadership, “including its critical work on child safety and other online harms, its publication of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, the Trust and Safety Research Conference, and the Trust and Safety Teaching Consortium.”
“Stanford remains deeply concerned about efforts, including lawsuits and congressional investigations, that chill freedom of inquiry and undermine legitimate and much needed academic research — both at Stanford and across academia,” Mostofi added.
The study of misinformation has become increasingly controversial, and Stamos, DiResta and Starbird have been besieged by lawsuits, document requests and threats of physical harm. Leading the charge has been Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whose House subcommittee alleges that the Observatory improperly worked with federal officials and social media companies to violate the free-speech rights of conservatives.
Jordan has demanded reams of documents from Stanford, including records of students discussing social media posts as they volunteered to help the Observatory, and Stamos testified before the House Judiciary Committee for eight hours.
“Free speech wins again!” Jordan posted on X on Friday, calling the Observatory part of a “censorship regime.”
Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s law firm filed a First Amendment lawsuit in May 2023 against the Observatory, Stamos, DiResta and others; it is still pending.
In a joint statement, Stamos and DiResta said that their work involved much more than elections and that they had been unfairly maligned.
“The politically motivated attacks against our research on elections and vaccines have no merit, and the attempts by partisan House committee chairs to suppress First Amendment-protected research are a quintessential example of the weaponization of government,” they said.
“We are thankful to Stanford for defending our work, including in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, and are confident that the judicial system will eventually act to protect our speech and the speech of other academics.”
The high court will rule within weeks on a case known as Missouri v. Biden, which includes claims against the Observatory.
The staff cuts were first reported late Thursday by the social media newsletter Platformer.
Stamos founded the Observatory after publicizing that Russia had attempted to influence the 2016 election by sowing division on Facebook, causing a clash with the company’s top executives. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III later cited the Facebook operation in indicting a Kremlin contractor. At Stanford, Stamos and his team deepened his study of influence operations from around the world, including one it traced to the Pentagon.
Stamos told associates he stepped back from leading the Observatory last year in part because the political pressure had taken a toll. He had raised most of the money for the project, and the remaining faculty members have not been able to replicate his success, as many philanthropic groups shift their focus to artificial intelligence and other, fresher topics.
Major, time-limited grants from the Hewlett Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and others have ended, those organizations confirmed to The Post. No comparable new grants have materialized.
Staff hoped Stanford might step in to fund the group through the momentous November election.
In supporting the project further, the university would have risked alienating conservative donors, Silicon Valley figures and members of Congress, who have threatened to stop all federal funding for disinformation research or cut back general support.
The Observatory’s non-election work included developing a curriculum for teaching college students how to handle trust and safety issues on social media platforms, and launching the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to that field. It also investigated rings that published child sexual exploitation material online and flaws in the U.S. system for reporting it, helping prepare platforms to handle an influx of computer-generated material.
“We hope that Stanford is willing to support the remainder of the SIO team and serve as a safe home for future research into how the internet is used to cause harm against individuals and our democracy,” Stamos and DiResta said in the statement.
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evil b/c pervert class action
https://www.rawstory.com/jim-jordan-2661556363/
no lnx raw 6 23
Jim Jordan leads GOP push to cripple 'fight against disinformation': report
Matthew Chapman
June 19, 2023,
Republican lawmakers are joining forces with far-right activists to attack universities and even private businesses that are investigating the spread of disinformation online — claiming that this amounts to an effort to silence conservatives on the internet, according to a report.
The New York Times posted a details of the actions they are taking on Monday.
"The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money, according to several people involved," reported Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel.
"They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise — and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election."
The House Judiciary Committee, under Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), has been leading the charge. Meanwhile, a group founded by far-right former Trump adviser Stephen Miller has filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court going after the same entities.
"Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online," said the report.
"In a related line of inquiry, the committee has also issued a subpoena to the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade association, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media it created. The committee’s Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers and tech companies found to be harmful."
The new push is part of a broader, years-long conspiracy theory among right-wing activists that the government and "big tech" companies are colluding to silence conservative speech on the internet. There is no evidence of any such conspiracy; in fact, research shows conservative content actually spreads more easily on Facebook and Twitter.
:{
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LNX
There is no evidence of any such conspiracy; in fact, research shows conservative content actually spreads more easily on Facebook and Twitter.
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ref nyt
bing steal nno lnx
G.O.P. Targets Researchers Who Study Disinformation Ahead of 2024 Election
A legal campaign against universities and think tanks seeks to undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and other hot political topics.
By Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel
June 19, 2023
On Capitol Hill and in the courts, Republican lawmakers and activists are mounting a sweeping legal campaign against universities, think tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation, accusing them of colluding with the government to suppress conservative speech online.
The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money,according to several people involved.
They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise— and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
“I think it’s quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — attempt to chill research,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director ofColumbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute,an organization that works to safeguard freedom of speech and the press.
:{
}:
The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican majority control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public. It has threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly or fully enough.
A conservative advocacy group led by Stephen Miller, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, filed a class-action lawsuit last month in U.S. District Court in Louisiana that echoes many of the committee’s accusations and focuses on some of the same defendants.
:{
}:
Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online.
In a related line of inquiry, the committee has also issued a subpoena to the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade association, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media it created. The committee’s Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers and tech companies found to be harmful.
A House subcommittee was created to scrutinize what Republicans have charged is a government effort to silence conservatives. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The committee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a close ally of Mr. Trump, has accused the organizations of “censorship of disfavored speech” involving issues that have galvanized the Republican Party: the policies around the Covid-19 pandemic and the integrity of the American political system, including the outcome of the 2020 election.
Much of the disinformation surrounding both issues has come from the right. Many Republicans are convinced that researchers who study disinformation have pressed social media platforms to discriminate against conservative voices.
[The Spread of Misinformation and Falsehoods
The Titanic Truthers of TikTok: On the app, long-established facts about the 1912 disaster are being newly litigated as musty rumors merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content.
A Global Effort: A group of scholars introduced an international panel to study online misinformation, inspired by the way scientists documented the global effect of carbon emissions.
A Hub for Conspiracy Theories: The Denver airport is a magnet for tall tales inspired by the paranormal — and an experiment into whether, sometimes, institutional fabulism can just be fun.
Climate Lies: In 2021, Google said that it would stop running ads alongside content that denied climate change. But a report shows that one of its platforms, YouTube, has continued to profit from videos pushing misinformation on the topic.]
Those complaints have been fueled by Twitter’s decision under its new owner, Elon Musk, to release selected internal communications between government officials and Twitter employees. The communications show government officials urging Twitter to take action against accounts spreading disinformation but stopping short of ordering them to do, as some critics claimed.
Patrick L. Warren, an associate professor at Clemson University, said researchers at the school have provided documents to the committee, and given some staff members a short presentation. “I think most of this has been spurred by our appearance in the Twitter files, which left people with a pretty distorted sense of our mission and work,” he said.
Last year, theRepublican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration in U.S. District Court in Louisiana, arguing that government officials effectively cajoled or coerced Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms by threatening legislative changes. The judge, Terry A. Doughty, rejected a defense motion to dismiss the lawsuit in March.
The current campaign’s focus is not government officials but rather private individuals working for universities or nongovernmental organizations. They have their own First Amendment guarantees of free speech, including their interactions with the social media companies.
The group behind the class action, America First Legal, named as defendants two researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta; a professor at the University of Washington, Kate Starbird; an executive of Graphika, Camille François; and the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graham Brookie.
If the lawsuit proceeds, they could face trial and, potentially, civil damages if the accusations are upheld.
Mr. Miller, the president of America First Legal, did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, he said the lawsuit was “striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex.”
The researchers, who have been asked by the House committee to submit emails and other records, are also defendants in the lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The plaintiffs include Jill Hines, a director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization that has been accused of disinformation, and Jim Hoft, the founder of the Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site. The court in the Western District of Louisiana has, under Judge Doughty, become a favored venue for legal challenges against the Biden administration.
The attacks use “the same argument that starts with some false premises,” said Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, which is not a party to any of the legal action. “We see it in the media, in the congressional committees and in lawsuits, and it is the same core argument, with a false premise about the government giving some type of direction to the research we do.”
The House Judiciary Committee has focused much of its questioning on two collaborative projects. One was the Election Integrity Partnership, which Stanford and the University of Washington formed before the 2020 electionto identify attempts “to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters or delegitimize election results without evidence.” The other, also organized by Stanford, was called the Virality Project and focused on the spread of disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.
Both subjects have become political lightning rods, exposing the researchers to partisan attacks online that have become ominously personal at times.
In the case of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the requests for information — including all emails — have even extended to students who volunteered to work as interns for the Election Integrity Partnership.
A central premise of the committee’s investigation — and the other complaints about censorship — is that the researchers or government officials had the power or ability to shut down accounts on social media. They did not, according to former employees at Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, who said the decision to punish users who violated platform rules belonged solely to the companies.
No evidence has emerged that government officials coerced the companies to take action against accounts, even when the groups flagged problematic content.
“We have not only academic freedom as researchers to conduct this research but freedom of speech to tell Twitter or any other company to look at tweets we might think violate rules,” Mr. Hancock said.
The universities and research organizations have sought to comply with the committee’s requests, though the collection of years of emails has been a time-consuming task complicated by issues of privacy. They face mounting legal costs and questions from directors and donors about the risks raised by studying disinformation. Online attacks have also taken a toll on morale and, in some cases, scared away students.
In May, Mr. Jordan, the committee’s chairman, threatened Stanford with unspecified legal action for not complying with a previously issued subpoena, even though the university’s lawyers have been negotiating with the committee’s lawyers over how to shield students’ privacy. (Several of the students who volunteered are identified in the America First Legal lawsuit.)
The committee declined to discuss details of the investigation, including how many requests or subpoenas it has filed in total. Nor has it disclosed how it expects the inquiry to unfold — whether it would prepare a final report or make criminal referrals and, if so, when. In its statements, though, it appears to have already reached a broad conclusion.
“The Twitter files and information from private litigation show how the federal government worked with social media companies and other entities to silence disfavored speech online,” a spokesman, Russell Dye, said in a statement. “The committee is working hard to get to the bottom of this censorship to protect First Amendment rights for all Americans.”
The partisan controversy is having an effect on not only the researchers but also the social media giants.
:{
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Twitter, under Mr. Musk, has made a point of lifting restrictions and restoring accounts that had been suspended, including the Gateway Pundit’s. YouTube recently announced that it would no longer ban videos that advanced “false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past U.S. presidential elections.”
Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation for The Times. He has worked in Washington, Moscow, Baghdad and Beijing, where he contributed to the articles that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2021. He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.” @stevenleemyers • Facebook
Sheera Frenkel is a prize-winning technology reporter based in San Francisco. In 2021, she and Cecilia Kang published “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.” @sheeraf
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franta weaponizing econ:
Bernstein, who deserves credit for shedding light on this issue, notes that Charles River Associates’ work was not entirely outside the mainstream. Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, another consulting firm hired by the petroleum industry, also predicted high costs for climate policies (WEFA 1997, 1998). Perhaps most significantly, Bernstein observes that Charles River Associates’ work was similar to work done by other modeling groups such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is also funded by fossil fuel companies, and that both Charles River Associates and the Joint Program participated in Stanford University's Energy Modeling Forum, which again is funded by fossil fuel companies.:{8}:
6. Conclusion
For decades, the fossil fuel industry has hired economic consultants to help weaken and delay US and international climate policy. Among them, the economic consultants of Charles River Associates played a key role,helping to undermine carbon pricing, international climate agreements, and other climate policies from the early 1990s onward. The work of these economists was often portrayed to the public as independent, when in fact it was funded by the fossil fuel industry, and their models were incomplete and biased in favor of continued fossil fuel use. Yet their conclusions often passed without challenge and eventually came to represent a significant part of conventional economic wisdom.
Research on the climate change counter-movement has traditionally focused on documenting the promotion of disinformation regarding climate science (Brulle 2014, Franta 2021). While such disinformation has played a crucial role in delaying effective climate policy, the fossil fuel industry and broader climate change counter-movement have also made frequent use of economic arguments to justify inaction. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry has made substantial investments in influential climate economics programs across the US. Further attention is needed on the role of economists and particular economic paradigms, doctrines, and models within climate politics and the perpetuation of fossil fuels.
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bj fogg captology persuasion
stanford uber1
https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-6975
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Former Associated Press reporter Emily Wilder was fired from the international media company late Thursday following a pressure campaign by right-wing media, including publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon working in tandem with the Standford College Republicans. Wilder was "canceled," if you will, for pro-Palestinian activism during her years in college — not at the AP.
The campaign to have Wilder fired started on Monday with the Stanford College Republicans taking to Twitter to bill the reporter's past pro-Palestine demonstrating as controversial, coming to the verdict that she would never be able to be impartial while covering national news.[twt pix]
"Recently, we discovered that theAssociated Press has hired former Stanford anti-Israel agitator, Emily Wilder, who referred to the late Sheldon Adelson as a 'naked mole rat' as one of their 'journalists,'" the college Republican organization tweeted. The series of tweets from the Standford Republican chapter went onto claim that the reporter, who is Jewish, during her college years belonged to a "Students for Justice in Palestine," on-campus group. The college Republicans — who appear to have their own questionable Twitter activity — also took offense to Wilder calling right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro a "little turd" and Sheldon Adelson a "naked mole-rat."
From there, the right-wing outrage machine got ahold of the story, including The Federalist, The Washington Free Beacon, and Fox News, which billed the reporter as being "anti-Israel." Notably, the Free Beacon ran their hit-piece with no attached byline and didn't return Salon's request for comment as to why.
On Thursday, an all-staff email from AP News director Peter Prengaman to employees read: "A note to say that news associate Emily Wilder is no longer with the AP[twt pix]
but the Associated Press claims it wasn't her activism in college. "While AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder's comments on Thursday thatshe was dismissed for violations of AP's social media policy during her time at AP," an AP spokesperson told The Wrap.
"Amazing how quickly a talented young reporter's career can be snuffed out by a Twitter mob that decided to feign outrage over some college tweets. And if @vv1lder somehow violated @AP's social media rules, the solution is to offer guidance, not termination, to a new reporter," TheWashington Post's Glenn Kesslerwrote on Twitter following the ouster.
[twt pix] responding to her firing, Wilder told SFGATE that her firing was nothing more than a right-wing outrage mob that reportedly disdains "cancel culture," doing what they claim to resent.
"There's no question I was just canceled," told SFGATE reporter Eric Ting on Thursday following the news of her firing. "This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around 'cancel culture.' To Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be, but when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture — specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine — it's always the same side."
in her interview with SFGATE, Wilder noted an "onslaught of absolutely vile messages" she received after right-wing media began running with the story. Wilder didn't immediately return a request for comment from Salon.
While The Associated Press might have folded to the demands of the right-wing mob, many journalists on Twitter voiced their support for the young journalist. "Shame on @AP @peterprengaman. I stand with Emily. Her reporting at our newspaper was excellent. Reverse your decision NOW," The Arizona Republic's reporter Rebekah Sanders wrote. The Washington Post's Dave Weigel responded: "'Hire @vv1lder' is something more and more people are saying."
"Every journalist should be outraged about @AP firing [Wilder] over college activism in favor of freedom for Palestinians. The industry is rife with clear double-standards on this," Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Adam Elmahrek commented on the firing. The Daily Beast's senior politics reporter Will Sommer replied, "It's crazy that editors are still falling for these bad-faith campaigns from right-wing media."
The decision to out Wilder comes on the heels ofright-wing pundits cheering the Israeli airstrike that leveled a building in Gaza on Saturday, housing several international news outlets, including The Associated Press.
FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES
- 'Criminal complicity': Outrage as Biden pushes $735 million ... ›
- The Associated Press says it can't declare a winner in Iowa as ... ›
- Fox News confirms shocking story on Trump's contempt for ... ›
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- Trump Coronavirus Adviser Threatens to Sue Stanford Doctors over Criticism
- https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/18/headlines/trump_coronavirus_adviser_threatens_to_sue_stanford_doctors_over_criticism
- Trump’s personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz has threatened to sue scores of Stanford professors and researchers after they published an open letter denouncing the qualifications of Scott Atlas, a colleague at Stanford who is now advising Trump on the pandemic. Atlas is a neuroradiologist with no expertise in infectious diseases. The Washington Post recently reported Atlas is pushing Trump to promote a controversial herd immunity strategy which could result in the deaths of millions of more Americans.
In an open letter, the Stanford doctors wrote of Dr. Atlas, “The guidance he is giving to the White House does not reflect sound epidemiological reasoning, nor is it consistent with the current body of scientific knowledge about COVID-19.”
Attorney Marc Kasowitz, who is now representing Atlas, has threatened to sue signatories of the open letter and has demanded a retraction, saying the letter “maliciously defames” his client.
Stanford professor Michael Fischbach responded to the threat by writing on Twitter, “I stand by everything we said. More facts, more science. Less Kasowitz.” Full disclosure: Amy Goodman’s brother Steven Goodman is a dean at the Stanford School of Medicine and one of the writers of the letter.
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// henry miller forbes mofo but mo so?
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-martha-maccallum-having-differences-opinion-science-surrounding-covid-19-something-we
wrongshow?
https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/trumps-new-coronavirus-adviser-right-wing-media-talking-head-who-consistently
Donald Trump announced this week that Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, will serve as a new “adviser” to the president on COVID-19. Atlas, whose background is in diagnostic radiology, is not an expert in infectious disease but rather a pundit andfrequent Fox guest who has been repeatedly wrong about the pandemic.
Atlas, who has appeared 20 times on Fox News since the end of April, predicted in March that there would only be 10,000 deaths from COVID in America, said in April that the pandemic “appears to be entering the containment phase,” and claimed in May that “the curves have been flattened.” More recently, he has taken to making unproven claims downplaying the risk of COVID-19 in considering whether to reopen schools for in-person learning.
But Fox News and other right-wing outlets have elevated his politically convenient though dubious commentary; and on August 12 he gave brief remarks during a White House press briefing after Trump asked him to come up to the podium.
Here is a noncomprehensive list of Atlas’ false claims, incorrect predictions, and pro-Trump sycophancy that preceded his new role at the White House.
- Atlas claimed in a March 16 tweet, “Virus infections typically have seasons. This is temporary.”
- In a March 26 op-ed in The Washington Times, Atlas wrote, “This virus could cause about 10,000 deaths in the United States overall.”
- In a March 26 “:{Hoover:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: Virtual Policy Briefing,” Atlas claimed, “All reasonable numbers point to the fact that our number of severe outcomes will be peaking around three weeks or so.”
- In an April 1:{ op-ed in The Hill:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Atlas wrote that “Americans should not panic. The United States has the most advanced medical care in the world for situations like this.”
- As the national curve of daily deaths continued to rise, Atlas wrote in an April 13 op-ed in The Hill that “we now need to reenter normal life” and that “continuing full-population isolation and waiting for a vaccine would be doubling down and yielding to panic.”
- Atlas opened his April 22 op-ed in The Hill by declaring, “The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase.”
- In an April 26 appearance on Fox News' The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, Atlas told the host, “Young people under 18 have virtually no risk of serious illness or death, so it's logical to open most schools. It's logical to open most businesses.”
- Atlas claimed on the :{April 27 edition of Fox News’ *Tucker Carlson Tonight*:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, “It’s actually good news that the virus spreads widely and without high risk to the vast majority of people … because that means we have a better chance of developing population immunity.” The Mayo clinic describes “major problems” with the idea that herd immunity can be achieved through natural infection as it is unknown to what extent an individual is immune to further infection after exposure. Also, according to the Mayo clinic, even if it was possible for herd immunity to be achieved this way, it “could also lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have chronic conditions.”
- On the May 11 edition of Fox News' *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas referenced the social distancing measures and claimed that “the cure is bigger than the disease at this point.” He also told the audience that “the curves have been flattened.”
- On the June 8 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas falsely claimed “there is really no risk to young people” when it comes to COVID-19.
- On the June 22 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, host Martha MacCallum mentioned to Atlas former Food and Drug Adminstration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s claim that 25% of hospitalizations in Texas are among people aged 20 to 29. Atlas responded that he didn’t believe the number, saying, “I question if those people who are positive for COVID-19 and being hospitalized for something else are classified as COVID-19 hospitalizations. That's a big difference.”
- On the June 29 edition of Fox News' :{Tucker Carlson Tonight:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Atlas falsely claimed young people “do not have a significant problem, they do not have the serious complications, they do not die” from COVID-19. (The data showed at the time of this appearance and continues to show that young people do in fact die or suffer serious complications from the virus.) He also said it’s “fantastic news that we have a lot of cases,” which common sense and real-time data show to be false.
- On the July 6 edition of *The Story with Martha MacCallum*, Atlas repeated the falsehood that “it doesn’t really matter how many cases, it only matters who gets the cases” because young people die at a lower rate than older people. But increased caseloads lead to an increased strain on the capacity of health systems and may spread the virus to people who are more vulnerable to serious complications from the disease, even if the vast majority of young people who make up the increased number of cases do not.
- Atlas downplayed the potential risks that COVID-19 poses to people under 70 on the July 7 edition of Fox News' *The Ingraham Angle*, claiming, “The risk of this has been grossly overblown.”
- On the July 15 edition of *America's Newsroom*, Atlas falsely claimed, “It doesn’t matter if children get the disease. ... The data shows that they do not significantly transmit to adults.”
- On the July 25 edition of Fox News’ *Watters World*, Atlas uncritically shilled for the Trump’s disastrous COVID-19 response, saying, “I think the president’s briefings that were done this week were excellent, and I think it’s obvious to everyone that there’s a focus on the data, that they’re closely monitoring the situation.” He also falsely claimed that it’s been “established” that “ children are not significant spreaders,” when in fact the science on this issue remains unsettled.
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https://medium.com/team-human/the-anti-human-religion-of-silicon-valley-ac37d5528683
The Anti-Human Religion of Silicon Valley
How an esoteric Russian religion still fuels the digital apocalypse
There is a Silicon Valley religion, and it’s one that doesn’t particularly care for people — at least not in our present form. Technologists may pretend to be led by a utilitarian, computational logic devoid of superstition, but make no mistake: There is a prophetic belief system embedded in the technologies and business plans coming out of Google, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, among others.
It is a techno-utopian and deeply anti-human sensibility, born out of a little-known confluence of American and Soviet New Age philosophers, scientists, and spiritualists who met up in the 1980s hoping to prevent nuclear war — but who ended up hatching a worldview that’s arguably as dangerous to the human future as any atom bomb.
I tell the story in my new book, :{Team Human}:, because it’s one I have yet to see documented anywhere else. I pieced it together through interviews with some of the people involved in the Esalen “track two diplomacy” program. The idea was to forge new lines of communication between the Cold War powers by bringing some of the USSR’s leading scientists and spiritualists to the Esalen Institute to mix with their counterparts in the United States. Maybe we all have common goals?
They set up a series of events at Esalen’s Big Sur campus, where everyone could hear about each other’s work and dreams at meetings during the day and hot tub sessions into the night. That’s how some of the folks from Stanford Research Institute and Silicon Valley, who would one day be responsible for funding and building our biggest technology firms, met up with Russia’s “cosmists.” They were espousing a form of science fiction gnosticism that grew out of the Russian Orthodox tradition’s emphasis on immortality. The cosmists were a big hit, and their promise of life extension technologies quickly overtook geopolitics as the primary goal of the conferences.
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption.
The cosmists talked about reassembling human beings, atom by atom, after death, moving one’s consciousness into a robot and colonizing space. The cosmists pulled it all together for the fledgling American transhumanists: They believed human beings could not only transcend the limits of our mortal shell but also manifest physically through new machines. With a compellingly optimistic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gusto, the cosmists told America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way to beat death.
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption. The stuff robots and computers could reproduce was the best stuff about us, anyway.
The idea that lit up the turned-on technoculture was that technology would be our evolutionary partner and successor — that humans are essentially computational, and computers could do computation better. Any ideas that could be construed to support this contention were embraced. And so Stanford professor René Girard— whose work had much broader concerns — was appreciated almost solely for his assertion that human beings are not original or creative but purely imitative creatures. And, even more thrilling to future tech titans like **Peter Thiel**, that the apocalypse was indeed coming, but it was the humans’ own damn fault.
No less popular to this day are the “captology” classes of Stanford’s B.J. Fogg, who teaches how to design interfaces that manipulate human behavior as surely as a slot machine can. According to the department’s website, “The purpose of the Persuasive Technology Lab is to create insight into how computing products—from websites to mobile phone software—can be designed to change people’s beliefs and behaviors.” Toward what? Toward whatever behaviors technologies can induce — and away from those it can’t.
As a result, we have Facebook using algorithms to program people’s emotions and actions. We have Uber using machine learning to replace people’s employment. We have Google developing artificial intelligence to replace human consciousness. And we have Amazon extracting the life’s blood of the human marketplace to deliver returns to the abstracted economy of stocks and derivatives.
The anti-human agenda of technologists might not be so bad — or might never be fully realized — if it didn’t dovetail so neatly with the anti-human agenda of corporate capitalism. Each enables the other, reinforcing an abstract, growth-based scheme of infinite expansion — utterly incompatible with human life or the sustainability of our ecosystem. They both depend on a transcendent climax where the chrysalis of matter is left behind and humanity is reborn as pure consciousness or pure capital.
We are not being beaten by machines, but by a league of tech billionaires who have been taught to believe that human beings are the problem and technology is the solution. We must become aware of their agenda and fight it if we are going to survive.
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ref
http://captology.stanford.edu/go/welcome?from=
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Giants peter p:
of the 199 power elite managers
(70 percent) are male. Eighty-four percent are whites of Euro-
pean descent. The 199 power elite managers hold 147 graduate
degrees, including 59 MBAs, 22 JDs, 23 PhDs, and 35 MA/MS
degrees. Almost all have attended elite private colleges, with 28
attending Harvard or Stanford.
People from twenty nations...
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enstrom oreskes:
John Hennessy - Stanford University
https://www.stanford.edu/~hennessy/
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Departure of Stanford's president ends a transformational era - LA Times
www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-stanford-president-20150613-story.html
2.
Stanford divided on tobacco dollars – The Mercury News
www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/05/stanford-divided-on-tobacco-dollars/
May 5, 2007 - A group of prominent Stanford University academics are urging the school ... with leaders such as President John Hennessy and School of Medicine ... cited industry-sponsored work by UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom, ...
Tobacco Gun for Hire James Enstrom, Willie Soon and the Climate ...
https://www.desmogblog.com/.../tobacco-gun-hire-james-enstrom-willie-soon-climate...
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Academics debate use of tobacco industry money | PopMatters
www.popmatters.com/article/academics-debate-use-of-tobacco-industry-money/
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Tobacco.org : Quotes
archive.tobacco.org/quotes.php?starting_at=850
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:{[PDF]:(style="font-weight:bold;cursor:auto;margin:0px 3px 0px 0px;float:left"):}:To: Viscount Monckton of Brenchley Cc: u - SourceWatch
www.sourcewatch.org/.../S_Fred_Singer_emails_about_attacking_Merchants_of_Dou...
1.
http://gcep.stanford.edu/about/sponsors.html
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http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/20/mark-jacobson-renewables/
Ditching Fossil Fuels and Switching to 100% Renewables No Problem, Says Stanford Study and Hawaii goes for 100%. See Solar. 6/15.
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http://grist.org/news/stanford-will-dump-its-coal-company-investments/
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Battle Heats Up Over Stanford Watering Golf Course Instead of Protecting Endangered Steelhead During Extreme Drought
The dam blocks the migration of...
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Stanford Professors Urge Withdrawal From Fossil Fuel Investments
Suzanne Goldenberg / The Guardian
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Censoring spokes doctor-turned-critic
InJune 2005, U.S. National Public Radio's Snigdha Prakash reported:
"New documents obtained by NPRsuggest that even as Merck was making Vioxx into a bestseller, the company was putting pressure on independent doctors. The company's apparent aim: to keep them from discussing evidence of Vioxx's potential safety problems. The documents show that Merck exerted pressure not only on individual doctors, but also on several of the nation's top medical schools."
Merck's campaigned to recruit physician Gurkirpal Singh of Stanford University as a Vioxx spokesperson"because he was a senior researcher on a seminal study of arthritis patients." Starting in 1998, Singh became a Vioxx booster and was paid $2,500 per speaking engagement by Merck. However, in 2000, a study suggesting heart problems among Vioxx users worried Dr. Singh and he requested the data. According to Dr. Singh in an interview with NPR:
"I wanted to know how many heart attacks, how many strokes, how many deaths were occurring in each one of the groups, and what were these actual number of patients at risk, and how many ended up having an event."
Merck originally promised to share the information with Dr. Singh, but never did. When Dr. Singh began including his concerns in his public presentations on Vioxx, Merck began closely tracking his activities. According to NPR, almost a dozen Merck executives were involved in tracking Dr. Singh. According to an October 4, 2000 email sent by a senior, regional executive who had supervised his scientific handlers:
"I have in excess of 80 e-mails pertaining to interactions with Dr. Singh from March 1999 to present. The following is my best recollection of what has happened. Because of the sensitive nature of the following, I strongly encourage you not to share with anyone unless they clearly have a need to know."
As Singh's public criticisms of Vioxx continued (he was by this time, promoting Vioxx's rival, Celebrex, while being paid by Pfizer), [17] Merck began calling his superiors at the university.According to Stanford medical professor James Fries:
"(I) received a call from a medical director at Merck, stating that someone on my staff had been making wild and irresponsible public statements about the cardiovascular side effects of Vioxx." According to Dr. Fries, the representative "hinted there would be repercussions for Fries and Stanford if Singh's statements didn't stop. He was left with the sense that Merck's financial support to Stanford was at risk." [18]
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