Nature jrnl
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an 5 26 thom
And let’s not forget Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature and the Queensland University of Technology study, tilted the X algorithm in mid-July 2024 to dramatically boost his own posts and Republican-leaning accounts. After that change, views on Musk’s posts surged 138 percent, and right-wing accounts saw engagement leaps that progressive accounts simply never get any more on billionaire-run social media.
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2 26 MANY yt ON CENSORSHIP ~ KARA?
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DUCK 5 26
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rawstory.com
Researchers expose algorithm skew that boosted Trump in 2024
2 days ago
](https://www.rawstory.com/trump-2676859361/)
- [
truthout.org
- [
TikTok Algorithm Favored Conservative Content in 2024 POTUS Race, Study Suggests
23 hours ago
](https://truthout.org/articles/tiktok-algorithm-favored-conservative-content-in-2024-potus-race-study-suggests/)
A NEW study examining the algorithms of the social media site TikTok appears to suggest that content users received on the platform skewed more politically conservative during the 2024 presidential election, regardless of a user’s personal preferences.
Researchers Talal Rahwan and Yasir Zaki at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus created over 300 “dummy” botaccountstomimic real-life users during the 2024 race. The bots “lived” in Democratic-leaning New York, Republican-leaning Texas, and the “purple” state of Georgia.
After creating the accounts, the researchers trained some to follow and react positively to Democratic messaging, while others were trained to support Republican content. Afterward, the researchers monitored the accounts’ “For You” pages for 27 weeks during the campaign, analyzing over 280,000 videos that were suggested by TikTok.
For the Republican bots, the outcome was predictable: the algorithm resulted in an 11.5 percent higher chance that they’d see more Republican-leaning content than Democratic-leaning posts.
But for the Democratic bots, it was different. Those accounts were 7.5 percent more likely to see Republican posts than Democratic ones.
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Owda’s account had 1.4 million followers, she said.
By Sharon Zhang , TruthoutJanuary 29, 2026
“Our findings show partisan imbalances in political information exposure on a platform dominated by algorithmic recommendations, with implications for platform governance and democratic discourse,” the researchers wrote in their study, which was published in *Nature*this week.
“The question arises whether the partisan content recommended on TikTok is skewed towards one party over the other,” the authors added.
TikTok responded to the study’s findings, claiming that its conclusions were largely incorrect. In a statement, the company stated:
This artificial experiment with fake accounts does not reflect how people actually use TikTok. In reality, people discover and watch a wide variety of content on our platform which they continuously shape and can control through more than a dozen tools the authors seem unaware of.
But the study’s authors defended their conclusions.
“Our finding isn’t just about reinforcement; Democratic accounts were shown significantly more anti-Democratic content than Republican accounts were shown anti-Republican content,” Rahwan said, speaking to *The Guardian* about the study’s findings.
“The algorithm wasn’t just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them,” Rahwan added.
How social media sites design their algorithms — and whether they are skewed toward one political party over another, accidentally or purposefully — could have real repercussions for elections and the political direction of the country. Indeed, according to data collected from Pew Research, 57 percent of Americans used digital devices “often” to get their news in 2024, higher than any other media, including television (33 percent) and the radio (11 percent).
“In an environment where margins are thin, systematic differences in the kind of political information recommended to tens of millions of young voters are worth taking seriously,” Zaki said.
TikTok Algorithm Favored Conservative Content in 2024 POTUS Race, Study Suggests | Truthout
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Nature
https://www.nature.com › articles › d41586-026-01314-0
TikTok's algorithm systematically skewed to the right during the 2024 ...
2 days agoAn audit of TikTok's recommendation algorithm using hundreds of automated 'bot' accounts during the 2024 US presidential election finds that the 'For You' feed of the platform steered ...
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Scott Galloway on TikTok, Musk, and the Radicalization Pipeline | Best of Lincoln Square
959 views Premiered 3 hours ago #politics #lincolnsquare #democracy
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an 11 25
Seven states are one flood away from a toxic sludge site spilling into the community.
Mother Jones reported Friday, "Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for 80 percent" of the sites. "Most of this risk is already locked in."
More than 5,500 toxic sites across the U.S. could face coastal flooding by 2100, threatening to spill contaminants into surrounding neighborhoods within the lifetimes of Generations Alpha and Beta, new research warns.
Scientists at the University of California found that a wide range of hazardous facilities are vulnerable, including sites handling sewage, toxic waste, oil, gas and other pollutants that are not fully protected from sea level rise and severe flooding.
"After examining 23 coastal states and Puerto Rico, scientists found that flood risk is far from evenly distributed. Florida, New Jersey, California, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas account for nearly 80 percent of the hazardous sites expected to be at risk by 2100," the report said.
The project examined 47,600 coastal facilities in the U.S., finding that about 5,500 are at risk of frequent flooding that could send toxic materials into nearby communities.
Current environmental safeguards do little more than delay the danger. Future generations will be forced either to build stronger containment systems that can withstand flooding or face the consequences.
“Restricting greenhouse gas emissions to the low emissions scenario makes little difference in terms of the number of projected sites at risk in the near term (2050) but would reduce the number of at-risk sites from 5,500 to 5,138 (a reduction of 362 or 7 percent of sites) in the long term," the scientists found.
Read the full study at Nature Communications.
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an 6 25
The 1973 dystopian sci-fi movie "Soylent Green "— which starred Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson and took place in 2022 — depicted a hellish world in which widespread pollution and global warming had led to severe food and water shortages as well as widespread hunger and desperation. Now, in 2025, a newly released study finds that severe weather is threatening crops in a major way — and that the production of some key crops in the United States could decrease by as much as 50 percent by the end of the 21st Century.
The study was published by Nature.com on Wednesday, June 19 and was, according to CNN's Laura Paddison, "eight years in the making." It was conducted by a group of scientists, including Solomon Hsiang of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and illustrates the link between food supply and climate change.
"Of the many impacts of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis," Paddison reports in an article published by CNN that day, "damage to the global food system is one of the most terrifying. But the overall impact of climate change on crops — and how much it can be offset by farmers' adaptations — has been hard to establish and hotly debated…. The scientists analyzed six crops — maize, soybeans, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum — in more than 12,000 regions across 54 countries.Together, these crops provide more than two thirds of humanity's calories."
READ MORE:Trump's new greed deal the ultimate act of destruction the prophets have predicted
The CNN reporter continues, "They also measured how real-world farmers are adapting to climate change, from changing crop varieties to adjusting irrigation, to calculate the overall impact of global warming. Their findings are stark."
Paddison notes that according to the study, "every 1 degree Celsius the world warms above pre-industrial levels will drag down global food production by an average of 120 calories per person per day." Hsiang warns that this will increase food prices.
Hsiang told CNN, "If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that's basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast…. This is a major problem. It's incredibly expensive. As a species, we have never confronted anything like this."
Paddison reports, "Wheat, soy and maize — high value crops for a lot of the world — will be especially badly affected, the study found. If humans keep burning large amounts of fossil fuels, maize production could fall by 40 percent in the grain belt of the U.S., eastern China, central Asia, southern Africa and the Middle East; wheat production could fall by 40 percent in the U.S., China, Russia and Canada; and soybean yields could fall 50 percent in the U.S."
READ MORE:'Catastrophe': Trump uses 'phony energy emergency' to 'illegally' destroy state laws
The CNN journalist adds, "The only staple crop that might be able to avoid substantial losses is rice, which can benefit from warmer nighttime temperatures…. Global warming will be particularly devastating for the U.S., where it's projected to reduce yields by 40 percent to 50 percent for all staple crops except rice, Hsiang said."
READ MORE:How climate change could upend the American Dream
*Read the study at Nature.com and find CNN's coverage here.
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ctr-pt: to covid bailout bill as dis cap'l NEW STORY? WE CAN SAVE $ AND PPL BY GOING GREEN
https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-crisis-economic-growth-2645724784.html
Every country around the world would see economic gains from combating the climate crisis and trying to keep global heating within the bounds of the Paris agreement, according to a_{ new study published in Nature Communications.}_
The straw man argument against taking action on the climate crisis is that the cost of limiting emissions and investing in green infrastructure is too steep and would cripple economies. It turns out, according to the research, that the opposite is true.
In fact, the study found that if nations around the world fail to curtail greenhouse gas emissions within the bounds of the Paris agreement, the global economy will lose anywhere from $150 trillion to nearly $800 trillion by the year 2100, as CBS News reported. The upper end of the range is if countries fail to meet their current commitments, which are inadequate to meet the Paris agreement as they are expected to lead to 3 degrees Celsius in warming.
The study's authors, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and other Chinese institutions, billed their findings as a self-preservation strategy for government, according to The Guardian.GUK
The researchers calculated the potential benefits of emissions reductions by looking at the social welfare aspects of cutting greenhouse gases and its affect on economic growth. They found that the benefits from cutting emissions would provide the largest boost to developing countries with large populations of poor and vulnerable people, who are most likely to be negatively affected by droughts, floods, fires, storms and food shortages, as The Guardian reported.
While all countries would benefit in the long term, the most immediate benefits would go to developing countries with high emissions, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and China, according to The Guardian.
The Paris agreement is composed of voluntary commitments known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, made by each country in the accord. The main aspect of the commitments is to reduce greenhouse emissions by cutting the burning of fossil fuels, thus reducing global warming and the adverse impacts of warming. However, many countries are witnessing economic damage from the coronavirus lockdowns and are rethinking their commitment to their NDCs. Already, government bailouts for the fossil fuel industry and the airline industry are in the works, as well as a rollback of their carbon emission reductions, as CBS News reported.
"A number of studies have proved that current [NDCs] are not enough to achieve the global warming targets," said Biying Yu, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study, as CBS News reported.
The research shows that the choice between climate action and economic growth is in fact a false dichotomy. The authors' work concludes that countries could reach their climate goals and at the same time see an increase in their net income.
According to CBS News, Yu and her team calculated ideal strategies for countries to improve their NDCs, minimize economic losses and maximize gains. They found that if nations are able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the net global economic benefit would range between $127 trillion and $616 trillion by the end of the century.
"Early and quick action will provide a better chance to close the widening emissions gap, even though a large amount of abatement cost would occur in the short term," said the study.
"The literature overwhelmingly shows the economic benefits of serious mitigation efforts exceed the costs in the long run," said Noah Kaufman, a climate and energy economist from Columbia University, to CBS News.
However, Yu is concerned that governments will be short-sighted and balk at the upfront cost of investing in infrastructure to combat the climate crisis. She also sees that the climate emergency takes commitments from every country.
"Combating climate change is not a matter for one country. It requires collective action and cooperation from all countries around the world," Yu explained, as CBS News reported. "Let's work together and save ourselves"...
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Evidence-based strategies to combat scientific misinformation
Nature Climate Change (2019) | Download Citation
Abstract
Nowhere has the impact of scientific misinformation been more profound than on the issue of climate change in the United States. Effective responses to this multifaceted problem have been slow to develop, in large part because many experts have not only underestimated its impact, but have also overlooked the underlying institutional structure, organizational power and financial roots of misinformation. Fortunately, a growing body of sophisticated research has emerged that can help us to better understand these dynamics and provide the basis for developing a coordinated set of strategies across four related areas (public inoculation, legal strategies, political mechanisms and financial transparency) to thwart large-scale misinformation campaigns before they begin, or after they have taken root.
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mann bk ch 12: 2007 big year: inc truth,
IPCC ARA 4, Nobel
even Luntz 180 after 2002 memo
ARA ~ pillars of deniers
but 2008 Nature jrnl artlmisrepped, --> GW stopped meme --> Geo Will Wapo op ed; superFreakonomics 2009
Jrnl G res defreitas, carter amd ---
M&M PNAS
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