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MMA

Pro-Trump podcaster Kyle Forgeard talks about YouTube's event during Trump's inauguration weekend

Foregeard contrasted his Trump interview getting “deleted two years ago" with a TV at the company's event showing “on repeat ... all the content that people had done with Trump leading up to the election”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 03/07/25 11:39 AM EST

Video

From the March 5, 2025, edition of the Full Send Podcast, streamed on YouTube

ANDREW TATE (GUEST): I think the CEO to YouTube has changed now, hasn't it?

KYLE FORGEARD (HOST): Yeah. We met him at the inauguration and it was crazy. So like we said, our Trump interview got deleted two years ago.

TATE: I remember that. That was insane.

FORGEARD: It was insane. Right? So and then we went to this -- it was a YouTube party, the CEO of Google was there, the CEO of YouTube, and it was an inauguration event. So like, PBD [Patrick Bet-David] was there too, like Lex Fridman and then there was a TV and on repeat it was all the content that people had done with Trump leading up to the election.

TATE: Wow.

FORGEARD: And I'm like looking in the corner and I'm looking at the TV and like, “This is a fucking YouTube event.” Like two years ago, our shit got deleted with Trump and that was his first podcast he ever did. I think they're obviously, I mean, they're probably following the money at the same time, but the YouTube CEO seemed like, he knew I was an O.G. He knew all about our channel, so it seems like he's -- They're obviously going to have to get a lot more in touch with everything, right?

//

How the Nelk Boys went from viral pranksters to right-wing media stars

02/21/24 10:29 AM EST

2. ### YouTube let right-wing figures undermine the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast

10/31/24 5:03 AM EDT

3. ### Beyond Andrew Tate: Meet the misogynistic “manosphere” influencers proliferating across social media

03/16/23

===

YouTube let right-wing figures undermine the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast

Media Matters found at least 22 right-wing channels on YouTube that pushed election misinformation from May through August, such as baselessly claiming the 2024 contest would be “rigged” against Trump

Written by Payton Armstrong, Jack Winstanley, Noah Dowe, Ben Van Bloem & Kayla Gogarty

Published 10/31/24 mma

After rolling back its election misinformation policy last year, YouTube allowed right-wing media figures to undermine confidence in the 2024 election results even before any votes were cast, with streamers asserting that “the only way this election can be won from the left is if it's stolen,” suggesting that “illegal ballots” might be “slipped in” in Pennsylvania, and claiming that Democrats are trying “to rig and steal the election” including with an “illegal alien push.”

In December 2020, after states certified their election results, YouTube began removing content with false claims that widespread fraud had changed the outcome of the election, but the platform reversed that policy in June 2023, saying that it would “stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.” (The decision was cheered by right-wing media.)

Over the last year, right-wing creators have exploited YouTube’s policy rollback, especially in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election. In July, for instance, Media Matters reported that after becoming co-chair of the Republican National Committee in March, Lara Trump repeatedly engaged in election denial on her show that streams on YouTube.

Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder even acknowledged the policy change during an August stream on the platform, saying, “Here’s another way that they try to steal this election from you. And we’re allowed to say that on YouTube now, which is great.”

New Media Matters study finds hundreds of videos on YouTube with election misinformation

• In a new study, Media Matters reviewed YouTube content streamed or uploaded between May 1 and August 31 by 30 right-wing channels or channels that hosted notable right-wing figures. We found 286 videos — totaling at least 44 million views and including at least 93 monetized videos — that contained misinformation about the 2020, 2022, and/or 2024 elections.

According to our study, former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was the most prolific election misinformer, accounting for 77 of the 286 videos, and right-wing streamer Benny Johnson had the most videos that we observed with preroll ads.

We found that in the two months after WABC canceled Giuliani’s radio shows (May 10 through July 12), he relentlessly claimed on YouTube that the 2020 election was “stolen” and Democrats were “going to cheat” in the 2024 election. More details on these findings can be found here.

We also found Johnson pushed election misinformation in dozens of monetized YouTube videos from May through August. These videos — which each included preroll ads, paid promotions, and/or Super Chats — have earned millions of views. More details on these findings can be found here.

• ## On YouTube, right-wing figures are priming their audiences to doubt the 2024 election results if Trump loses

• In the months leading up to the 2024 election, conservative media figures on YouTube have feverishly prepared their audiences to doubt any result other than a Trump victory. Among the 30 channels we examined, we found at least 22 channels that have echoed false claims about the 2024 election, totaling at least 115 videos.

These claims included that the election process is “rigged” against Trump, that the legal cases against him constitute “election interference,” that Democrats want and are enabling noncitizens to vote in order to win the election, and that Kamala Harris was “illegally installed” as the Democratic nominee in a “coup” against Joe Biden.

• ## Right-wing figures portrayed the election process as “rigged” against Trump

• Ahead of the 2024 election, right-wing figures on YouTube have repeatedly suggested that the election will be “compromised” and Democrats will “cheat” and “resort to electoral dirty tricks,” including the use of alleged “illegal ballots.” Some figures, like Rudy Giuliani, have even continued to parrot baseless or debunked claims that the 2020 election was “fixed” and full of “outright cheating,” suggesting that “the fraud in the 2020 election has to be addressed if you don't want it to repeat itself in 2024.”

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

• • Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Jeremy Carl said he hoped Trump “takes no prisoners” because of “this system just being completely rigged against him in the context of the election and everything that’s going on.” On an episode of American Moment’s Moment of Truth podcast, Carl said, “We're going to have to do some incredibly forward things legally. We're going to need brave attorneys to say, ‘Yep, I’m good with that, that’s legal.’” YouTube, [5/13/24]

• • Salem Media’s Eric Metaxas said it was “very clear to me [the left] stole the last election.” Metaxas continued, “We need to be clear about this, that this is a wicked thing, and that they don't need to poll well if they know how to cheat, if they know how to game the system.” YouTube, [6/3/24]

• • Conservative streamer Benny Johnson suggested Democrats are “paying for votes with packs of cigarettes and welfare cards.” Johnson continued, “This is why I love the ‘too big to rig, too big to rig’ nomenclature of the Trump campaign this time around.” YouTube, [6/20/24]
• Video

Share

CitationFrom the June 20, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by Benny Johnson

• • Johnson also complained in June that Democrats can win Illinois only because the “hellscape city” of Chicago is a “rigged system.” Johnson: “There's your rigged system right there. How many of those people are actually voting, right? … How many of those people knew that they voted?” YouTube, [6/7/24]

• • Fox News host Greg Gutfeld suggested Democrats would “resort to electoral dirty tricks” with “the votes, legal or illegal,” admitting that he had “very little evidence on that, but that hasn’t stopped me before.” Co-host Jesse Watters added, “We have to win so big you can't rig.” YouTube, [5/13/24]

• • The Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson interviewed a Trump rally attendee who implied “dead people voted for Biden” in 2020 and claimed Democrats “let all these migrants in to vote.” After Conradson suggested that “illegal immigrants flooding across the border” were “probably going to vote in this next election,” the interviewee responded, “They’re trying to get the Democratic vote, but it’s not going to work.” YouTube, [5/23/24]

• • Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton argued “the 2024 election has already been compromised” and announced plans by his organization to sue states in order to “overcome the election rigging.” In a speech delivered at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference, Fitton — who has repeatedly attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 election with baseless allegations of voter fraud tied to Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines — decried “counting votes of ballots that arrive after election day” and said the practice was “illegal.” YouTube, [6/26/24; Media Matters, 2/25/21]

* Donald Trump Jr.: “Democrats to me today could show up on the evening of November 5 with five billion ballots … and with a straight face, tell us it was a landslide in the freest and fairest election in the history of the world.” In an interview conducted at the Republican National Convention, Trump Jr. argued “there’s nothing they won’t do.” YouTube, [7/18/24]

• • Conservative attorney Harmeet Dhillon called on Republicans to “overwhelm the margin of chicanery, shenanigans, and even outright cheating that the Democrats did in 2020.” Dhillon, who leads Trump’s “election integrity” operation in Arizona, continued, “The Democrats are so confident of winning, they could put up any regime puppet and expect to win the election.” YouTube, [7/23/24; Axios, 10/9/24]

• Video

CitationFrom a July 23, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by Just the News

• • Fox host Mark Levin said Democrats “will do anything for votes — imprison Trump, steal elections.” Speaking on his radio show which is also uploaded on YouTube, Levin alleged that Democrats would “change the electoral process” to get more votes. YouTube, [5/7/24]

• • Daily Wire host Michael Knowles accused “libs” of “doing everything they can to rig the election against Trump.” While discussing a new variant of COVID-19, Knowles asked, “Are the libs once again going to use COVID to shut down at least our country and then change all the election rules and rig the election for Joe Biden — again? Are they going to do that? They’re going to try.” YouTube, [5/14/24]

• • Knowles also claimed that “elections are rigged all the time” and argued “the people who oppose paper ballots want to rig the elections.” After the Baltimore City Council discovered a discrepancy “during a routine double check of results” which led to an overcount of 590 votes in a local race, Knowles stated: “The people who oppose paper ballots want to rig the elections. They want the elections to be riggable.” YouTube, [5/22/24; The Baltimore Sun, 5/17/24]

• • PBD Podcast co-host Vincent Oshana fearmongered that Biden would institute martial law in order to “shut down the election if they can.” Oshana: “I think this is one of their tactics if their cheating doesn't work. … I know they're going to try to do it because, obviously, we're seeing Trump as the frontrunner. Without a shadow of a doubt he's going to win unless something nefarious happens.” YouTube, [7/9/24; Media Matters, 5/13/24]

• • On the PBD Podcast, podcaster Bret Weinstein said Democrats “cheat in every conceivable way” and called to “defeat them so decisively that we get past the cheat margin.” Weinstein also declared, “Frankly, I don’t trust them. They cheat in every conceivable way that we can see, right? … And the question is, how far does that go? Do we really believe the people who would cheat in every conceivable way that we can see won’t cheat in ways that we can’t see? I find that unlikely.” YouTube, [8/23/24]

• • In an apparent attack on the owner of WABC, who canceled Rudy Giuliani’s radio show in May, Giuliani suggested it's “more likely” Democrats “cheat in 2024” if “we are submitted to the dictate of John Catsimatidis.” Giuliani also asked, “Isn't it much more likely they won't cheat if their prior cheating is laid out and they end this protection they're getting for what they did in 2020, which nobody else would get other than crooked Biden Democrats?” YouTube, [5/13/24]

• • Giuliani called on his audience to watch his show on YouTube to “send a message to WABC that you want news that comes out about the 2020 election because it might help prevent cheating in the 2024 election.” Giuliani also listed supposed examples of fraud, including “news like 375,000 ballots are missing in Georgia, news like 3,000 ballots were discovered double-counted.” Notably, these claims have been debunked by elections officials, as well as news outlets. YouTube, [5/20/24; USA Today, 5/23/24; The Associated Press, 11/28/23]

• • Giuliani argued that “if we get cowered into not talking about the 2020 election, they're going to feel much more empowered to cheat heavily in 2024.” Giuliani went on to declare that Democrats are “going to cheat in 2024” because “Democrats have probably cheated in every election since Boss Tweed.” He added, “It's a crooked party; crooked parties cheat.” YouTube, [5/27/24]

• • Giuliani baselessly claimed that “the capacity for cheating is well known” in Arizona. The comments came as Giuliani celebrated that Trump was leading then-candidate Biden in Arizona polls. YouTube, [6/10/24]

• • Giuliani argued that “the fraud in the 2020 election has to be addressed if you don’t want it to repeat itself in 2024.” Giuliani added, “We can’t be stopped from talking about it, as, you know, they try to do with me.” YouTube, [6/12/24]

• • Giuliani baselessly claimed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro “helped to steal the 2020 election.” Giuliani argued, “It’s Democrat crooked Philadelphia and Pittsburgh where the election was fixed.” YouTube, [7/22/24]

• • Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman argued Democrats have “been cheating every election … going back to 1960.” Goodman continued, “Every election we’ve won, we beat the cheat.” YouTube, [8/12/24]

• • Giuliani also said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson had “already committed election fraud in the 2024 election … a continuation of what she did in 2020, in trying to fix the election of 2020.” Giuliani argued Benson had “already committed election fraud in the 2024 election with regard to taking Trump off the ballot,” even though Benson herself clearly articulated her opposition to such a measure in 2023. YouTube, [8/29/24; The Washington Post, 9/13/23]

• • Right-wing radio host Steve Deace said Democrats would be “dropping ballots” and “bussing people in … to keep the spigot going until they get what they want” on Election Day. Deace continued, “All they’re trying to do is make her credible enough so they can fortify this thing at the end here.” YouTube, [7/24/24]

• • Deace also alleged that the Democrats’ “game plan” is to get polls “within their narrative margin to justify cheating.” Deace explained, “Biden is not gone, OK, because they couldn't get the votes they wanted, but because no one was going to buy that he could get the votes that they got.” YouTube, [8/28/24]

• • Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder: “The only way this election can be won from the left is if it's stolen.” He prefaced the claim by saying, “I don't care if we're not on YouTube anymore.” Crowder, who also streams on Rumble, was demonetized on YouTube in 2021, meaning he has seemingly been unable to earn ad revenue from his streams on the platform. YouTube, [7/18/24; The Nation, 7/11/23; The Verge, 3/30/21]

• Video

CitationFrom a July 18, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by StevenCrowder

• • Crowder also announced plans to have “boots on the ground” on Election Day because “this already is election theft.” During the stream, Crowder called on viewers to “help out” if they are in any of several listed cities, stating that they would be “compensated.” YouTube, [8/12/24]

• • While promoting his Election Day plans, Crowder declared that “the steal is already taking place” and said he was “willing to bet that YouTube is going to suspend us.” Crowder also suggested that his “electoral integrity map” would mean “no more Arizonas, no more pipes bursting in the middle of the night with no substantiation and they change the story the next day.” YouTube, [8/14/24]

• • Lara Trump claimed that “as the co-chair” of the Republican National Committee, she was “well aware of all the ways that they are trying to sway the election and rig it in every single state.” Trump continued, “The problem is that the Democrats want to make it easier to cheat and harder to vote for people, and we’re trying to do the opposite.” YouTube, [6/4/24]

• • In another apparent attack on Democrats, Lara Trump declared: “We don't cheat at the ballot box. We don't do crazy things with drop boxes all over the country. We don't allow illegals to vote.” YouTube, [6/5/24]

• • On Tucker Carlson’s show, The Blaze’s Jason Whitlock accused California of “manipulat[ing] voting,” and Carlson claimed Kamala Harris “didn’t win any elections” and was “chosen by the unions in California and installed.” Carlson also said, “There is no democracy in California. It’s fake.” Whitlock added that “they have a system in place to manipulate voting and all that.” YouTube, [8/23/24]

• ## Right-wing figures called the multiple legal cases against Trump “election interference led by Joe Biden”

• Several right-wing pundits made efforts to repeatedly claim that the legal cases against Trump are really “lawfare” or “election interference” intended to tarnish his image and overwhelm his supporters. Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer and frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room, was especially prolific in blaming these cases directly on the supposed political strategy of Biden and other Democrats.

Trump has faced four criminal cases. In May, a jury found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records after the presentation of extensive dockets of evidence detailing many of his violations of New York law. In the federal election subversion case, special counsel Jack Smith recently released documents revealing some of the evidence against Trump. In the other cases, the evidence related to the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago has been well documented, and the Georgia indictment against Trump relied at least partially on public accounts of Trump asking Gov. Brian Kemp to “find 11,780 votes.”

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

• • Appearing on The Benny Show in May, Article III Project founder and Trump ally Mike Davis claimed that Trump’s criminal hush money trial was “obviously Democrat lawfare and election interference.” In another appearance, Davis promised “retribution” if Trump won in November, saying, “We are going to crush you after January 20, 2025, after what you've done. … There is absolutely going to be retribution.” YouTube, [5/13/24, 5/31/24]

• • During an interview uploaded to Article III Project’s YouTube page, Davis called for Trump to “ensure there are severe legal, financial, and political consequences to this Republic ending lawfare and election interference led by Joe Biden.” He later called for revenge for the legal cases against Trump and said “we need to give them retribution.” YouTube, [5/22/24, 7/3/24]

• Video

CitationFrom a May 22, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by The Article III Project

• • On YouTube, Davis repeatedly attacked the legal cases against Trump, many times asserting that they were “lawfare” and a form of “election interference.” On May 30, Davis complained: “This is lawfare, this is election interference, this is a criminal conspiracy to violate the … constitutional rights of Trump.” In another video, Davis also referenced the cases, criticizing “this Biden Democrat lawfare and election interference on many different fronts, the four criminal indictments” as a “house of cards.” YouTube, [5/30/24, 7/3/24]

• • Davis claimed prosecutions were “blatant lawfare and election interference.” He argued that the cases were “unconstitutional” and “part of the Democrats’ criminal conspiracy against President Trump.” In a later appearance, he said that Democrats had “crossed the Rubicon.” YouTube, [5/20/24, 6/7/24]

• • Davis criticized “unprecedented republic-ending lawfare and election interference by President Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland.” Davis again blamed Biden for having “brought our country to the brink with this republic-ending lawfare and election interference” in a later appearance. YouTube, [7/15/24, 7/17/24]

• • Davis also criticized Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump’s hush money case, and directly accused him of election interference. “He set the sentencing hearing for like four days before the Republican National Convention starts,” Davis complained, calling it “obvious election interference by this judge — continued election interference by this judge.” In a later appearance, Davis called Merchan “the Forrest Gump of this Biden-Democrat lawfare against President Trump.” YouTube, [6/4/24, 6/10/24]

• • In one appearance, Davis called for Merchan, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and other “bad actors” to be arrested and charged with “criminal conspiracy,” calling the hush money case against Trump “blatant Biden-Democrat lawfare and election interference.” “Frankly, after January 20, 2025, the Trump 47 Justice Department should arrest and charge Judge Merchan and Alvin Bragg ... and all these bad actors, charge them with criminal conspiracy.” YouTube, [6/14/24]

• Video

CitationFrom a June 14, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by The Article III Project

• • Davis attacked DOJ officials and claimed they were supporting “republic-ending lawfare and election interference” and “political persecution.”He complained that “all of this unprecedented, republic-ending lawfare and election interference by President Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, and their special counsel, Jack Smith, … this is political persecution.” Davis later said, “This is obviously election interference, continued Biden and Kamala lawfare,” claiming, “Jack Smith once again is ignoring the law.” YouTube, [7/15/24, 8/28/24]

• • On PBD Podcast, Tom Fitton declared that “the election already is compromised” because of Trump’s criminal trials. Fitton added, “If Trump loses, many people are rightly going to say, well, they had their thumb on the scale, so it's no surprise.” YouTube, [6/7/24; Media Matters, 5/13/24]

• • Trump campaign fundraiser and political adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle claimed the cases against Trump are simply “efforts to undermine election integrity.” Guilfoyle added that “all these people are working together in concert to try to undermine American elections, to try to defeat Donald Trump because they don't want to face him at the ballot box, and bankrolling these efforts — this lawfare against him.” YouTube, [5/9/24]

• • On NTD News, former Trump national security adviser Kash Patel said the guilty verdicts in Trump’s hush money trial are part of a “system of rigged election-interfering justice.” “And that is a loss for the world, not just America,” Patel said. “So we’ve got to get behind Donald Trump's movement, and make sure that we can fix this system of rigged, election-interfering justice.” YouTube, [5/30/24]

• • Just the News, No Noise host Amanda Head declared that the prosecutions against Trump were “election interference.” YouTube, [7/10/24]

• • Rudy Giuliani argued that Trump’s New York hush money trial was “a political prosecution intended for the purpose of rigging the 2024 election.” He also claimed “these are the kinds of verdicts that occur in dictatorships and Third World and banana republic governments.” YouTube, [5/30/24]

• • Giuliani directly attacked the courts and prosecutors in Trump’s cases, claiming that “they're working on a massive election interference conspiracy, and they're one part of it.” YouTube, [6/7/24]

• • Gateway Pundit host Elijah Schaffer claimed that the criminal prosecutions against Trump are “lawfare cases” and “the goal is to try to get him removed off the ballot or to put him in a place where he can't run — like, kill him.” YouTube, [6/6/24]

• ## Right-wing figures claimed that Democrats want — or are enabling — noncitizens to vote so they’ll win the election

• Several right-wing media figures and outlets on YouTube peddled baseless claims that the Democratic Party is actively courting noncitizens and allowing them into the country for the purpose of ensuring a “permanent Democrat majority.” Many of these claims, including that Democrats are “fine with the possibility of voter fraud” or that they “just don't want a fair and free election,” were made during discussions of the SAVE Act, which is Republican-championed legislation aimed at making it illegal for noncitizens to vote, even though noncitizen voting is already illegal and extremely rare.

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

• • In a June 17 video, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro suggested that Democrats who oppose the SAVE Act are “fine with the possibility of voter fraud.” Shapiro said: “Why Democrats would oppose this is absolutely beyond me. Unless they are very, very much fine with the possibility of people not actually showing ID to vote. Which suggests they are fine with the possibility of voter fraud.” YouTube, [6/17/24]

• • In a video posted in August, Shapiro characterized Democrats’ voting rights initiatives as “full-scale national ballot harvesting.” He stated, “So all of the talk about how, ‘No, don't worry. Illegal immigration, that's never going to be a matter of voting or demography or anything like that.’ Well, then why are Democrats so hellfire bent on actually amnesty-ing 10 to 15 million people? They've already said they're going to do this, by the way. This is their comprehensive immigration reform plan, a pathway to citizenship, by which they mean everybody here illegally gets citizenship in the hopes that they will all vote Democrat.” YouTube, [8/21/24]

• • Benny Johnson claimed opponents of the SAVE Act “want illegal criminal aliens to vote in our election.” YouTube, [7/11/24]

• • Johnson also claimed in a monetized video that “alarming numbers of people” should not be on voter rolls, including “criminal aliens.” Johnson speculated that “the steal is on to actually get people to deliver ballots, early ballots, and they're not American citizens,” and he asked Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump how she would “stop that.” YouTube, [8/19/24, 8/19/24]
• Video

CitationFrom an August 19, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by Benny Johnson

• • In another stream, Johnson claimed that Democrats have a “goal of bringing in 30 million criminal aliens” in order to ensure a Democrat victory. Johnson claimed, “Joe Biden only ‘won’ the election by 40,000-some-odd votes. So if you bring in 30 million new people, you're gonna be able to really scrape off the top the margins that you need forever to beat Republicans forever. Right? And we've already seen this with Kamala Harris, fake crowds, fake support, fake election, fake influencers, and a fake campaign.” YouTube, [8/23/24]

• • Johnson also questioned why Biden and Harris haven’t “closed the border,” saying “it’s obvious” and that “they want to horse trade amnesty through Congress” to ultimately get “30 million new Democrat voters and a permanent Democrat majority forever.” Johnson described a supposed plan to “rachet up the social pressure, rachet up the pain for the actual citizens of the country, until people just give in” to amnesty and ultimately give Democrats 30 million new voters. YouTube, [8/30/24]

• • In an interview streamed on YouTube, Project 2025 adviser and former Trump personal aide John McEntee claimed that Democrats “definitely want” noncitizens to vote. McEntee said: “Democrats will say, ‘Well, illegals can't vote.’ Like, for sure some do and even if they don't know they are, people are filling out the ballots.” YouTube, [5/1/24; Media Matters, 2/16/24]

• • In an appearance on Fox News’ Hannity posted to YouTube, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller claimed that the Biden administration is making “a conscious choice to let illegal aliens vote.” YouTube, [7/11/24]

• • Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich claimed during an appearance on Hannity that was posted to YouTube that Harris wants “to have millions of immigrants come in illegally, vote illegally.” YouTube, [7/25/24]

• • In a video uploaded to Judicial Watch’s account, president Tom Fitton stated that “of course, they're [noncitizens] gonna be voting in elections.” Fitton said that “we have the issue of noncitizens voting — or the potential of noncitizens voting.” He also said that the law prevents it, “but there’s no check. … Of course they’re gonna be voting in elections.” He also called the current voter registration system “fraud waiting to happen,” adding that “that's one danger to our democracy with the presence of tens of millions of foreign nationals here in the United States.” YouTube, [5/15/24]

• • In another video, Fitton claimed that Democrats “want to make it easier for noncitizens to illegally vote in elections, generally, and they want, generally, noncitizens in principle to vote in all elections.” Fitton also claimed that votes from noncitizens are “essentially negating the votes of citizens.” YouTube, [7/17/24]

• • Fitton also stated during an appearance on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria, which was uploaded to YouTube, that “the Democrat-controlled administration is knowingly offering the opportunity to vote to these illegal migrants.” Fitton added that, “if you're registered to vote, even a voter ID isn't gonna stop you from voting because many aliens, both illegal and legal, have the necessary documents to show their ID in order to vote. So the more people you have here who are noncitizens, because we have virtually no effective checks in place, the increased likelihood of them voting. And a major study showed about 80% of aliens who vote tend to vote Democrat.” YouTube, [7/29/24]

John Solomon, editor-in-chief for Just the News,}: claimed that “the strategy and motive of the Democrats and liberals” was to “stack the decks in blue cities and blue states and, too, of course to open the door to noncitizen voting.” YouTube, [5/15/24; Media Matters, 10/17/19]|

• • On Just the News, No Noise, conservative lawyer and former assistant secretary of state Robert Charles, claimed that the Biden administration was “pulling illegals into this country as fast as they can pull them in, dispatching them at night to places like Portland, Maine, and middle of Montana, and trying to turn red states purple and then blue with these illegal votes.” Charles added, “The bottom line is: This is not just a random ‘might be’; this is a real thing. It is happening.” YouTube, [6/13/24]

• • Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform initiative and a Project 2025 contributor, claimed on Just the News, No Noise that “the evidence is clear” that noncitizens are voting. Von Spakovsky added, “It tells you something that, for example, on the alien voting issue, only five Democrats supported a bill to do something as simple as telling states: verify citizenship.” YouTube, [7/11/24; The Guardian, 7/10/24]
• Video

CitationFrom a July 11, 2024, video streamed on YouTube by Just the News

• • Right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec called on Republicans to “start gumming up the works” with lawsuits because of potential “illegal ballots” from noncitizens in Pennsylvania. After Real America’s Voice host Brian Glenn fearmongered about “how many illegals are registered to vote in this election,” Posobiec said, “You need to start gumming up the works because there’s no question that if those illegal ballots are slipped in, once they come out of those envelopes, we know that it is going to be counted as a vote for Joe Biden or, excuse me, Kamala Harris.” YouTube, [7/31/24]

• • Article III Project founder Mike Davis, appearing on Just the News, No Noise, claimed that “the next thing they're going to do is they're going to try to rig and steal the election … by registering illegal immigrants and other noncitizens to vote and make it very hard to get those illegal immigrants and other noncitizens off the rolls before November 5.” YouTube, [8/17/24; Media Matters, 2/29/24]

• • The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles claimed that the Biden administration has “imported tens of millions of illegal aliens” in an attempt to “rig the elections.” Knowles claimed, “We've seen record numbers of them come into the country. They're rolling out the red carpet for them. They're releasing them into the country. They're flying them to the center of the country in some cases, into crucial areas. Why are they doing that? They're doing that to rig the elections.” He also suggested that, short of winning the election, Democrats are “doing that to increase the population in their own states because seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned not by the number of citizens but just by the number of people.” YouTube, [7/11/24]

• • On PBD Podcast, Christina Bobb, who is senior counsel to the Republican National Committee’s election integrity team, claimed that Democrats are making an “illegal alien push” to win the 2024 election. Bobb claimed, “We've got information that leads me to believe that they are trying to register a lot of these people coming across the border to vote in all 50 states.” She also suggested that this was being done to supplement the Democrats supposed election fraud practices from 2020, adding, “I don't think they're shying away from 2020 with the mail-in ballots and, you know, don't go to polls, mail everything in. They're trying to play the same game that they played in 2020, but it's not gonna be as effective, and it's not gonna have near the impact. So they're trying to supplement it.” YouTube, [6/3/24; The Washington Post, 4/26/24; Media Matters, 5/13/24]

• • In a June 4 video posted to YouTube, Giuliani baselessly suggested that there were “ineligible voters” on the rolls in Arizona in 2020 and 2022. Giuliani claimed that “people move and they stay registered there for 10, 12 years. Why? So the crooked Democratic Party can vote them, and they hook them up with a phony registration. And they did it enough to turn around the election of 2020 and get the electoral votes in Arizona.” YouTube, [6/4/24]

• • In a separate July 11 stream, Giuliani suggested that noncitizens would vote in the 2024 election and that some Democrats “believe that noncitizens should vote.” During a monetized stream, Giuliani said: “198 Democrats in the House of Representatives believe that noncitizens should vote in your elections, and you’re going to vote for them? What, do you belong to some other country? I would think, Republican or Democrat, we should all agree that in order to vote you got to have a stake in the country, which is citizen.” YouTube, [7/11/24, accessed 7/24/24]

• • During an episode of Louder with Crowder streamed on YouTube, Steven Crowder claimed that Biden “cannot deport these people because he depends on them for votes.” YouTube, [5/7/24; Mashable, 5/19/23]

• • Without evidence, Lara Trump suggested that Democrats “cheat at the ballot box,” “do crazy things with drop boxes,” and “allow illegals to vote.” YouTube, [6/5/24]
• Video file

Video

CitationFrom a June 5, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by The Right View with Lara Trump

• • Lara Trump pushed a conspiracy theory that Biden “is obviously banking on illegals voting in this election to get him over the line.” Echoing the white nationalist “great replacement” theory, Trump said it’s “pretty clear” that Biden is allowing migrants to cross the border to vote for him for president, adding, “That’s the whole goal.” YouTube, [5/1/24; Media Matters, 1/12/24]

• • On Timcast IRL, former Trump adviser Kash Patel claimed that Democrats are planning to “inject another rig job into an election by allowing, what is it, 10-plus million people so far. Half of them are getting voter IDs.” YouTube, [5/27/24]

• • In a segment of his show Tucker Carlson Uncensored posted to YouTube, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that “foreigners” were “a brand-new electorate” for Democrats. Carlson added, “It's illegal, you say, for illegal aliens to vote in a federal election. Well, actually, it's not illegal, it turns out.” YouTube, [5/7/24]

• • Tucker Carlson, while interviewing Ben Carson, who served as secretary of housing and urban development under Trump, asked if “letting in tens of millions of people illegally” will impact the election, to which Carson responded, “That's the whole purpose of it.” Carlson also remarked that, “I don’t think we’re allowed to talk about voter fraud on YouTube, which tells you that it’s real.” YouTube, [7/25/24]

• Video

CitationFrom a July 25, 2024, video uploaded to YouTube by Tucker Carlson

• ## Right-wing personalities said Harris is “illegitimate” as the Democratic nominee over Biden

• Right-wing media figures claimed that Harris is not the legitimate Democratic nominee for president, often using this allegation to suggest that Democrats will “cheat” in the general election. Multiple election law experts have debunked this point — as Biden was not yet the official nominee, his decision to withdraw from the race weeks before he was expected to be nominated at the DNC “does not present any legal or constitutional problems,” according to PolitiFact.

Some examples Media Matters identified include:

• • Benny Johnson insisted that Democrats “cheated” by having Harris “illegally installed” as their presidential nominee, arguing: “They're hoping that the sugar high is enough to, like, get them within the margin of fraud, right? And then shenanigans.” YouTube, [8/13/24]

• • Johnson again claimed that “Democrats cheated” by nominating Harris, calling her “illegitimate.” “We have the candidate that actually has been elected, right?” Johnson said. “That's a real candidate. People actually voted for them. They didn't cheat — we didn't cheat with Trump. Democrats cheated. They knew they were going to lose, so they changed the player in spite of 15 million votes. It's illegitimate. Kamala Harris is illegitimate. Don’t care what you do, that’s the truth.” YouTube, [8/15/24]

• • Mark Levin claimed Democrats “stole the election from their own primary voters and they're going to install somebody who hasn't gotten a single delegate on her own.” YouTube, [7/22/24]

• • Louder with Crowder host Steven Crowder suggested Democrats had planned to “install somebody, coronate Kamala Harris even though she didn’t receive any votes,” and he insisted that Democrats would cheat in the election. Crowder said: “Biden's fine until the polls show Americans don't believe it. Cheat, install somebody, coronate Kamala Harris even though she didn't receive any votes. It's going to be the same thing right now. Lie, lie, lie, lie. ... And when it doesn't work, cheat. That's what they're going to do in the election.” YouTube, [8/30/24]

• • Tucker Carlson called Harris’ nomination a “coup” against Biden. Carlson said: “They just prosecuted a coup against a sitting supposedly elected president who got, like, several billion votes, they've told us for the past four years. And they just took him out because they didn't like his polling.” YouTube, [7/30/24]

===

Officials have begged people to not spread misinformation about Hurricane Helene. YouTube has monetized it.

10/10/24

https://www.mediamatters.org/google/officials-have-begged-people-not-spread-misinformation-about-hurricane-helene-youtube-has) mma

modesto olvieria

'Go back where you came from': Small-town Pennsylvania residents run off far-right YouTuber - Alternet.org

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algo YT diy -->

"Climate Change is a Myth" -- A Nobel Prize Winner's Embarrassing Ideas

Sabine Hossenfelder

722K views 1 month ago

The biggest problem with Climate Change | Konstantin Kisin

John Anderson Media

596K views 5 months ago

WATCH: An Honest & Sensible Conversation about Global Energy | Scott Tinker

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

1.8M views 10 months ago

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White nationalist Keith Woods brags about “huge money coming in” from YouTube Super Chats while streaming with Nick Fuentes

08/29/24 mma

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no lnx an 7 23 twt

google-owned YouTube is again facing allegations of profiting from not enforcing its own ban on the monetization of climate misinformation, this time in a report published Friday amid legislative battles in Brazil over policies on the Amazon rainforest, Indigenous rights, and social media.

Google announced in October 2021 that for advertisers and publishers along with creators on its video platform YouTube, the company would "prohibit ads for, and monetization of, content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change."

For four weeks, researchers with Ekō—a group formerly known as SumOfUsthat works to curb the power of big corporations—reviewed 60 YouTube videos in English and Portuguese that contained disinformation and conspiracy theories about Amazon deforestation, Indigenous rights, and the climate emergency.

Over two-thirds of the videos were monetized, and Ekō identified more than 150 brands in the ads. Using a common industry tool, researchers estimated that the channels—which collectively had over 40 million subscribers and more than 5 million views—earn $636,000 to $10.1 million a year through monetization.

"The proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories are helping to derail efforts by the Lula administration to advance policy agendas around Amazon protection, Indigenous land rights, and social media regulation."

"Well-known Brazilian and global brands likeLyft, Calvin Klein, Budweiser, Panasonic, and Samsung, as well as environmental and human rights groups like Friends of the Earth U.K., UNICEF, and the Peace Corps,are appearing next to extreme climate denial content and conspiracy theories," the report states, "effectively pouring money into the pockets of conspiracy theorists and climate deniers."

"Ekō researchers found top-name apparel, electronics, and drink brands appearing next tovideos suggesting actor Leonardo DiCaprio funded nongovernmental organizations to commit arson in the Amazon,"the publication continues. "Other false claims include that the rainforest is too humid to catch fire, and that manmade global warming is a lie."

"The proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories are helping to derail efforts by the Lula administration to advance policy agendas around Amazon protection, Indigenous land rights, andsocial media regulation," the document adds, pushing for policy "that prevents platforms from monetizing and profiting from disinformation and lies that are subverting the legislative process."

In a statement Friday, Ekō campaign director Vicky Wyatt also demanded action from the company.

"While global warming, deforestation, and wildfires reach their highest levels ever recorded, YouTube's shameless greenwashing is exposed—with the company giving profits to climate deniers to the tune of millions," said Wyatt. "This is a clear slap in the face to the brands whose advertisements unknowingly support climate disinformation. It's time for YouTube to step up, detox its platform, and protect the integrity of the fight against the climate crisis."

Ekō's analysis follows a May report from Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) for which researchers found 200 YouTube videos containing climate mis- and disinformation. The videos had a total of 73.8 million views and all had featured ads.

YouTube spokesperson Michael Aciman told Engadget in response to those findings that the company is "constantly working" to remove content that violates its rules and welcomes third-party feedback to "help improve the accuracy of our enforcement over time."

"In 2021, we launched a new, industry-leading policy that explicitly prohibits ads from running on content promoting false claims about the existence and causes of climate change, which we designed in consultation with experts and authoritative sources on climate science," Aciman also said. "We do allow policy debate or discussions of climate-related initiatives, but when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we remove ads from serving on those videos.”

Meanwhile, Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, part of the CAAD coalition, said at the time that "despite Google's green grandstanding, its ads continue to fuel the climate denial industry."

"Whether it's taking cash to target users with climate disinformation, or running ads that make climate denial content profitable, the company is selling out," Hood added. "Tech companies make big promises on hate and misinformation because they know it's hard to see if they've kept them. We need to force Google to open up the black box of its advertising business."

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https://www.mediamatters.org/rumble/rumble-profiting-videos-nick-fuentes-antisemitic-rally

https://www.mediamatters.org/rumble**/youtube-**allowing-fringe-streamers-push-audiences-harmful-content-rumble-and-even-profiting

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see soc media links

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

aha note bail on moderation (big layoffs)

mma 6 23 badish code box size

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

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

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

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

Meta is deprioritizing content moderation and user safety

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

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

Below is a timeline of key developments since the start of 2022:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A timeline of key developments since the start of 2022:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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youTube’s decision to permit content promoting election conspiracy theories and misinformation is being heralded by right-wing media and figures as a win for “free speech.”

The platform confirmed to Axios on June 2 that it would allow users to upload content claiming that “fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 presidential election and other U.S. elections.” The decision reverses a December 2020 election integrity policy, which the company reportedly felt could have the effect of “curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm."

On Friday, Media Matters’ Julie Millican released a statement condemning the decision: “YouTube and the other platforms that preceded it in weakening their election misinformation policies, like Facebook, have made it clear that one attempted insurrection wasn’t enough. They’re setting the stage for an encore.”

In March, YouTube reinstated former President Donald Trump’s account– which was suspended following the January 6 attack on the Capitol – despite his continued attempts to push the election misinformation that resulted in real-world violence. The decision to allow election conspiracy theories to circulate on the platform recklessly ignores social media as a major factor in the deadly insurrection.

Some right-wing media outlets and figures are celebrating the policy change, claiming that it’s a win for conservatives, who falsely claim that social media platforms are censoring them. Others have also linked the decision to Elon Musk rolling back content moderation policies on Twitter, with some saying Musk paved the way for YouTube’s decision.

Right-wing outlets and figures celebrated that election conspiracy theories will be allowed on the platform again

• Reacting to the news, “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexanderdeclared on Telegram that “Stop the Steal prevails.”
• Right Side Broadcasting reporter Liz Willistweeted: “HUGE - YouTube reverses ‘election misinformation policy,’ allows people to discuss the fraudulent 2020 election.”
• Former Epoch Times columnist-turned-QAnon influencer Brian Catescelebrated the news on Telegram, saying, “First they mock and ridicule you. Then they angrily call you a bigot and a liar. Then they ban you. Then they admit you were right and THEN YOU WIN.”
• Notorious election deniers and founders of True the Vote Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillipstweeted about the news, saying of YouTube: “Just figured out they committed billions of federal crimes? …nope just figured out they lost 1/2 of Americas eyeballs and the money that comes with them.”
• Following the policy reversal, the QAnon account Badlands Mediasuggested the account would post election misinformation on YouTube, saying, “Let's see if YouTube is actually going to backtrack on censorship. If you're on there, be sure to subscribe to Badlands Media! We'll be putting it to the test.”
• Gateway Pundit writer and Badlands Media host Brian Lupo, who is known online as “CannCon” and was allegedly banned from YouTube in June 2021 for posting election misinformation, celebrated YouTube’s policy reversal. Lupo declared on Twitter, “YouTube back in play!!!!”

Right-wing media figures and outlets praised Musk for “moving the needle” and implied his actions influenced YouTube’s decision

• On Twitter, right-wing influencer ALXcredited Musk for YouTube’s decision, saying, “Last week, YouTube reversed their policy on talking about election fraud just as Twitter has been focusing on long form content. … Twitter is moving the needle and forcing other platforms to swing toward Free Speech.”
• Cheering on YouTube’s move, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton tweeted that the decision was a sign “of the impact of @ElonMusk's free speech reforms.”
• On Twitter, former Fox Business host Trish Regan asked if YouTube made the decision because the platform is “worried about Twitter competition.”
• The right-wing outlet Epoch Timesemphasized Musk in coverage of YouTube’s policy reversal and parroted Musk’s framing that he is a free speech “‘absolutist’ … who took over Twitter last year with a pledge to remove political bias from the platform and make it more balanced.”

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6 23

Media Matters Vice President Julie Millican released the following statement after Axios reported that YouTube has reversed its election integrity policy and will no longer prohibit “content that says fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 presidential election and other U.S. elections.”

YouTube’s announcement today that they will resume allowing bad actors to lie about the 2020 presidential election result comes as no surprise. YouTube was one of the last major social media platforms to keep in place a policy attempting to curb 2020 election misinformation. Now, it’s decided to take the easy way out by giving people like Donald Trump and his enablers free rein to continue to lie without consequence about the 2020 elections.

YouTube and the other platforms that preceded it in weakening their election misinformation policies, like Facebook, have made it clear that one attempted insurrection wasn’t enough. They’re setting the stage for an encore.

YouTube initiated its election integrity policy in December of 2020, beginning to prohibit claims of widespread fraud in that election. The platform did not employ similar policies prohibiting such claims for the 2022 midterms.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-deace/**youtube**-steve-deace-calls-mass-arrests-ahead-philadelphia-pride-events

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fail

mma 5 23

https://www.mediamatters.org/google/steven-crowder-openly-flouts-youtube-lets-alex-jones-host-his-show-and-promote-infowars

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https://www.mediamatters.org/matt-walsh/youtube-strips-ad-revenue-matt-walsh-show-after-repeated-vitriol-against-dylan-mulvaney

no lnx many

youTube strips ad revenue from The Matt Walsh Show after repeated vitriol against Dylan Mulvaney

Walsh has been leading an effort to boycott Bud Light for its collaboration with the TikTok star, whom he previously called “weird and artificial”

Special PROGRAMS

LGBTQ

WRITTEN BY ARI DRENNEN

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALYSSA TIRRELL

PUBLISHED 04/20/23

In a speech at the University of Iowa, self-described “theocratic fascist” and Daily Wire host Matt Walsh complained that his YouTube channel had been stripped of advertiser revenue, which he said was bringing in more than $100,000 per month. An independent estimate suggests that Walsh’s YouTube revenue could have been as high as $1.6 million per year.

YouTube confirmed the demonetization, with a spokesperson writing, “We suspended monetization on Matt Walsh’s channel due to repeated violations of our YouTube Partner Program policies, which include our Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines. These policies apply equally to all creators, regardless of political viewpoint, and channels that repeatedly violate these policies are demonetized."

:{:{}:

}:

The demonetization, which was announced before the speech in a Twitter thread by Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boering, reportedly comes in response to Walsh’s increasingly vitriolic campaign against Dylan Mulvaney, which escalated after the transgender TikTok star announced a collaboration with Bud Light.

Speaking before an audience of college students, Walsh announced that rather than stop his tirades against Mulvaney, he would make his show free to all viewers on the Daily Wire+ app and would upload episodes toTwitter, suggesting some kind of deal with Twitter CEO Elon Musk. “I truly see the fight against gender ideology as the last stand for Western civilization,” Walsh said. “Because if the sane side loses this, it's over. It's over after this."

Walsh has targeted Mulvaney in a series of increasingly vicious attacks over a period of several months, beginning with a rant in which Walsh told the trans influencer, “You are weird and artificial, you are manufactured and lifeless, you are unearthly and eerie.” The monologue led to backlash within right-wing media and was cited by one Daily Wire writer in her decision to leave the company. But Walsh doubled down, saying that he “would rather be dead” than have a trans child. And then, at the start of  April, Bud Light sent Mulvaney a can of beer with her face on it.

Walsh, who previously made comments supportive of teenage pregnancy, has a history of spreading anti-trans vitriol. As documented by Media Matters, between mid-February and mid-March, Walsh also repeated his statement about preferring death to a trans child; misgendered and deadnamed a trans woman featured in a Hershey’s chocolate ad (in Canada); defended his colleague Michael Knowles’ call to eradicate “transgenderism … from public life entirely” by claiming to be “in a war against the most deranged ideology ever invented by the human race,” which he called a “parasite”; and called the trans community “a suicide cult.”

YouTube’s hate speech policy promises to “remove content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups” based on ... “gender identity and expression” and/or “sexual orientation.” Social Blade indicates that two Walsh videos had already been demonetized in April when the Daily Wire host led a boycott against Bud Light for collaborating with Mulvaney. If Walsh’s contract contains provisions similar to those found in the contract offered to Louder with Crowder host Steven Crowder, which stated that being demonetized would lead to a 25% cut in his salary, the loss of YouTube revenue is a huge financial blow to Walsh.

The Daily Wire+ app continues to be available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play store.The Apple App Store’s content guidelines lay out a prohibition on “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary” targeting gender or sexual orientation, especially if the app or content “is likely to humiliate, intimidate, harass, or harm individuals or groups.” The Google Play terms of service similarly forbid “apps that promote violence, or incite hatred against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, caste, immigration status, or any other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.”

Walsh’s move to uploading his show to Twitter comes at a convenient time for the Daily Wire host. Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022, recently updated its terms of service to remove its previous prohibition on targeted misgendering and deadnaming of trans people. Musk recently launched an effort to reassure nervous Twitter advertisers and to convince those who previously abandoned the platform to return. In one recent interview, Musk claimed that Twitter was open to advertiser feedback but that “freedom of speech is paramount.”

THE LATEST

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Media Matters weekly newsletter, April 21

04/21/23 10:02 AM EDT

Fox host calls for “an Elon Musk” to fix the intel community

04/21/23 9:26 AM EDT

Dana Loesch says generational wealth “doesn't actually exist in the United States”

04/21/23 9:24 AM EDT

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04/20/23 9:53 PM EDT

Pagination

Current page1

Related

Right-wing media attack Bud Light for its collaboration with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney

04/06/23 3:11 PM EDT

Daily Wire hosts have repeatedly violated YouTube and Spotify terms of service with statements of anti-LGBTQ hate

03/10/23 10:38 AM EST

Matt Walsh’s sordid history as a radio host, exposed

10/04/22

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https://www.mediamatters.org/google/youtube-has-monetized-videos-baselessly-connecting-celebrity-deaths-covid-vaccines

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1 23 fresh air purple team  FB key in j6?

cal sil vly pass?

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/26/1151360750/social-medias-role-in-jan-6-was-left-out-of-the-final-report

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I am Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, announced Wednesday that both platforms will restore the accounts of former President Donald Trump, ending a two-year suspension that began after the assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. The congressional committee that investigated the January 6 riot spent considerable effort looking into the role of social media in assembling the mob and fueling the violence. But very little of their evidence and findings made it into the committee's 800-page final report.

Our guest today, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, is part of a team of reporters who brought those findings into the public sphere. They wrote an article about a 122-page memo investigators circulated among the committee based on their interviews with employees of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other tech platforms as well as other research. They found that tech companies failed to act on their own employees' warnings about violent rhetoric growing on their platforms in part out of reluctance to penalize conservatives, particularly then-President Trump. Drew Harwell is a technology reporter for the Post. He was part of an international reporting team that won a George Polk Award in 2021. Before he joined the Post in 2014, he worked for the Tampa Bay Times.

...

HARWELL: Yeah, we had a story on January 5 that was all about just the volume of rage you could see on these sites. It was not hidden at all. It was very overt. It was very direct. It was, you know, maps of the U.S. Capitol. It was bridges into D.C., where people suspected there would be police checkpoints. It was strategies on how to sneak firearms into D.C., where they are banned. It was really a road map for literally what we saw happen on January 6. And we had been following disinformation around the election for months. And you could tell that on that day, it had really reached a fever pitch. I mean, there was clear mobilization.

And so the question at the time was, what's going on with these companies that we can see this in plain sight? Shouldn't there be something more robust to tackle these very direct calls for violence and threats and lies about the election being stolen? And at the moment, we didn't really know how bad it was inside of these companies. But, you know, now we get a sense of there was a real, clear failure here - not just political, but from these companies that really run the backbone of how we all communicate with each other.

DAVIES: In a general way, how much effort went into looking into the role of social media companies by the staff of the January 6 Committee? I mean, do you have any general sense of - I don't know - how many interviews, what kind of documents? How much effort went into looking into this?

HARWELL: A lot. I mean, in the committee, there were multiple teams approaching this question from different angles. There was a - specifically a purple team that focused on social media and its role in the violence. And they were experts, political staffers, smart people who were part of this committee. And they sifted through tens of thousands of documents from more than a dozen of these big tech companies. They interviewed executives, former employees. They assessed thousands of Twitter messages from Trump and his supporters and many other people. They had subpoena power, so they could really get information.

I mean, they - we have rarely seen a federal body with this kind of people power and resources look into social media. And, you know, you understand why because this was a massive event in American history. And so when they started out, they really had a big concentration of power here looking at this problem. And you could see that in this hundred-page memo, they really focused on this problem very, very specifically and very concretely. And they had a lot of material to back it up.

DAVIES: Right. Which raises another question - why didn't this get more attention in the final report?

HARWELL: Yeah, so that was what we were really kind of interested in. When the final report came out late last year, the material that the purple team had uncovered was almost totally absent. You know, there was this 800-page final report that really didn't dig into social media as an entity in this problem. It was very focused on Trump and his orbit, which were important. But the purple team was dismayed at how much was left on the cutting room floor. And so that was kind of what we wanted to find out when we did our reporting.

And from, you know, a number of interviews with people who were sort of close to this process and understood, their takeaway was that some of this was shaped by political sensibilities, right? You had people on this committee who were reluctant to make this a battle with the tech companies. They didn't want to get in this tit for tat with these very important American firms. And some of those people were congresspeople with jurisdictions in California close to Silicon Valley. So that was a factor of it. There was also some worry from these committee members that they didn't want to distract from Trump.They wanted to keep this really tightly focused on Trump because they worried about the message getting diluted.

But, you know, one other factor in this was that focusing too much on social media cast an inconvenient glimpse at not just far-right QAnon people, who were very conspiratorial, but also the Republican Party itself and its role in tolerating this kind of chatter online from Trump and Americans at large. So there was a worry that, you know, digging in too much on these issues was going to reflect poorly on, you know, Republicans as a party. And so the result of that was the report ended up being a bit watered down. And a lot of this incisive material about social media, which is really important in everybody's lives not just on this day but every day, just was left out.

DAVIES: You know, it's interesting. On that particular point, I do recall, you know, the co-chair, Liz Cheney, the Republican, sharply condemning her Republican colleagues who, as she put it, were defending the indefensible. You think there was still some sensitivity on not holding Republicans to account for their complicity in the social media end of this?

...

davies: ...

You know, it's interesting. There was some mention in the public hearings of the committee in July of Twitter. They played testimony from a former Twitter employee saying that the platform had given Donald Trump special treatment. The employee was anonymous at the time. It was audio, not video, and in fact, the voice was distorted to protect the employee's identity. You later interviewed this employee on the record, right? You want to tell us a bit about her?

HARWELL: Yeah, that's right. Her name is Anika Collier Navaroli. She worked for Twitter for several years, including on the day of January 6 and before. And her role was as a legal expert on the safety policy team helping Twitter craft rules for how to approach content, protect the free speech of what people were talking about, but also take down calls to violence, set up clear red lines against extremism, and just play this kind of middle role of trying to protect the platform. So she had a really interesting view on this, and, you know, she had seen the company approach geopolitical issues all the time, right? Riots and political unrest. How do we approach this? How do we allow - what do we allow in terms of protest language that doesn't go too far over the edge?

So she was cognizant of these things and her feeling as the election became this moment where Trump was saying that the vote had been stolen - she had been seeing Twitter really erupt with a lot of people kind of mobilizing their messaging, going from just sort of vague anger to real clear directions of where they were going to go, what they were going to do, and how much they felt like Donald Trump was talking to them. You know, this whole stand by, you know, call that he gave for the Proud Boys. So, you know, she, inside the company, was pushing them - and not just her, but others, too, pushing the company to enact some new rules that would just take a tougher stance on this. One of these was a policy - she called it coded incitement to violence. So incitement to violence is not allowed on Twitter, but you can sort of code it a little bit - right? - and this is what people were doing. They were saying, I'm locked and loaded, but not specifically say where they were going. And yet, you know, by the context of it, it was pretty clear.

So she could see there was starting to be more talk of bringing guns, more talk of really sowing this anger against the federal government, and she was pushing the company to do more. And, you know, what she told the committee, and what others ended up telling the committee as well, was that Twitter was really resistant to any kind of rule that could have helped on January 6th. I mean, they passed some policies, but the company employees who spoke to the committee felt like it was just clearly not enough, and they felt like some of what happened on January 6th was really inflamed by the company's lack of action and reluctance to delve into these issues and to, really, even hold former President Trump to account for what he was saying on Twitter as well.

DAVIES: Right. Of course, Trump loved Twitter. I mean, he did tens of thousands of tweets over the years. Was Twitter's management motivated in part, according to these employees, by them enjoying the spotlight, enjoying being Donald Trump's chosen social media vehicle?

HARWELL: Yeah, 100%. I think that was the most stunning claim she made, and that was one that was a real headline from one of the committee hearings, which was that Twitter, in her words, protected Trump because he was a star.You know, he had brought a large amount of attention and clout to Twitter. Twitter in social media is effectively an also-ran, right? They're not a Facebook or an Instagram or a TikTok. They're a news platform, and Donald Trump helped make Twitter into a very influential company. And so in her words, she felt like the company had become deferent to Trump because they felt like they couldn't punish somebody who was beneficial in this way. There was kind of a mutually beneficial arrangement here.

But there were other people who spoke to the company, too, from inside Twitter that also suggested that there was some fear of the backlash of being too tough on Trump. And, you know, even before January 6, Trump had always been very infamous for what he would say on Twitter, as anybody who was online during those years knew. I mean, it was a lot of borderline or over-the-line tweets that people were wondering, why is Donald Trump able to talk like this on the platform? Anybody else who was sharing these kinds of messages would be treated differently, and this is what Anika ended up saying to the committee - was that he was treated differently. He was given special treatment because of this impactful role he had in the company....

:{:{}:

}:

You know, I will say Facebook had stood up some election integrity efforts even before January 6 that were about, you know, if somebody posts something about the election being stolen, we're going to post a disclaimer that actually that's false. We're going to link you to proactive, right, accurate information. Facebook had very notably disbanded those efforts before January 6. I think they sort of felt like the election's over; we're not needed anymore. That was specifically called out as an institutional failure that could have led to some of these things. But it all sort of came back to, could the company have done more, taken down more, been more active in addressing these calls to violence? And would that have made any difference on January 6?

DAVIES: There was also mention in this memo that you and your colleagues found of a white list that Facebookkept of certain accounts that were exempted from the fact-checking that would occur on other accounts. Among the people on that list -Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. Glenn Beck, Gateway Pundit, various other conservative things. Did the committee find that troubling, the committee's investigators?

HARWELL: Yeah, they did. I mean, this was clearly special treatment for very high-profile people with big audiences who were known for saying things that would otherwise be fact-checked. Yeah, this was an issue because here was Facebook making a technically defensive position that would help the company, but that would actually contribute to a lot more lies and misinformation being spread to general users. So yeah, there was a feeling that this was a secret list that was not shared with the general public that was not just damaging their experience, but actively fostering these false narratives that, you know, many of which became pretty central to January 6. And there was a frustration that these elite provocateurs were getting to play by a different set of rules than anybody else.

DAVIES: And what, if anything, did Facebook executives say in defense of this to the committee?

HARWELL: Their argument was that this is a way to streamline the moderation process, right? These are people who - anything they say that becomes a controversy for Facebook, they want to handle at a high level and treat them with a different pair of gloves than people like you and me. I mean, you know, Facebook's argument in some of this is that these are people who will be targeted for, you know, mass reporting or, you know, will just sort of be at the center of a lot of kind of mucky battles. So they want to have a bigger, sort of different level of special treatment for these folks.

But, you know, I think what it ends up being is that these people can break rules, push the boundaries without penalty or consequence. And you certainly saw this with Donald Trump on Twitter where his profile cannot not even be accessed in the same way as anybody. He was constantly, no matter what he said, he was on zero strikes forever. And there was nothing he could say that would really push him over the line until we actually saw January 6. So this was a clear sort of technical measure that had become really problematic for the committee and for the general public...

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Drew Harwell. He is a reporter for The Washington Post and was part of a team that wrote recently about investigative material developed by the staff of the January 6 Committee that didn't make it into the committee's final report that dealt with how social media platforms failed to address online extremism and threats of violence in the weeks that led up to the January 6 assault.

The investigators were pretty thorough about this. They also looked at YouTube, found certainly some failings in their efforts to restrict content. YouTube was very influential. And they also looked at less-well-known platforms and sites, you know, Reddit and Tik-Tok. And some of these - in addition, some of these alt tech and really fringe sites, you know, Parler and Gab and 8kun, some of these things that were really places, I gather, where participants in the January 6 assault were really communicating directly about their intentions and plans, right?

...

HARWELL: Yeah, it is difficult. You know, I think when this process began, people were hoping that this final report would give us some clarity with, you know, the imprimatur of the federal government saying let's pass new regulations to require either no auditing and transparency of these companies or to threaten punishment against social media executives when you see failures like this happen again. You don't see any of those policy recommendations in the report. You see the committee effectively telling the companies to do a better job in policing themselves. And, you know, that goes back to what some of the committee folks were telling us, which was that this was a missed opportunity. Here was a chance for the federal government to say social media is a critical part of Americans' lives. And we want to set a framework for the productive use of it and keep people safe. But instead, the conclusions ended up really being a reflection of just how little ground we've made on this issue, which is a complicated issue, but is still one that is really important to us. So I think people came away from it with a lot more questions than answers.

DAVIES: You know, it's been alleged by conservatives for quite some time that social media are biased against them and that you can see that in their decisions. The investigators did test that in some cases, didn't they, I mean, to see whether that was generally true with some of the larger social media platforms? What did they find?

HARWELL: Yeah, what they found was really contradictory to that point. I mean, and that point has been something that Elon Musk was sharing in the Twitter files that has been the main cause celebre of Republicans in Washington, which is that Silicon Valley is a bunch of Californian techies who are against us and are tearing us down. They're using social media to silence and censor us. And it's unfair, you know? And the committee tested that. And from the many interviews and the many thousands of pages of documents, I mean, what they found was, really, the opposite. I mean, people like Donald Trump, viewpoints like stop the steal, were given a huge amount of leeway.

I mean, in Trump's case, he effectively was not punished for saying the same sort of things that would have knocked anybody else off the platform. He was really treated in a special way so as to keep his account on Twitter for years. And, you know, so he was really - instead of being sort of unfairly censored, he was elevated and promoted, which was, you know, totally the opposite of what people were conveying in the Twitter files. And so I think that was one big surprise from this whole investigation, which was that, really, these Twitter employees were worried that Twitter had not gone far enough and that some of that silence or reluctance to be more aggressive had contributed to what we ended up seeing happen at the Capitol.

DAVIES: Well, Drew Harwell, thanks so much for speaking with us.

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/24/2130859/-Google-s-Selling-Climate-Disinfo-Ads-Despite-Policy-Against-It-YouTube-Too-Still

Google's Selling Climate Disinfo Ads, Despite Policy Against It. YouTube, Too. Still.

Daily Kos

Hate speech test case Mark Steyn interviewing pro-J6-insurrection Marc Morano and debunked-by-deniers Monckton about their recent invitation to be ...

...In October of 2021, Google announced that it was banning climate disinformation from its advertising system, including on YouTube. That (should have) meant videos denying the scientific reality that fossil fuels are causing climate change shouldn't have ads on them, and websites that publish such false claims would also be barred from using Google's ad services.

In October of 2022, it's still all too easy to find climate disinformation on YouTube that's selling ads. 

FoxNews clips that get fact checked? Still monetized. UK's version of Fox, GBNews, having a PR exec turned professional denier on to say the "'UK Government has been taken over by sleeper agents"? Making ad money.Hate speech test case Mark Steyn interviewing pro-J6-insurrection Marc Morano and debunked-by-deniers Monckton about their recent invitation to be a laughing stock? Monetized! Amateur that depends on professionals Tom Nelson's podcast videos, Alex Epstein on Glenn Beck, John Stossel tapping deceased denier Pat Michaelsto deny hurricane science, and our favorite, the canonically bad climate denial video, the Great Global Warming Swindle, that Avaaz called out in 2020, are all monetized.

And that's just on YouTube! There's also Google's sprawling advertising display business. Google gets paid to place ads on websites across the internet. Its policy against climate disinformation should mean that it doesn't place ads on websites that publish climate disinformation. And the company should care about that, because big name advertisers are very clear about not wanting their products to appear next to the casual bigotry, hatred and lies found on websites that carry climate disinformation.

But apparently a year is still not enough time for Google to actually enforce its demonetization policy, because a new report from Dewey Square Group found Google "is by far the most significant advertising supplier on websites that promote climate disinformation both in terms of the share of sites they enable and the ad traffic they monetize."

Using weekly visits as the metric, of the total 113 websites analyzed, Google ads accounted for 97.7% of the projected weekly visits. Assuming an average price, "Google would potentially have pulled in $7.6 million in display advertising revenue over the past year from such sites" the report states.

Of the top 50 climate disinfo websites by traffic, like Breitbart and The Dailies Wire and Caller, Dewey analysts found that Google was serving ads on 39 of them.

Not only is Google still monetizing climate disinfo, it's the biggest player in the game, and it's working with the biggest, most obvious publishers of harmful climate denial. 

Despite its own rule saying it explicitly would not do that. Apparently it’s less of a policy, and more of a request...

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https://www.mediamatters.org/spanish-language-media/dozens-spanish-language-election-fraud-youtube-videos-demonstrate-platforms

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https://www.mediamatters.org/spanish-language-media/despite-policies-election-misinformation-persists-spanish-youtube

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mma 8 22 youtube

 D'SOUZA (HOST): John has also been a lawyer for Trump. And this is actually what we want to talk about is the – is the actions of the left and trying to go after John and others for their work for former President Trump. John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me. We actually go kind of way back. As you might remember, I was a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute right after Dartmouth. And that's where I met – I met the whole gang of Clare-monsters, as we might call them, who have had such a tremendous influence on American public policy.You have gone on to a really distinguished career. I'd like you to start by just talking about those kind of tense days in the maybe even leading up to the election, but certainly in the aftermath of the election. What is it that you did that is supposedly now driving the left off a cliff and causing them to sort of summon this big kind of lynch mob against you, as if to say that you are a grave enemy of the country and the Constitution.

JOHN EASTMAN (GUEST): Well, in fact, in one of the litigations I'm currently involved with, the January 6 committee actually says not only was I wrong, but I was dangerous. I guess the danger there lies in standing up and speaking the truth to power. And I'm – and I'm catching the same kind of assault that you've been under, Dinesh, for the terrific movie you did, 2000 Mules that starts to expose some of the corruption. You focus there on some very important evidence of outright fraud.I focused mostly on the evidence of illegality.Our Constitution is very clear. 

Article two of the Constitution gives to the legislatures of the states the plenary power to, quote, direct the manner of choosing presidential electors. Most people would find this odd today, but for the first half-century of our nation's history, the legislatures just chose the electors themselves. And – and even when they submit that decision to popular vote as – as all the states have done since the Civil War, the manner that they set out is the election code. And when you had non-legislative officials, secretaries of state, county clerks, what have you, simply ignoring the existing election code laws on absentee ballots, on the requirement of signature verification, all of these steps that the legislatures put in to prevent fraud from occurring because it's so difficult to discover it after the fact. 

Those things were just dispensed with by non-legislative officials,[60 court cases]  and that meant that the election was conducted illegally, even unconstitutionally. And that's what we focused on. And the left doesn't want anybody talking about that,at least not talking about it since 2020. Of course, they talked about it a lot in 2018 and 2016 and what have you. And so what they are now attempting to do is criminalize those that spoke up against the admitted illegality in the conduct of the election. That is, as your movie and other investigations are showing, actually led to the very fraud that those statutory restrictions were put in place to try and prevent.

D'SOUZA: John, you're making a crucial point here, and I want to slow it down because I – I want to make sure I understand it clearly. What you're saying is that even though Trump believed there was fraud and there were, of course, accusations of fraud from the very beginning, you're saying that your argument didn't really depend on that.It didn't depend upon being able to prove instance A, B, C, or D of fraud. You're saying that there is a process that needs to be in place for the Constitution to be upheld. The Constitution dictates how elections should be conducted and who should run them. And the Constitution specifies that the answer to that is state legislatures. And so in the state legislatures and what they specifically put in the code is undercut by secretaries of state, by other officials. Then, in a sense, we have a – an illegal – illegally conducted election, even if you're unable to prove any fraud at all. Am I correct in summarizing that is the argument you're making?

EASTMAN: That's right. And – and the reason that's so important is because of how difficult it is to prove fraud after the fact. And I'll give you one very good example. Wisconsin prohibits drop boxes, unmanned drop boxes, what have you. They also require extensive signature verification and witness signatures on the absentee ballots before they're counted. And the law is very clear. If it doesn't include those things, the ballots shall not be counted.

Now, once you separate the ballot from the envelope and after the fact, try and determined, well, that we didn't have a signature. How do we know that was actually the illegal voter who cast that ballot? Well, you could say, okay, there and now we've got evidence of fraud. But – but how was the vote cast? The ballot is now separated from the envelope and it can't be proved which way it went.

In 2018, in North Carolina's 9th congressional district, there was an illegal ballot harvesting scheme that was conducted on behalf of one of the [GOP?] candidates. Without his knowledge, I might point out. But – but the elections board said we cannot prove then, given the number of illegal ballots that were collected, we can't prove or certify what the actual result of the election is. And they ordered a new election. This is the reason these rules are in place ahead of time.

There was massive cheating that went on.Whether that actually produced the fraud that it was designed to make it difficult to accomplish or not is immaterial to the illegality that occurred. And that's what I tried to focus on in our Supreme Court briefs, both in – in my motion to intervene on behalf of President Trump in the Texas litigation, but in a cert petition filed from Pennsylvania on three of the illegally changed statutes, I mean, they changed the deadlines. They changed the signature verification.

They said, oh, if you're in the room in the Philadelphia Convention Center, which is about as big as a football field, standing all the way at one end, that's good enough to be able to observe what's happening a hundred yards away. I mean, it was insane.

And – and they and – they threw out the ability for people to make any election challenge. They said, even though we've been doing signature verification for a hundred years, we don't find that anywhere in the statutes and all of those statutory provisions that – that seem to acknowledge that those are just archaic relics and you can just ignore them. I mean, this is what the court actually said and the notion that we can change the rules. And by the way, some of that went on after the election up to two weeks after the election. They were still changing the rules for partisan benefit in Pennsylvania. This kind of stuff, we used to call it cheating and they're now trying to go after criminally those people who are calling them out on the illegality, the unconstitutionality, and the cheating.

D'SOUZA: John, let's take a pause.

As YouTube notes on its site:

Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come. As always, news coverage and commentary on these issues can remain on our site if there’s sufficient education, documentary, scientific or artistic context.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/youtube-defends-delete-january-6th/

says lacked context but whole hearing still there/posted

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422

// fox nation streaming?

https://www.mediamatters.org/google/march-tucker-carlson-clips-made-nearly-half-most-viewed-videos-foxs-youtube-channel

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posted on realclear investigations oct 2021

https://www.axios.com/googles-climate-denial-crackdown-misinformation-e0925b26-76ff-4c1d-8b11-c498cc8527d9.html

interesting this is axios, good news [for planet anyway] tho they think it will be read as big tech censorship?!

google's new policy of demonetizing climate denial content marks a significant step in its efforts to rein in climate misinformation.

Why it matters: Videos promoting clear falsehoods about the existence of global warming or its causes have long found a home on YouTube, which Google owns.

• Meanwhile, on search, ads for climate contrarian websites have consistently appeared next to search listings for sites offering politically neutral and scientifically rigorous evidence.

Driving the news: The company's announcement Thursday that the new policy takes effect Nov. 1, during the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, could cool the political polarization around climate in the U.S.

How it works: Per a Google statement, the policy affects the monetization of "content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change."

• "This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change."
• Google plans to use "automated tools and human review" to put the policy into practice.
• The system does not seek to limit policy debate, making Google's job easier but potentially allowing the promotion of partisan assaults on established science.
• Discerning denial can be tough. Google says it will "look carefully at the context in which claims are made, differentiating between content that states a false claim as fact, versus content that reports on or discusses that claim."

Our thought bubble, from Axios' Scott Rosenberg: Facebook and Google have both faced censorship accusations from conservatives who object to measures that have sought to limit misinformation on COVID, elections and other topics.

• YouTube's move on climate is likely to encounter similar objections, given the politically polarized views on this issue, especially in the U.S.

Between the lines: The policy also brings Google's ad revenue strategy more in line with its sustainability agenda.

• The company aims to run on 100% carbon-free energy by 2030.
• On Wednesday, Google rolled out new features to help travelers limit the carbon footprint of their flights via Google Flights.

What's next: The policy will immediately be put to the test with COP26 taking place.

• Spikes in social media activity around climate change over the last six months coincided with major news events, according to data from Keyhole.
• Peaks in search activity also tend to occur around news events, including climate summits, according to Google Trends.

What we're watching: Whether Google's move boosts pressure on Facebook to modify its efforts to limit climate misinformation.

• Facebook expanded its Climate Science Center last month and steers users there when they search for climate-related terms. Facebook also pledged $1 million to a grant program to combat misinformation.
• But activists say the platform still allows denial to flourish.

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why not deplat youtube? vs vaxxer?

no lnx

How Mike Lindell and 'a mysterious dark money organization' pushed a bogus 'snake-oil treatment' for COVID-19

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell speaking at the 2020 Student Action Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, Gage Skidmore

Alex Henderson February 07, 2022

A variety of bogus “treatments” or “cures” for COVID-19 have been promoted in MAGA World, from hydroxychloroquine to oleandrin (an extract from the poisonous oleander plant). According to Daily Beast reporters Roger Sollenberger and William Bredderman, one of the companies that haspromoted oleandrin as a COVID-19 miracle cure is Propter Strategies— which has ties to two major allies of former President Donald Trump: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

“It’s an all-too-familiar story at this point: A person pushing an unproven COVID-19 cure — and pushing back against the vaccines — pays the ultimate price for their skepticism,” Sollenberger and Bredderman report. “But this time, there’s a new wrinkle. It’s not just one person dabbling in COVID quackery with tragic results; it’s actually a mysterious dark money organization, with ties to influential MAGA figures like Steve Bannon and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.”

The organization, according Sollenberger and Bredderman, was Propter Strategies — and the person who became a “victim” of its “secretive work” was partner Kenneth Happel.

“To this day, Propter Strategies is a black hole, despite its high-profile connections and multi-million-dollar budget,” the Beast reporters explain. “Aside from Happel’s account, there is no evidence of Propter’s activities anywhere in the public record. And that might be with good reason: Those activities included hawking the snake-oil COVID treatment oleandrin at the highest levels of the government, as the pandemic’s lethal second wave peaked across the country.”

Happel, according to Sollenberger and Bredderman, is presently hospitalized with his second COVID-19 infection — and his wife died from COVID-19 in January.

“In a phone interview from his hospital bed, Happel, 72, remained unrepentant and defiant about the numerous baseless theories that quite likely landed him back in the hospital, and killed the wife he loved dearly,” Sollenberger and Bredderman write. “Happel still places hope in the pseudo-science that he, Propter Strategies, and Lindell had pushed so hard — a proprietary compound derived from oleander extract, which the pillow tycoon and at least one Propter official had invested in.”

Registration data, according to Sollenberger and Bredderman, shows that Happel is the owner of Proper’s website, needsp.us, and Happel has “confirmed” to the Beast “that the Propter Strategies cited on his page was, in fact, the same group linked to those leading MAGA figures.”

“Happel, a former Tea Party activist with an entrepreneurial history that intersects with biotechnology, recounted working on oleandrin in 2020 with Propter board member Andrew Whitney,” Sollenberger and Bredderman note. “A serial entrepreneur and former Bain Capital investor, Whitney was actually pulling oleandrin double-duty — he was on the board at the nonprofit Propter, as well as at Texas-based Phoenix Biotechnologies, whose research centered on the product. Happel also acknowledged the connection toLindell, who, it turns out, also holds a financial stake in Phoenix Biotechnologies.”

Whitney and Lindell, according to the Beast reporters, “paired up for a MAGA media parade” and promoted oleandrin “as a neglected medical miracle” on right-wing outlets such as Newsmax andDiamond & Silk’s YouTube show. And Lindell “confirmed he still has a financial stake in Phoenix.”

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Marc Morano

Weekly update · October 8, 2021

NEWS

Google's Climate Crackdown: A conversation with Marc Morano | Washington Examiner

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In this interview, ClimateDepot.com founder Marc Morano tells Doug McKelway, the tactic is another step that big tech and its progressive allies have ...

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Marc Morano Debunks #COP26 Climate Extortion in "Green New Deal: The Great Regret ...

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Marc Morano, who is anti-vax, anti-mask and pro-insurrection, is suddenly worried about (left ...

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Marc Morano, who is anti-vax, anti-mask and pro-insurrection, is suddenly worried about (left) political violence? 0. Published on October 4th, 2021.

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7h ago. More From. Washington Examiner. Washington Examiner. Google's Climate Crackdown: A conversation with Marc Morano. 31m ago. Washington Examiner ...

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EXCLUSIVE: Experts BASH Big Tech for Reported Demonetization of So-Called 'Climate Denial'

NewsBusters

Climate experts Steven Milloy and Marc Morano bashed Google/YouTube for reportedly vowing to prohibit ads on videos questioning climate change.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/catherine-salgado/2021/10/08/exclusive-experts-bash-big-tech-reported

no lnx

EXCLUSIVE: Experts BASH Big Tech for Reported Demonetization of So-Called ‘Climate Denial’

Catherine Salgado

October 8th, 2021 12:48 PM

The atmosphere for content creators with Google just reached a new freezing point. YouTube and parent company Google reportedly plan to demonetize all content from so-called “climate deniers.”

Climate experts Steven Milloy and Marc Morano bashed Google/YouTube for reportedly vowing to prohibit ads on videos questioning climate change. “This is Big Tech Collusion with the government,” Morano stated. “Google’s demonetization is an admission that we are winning, a treasure far more valuable than Google ad revenue,” Milloy said.

Climate Depot publisher Morano said, “Google is simply doing the bidding of the federal government and global groups like WHO and the UN. Google is implementing a policy that says you officially cannot disagree with the claims of your government or quasi-government organizations. This is Big Tech collusion with the government.”

Morano compared the Google/YouTube climate video ban to recent COVID-19 restrictions: “They have labeled as ‘misinformation’ any COVID claims that were not in line with WHO, and now they will do the same with any climate claims that are not in line with the UN climate panel.” Morano said, “For decades the progressive movement has tried to impose and sought a one-party state in America.Climate activists [like] Tom Friedman on the pages of The New York Times extolled the virtues of China’s one-party system.”

He continued: “When COVID came along, they were able to achieve their long-sought vision of no dissent under essentially a one-party state in the once free West. John Stossel has already faced the wrath of the climate censors of Big Tech.” Morano warned, “Big Tech has shut down COVID lockdown dissent [and] vaccine mandate dissent, and now they have their sights set on climate ‘denial.’” Morano also indicated he fears his video series, the Morano Minute, will soon be banned.

Milloy, founder of JunkScience.com, told MRC Free Speech America, “Demonetization of websites that expose the climate hoax does nothing but validate what climate realists have been saying for years: It’s not about the climate; it’s about the political power. If what we were saying was wrong, we would have been laughed off the Internet long ago. Instead, reality is validating us and public support for climate idiocy is going nowhere.”

Milloy even added that “Google’s move will have no effect on climate realist web sites for the simple reason that the ad revenue is pretty trivial.” “We do it because we oppose the abuse of science, especially as it is being used to advance totalitarianism.”

Google and YouTube will no longer allow ads or creator payments which allegedly contradict “‘well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,’ the company’s ads team said in a statement,” reported Axios. Google promised to consider “context” and said it consulted “experts,” including from the United Nations, Axios wrote. Axios called the move “one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken” regarding climate change.

Google and YouTube are increasing censorship through demonetization. YouTube has also reportedly demonetized fishing and hunting videos. Grabien, “which provides a suite of tools for newsmakers and curates its own original news content,” had its channel on YouTube demonetized in August. Google also demonetized a Daily Mail column from Piers Morgan criticizing gymnast Simone Biles for abandoning her fellow U.S. gymnasts at the Tokyo Olympics in August.

Conservatives are under attack. Contact YouTube here or send feedback and contact Google at (650) 253-000 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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youtube block on ~ vax not effective? mma

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empir study of echo insurrection youtube #2 to daily wire?

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mma 121

Tech companies and social media platforms are furiously trying to distance themselves from the January 6th storming of the Capitol -- after many of them spent years catering to extremists. Here's some of what has emerged this week:

• QAnon podcasts supportive of the January 6 putsch are flourishing on Apple and Google podcast platforms -- even though a Media Matters’ report in October noted their presence and QAnon's link to violence.
• YouTube is still allowing videos pushing false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, even though it promised to crack down. Several of the videos have been monetized, and YouTube didn't take any action on them until Media Matters reported it.
• As we reported last week, YouTube is not only allowing militia groups linked to violence to recruit videos, but is also monetizing and profiting from them.
• YouTube removed Steve Bannon's podcast after numerous calls for violence, but it is still live on Google Play.
• The unfounded conspiracy theory claiming that martial law will be declared in the United States was going viral on TikTok, even though it clearly violates the platform’s community guidelines on misinformation.
• Far-right militias are using TikTok to organize and recruit new members. The content was on the platform before January 6th and has continued to circulate.
• The putsch was organized and led by Republicans and Trump supporters. Nevertheless, false claims blaming anti-fascists ("antifa") for the attack went viral on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. In fact, the only thing that kept Trump from amplifying the lie was his ban from social media.
• Trump supporters have been fleeing to platforms like Gab and Telegram, which have long been hotbeds of extremism.
• Data shows that Parler users posted from inside the Capitol on January 6.

We need a separate list for Facebook:

• Before the deadly pro-Trump putsch, several Republican Party organizations used Facebook to post a flyer that called for “Operation Occupy the Capitol” and promoted the hashtag “1776Rebel.”
• Dozens of Republican Party groups used Facebook to help organize bus trips to Washington, D.C. for the event.
• Pro-Trump group Women for America First and its leaders Kylie Jane Kremer and Amy Kremer, who organized the “Save America March” along with Ali Alexander, are still on Facebook and Instagram even though they post almost exclusively to promote “Stop the Steal” events.
• Facebook finally and belatedly announced plans to remove any “content containing the phrase ‘stop the steal,’” adding that “it may take some time to scale up our enforcement of this new step.” A Media Matters analysis identified at least 70 active Facebook groups that were either named for or affiliated with “Stop the Steal” that the company could have taken action against long ago. 46 of these groups were private. CNN continues to find such groups as well.
• Buzzfeed News reported that Facebook displayed ads for guns and military-related paraphernalia in its News Feed for people who engaged with content related to the putsch. Facebook said over the weekend that it would pause such ads, but BuzzFeed continues to see them.

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1220 mma

tim Pool admits that YouTube doesn't actually care about disinformation on their platform, it just wants to assuage advertisers

12/11/20 9:44 PM EST

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mma 1120

Following election day YouTube has allowed users to share videos pushing false conspiracy theories alleging interference with voting machines and election computer systems. The videos have racked up millions of views, and the platform has profited from some of them.

A variety of debunked conspiracy theories have circulated on social media, including one theorythat falsely alleged that some kind of supercomputer named “Hammer” and a computer program called “Scorecard” were used to alter vote counts (and that footage shown on CNN last year proves it); the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security has called it “nonsense.”

The claims promoted in these videos are false, however YouTube have suggested that election misinformation that does not directly encourage people to interfere with the vote count does not violate its rules and says it is not algorithmically promoting inaccurate videos.

This week Media Matters used the tracking tool BuzzSumo to review videos posted between November 5 and November 12 that have at least 10,000 views and had “hammer” and “scorecard” or “dominion” in the title, and we found 41 such videos, with a combined total of nearly 3 million views.

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aha, no accident this is most pronounced on youtube? post-literate, video enflames emotiions more than print, bypass brain, plus algo amplification:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/are-fox-news-viewers-racist/

It's no secret that U.S. politics has become highly polarized.

Even so, there are probably few living Americans who ever witnessed anything that quite compares with this fall's first presidential debate.

Was it really the case that the nation could do no better than a verbal food fight, with two candidates hurling fourth-grade insults and talking past each other?

To us, the discordant debate was just one more symptom of the nation's fraying civic discourse, which, in a recent study, we were able to show extends to the words we use to talk about politics.

Earlier this year, we started constructing a data set that consists of all of the viewer comments on YouTube videos posted by four television networks — MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and One America News Network — that target slices of the political spectrum. Together, the data set contains over 85 million comments on over 200,000 videos from 6.5 million viewers since 2014.

We studied whether there are distinct variants of English written in the comments sections, akin to the distinction between British English and American English.

Using machine learning methods, we found these permutations do exist. Moreover, we can rank them in terms of the "left-ness" and the "right-ness." To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical demonstration of quantifiable linguistic differences in news audiences.

Our second finding, however, was even more unexpected.

Our machine learning translation system found that words with vastly different meanings, like "KKK" and "BLM," were used in the exact same contexts depending on the YouTube channel being analyzed.

The company a word keeps

When translating two different languages — say, Spanish and English — automated translation systems like Google Translate begin with a large training set of texts in both languages. The system then applies machine learning methods to become better at translating.

Over the years, this technology has become increasingly accurate, thanks to two key insights.

The first dates back to the 1950s, when linguist John Rupert Firth came up with the aphorism "You shall know a word by the company it keeps."

To modern machine translation systems, the "company" a word keeps is its "context," or the words surrounding it. For example, the English word "grape" occurs in contexts such as "grape juice" and "grape vine," while the equivalent word in Spanish, uva, occurs in the same contexts — jugo de uva, vid de uva — in Spanish sentences.

The second important discovery came rather recently. A 2013 study found a way to identify — and thereby link — a word's context in one language to its context in another. Modern machine translation depends heavily on this process.

What we have done is to use this type of translation in an entirely new way: to translate English to English.

When "Trumptards" become "snowflakes"

That may sound bizarre. Why translate English to English?

Well, consider American English and British English. Many words are the same in both languages. Yet there can be subtle differences. For instance, "apartment" in American English may translate into "flat" in British English.

For the purposes of our study, we labeled the language used in each network's comment section "MSNBC-English," "CNN-English," "Fox-English" and "OneAmerica-English." After analyzing the comments, our translation algorithms uncovered two different patterns of "misaligned words" — terms that aren't identical across the comment sections but are used in the same contexts.

One type was similar to "flat" and "apartment," in the sense that both are describing ostensibly the same thing. However, the word pairs we uncovered have different intonations. For example, we found that what one community calls "Pelosi," the other one calls "Pelousy"; and "Trump" in one news-language translates into "Drumpf" in another.

A second — and deeper — kind of misalignment occurred when the two words refer to two fundamentally different things.

For example, we found that in CNN-English, "KKK" — the abbreviation for the Ku Klux Klan — is translated by our algorithm to "BLM" — shorthand for Black Lives Matter — in Fox-English. The algorithm is basically finding that the comments made by one community about KKK are very much like the comments made by the other about BLM. While the belief systems of the KKK and BLM are about as different as can be, depending on the comment section, they seem to each represent something similarly ominous and threatening.

CNN-English and Fox-English are not the only two languages displaying these types of misalignments. The conservative end of the spectrum itself breaks into two languages.For example, "mask" in Fox-English translates to "muzzle" in OneAmerica-English, reflecting the differing attitudes across these subcommunities.

There seems to be a mirrorlike duality at play. "Conservatism" becomes "liberalism," "red" is translated to "blue," while "Cooper" is converted into "Hannity."

There's also no lack of what can only be called childish name-calling.

"Trumptards" in CNN-English translates to "snowflakes" in Fox-English; "Trumpty" in CNN-English translates to "Obummer" in Fox-English; and "republicunts" in CNN-English translates to "democraps" in Fox-English.

Uncharted territory

Linguists have long emphasized how effective communication among people with different beliefs requires common ground. Our findings show that the way we talk about political issues is becoming more divergent; depending on who's writing, a common word can be imbued with an entirely different meaning.

We wonder: How far are we from the point of no return when these linguistic differences begin to erode the common ground needed for productive communication?

Have echo chambers on social media exacerbated political polarization to the point where these linguistic misalignments have become ingrained in political discourse?

When will "democracy" in one language variant stop translating into "democracy" in the other?

Mark Kamlet, University Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University; Ashique KhudaBukhsh, Project Scientist at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and Tom Mitchell, Founders University Professor of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University

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mma 920

we've already documented the right-wing lies about absentee and mail-in voting at length, and how those lies have permeated Facebook.

A new Media Matters study shows that such lies are also all overYouTube. We assessed the top 100 YouTube videos about mail-in voting (as identified through a search on the tool BuzzSumo) with at least 10,000 views from right-leaning, left-leaning, and nonaligned YouTube channels over a six-month period between March 1 and August 31:

• Right-leaning channels posted 39 of the top 100 videos during the six-month period, and these videos accumulated over 8.6 million views -- nearly half of the total views (47%).
• Left-leaning channels posted 22 of the top 100 videos during the six-month period, and these videos accumulated over 4.2 million views (23% of the total) -- less than half as many views as right-leaning channels.
• Nonaligned channels posted 33 of the top 100 videos during the six-month period, and these videos accumulated over 5.6 million views (30% of total views).
• The top 100 videos about voting by mail that accumulated at least 10,000 views came from 52 different channels.

Watch: The rank hypocrisy of the Judicial Crisis Network

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FB 2020 fail

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-and-other-social-media-platforms-let-manipulated-biden-blackface-video-circulate

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720 rww

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/youtube-%e2%80%8bbans-six-big-white-nationalist-channels/

YouTube ​Bans Six Big White Nationalist Channels

==

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google's subsidiaries

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escalator pipeline by 2 biggest FANGs

aha: youtube to facebook pipeline/escalator to everyone's news feed [2 biggest FANGs, synergy? amplifier?]

plandemic

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2020/heres-how-plandemic-went-viral/

https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/may/08/fact-checking-plandemic-documentary-full-false-con/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/23/facebook-posts/no-democrats-arent-pushing-microchips-fight-corona/

For Erin Gallagher, the conspiratorial documentary “Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19” came to her attention like it did for myself — a question from her mom about the veracity of the 26-minute video full of coronavirus misinformation.

After hearing about it from more friends and family, Gallagher decided to investigate how the video went viral so quickly.

Gallagher, an independent social media researcher who has been featured in NBC News and Wired, analyzed 37,000 posts containing the word “plandemic” and 24,000 posts with the name “Judy Mikovits,” the former National Cancer Institute scientist whose work has been discredited, yet is the key expert in “Plandemic.”

Using graphs showing the Facebook groups where “Plandemic” was posted, along with the type of link users were sharing, she found a pipeline of how this video went viral: from YouTube to Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members and names like “Chemtrails Global Skywatch,” “OFFICIAL Q / QANON” and “Drain the Swamp.” YouTube links were the most commonly-shared access points for “Plandemic,” regardless of how quickly YouTube removed them.

“Everyone uses multiple platforms to varying degrees now so nothing is ever limited to just one or two,” Gallagher told me this weekend. “But in this case, YouTube hosted the video, and I suspect many mirrors of it once it started getting pulled down, and these large, highly-active Facebook groups were key to spreading it like wildfire and pushing it into all of our families’ Facebook feeds.”

In the “plandemic” keyword data, which was collected between April 8, and May 8, YouTube links posted on Facebook had nearly 200,000 likes and more than 150,000 each of shares and comments.

I reached out to YouTube and Facebook for comment but haven’t heard back. I will send an updated note with tomorrow’s newsletter if either company responds.

“‘Plandemic’ creators encouraged viewers to download the video from the documentary’s website and post it across video platforms,” said Alex Kaplan, senior researcher at the left-leaning Media Matters for America. “And you could see the impact: dozens of reuploads of the video on YouTube — even after they tried to remove the original — and shares of it on other platforms.”

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This isn’t the first YouTube-to-Facebook conspiracy video Kaplan has studied. He found some of the most-viewed YouTube videos touting the debunked claim that Bill Gates is pushing a coronavirus vaccine to microchip the public receiving thousands of engagements on Facebook. And a video calling COVID-19 a “false flag” drew 6 million views on YouTube and more than 1 million engagements on Facebook before it was removed. Both videos went viral over the last two months.

“Be really careful about sharing content coming from places you haven’t heard of before just because it gives you some kind of emotion,” Kaplan said. “Take the time to do some research on the person(s) behind it or the claims made in it, and see if someone, like a fact-checker, has debunked it, before sharing.”

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while some right-wing activists have called on President Donald Trump to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, a prominent voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, one far-right conspiracy theory site is telling millions of viewers that being fired is “the nicest thing that could be done to Fauci” and is calling him a traitorous criminal who is “directly responsible” for the development of the coronavirus.

Fauci heads the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and has sometimes angered Trump supporters by correcting misinformation dispensed by the president. On April 12, Trump retweeted a call by failed congressional candidate and conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine to “#FireFauci.”

Conspiracy site Next News Network went a step further on April 16, publishing a long interview with Dr. Rashid Buttar who, as Media Matters noted in its report on the video, “proceeded to push multiple falsehoods and conspiracy theories,” including the claim that not a single death had actually been demonstrated to be caused by the COVID-19 virus. Buttar claimed that social distancing guidelines defy “every logical aspect of science and medicine.”

Buttar accused Fauci of violating a government moratorium on a type of “chimeric” research and directing funding toward research that Buttar claims led to the creation of the COVID-19 virus in a North Carolina lab. Host Gary Franchi said that research was then outsourced to China.

Here’s part of the exchange about Fauci between host Gary Franchi and Buttar, who has been described by Huffington Post as “a widely discredited osteopath”:

Franchi:

Is Fauci directly responsible for this pandemic? Because he maneuvered the money, he maneuvered around the moratorium, kept this chimeric research going in China? Is he directly responsible for not just the pandemic, but also the response that’s killed the economy, put what, 17 to 22 million people out of work? Is Fauci directly responsible?

Buttar:

I’m gonna say this, I think I’ve seen some petitions going around. I know Dr. Shiva said that Fauci should be fired. I think that’s the nicest thing that could be done to Fauci … He’s a criminal. He’s broken the law. He’s going against the government. I mean, to me, that seems like it’s a traitorous thing to do when you—the government has passed a regulation, and he’s at one of the highest levels in the NIH. He’s got a directorship at the NIH. And then he breaks the law. He breaks the moratorium and then funds research against something that could potentially cause harm throughout the entire world. And he’s in collusion with a foreign government to do—I mean, I don’t know. That’s a matter for attorneys to decide.

Buttar then talked about the early days of the HIV crisis, when he claimed Fauci was “pushing the agenda of a drug prophylactically to treat people for a condition that has now been seen to be related to lifestyle, nutritional status, all sorts of other things.” Returning to the nation’s current coronavirus crisis, he charged that there is a “conflict of interest”involved in Fauci pushing for an unproven vaccine while arguing against treating patients with drugs promoted by Trump that have not yet been shown to be safe or effective.

Buttar added:

People need to wake up and realize there is a massive criminal component to this. This entire world economy, the whole world economy shutting down, it comes back to one person, in my opinion, and that’s Fauci.Now, there’s other people that are involved with the charade, obviously, but Fauci is the person that they’ve put up in the front, and Fauci is the one who had the ability to stop this.

In 2018, The Guardian identified the Next News Network guk as “a dubious operation that recycles stories harvested from far-right publications, fake news sites and Russian media outlets.” It reported that Franchi was “once a leading proponent of a conspiracy that claimed the US government was creating concentration camps for its citizens” and noted that YouTube’s algorithms “consistently amplified” the network’s anti-Clinton videos in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Media Matters noted this week that the Next News Network video has “racked up millions of views” in spite of YouTube’s pledge to crack down on misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last October, in a story titled “YouTube Doesn’t Just Welcome ‘Conspiracy Theorists’—It Gives Them Awards,” Forbes associate editor Thomas Brewster noted that YouTube had given Franchi a gold “creator Award” in May. In December, Franchi put out a press release celebrating thatNext News Network had surpassed 1 billion views and was approaching 1.3 million subscribers.

Tags: Gary Franchi Rashid Buttar conspiracy theories Coronavirus Next News Network

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https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-figures-are-making-unhinged-connections-between-coronavirus-and

Some of right-wing media’s most prolific climate deniers are using the disastrous effects of the coronavirus to promote their anti-climate agenda across multiple platforms.

These figures have reframed their usual climate attacks around the pandemic. Some have compared the (alleged) outcomes of the Green New Deal to the (real) impacts of the coronavirus, while others have claimed that both the coronavirus and climate change are being used by leftists to push a radical agenda.

Green New Deal

Perhaps the most shameful connection made between coronavirus and the Green New Deal came from Daniel Turner, a fossil fuel industry shill whose recent career has been bankrolled by Koch Industries. Making his debut in The Federalist**on March 13, with an article titled “How The Wuhan Virus Is Accomplishing The Green New Deal’s Goals,” Turner concluded that “coronavirus is a glimpse of the long-term pain a Green New Deal and environmental radicalism would inflict on America.”

Turner attempted to support this conclusion with false claims about the Green New Deal, claiming that, like the coronavirus, it would crush capitalism, put the “oil and gas industry into panic,” end travel, and control the population.

To add insult to blatant misinformation, he also stated that supporters of the Green New Deal should be “pleased” at what the coronavirus is accomplishing because “green activists don’t fret these casualties” and that “greens will rejoice” over the coronavirus’s disastrous effects.

Turner had previously pushed this narrative on March 11, again connecting the coronavirus and the Green New Deal to “more government control.”

Over the past year, Turner has made a habit of appearing in right-wing outlets to lie and fearmonger about the Green New Deal, and to promote climate denial in general. This is also not the first time he’s claimed that the Green New Deal is just a front for socialism. Since January 2019, he’s appeared on Fox News at least 12 times and on Fox Business at least 21 times, and written at least 40 op-eds for Fox News’ website.

The same day that Turner published his abhorrent piece in The Federalist, well-known climate denier Rush Limbaugh made a similar connection between the climate resolution and coronavirus on his radio show, stating that “If you want to know what the Green New Deal would look like, you're starting to see it”:

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rush is no stranger to lying about the Green New Deal; in August, he said that “the premise behind it is bogus,” and also said that “there is no man-made climate change.” He’s been echoing the same sort of misinformation during the coronavirus outbreak, even claiming that it’s been “exaggerated and ... lied about.”

Alex Epstein, author of the book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which argues that the “overall impact of using fossil fuels is to make the world a far better place,” picked up on the egregious connection between the Green New Deal and coronavirus in a March 16 tweet. He told his followers:

Epstein has produced five videos featuring climate denial with Prager U--a right-wing, propagandist online video resource -- including one in which he lies about the Green New Deal. Perhaps more dangerously, his controversial (and flat out wrong) ideas are being promoted by Chevron to push back on climate activism against the oil industry. In the past, he’s appeared on, Fox Business,, and the.

These climate deniers love to fantasize about the supposed bad outcomes of the Green New Deal, despite the fact that it will have positive climate impacts -- it will help fight climate change and inequality, while reducing the reliance of harmful fossil fuels that are contributing to these very issues in the U.S.

Leftist policies and government control

Claims that climate action, especially as embodied by the Green New Deal, is just a front for more government control over our lives are popular among right-wing media figures, and they’ve also been invoked when talking about the coronavirus.

On March 16, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowlesdid just this, calling the responses to both climate change and coronavirus a “panic” and arguing that these issues are “simply being used to push through all the leftist policies that the left really, really wants.” He specifically referred to efforts “to pump up the Wuhan virus panic,” and he misrepresented climate science multiple times.

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Knowles is perhaps best known for being too unhinged even for Fox News; after he shamefully called Greta Thunberg a “mentally ill” child on a September appearance on The Story with Martha MacCallum, the network apologized for his “disgraceful” comment and stated that it had no further plans to book him. But he apparently still fits in perfectly at the cesspool of hatred and bigotry that is The Daily Wire.

Not to be outdone by Knowles, National Review’s Kevin Williamson invoked fascism when discussing climate change.Although he didn’t claim that the coronavirus is a false crisis, like some of his other right-wing colleagues, Williamson insinuated that both the left and the right are using the pandemic to push their respective “agendas.”

The great American longing for a generation-defining crisis — Pearl Harbor envy — is strange and enduring, and it shapes thinking on both sides of the great sociopolitical divide: On the left, global warming is the Third Reich, the so-called Green New Deal is the moonshot, and whatever unnecessary immiseration and chaos is unleashed by the fantasies of progressives are only sadly inevitable casualties on the beaches of this new Normandy. On the right, it’s an Islamic caliphate, the coming civil war (there’s always one), the nation’s being overrun by hordes of Spanish-speaking people, or — it is almost a relief to consider it — Armageddon itself. With everything from right-wing survivalist novels to ironic hipster zombie shows, we have been preparing ourselves, in our low-impact way, for just such an eventuality.

And in the plague, we see whatever we want to see: the need for a universal health-care system and paid leave, the need for a wall and for severing our relations with the Chinese.

An op-ed in RT (the state-run outlet formerly known as Russia Today) also made the government control point-- and also included a reprehensible attack on children concerned about climate change. Titled “What do the coronavirus & Greta Thunberg have in common? They’re both great for the planet,” the author writes:

Airplanes are grounded. Roads, deserted. The skies are clear and fish swim once again in Venice’s canals. Covid-19 has achieved in three short months what Greta Thunberg and her ilk could only dream of.

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But climate hysteria has been relegated to the back pages by coverage of Covid-19. Thunberg and her devotees can find some silver linings though: not only does she not have to return to school (nice timing, G), but the virus has helped Mother Earth recover in ways that screaming, crying, and gluing themselves to trains never could.

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But once things are back to normal, the environmental debate will likely start anew. This time, the Greta Thunbergs of the world can point to the current, virus-induced environmental uptick as proof that we can – when push comes to shove – give up our carbon addiction. However, remember that if your leaders are serious about meeting the climate goals they promise to, the lifestyle changes they ask of you will need to be enforced with the machinery of the state.

The author insinuates that “extreme measures” being taken to stop the spread of coronavirus are what “environmental crusaders” really want in pursuing their climate change goals.

The Russian government-backed RT has posted misleading climate videos on YouTube and has generally sown misinformation through its platform.

The government control idea has also been espoused by fringe, far-right YouTubers. One YouTuber, who has over 360,000 subscribers, produced a saying that coronavirus and climate change are both propaganda and that both of these “scaremonger” stories are being pushed by “globalist-backed” agendas that allow “governments to crack down on the public in various ways.” YouTube, which has a huge problem with climate change misinformation on its platform, has not tagged the video as pushing a climate falsehood.

Right wing-outlets, especially Fox News, have used a lot of misinformation when talking about the coronavirus. It’s no surprise that they’re also using favorite climate denier arguments within the discussions.

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youTube protected VDare's account. That account is now calling for a secessionist ethnostate in the United States.

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