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MISINFO 2

11 22

vs disinfo also coord but more putin based

see denial

see echo escalator

see alt fact Earth2

see yacc twit 5 musk

see tiktok

see soc media bias BS de-plat fail

see algo hype fear sticky viral

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(Misinformation, it’s said by academics, is when someone unwittingly spreads false rumours, while disinformation is intentionally starting or spreading those false rumours, maliciously.)

austin am st

During the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate in New York, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, declined to answer when asked whether he and former President Donald Trump would challenge the results of November’s election if they lost, as Trump did in 2020.

Instead, Vance pivoted to what he said was a much bigger threat to democracy: internet censorship.

"I believe that we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country. … It is the threat of censorship," Vance said.

Vance said Vice President Kamala Harris would "like to censor people who engage in misinformation." He said Harris "is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale. She did it during COVID. She’s done it over a number of other issues."

Then, during a back-and-forth exchange with Democratic vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vance said Harris "wants to use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment."

Many PolitiFact readers asked what Vance was talking about when referring to Harris and censorship.

Vance sought to tie Harris to the Biden administration's efforts to push social media platforms to remove what it deemed to be false content about COVID-19 during the pandemic.

The White House declined to comment.

Republicans have long bemoaned social media platforms’ efforts to moderate content, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The "censorship" commentary intensified in August when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress that the Biden administration had pressured the company to censor some posts. But experts have told PolitiFact such pressure doesn’t amount to censorship, and the Supreme Court ruled in Biden’s favor in a lawsuit on the topic. The Trump administration similarly asked Twitter to remove some posts.

Vance’s examples

When contacted for comment, an Republican National Committee spokesperson pointed PolitiFact to several news stories:

The letter did not mention Harris or any other specific person.

The Republican-led committee shared Zuckerberg’s letter on X, calling it a "Big win for free speech." Zuckerberg in his letter said ultimately it was the company’s decision whether to remove content, but that "the government pressure was wrong" and he regretted not speaking up about it at the time. One of Meta’s decisions Zuckerberg cited — to temporarily demote a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop after an FBI warning about a potential Russian disinformation operation — happened while Trump was still in office.

Meta’s fact-checking program during the pandemic spanned the Trump and Biden presidencies.

PolitiFact partners with Meta on its fact-checking program to slow misinformation’s spread. As part of the partnership, Meta flags posts that the company believes might be inaccurate or misleading, and fact-checkers provide feedback with published articles. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, decides what, if any, action to take on its platforms.

The RNC didn’t specify what "other issues" besides COVID-19 Vance was referring to at the debate.

What has Harris said?

Harris has talked about social media platforms’ responsibilities. She said in a May 2019 speech that she would hold them "accountable" for hateful content they shared.

She called for Twitter to suspend Trump’s account in October 2019 because of his posts discussing a whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president that led to Trump’s first impeachment. This year, X owner Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Trump supporter and former independent presidential candidate, seized on Harris’ 2019 comments to amplify a false claim that Harris plans to shut down X if she’s elected.

An 880-page report in May from the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government detailed what it called the "Censorship-Industrial Complex," referring to what it described as the Biden-Harris administration’s pressure campaign against social media companies.

The report makes no accusations specific to Harris beyond a footnote referring to a September 2019 CNN interview in which she said Twitter should suspend Trump’s account.

Is pressuring social platforms censorship? Experts weigh in

Experts told PolitiFact in April that the Biden administration’s efforts to contact platforms about social media posts weren’t censorship unless they crossed the line into coercion, but that the Supreme Court would ultimately decide.

Sheri Berman, a Barnard College at Columbia University political science professor, said it’s reasonable for citizens and candidates to debate how much social media moderation should happen. But she said attempts to limit the spread of dangerous or false information pertaining to election results or vaccines’ efficacy during a pandemic "is not a threat to democracy."

The Supreme Court in June rejected an effort by Republican-led Missouri and Louisiana to restrict federal employees from pressuring social media companies to remove posts, saying the plaintiffs had no legal standing.

In the court’s 6-3 ruling, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote that although the government factored in some of the platforms’ moderation decisions, "The evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment."

Trump also pressured social media platforms

Vance’s comments ignore evidence that the Trump administration also talked to social media platforms about removing content.

At a February 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing with then-Twitter executives about the Hunter Biden laptop story, one witness testified that the Trump White House had sought to remove a post from model Chrissy Teigen that criticized Trump.

Teigen had responded to Trump’s Sept. 8, 2019, social media post that called her "filthy-mouthed" by calling the former president a derogatory term.

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., asked Anika Collier Navaroli, formerly of Twitter’s U.S. safety policy team: "The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?"

Navaroli said: "I do remember hearing we'd received a request from the White House to make sure we evaluated this tweet, and they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president."

Our sources

TikTok is serving users blatant misinformation about Haitian immigrants

09/26/24 mma

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the X billionaire’s false posts about noncitizen voting spur officials to fact-check him, lead to requests to purge voter rolls, and add to worries about threats.

the Lie Detectives - In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age*

Journalist Sasha Issenberg provided a snapshot of how some political campaigns are fighting back against disinformation to win elections. Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., ho… booktv

steven-brill-social-media-online-misinformation

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the Death of Truth

225 K KIA xvr disinfo

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in a new analysis of electric vehicle-related content on Facebook, Media Matters found that negative stories made up the vast majority of content, particularly on right-leaning and politically nonaligned U.S. news and political pages, a trend which does not align with the optimistic outlook of EV adoption and technological advancements.

Since 2021, the Biden administration has allocated billions of dollars toward meeting the ambitious goal of making half of all new cars sold electric or hybrid over the next few years. Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the CHIPS Act have provided tax credits and other incentives to jump start electric vehicle sales and infrastructure such as charging stations, domestic battery manufacturing, critical mineral acquisition, in addition to preparing the automotive industry workforce for the transition.

In March, an Environmental Protection Agency rule setting strict limits on pollution from new gas-powered cars primed automakers for success in meeting these goals.

Biden’s EV push will continue to play an important role in the upcoming presidential election. Former president and current GOP candidate Donald Trump has insisted that Biden’s policies benefit China, which makes up the largest share of the global EV market. In March, while talking about the current state of the auto industry, Trump declared, “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” Economists disagree.

The comment tracks with years of outrage and opposition from Republican politicians, right-wing media, and fossil fuel industry surrogates, who have often disparaged the new technology and related policy and misleadingly framed the EV push as a threat to American jobs and national security.

Constant attacks on EVs from the right have helped fuel a politically divided market, where people who identify as Democrats are now much more likely to buy them or consider buying them, while nearly 70% of Republican respondents to a recent poll said they “would not buy” an EV. So far in 2024, headline after headline announced EV sales slumps and proclaimed that “EV euphoria is dead,'' despite reports of “robust” growth. In February, CNN changed a headline about EV sales on its website from a success story to a failure. Despite the positive long term outlook for EVs based on indicators like sales and government investments, the discourse around electric vehicles is often pessimistic.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more visible than on social media.

Media Matters compiled and analyzed Facebook posts related to EVs from U.S. news and political pages between January 1 and June 1 of this year and found that the majority of posts framed EVs in a negative light. The analysis also found that negative posts earned more than triple the interactions that content with a positive or neutral framing earned.

Media Matters also isolated Facebook posts from right-leaning U.S. news and political pages. In both this data set and the data set that included pages of all political leanings, the subject we saw the most was automakers or car rental companies rolling back their commitments to selling EVs.

However, on Facebook Media Matters found that this “day-to-day messiness” appears to be getting much more attention than the big picture. Negative stories related to EVs represented 81 out of 100 posts and generated 1.3 million interactions. That’s far more than more positive stories (15% of interactions) or neutral stories which presented both pros and cons (7%).

Even though EV owners are largely satisfied with their purchases overall, the emerging industry is still responding to challenges. These issues, particularly frustration with charging networks, which increase concerns about driving range, are a speed bump on the road to electrifying transportation.

Facebook users were drawn to news stories about Teslas breaking down in the cold, or people waiting in lines for hours to charge their EVs.

Some of the positive stories, which were apparently largely overlooked, included news of expanding charging networks in states like Florida, Michigan, and California. In another post, President Joe Biden declared that “the future of electric vehicles will be made in America by union workers.”

The top post on right-leaning pages during the study period, which was posted by Breitbart and earned 58,283 interactions, highlighted that Ford lost $1.3 billion on EVs in the first quarter of 2024. Anothertop post, from a local Fox affiliate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, featured a story with the headline “Hertz selling 20,000 EVs from rental fleet; will invest in gas-powered vehicles.” This post earned 76,224 interactions.

Stories about automakers and EV sales garnered 675,188 interactions (38%) compared to content about charging infrastructure (164,150 interactions, or 9%) or even EV trouble in cold weather (295,794 interactions, or 17%).

When looking at the top 100 posts from right-leaning political pages only, Media Matters found a similar pattern. Posts related to automakers or EV sales garnered 477,233 interactions (45%). Posts about charging infrastructure earned just 7% and posts about performance issues, particularly in cold weather, earned 10% of interactions. The remaining posts covered an even wider range of different topics.

Importantly, EV sales are still growing, despite setbacks. In May, Ford reported a 65% increase in hybrid and EV sales. Also in May, Bloomberg reported that “EV sales are still booming for most automakers — even if Tesla is in a nut.” The article pointed out that, “Six of the 10 biggest EV makers in the US saw sales grow at a scorching pace compared to a year ago.”

On the predicament at Hertz, CNN reportedthat the problem,“wasn’t necessarily that the cars were electric, and customers simply do not want to drive electric cars. The problem was how Hertz handled the fleet in general.” For example, Hertz did not have charging stations at its rental locations, and the company has been mired by other issues as well. This important context was largely omitted from the post text, headlines, or first paragraphs of the top posts Media Matters analyzed. On Facebook, the optimistic long-term outlook on EV growth was largely ignored.

* Right-wing media have been driving anti-EV sentiment (with help from fossil fuel industry allies) since the start of Biden’s term. This trend was clearly reflected in Media Matters’ analysis. Out of the top 100 posts related to EVs on right-leaning pages, 95% were negative, earning over a million interactions in 2024 so far.

But on Facebook, politically nonaligned pages fed into this trend as well. Nearly three quarters (74%) of EV related top posts on nonaligned pages had a negative framing. These posts generated 83% of all interactions on EV-related top posts from nonaligned pages.

Some of the same headlines that received attention on right-leaning pages also got attention on nonaligned pages. Several local news outlets highlighted Ford and Hertz’s losses, along with other problems related to EVs struggling to charge in cold weather.

Our analysis indicates that media on Facebook are not contextualizing conversations about the so-called EV sales slump, and other problems that most nascent technologies inevitably face. The nation is undertaking a massive and necessary transition to electrify the transportation sector, reduce car dependency, and expand access to public transit. Transforming the transportation sector in this way will not only cut planet-warming carbon pollution, but will also improve health outcomes for many Americans.

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Fauci blames Fox News’ Laura Ingraham for Trump's obsession with COVID “miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine”

06/18/24 mma

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if Trump is re-elected, he’d be America’s 47th president, so he’s named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47.” At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.

Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans, include:

Part of Agenda 47, Trump says, is “finishing the job” he started as president between 2017 and 2021.

Just two hours after he and Pence were sworn into office, they removed all mention of LGBTQ+ issues from the White House website.

Two days later, his State Department deleted former Secretary of State John Kerry’s apology to the nation for the “Lavender Scare” government persecution of gays and lesbians during the McCarthy era 1950s and early 1960s. A month later, Trump’s Justice Department announced they’d no longer defend the civil rights of trans kids.

His Education and HUD offices both withdrew their court defenses of queer people, particularly students and those in homeless shelters, and his Secretary of State refused to mention to the Russian Foreign Minister the detention and brutal executions of gay men by Russian soldiers in Chechnya. On May 4, 2017 Trump signed an executive order letting the DOJ ignore claims of illegal discrimination against queer people and women throughout every single one of the nation’s federal agencies.

In September, 2017, Trump’s Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, officially ended that agency’s Title IX guidance requiring schools to do something about sexual harassment, including sexual violence, against women and LGBTQ+ kids. In response to a question from the media about the change in policy and gay men, Trump said that his Vice President “wants to hang them all.”

In January of 2018, Trump rolled out the “Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom” at HHS, which would backstop people who wanted to use the excuse of “deeply held religious beliefs” to justify explicit discrimination against queer people and women, or to simply to make life difficult for government agencies.

All of this is just the beginning. The Human Rights Campaign has documented page after page of anti-queer policies put into effect by Trump that will be resurrected and put on steroids in a second term.

In the Agenda 47 section of his website, Trump explains how he’s going to use our schools and colleges to indoctrinate young Americans in rightwing ideology. He explicitly says:

“When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”

Any colleges that continue to teach “under the guise of [racial] equity will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”

In other words, just like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, he’s going to bankrupt the nation’s schools and colleges if they continue to teach the true history of America and promote egalitarian values. As Trump notes at his website:

“[W]e are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.”

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.

In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, if they can take both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:

“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”

Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.

Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.

First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.

“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information,” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.

He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:

“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”

In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.

They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.

Orbán’s rightwing buddies could buy the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.

Trump wants to do the same here in the US.

When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:

“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”

Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.

Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.

Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and III Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.

In a flashback to Hitler’s “work camps” that preceded the death camps by five years, Trump’s also proposed building concentration camps around the country to house “millions” of undocumented aliens and his political enemies. As he noted in a speech on Veterans’ Day this year:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” adding that Russia isn’t a problem. Instead, he said, “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Presumably that means people like me and you, who would oppose his fascist agenda.

Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal speechwriter’s job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office; Jackson’s favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered — was “The Indian Killer”).

Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president — himself, at the time — to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by Garfield’s presidency in 1881, routine.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.

It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.

It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.

Donald Trump wants to functionally end the Civil Service system and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself.

He tried to do this in the last months of his presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president to keep their jobs.

The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government, and ending any possibility that people in the government will push back against Trump the way they did during his presidency.

The Department of Justice was established by President Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, in part to enforce federal laws protecting the rights of people who’d recently been freed from slavery.

After Richard Nixon tried to use it against his enemies (and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for his efforts), Congress in 1978 passed the Ethics in Government Act which put a wall of separation between the DOJ and the White House.

Trump has explicitly proclaimed his intention to tear that wall down and go farther than Nixon ever imagined in using our armed investigative services for personal revenge and harassment of people he perceives as his enemies.

He wants the nation’s premiere police agencies to become his own personal enforcers, and has already said they will be hunting down “liberals,” Black Lives Matter protest participants, and Joe Biden, his family, and members of his administration.

He wants to imprison them, as well as the prosecutors and judges who have been participating in the effort to hold him to account for the crimes he committed over the past 7 years.

This politicization of law enforcement has been a first-order and primary feature of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime that’s risen to power over the past few hundred years, worldwide. It’s always one of the first things fascist leaders do when they seize power.

In an apparent attempt to portray himself as a visionary like JFK, with his promise to send men to the moon and bring them back safely, Trump is promising to build “freedom cities” in his second term. The main feature he’s discussed is that people will get around in them in “flying cars.”

While it’s being portrayed as a goofy stunt designed to make him seem like an imaginative idealist, in fact there has been a movement among rightwing billionaires for some time to create cities that they basically run as little feudal fiefdoms, the same way the morbidly rich run their companies and their football teams.

Some libertarian billionaires assert that the only reason there’s never been a successful libertarian nation in the history of the world is because true libertarianism — government doing nothing but running the police, army, and courts and everything else left to private charity and business owners — “has never been tried.”

The ”freedom cities” could be a new libertarian experiment, or they may be the 21st century version of the old “company town,” where nobody has rights or protection of the law but is subject to the whims of the local billionaire owner. A group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has already put forward what appears to be a plan to build a new city in California that they may or may not envision running along these lines. The group has so far purchased more than 53,000 acres of land, an area larger than the entire city of Beaumont, Texas, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Trump is also promising that he’ll end the brutal attacks against Ukraine on “day one” by simply turning the country over to his good friend, Vladimir Putin.

For the first time since World War II, this would legitimize a nation attacking another nation simply to seize their land, resources, and people.

It would greenlight China to do the same with Taiwan, and encourage every other tinpot dictator in the world to grab nearby territory that he wants. It would encourage war, and could very easily lead to a world war.

Abandoning Ukraine like this, along with Trump’s oft-stated preference to leave or end NATO and stop support for the UN, would lead the autocracies of the world — particularly Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea — to destroy the democracies in their sphere of influence, replacing those democracies with strongman autocracies.

The democratic experiment on this planet is only 250 years old, more or less, and this would signal a return to the way the world had been ruled for the 7,000 years prior to that: by kings, popes, mullahs, strongman warlords, and the morbidly rich.

Between Agenda 47 and Project 2025, Donald Trump and the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP have big plans for this nation, regardless of which Republican takes the White House next. They’re dead serious and far more well-funded than any of the groups that fight for and advocate democracy.

If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you.

Triple check your voter registration, especially if you live in a Red state where the voter purges have already begun, and make sure everybody you know is registered to vote.

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

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On Facebook, right-leaning pages lead the conversation about violence in Israel and Gaza | Media Matters for America

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The conspiracy subreddit is full of COVID-19 and anti-vaccine health misinformation that Reddit claims to prohibit | Media Matters for America

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// Arizona Republicans convene a COVID hearing chock full of misinformation — again - Alternet.org

an 10 23 no lnx

Arizona Republicans convene a COVID hearing chock full of misinformation — again

Jerod Macdonald-Evoy, Arizona Mirror

October 21, 2023

For the second time in five months, Republican state lawmakers listened intently and offered no pushback during a day-long special hearing at the Arizona Senate billed as examining the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic that was instead rife with conspiracy theories, misinformation and fear-mongering around vaccines and public health.

In May, the Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee featured testimony from a group of supposed health experts who spread myriad misinformation about vaccines and the pandemic during the committee’s time. On Friday, the committee convened again, bringing some of the same people to speak.

The committee had previously faced criticism for its awkward name, which has been promoted in abbreviated form by the QAnon-friendly political nonprofit The America Project. The abbreviated name, NCSWIC, is a commonly used abbreviation in the QAnon world, where it means “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming,” alluding to predictions of arrests and executions of members of the “deep state.”

Although the official name of the panel spells the word “southwestern” correctly, the committee was listed as “NCSWIC” on the Arizona Legislature’s website and the abbreviation was used by outside boosters.

The Republican elected officials on the panel were state Sens. T.J. Shope and Janae Shamp, the chair and vice-chair, respectively, of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee; state Rep. Steve Montenegro, who chairs the state House of Representatives’ Health and Human Services Committee; and U.S. Reps. Andy Biggs, Eli Crane and Paul Gosar.

While the state legislators were in attendance, Biggs, Crane and Gosar only appeared electronically and delivered pre-recorded video addresses. All three were in Washington, D.C., Friday as Republicans are locked in a fight over who should lead the U.S. House of Representatives.

“It’s disheartening to see Arizona’s elected officials once again provide a platform for spreading dangerous disinformation about vaccines for children,” Becky Christensen, founder and state campaigns director of SAFE Communities Coalition, the nation’s first pro-vaccine political advocacy organization, said in a statement to the Arizona Mirror. “Public health should be guided by fact-based information, not misinformation. Their actions undermine efforts to safeguard our communities.”

Christensen added that lawmakers should seek “responsible and informed discourse” to help better guide public health decisions.

Misinformation returns

Dr. Peter McCoullough once again boldly proclaimed that the COVID-19 virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China. There is no consensus on the origin of the virus.

McCoullough is known for spreading unfounded claims, especially around the origins of the virus. He previously has stated that he believed the pandemic was “planned” and has promoted the QAnon conspiracy film “Plandemic.”

McCoullough has become a darling to those in both QAnon and the broader conspiracy world, appearing regularly on shows like the one hosted by conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, who said the COVID vaccine is a “bioweapon.” Peters also was behind multiple QAnon conspiracy documentaries that made dubious claims about the vaccine, including that it included snake venom.

McCoullough has also appeared on disgraced retired Gen. Michael Flynn’s “Reawaken America” tour, where he has denounced drag shows and gender identity issues.

During Friday’s hearing, McCoullough spread even more falsehoods around COVID-19 and vaccine efficacy.

“It is called ‘turbo cancer’ for a reason,” McCoullough said, adding that he believes it is “theoretically possible” that multiple vaccines “could be related to cancer.”

The term “turbo cancer” comes from people who have spread false information about the COVID vaccine, attempting to link it to an aggressive form of cancer. There is no established link between the vaccine and cancer, and studies have found either no association or found a decreased risk of lymphoma.

McCoullough also continued to spread a false claim that 17 million people have been killed by the vaccine. The notion comes from a highly flawed analysis of data claiming that mortality rates were spiking because of the vaccine. McCoullough also spread other similar claims, such as saying that more than 500,000 people in the United States were killed by the vaccine, an idea based on a misrepresentation of United Kingdom data.

And McCoullough appeared to make claims that alluded to a conspiracy theory widely adopted by QAnon adherents, which was featured in a discredited film, claiming that blood clots found in people’s bodies were caused by the COVID vaccine.

The film, “Died Suddenly,” suggests it is all part of a shadowy plot to depopulate the world. But experts who have examined the film’s claims have said that many of the clots appear to be post-mortem clots. Cases of clots caused by the vaccine are “very rare,” according to one study that found only approximately 1,000 cases out of 2 million. The movie also featured incidents that occurred before the pandemic in 2020, but presented them as consequences of vaccination.

A member of the panel also has a direct connection to the conspiracy film.

Dr. Peter Chambers, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, appears in the film speaking about the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, or DMED, which he claimed showed a spike in medical conditions in the military which he attributed to COVID-19 vaccines.

Chambers’ claim has been debunked since 2021 by multiple fact-checkers.

The former military doctor is also a believer in the debunked conspiracy theory that 5G cellular technology is connected to the COVID-19 virus. Chambers also was part of a failed lawsuit seeking to prevent the military from implementing a COVID vaccine mandate.

Chambers’ presentation to the committee included a slide that referred to the “globalists.”

The globalist conspiracy theory is a far-right conspiracy theory with roots in antisemitism and is also often connected to the idea of a “New World Order” and a one-world government, most often with the Jewish people at the center of the conspiracy. Peters, the conspiracy theory talk show host and the man behind “Died Suddenly,” frequently works with antisemites and white supremacists. Chambers has also been supported by the America Project, which boosted the hearing and helped fund the Arizona Senate’s partisan “audit” of the 2020 election.

Also returning to the committee was Aaron Siri, an attorney who is most well known for his work with an organization called the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN.

ICAN has been on the frontlines of anti-vaccine misinformation and is led by Del Bigtree, a television and film producer who has become an anti-vaccine activist. ICAN was listed as one of the “key organizations” tied to the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s “The Disinformation Dozen,” the anti-vaxxers who play leading roles in spreading digital misinformation about COVID vaccines. Chambers mentioned that he worked with Bigtree on anti-vaccine issues.

Siri claimed that “you can’t say vaccines have reduced chronic health issues” among children.

“I’m not saying vaccines cause those,” he said, sharing a misleading claim on chronic illness in children. “Something is definitely going on.”

The committee also heard from Arizona resident Calli Varner, who claimed that she had a stroke due to the COVID vaccine.

Varner had an ischemic stroke when a blood-clot made its way to her brain. Strokes have been on the rise in younger populations, with doctors theorizing that one cause could be patent foramen ovale, which is present in between 24 to 40% of the population and generally goes unnoticed.

Varner told the committee that she has had various health problems develop, including an autoimmune issue, since she got vaccinated. McCoullough said he had been consulting with the Scottsdale resident about her experience and used the opportunity to say that strokes, infertility and immune disorders are being caused by the vaccine.

Studies have shown that those who contracted COVID-19 have an increased risk of stroke, while those who got the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and did not contract COVID -19 have “no difference in stroke risk.” There is also no evidence that the vaccine causes infertility and no conclusive evidence to suggest a link between the vaccine and autoimmune disorders.

McCoullough also once again spoke about the scientifically unsound plan to help people remove spike proteins from people’s bodies.

Shamp, a former nurse who has claimed she was fired because she refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, came up with the idea for the hearing and those in attendance applauded her for putting it together.

Shamp, who was present during the events of Jan. 6, has spread a multitude of QAnon conspiracy theories online for years, including a post with “NCSWIC” in it. Shamp said at the end of the hearing Friday that another one will be happening “sometime in December.”

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

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no lnx

Scientists debunk RFK Jr.’s 'completely unfounded' claim that chemicals can make children gay

https://www.alternet.org/msn/rfk-jr-2662274116/

Alex Henderson July 13, 2023

The saying that "politics make strange bedfellows" has never been more accurate than it is in 2023.

On one hand, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) — an arch-conservative neocon — gets a lot of respect from Democrats these days for aggressively calling out former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. At the same time, Democratic presidential candidate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. — is being praised by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson for his anti-vaxxer views.

RFK Jr. has drawn a great deal of criticism from medical experts for claiming that vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, are dangerous and that childhood vaccines can lead to autism. Now, according to CNN, medical experts are calling him out for promoting "unfounded conspiracies that man-made chemicals in the environment could be making children gay or transgender and causing the feminization of boys and masculinization of girls."

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson rewrites history with claim Big Pharma 'PR campaign' silenced RFK Jr.'s anti-vax lies

CNN reporters Abby Turner and Andrew Kaczynski, in an article published on July 13, explain, "Experts dispute the claims from Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist, and told CNN's KFile his theories that 'sexual identification' and 'gender confusion' among children could be from their exposure to 'endocrine disruptors' found in the environment are completely unfounded."

Turner and Kaczynski report that CNN "spoke to multiple experts who said there is no link between endocrine disruptors and children's gender and sexuality." The journalists stress that although there are legitimate environmental concerns about the quality of drinking water in the United States, nothing in the water will turn a person gay.

"While sex in in frogs is determined by environmental factors such as temperature and chemicals, Dr. Andrea Gore, professor of pharmacology and toxicology at University of Texas at Austin, said the sex of humans is determined at the moment of conception, and cannot later be altered by endocrine-disrupting chemicals," the CNN journalists report. "The baseless claim that chemicals — particularly in tap water — could turn people gay has gained popularity with conspiracy theorists over the years, most memorably with conservative radio host Alex Jones, who said chemicals in the water were 'turning the friggin' frogs gay.'"

READ MORE: Journalist details RFK Jr.’s appeal to a 'crackpot collection of fascists and anti-progressive leftists'

Find CNN's full report at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Tucker Carlson rewrites history with claim Big Pharma 'PR campaign' silenced RFK Jr.’s anti-vax lies ›

'Roiling with conspiracy theories': RFK Jr.’s 'madness' abounds in New Yorker interview ›

These wealthy megadonors are supporting DeSantis and RFK Jr. at the same time: report ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

RFK Jr.'s presidential campaign is driven by conspiracy theories : NPR ›

RFK Jr. Is Our Brother and Uncle. He's Tragically Wrong About ... ›

Why Robert Kennedy Jr.'s 2024 Bid Is a Headache for Biden - The ... ›

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owned by ggl

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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well ok but gop spreads more and worse, and are willing to use violence and have guns; dems do not do voter suppression, both siderism?

ith the reelections of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, many civil libertarians have warned that democracy is under attack worldwide. Some of them have also been sounding the alarm about the United States, saying that the Republican Party — especially the MAGA movement — no longer believes in the country's democratic traditions.

But Washington Post opinion writer Jason Willick, in a June 5 column, rejects the argument that one of the United States' two main political parties still favors democracy while the other does not. As Willick sees it, the real threat to U.S. democracy is the deep distrust that Republicans and Democrats have for one another.

A recent study by the journal Nature Human Behaviour, according to Willick, "suggests that the threat to American democracy arises, at least in part, from bad information."

READ MORE:'Bowing down to a dictatorship': Turkish-American NBA star shreds Elon Musk over Twitter censorship

"People overestimate the threat to democracy from the other tribe and are more willing to defensively subvert democratic norms as a result," Willick argues. "Think of a run on a bank: Investors who think others are about to withdraw deposits will also be more likely to withdraw their own."

Willick contends that framing the United States' political tensions as "democracy versus autocracy" is misleading because it "doesn;t reflect the actual challenge to self-government in the 21st Century.

"People who champion democracy can easily persuade themselves to undermine it if they think the other side is prepared to do the same," Willick writes. "To the extent that there is a risk of authoritarianism in the United States, it doesn't come from hostility to democracy. It comes from Americans' deepening attachment to democracy and their growing fear that it will be taken away."

READ MORE:The debt ceiling deal reflects a permanent feature of American democracy

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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zuck and edgelord musk bring him back for bucks

https://www.mediamatters.org**/facebook/trump-used-his-reinstated-facebook-page-post-misinformation-**filled-statement-response-his indict

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-returns-barricades-indicted-donald-trump

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/misinformation-about-recent-whale-deaths-dominated-discussions-offshore-wind-energy

no lnx twt

:{*:{after a slew of whale deaths along the east coast of the U.S., right-wing media have been promoting false fossil fuel industry talking points about offshore wind projects on Facebook.}:

Media Matters found that in the first two months of 2023, from January 1 - March 1:

Of the 288 posts that mention wind energy, nearly 84% specifically mentioned the unsubstantiated claim that offshore wind farms impact whale populations. These posts received 73,457 (73%) out of 101,277 interactions on posts about wind energy.

22 out of the top 50 most-interacted with posts about offshore wind energy contained misinformation claiming that they may be responsible for whale deaths on the East Coast.

None of the posts with misinformation had fact-checks from Facebook moderators, and nearly all of them were from right-leaning pages.}:

Right-leaning pages earned 90% of interactions on posts about wind energy.

Many posts that did not contain misinformation still promoted a misleading narrative about offshore wind projects.

According to NOAA and other experts, there is no evidence that proposed offshore projects have contributed to what the agency is calling an “unusual mortality event.”

:{:{Ramping up offshore wind development has been a focus of Biden’s energy agenda. In 2021, the administration set a goal of deploying 30 Gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. More recently, the Inflation Reduction Act granted $100 million for offshore wind projects and reopened additional areas for lease in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic for wind development.}:

This effort, along with concerns over what is causing whale mortality, has mobilized clean energy opponents and sparked extensive coverage and discussion on Facebook, driven almost entirely by right-leaning pages.}:

84% of Facebook posts about wind energy also mentioned whale populations

Out of the 288 posts on the topic of wind energy from the study period, 241, or 84%, specifically mentioned whale populations. From December 1 to March 1, 16 humpback whales have been stranded on or near beaches in states along the Atlantic coast, mostly in New Jersey and New York. North Atlantic Right Whales have also been experiencing an unusual mortality event along the Atlantic Coast since 2017; 6 have been found dead so far in 2023.

Currently, there are only two functional wind farms in the U.S., with about 20 proposed offshore wind projects in various stages of development in 11 states along the East Coast. This has become the perfect opportunity for anti-renewable activists and fossil fuels industry shills posing as environmentalists sympathetic to the plight of whales to launch a public relations and legal campaign in opposition to these offshore wind projects.

Right-wing media, and particularly Fox News,have propelled these efforts in response to Biden’s push for offshore wind. One of the top posts with the most interactions, about 1,600, featured a FoxNews.com article with a headline that read, “SOMETHING FISHY: Congressman says green energy projects may be to blame for animal deaths.” That Congressman isRep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), who introduced legislation that would mandate a federal investigation into the role wind energy development may have played in the recent uptick in whale deaths.

Fox News article with image of beached whale

Smith isn’t the only lawmaker that spoke out after extensive right-wing media coverage. Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), as well as a dozen New Jersey mayors have all called for a moratorium on offshore wind construction.

Another popular post was a screenshot of a tweet from Monica Crowley, a right-wing podcaster, former Trump official, and former Fox News contributor. The post suggests environmentalists do not care about whales dying because, in this instance, it does not fit their political agenda. It was shared by several pages affiliated with The Western Journal, including the Tea Party Community and Conservative Tribune. The February 13 tweet itself had over 100,000 likes, shares, and comments.

screenshot of a tweet from Monica Crowley

22 out of the top 50 posts with the most interactions about offshore wind and whales contained misinformation on the topic.

Nearly half of the top 50 posts examined by Media Matters incorrectly linked whale deaths to offshore wind projects.

The most popular post from our study, which had nearly 19,500 interactions, was a clip from the January 11 edition of Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime where Watters claimed that surveying for wind projects is killing whales. On January 11, Watters did a segment on his prime time show where he attempted to misleadingly portray Protect Our Coasts NJ as a grassroots oceans advocacy organization.

Jesse Watters plays video of beached whale

The second most popular post, which had almost 15,500 interactions came from Power the Future, whose founder, Daniel Turner, is an alumnus of the Charles Koch Institute. The post links to an opinion piece by Turner claiming that “radical environmentalists” are blaming whale deaths on fishing communities when they should, without evidence, be blaming wind farms.

Power The Future posts an article about "radical wind farm activists" from the Daily Caller*

None of the posts were labeled as misleading by Facebook fact-checkers

*None of the posts which contained blatant misinformation were labeled as such by Facebook through its fact-checking partnerships. In general, these posts failed to note NOAA’s statement on the topic or statements from any experts that have pointed out the improbability of a connection between the mortality event and offshore wind, especially given that whales face many other risks such as vessel strikes and entanglement. Some posts also accused environmentalists, Democrats and the Biden administration of being dismissive about the plight of whales. In reality, Biden’s massive investments in renewable energy may actually be key to helping save marine life; burning fossil fuels is impacting the species by limiting the availability of their food and changing marine migration patterns.

Other social media posts that were not included in this study and contain similar misinformation on the topic have been repeatedly fact-checked by other sites.

:{:{Many posts that did not contain misinformation still promoted a misleading narrative about offshore wind projects}:

Several posts Media Matters looked at featured articles and reports from USA Today, NPR, POLITICO, and Greenpeace that called out this misinformation campaign around offshore wind.

However, these debunks were outnumbered by content that, even if it acknowledged the lack of evidence to support anti-wind talking points, still gave them credence by repeating them over and over again without an immediate debunk and framing the issue as a real debate when very few groups actually disagree with NOAA, and those that do have no evidence to support their claims. Some coverage is also omitting or muddling key details about how far along the wind projects are to make them seem more directly correlated with whale deaths. }:

Even left-leaning pages were complicit in this. For example, a NowThis video asked: “Could Offshore Wind Developments be Causing Whales to Die?” The answer is no, but that isn’t evident until the end of the video.

All in all, the fact that content about all of the benefits offshore wind could bring to coastal communities paled in comparison to perceived harms reveals the success of fossil fuel industry propaganda online.

Is offshore wind killing whales?*

Conservative New Jersey activist jumps into anti-wind crusade

*Out of all of the posts about whales and offshore wind, 31 posts (13%) came from the page of a conservative activist Joseph Rudy Rullo, who unsuccessfully ran for New Jersey governor in 2017. So far, in 2023, Rullo has dedicated his Facebook page which has 384,000 followers, to spreading misinformation about offshore wind development and bashing New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy for opting to not implement a moratorium on offshore wind development off of the New Jersey coast. He has also been used as a source on the topic for local New Jersey news.

Rullo has directed his followers to take steps to actively oppose offshore wind projects, such as attending New Jersey EPA meetings as well as the February 19 rally to “save the whales.” At the rally, “organizers” with the fossil fuel industry front group Protect Our Oceans NJ addressed the crowd along with lawmakers.

Right-leaning pages posted the most about wind energy compared to left-leaning and ideologically nonaligned pages*

*Right-leaning pages that post about news and politics have almost completely dominated the Facebook conversation about wind energy in general, not just offshore wind. Right-leaning pages posted more often, and earned more total interactions than either nonaligned or left-leaning pages. Right-leaning pages earned over 91,300 interactions on posts about wind energy, or 90% of all interactions on posts about wind energy, while nonaligned pages earned over 5,800 interactions (6%), and left-leaning pages earned 4,077 interactions (4%).

Right-leaning Facebook pages made 192 posts about wind energy issues, over twice the volume of nonaligned pages, which had 81 posts. Left-leaning pages made just 15 posts. All in all, right-leaning pages made up 67%, or nearly three-quarters of Facebook posts about wind energy.

These posts mainly focused on offshore wind projects and marine life, but also pushed misinformation about the functionality of wind turbines on land and their environmental impact, in addition to making exaggerated statements about how often they experience structural issues.

For example, one Newsmax headline suggested that green energy is flawed while in the same video a Newsmax correspondent admitted that according to the Department of Energy, the “reliability rate of a wind turbine is about 98% so these collapses and failures are quite rare by industry standards.”

Jon Glasgow on wind turbines on American Agenda

The threat that wind turbines pose to birds, which has long been exaggerated and pale in comparison to other threats to avian life such as climate change, buildings, pesticides, and domestic cats was also a theme. The idea has been a staple of climate change deniers with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, such as Robert Bryce and more recently resurrected by renewable energy skeptics on Twitter.

Methodology

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics from January 1 to August 25, 2020.

For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here.

The resulting list consisted of 771 right-leaning pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 left-leaning pages.

Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled all posts for the pages on this list that were related to wind energy or whales deaths that contained the keywords: “wind energy,” “wind turbines,” “wind turbine,” “wind farm,” “wind farms,” “offshore wind,” “wind projects,” “wind project,” “wind development," “dead whale,” “whale death,” or “whale deaths” in the post itself or in the headline or description of any included link from January 1, 2023, through March 1, 2023.

Two Media Matters researchers then reviewed the posts to determine which ones were relevant to the topic of wind energy, and which were relevant to the topic of offshore wind and whales specifically.

Finally, researchers coded 50 posts with the most interactions to determine whether they contained misinformation about offshore wind and whale mortality. Misinformation in this case was defined as the suggestion that there is evidence that offshore wind development, most frequently the sonar used in undersea surveys, has been or may be contributing to whale deaths. If coding differed, posts were reviewed and discussed to reach a consensus.

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IN THIS ARTICLE

Facebook

Climate deniers

Related

Fox News is rapidly escalating its anti-offshore wind campaign

02/03/23

Fox News' Jesse Watters fails to disguise oil-industry funded group as a grassroots “ocean advocate” organization

01/12/23

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04/04/1*

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

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aha: algo Big tech Facebook (ggl?) amplify and monetize [meld info/ attn, money economy, // boosts political stokes rage machine and eg MTG fundraising --> comm chair?!

roger says demon portal over WH Biden and

https://www.alternet.org/meadows-2658957827/

an raw 12 22

The massive trove of text messages turned over by Mark Meadows to the House select committee show Republican elected officials were willing to violate the U.S. Constitution on "bizarre" and obviously phony evidence.

Talking Points Memo reporter Hunter Walker obtained the messages, which show the former White House chief of staff communicating with GOP officials at all levels of government about far-fetched conspiracy theories to justify overturning Donald Trump's election loss, and he told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that their lack of sophistication was genuinely shocking.

"We're touching on something that is really a central thing here," Walker said. "I covered the Trump White House, and a big question is how many people are in on the joke and how many people are true believers. I first, you know, became familiar with the text log when i was working on my book, The Breach, which is about the Jan. 6 investigation. I co-wrote it with [former GOP lawmaker] Denver Riggleman. He knows a lot of these people, and he was shocked when he opened the text log. He led the [select committee's] phone team, it was like looking into the mouth of madness, and even with that introduction, I had a similar reaction."

RELATED:Reporter reveals 'frightening' gaps in Mark Meadows texts laying out 'broad plot' to overthrow government

"Adults in government, not only engaging in frighteningly undemocratic language, but their base intelligence is called into question," Walker continued. "You're talking about the wild Italian theory, people were taking it seriously. We see another instance where someone has a bizarre theory from a Romanian YouTube video that any of us would know not to tweet, based on stuff from 2005 that they somehow thought carried over to 2022.The information literacy of our members of Congress is called into question here, and that's part of why we thought it was more important to present more of the totality of the these texts you have seen anywhere before, and our text team made sure you can see them in a phone as they were received, because the typos, the wild links, all of this is really important."

"One last point, and this is something that shouldn't be lost in this discussion," he added. "We see the pressure, we see it in real time in these texts on people like Doug Ducey, that was on people like Brad Raffensperger, that was on people like the Arizona attorney general. Scott Perry, the same guy sending this Italian theory, is talking about lobbying to have Trump pressure the Italian government and Pennsylvania legislatures, and you know, I think one of the things we see is if these people had given into the pressure, all of this plotting just might have worked."

Watch belowor at the link

===

https://www.factcheck.org/2022/12/the-whoppers-of-2022/

no lnx

Summary

The midterm elections are finally over, but it won’t be long before the 2024 campaign cycle — which will really start in 2023 — gets going. Before that happens, we’ve put together this list of the year’s biggest whoppers that politicians and others made over the past 12 months.

Political appeals to fear were as popular as ever in 2022. Republicans sounded a false alarm about Democrats authorizing the IRS to target middle-income taxpayers with tens of thousands of new IRS “agents.” On the other side of the aisle, Democrats attempted to scare up votes by claiming that Republicans had a plan to “end” the Social Security and Medicare programs based on a proposal that few Republicans supported.

President Joe Biden earned mentions in our roundup for giving his policies too much credit for a significant reduction in the federal deficit — and for claiming to have rescued an economy “in decline.” Meanwhile, his predecessor, Donald Trump, a regular on our Whoppers lists, deflected from his own mishandling of classified White House documents by falsely alleging that other past presidents had done something comparable.

COVID-19 misinformation continued to be a huge problem online as well.One viral video advanced a conspiracy theory that the disease was caused by snake venom being injected into the public water supply, and another popular video promoted the equally bizarre claim that the COVID-19 vaccines are being used to depopulate the planet.

We also addressed misinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including the statements of high-ranking Russian officials who denied for months that Russia was preparing to attack Ukraine. Then, after the attack had commenced, pro-Russia social media posts manufactured a claim about the supposed U.S. funding of secret Ukrainian “biolabs” to justify the Russia-provoked war.

And that’s just a sampling of the claims we’ve highlighted in our compilation. Read the analysis section for the complete list of falsehoods and other nonsense.

Analysis

Those 87,000 IRS “agents.” The Republican talking point of the year was the falsehood that “87,000 IRS agents” were coming after the “middle class” or the average Joe thanks to the Democrats. Former President Donald Trump added the bogus tidbit that this 87,000-strong “army” could “carry guns.” The figure refers to the number of employees the IRS could hire with funding that was part of the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act — but most of those workers would replace retiring or departing workers and most new positions would be in customer service, the Treasury Department told us.

Some hires would be tax enforcers, but their focus would be auditing high-income earners to make sure they pay the taxes they legally owe the government, administration officials have said. Only IRS “special agents” in the Criminal Investigation division are law enforcement officers who are authorized to carry guns.

A photo of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s false claims about past presidents and classified documents. After the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on Aug. 8 — seizing 11 sets of classified records, some labeled “top secret” — Trump falsely claimed that he was being held to a different standard than his predecessors. In an early October rally, Trump claimed that “many other presidents stored their millions of pages of stuff in unsecured warehouses,” giving several faulty examples.

The National Archives and Records Administration, not the former presidents, “securely moved” and stored documents in secure, temporary facilities while presidential libraries were being built, NARA said in a statement. For instance, Trump claimed President George H.W. Bush “took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley” and “an old and broken Chinese restaurant” with “no security.” Actually, NARA kept documents in a warehouse-like facility, which had once been a bowling alley and Chinese restaurant, while Bush’s official library was being built in Texas. A 1994 Associated Press story described how “[u]niformed guards” and “sophisticated electronic detectors along walls and doors” provided security.

The documents weren’t in Bush’s possession, as was the case with the classified material the Department of Justice had been trying to retrieve from Trump’s personal residence in Florida.

‘2000 Mules.’ The documentary by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza — viewed by over 1 million people — purported to provide definitive proof of a massive conspiracy by Democrats to commit widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Researchers from the conservative group True the Vote used geotracking data of cell phones and claimed it provided evidence that thousands of so-called “mules” were employed to illegally stuff ballot drop boxes with fraudulent ballots. But, we found, the film never delivered the goods.

When Georgia investigators looked into a handful of videos showing people depositing multiple ballots, it turned out to be people legally dropping off ballots for eligible voters in their immediate family.The Jan. 6 House select committee released video of an interview of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who offered a blistering assessment, calling the cellphone data “singularly unimpressive” and saying the film simply “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.” Nonetheless, top Republicans, including Trump, continue to cite and promote the film.

Biden’s deficit spin. Pushing back against the Republican narrative that rampant deficit spending was causing inflation to spike, President Joe Biden said numerous times this year that his policies reduced the country’s deficits by $350 billion in his first year and by another $1.3 trillion this year. As we wrote in April, most of the reduction in deficits was the result of expiring emergency pandemic spending. And if not for more emergency pandemic and infrastructure spending championed by Biden, deficits would have fallen further than they ultimately did, according to Congressional Budget Office projections.

“It’s pretty silly,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us. “He [Biden] didn’t cut the deficit, he increased it.”

President Biden discusses the American Rescue Plan.

.

Biden’s recovery puffery. The U.S. economy already was improving when Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act. Yet he wrongly claimed that the Democratic COVID-19 relief bill “literally turned the economy from one that was in decline to one that’s in recovery.”

Multiple economists told us that the economy, while weakened, definitely was “growing” prior to that bill becoming law in March 2021. For example, U.S. gross domestic product had increased for three consecutive fiscal quarters and the unemployment rate had decreased nearly nine percentage points from its pandemic peak. That economic progress was bolstered by pandemic-related assistance authorized under Biden’s predecessor.

Mediscare 2022. Most elections include claims targeting seniors about politicians wanting to “end” Medicare and/or Social Security, and the 2022 midterm was exhibit A for this Mediscare fear-mongering. Democrats seized on a policy proposal by GOP Sen. Rick Scott that, in part, called for Congress to reauthorize all federal legislation every five years. That certainly could lead to major changes for Medicare and Social Security, but many Republicans didn’t embrace the proposal. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected it. Democrats wrongly tagged many Republican candidates with Scott’s plan anyway.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee went as far as claiming that “Republicans will END Social Security and Medicare.” Biden often described Scott’s plan accurately, but a week before the election, he, too, claimed: “You’ve been paying into Social Security your whole life. … Now these guys want to take it away,” referring also to comments by Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson that funding for the two programs should be discretionary, not mandatory, and approved by Congress every year. Neither Scott nor Johnson said they wanted to “end” these programs for seniors. More importantly, Democrats were wrong to claim others in the party supported such a drastic move.

Never-ending spin on COVID-19 vaccines. As with last year, 2022 was awash in misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. Many social media users, in particular, shared supposed revelations about vaccine safety or efficacy allegedly pulled from official documents or government data. But those files didn’t support the claims.

In several cases, posts misinterpreted Pfizer documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to incorrectly claim they showed the company’s COVID-19 shot was unsafe, including during pregnancy. But in reality, the documents were evidence of the vaccine’s continued safety. In another instance, a post falsely said some of the Pfizer FOIA documents showed the vaccine was “12% effective.” That, too, is wrong — and didn’t even come from Pfizer. Instead, the faulty figure likely came from a misreading of a Food and Drug Administration briefing document.

Purveyors of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation also distorted a misleading analysis of data from v-safe, a new safety monitoring system the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unveiled for the COVID-19 vaccines.

Pair of videos push far-fetched COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Stew Peters, a conservative radio host, produced two viral videos this year, garnering tens of millions of views between them.

The first, titled “Watch the Water,” was released in the spring. It was comprised of a single, roughly hour-long, interview with Bryan Ardis, a retired chiropractor who sells purported acne cures online. Ardis spun out a fantastical conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is not caused by a virus, but by snake venom injected into public water by government agencies and the Catholic Church. That premise was lifted from an episode of the network TV drama “The Blacklist.”

Spoiler alert: COVID-19 is definitely caused by a coronavirus, which has been studied by scientists around the world. The vaccines that several competing pharmaceutical companies have tailored to the virus have been effective in preventing serious illness and death.

The second video, called “Died Suddenly,” came out in the fall. It relied heavily on references to other conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccines — including the false claim that circulated earlier this year that Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome was somehow related to vaccination; the long-standing false claim that athletes are dropping dead due to vaccination; and the false claim that plane crashes were caused by pilots suffering from the side effects of vaccination.

The video repeatedly displayed what appeared to be ordinary postmortem blood clots that are often found in dead bodies, but suggested that the clots were a new anomaly, surmising that they were caused by COVID-19 vaccines. The video suggested that this is part of a shadowy plot to depopulate the world.

:{:{}:

}:

Coronavirus origin baloney. In May, former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro incorrectly claimed, as others have before, that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci “killed a lot of people” by funding research that led to the creation of the coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2. Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, repeated the baseless claim earlier this week on the platform, less than a month after the company suspended enforcement of its COVID-19 misinformation policy. 

The U.S. indirectly funded some bat coronavirus research at a lab in Wuhan, China, where the COVID-19 pandemic began, but as we explained, those experiments could not have generated SARS-CoV-2 because the viruses used were very different. Published research suggests the coronavirus spilled over into humans from the wildlife trade, as other coronaviruses have done in the past.

Fauci is stepping down from his government positions at the end of this month, after more than half a century in public service.

Russia’s war in Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is still ongoing, was a major news story this year. But for months before the war began, Russian officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, repeatedly denied that Russia was preparing an attack, insisting that Russia is a “peaceful country” and accusing the U.S. and other nations of a manufactured “hysteria.” On Feb. 24, Russia launched a full-scale invasion, going through with the incursion that others suspected it was planning all along.

Biolabs in Ukraine: As Russia intensified its attack on Ukraine in late winter, Moscow also stepped up a disinformation campaign about Putin’s motivation for the invasion, which was amplified by social media in the U.S. Facebook posts spread the false claim that the U.S. was funding biolabs “engaged in top-secret zoonotic and infectious disease research in dozens of locations across Ukraine” and the creation of bioweapons.

The posts misrepresented the U.S. Biological Threat Reduction Program. The program evolved from a 2005 pact under which the Defense Department and Ukraine’s Ministry of Health agreed to work together to prevent the spread of infectious diseases and to ensure that labs studying disease in Ukraine could not be used to develop biological weapons.

Adding insult to injury. Paul Pelosi, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, was physically assaulted by a hammer-wielding intruder at their San Francisco home in late October. The alleged assailant, David DePape, was not a prostitute hired by Paul Pelosi — a baseless claim that was elevated by several conservative figures on social media.

A San Francisco Police Department spokesman told us that officers found no “evidence that shows that the victim and the suspect knew each other.” Plus, DePape told FBI officers that he broke into the house intending to capture Nancy — not Paul. Prior to the attack, DePape reportedly wrote online posts repeating theories about fraud in the 2020 election and other conspiracies.

Trump claims he stopped the steal — in 2018. Two days after the midterm elections, and with Republicans blaming him for the party’s lackluster results, Trump turned his ire on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — quite likely Trump’s chief rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. In a rambling Nov. 10 statement, Trump accused DeSantis of insufficient “loyalty” to him, and recalled how he “sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys” to Broward County during the 2018 election to stop “ballot theft” and help “Ron DeSanctimonious” become governor. One problem: Nobody else recalled Trump’s heroics.

“The Broward County Supervisor of Elections Office has no documentation of any federal law enforcement presence during the 2018 elections,” Ivan Castro, a spokesperson for the county supervisor of elections, told us in an email. “Also, to clarify, there is no evidence of corruption during the 2018 election cycle in Broward County.”

===

N 11 22

Conspiracy theories and misinformation did not greatly impact the 2022 midterm elections, a new analysis has determined.

According to Axios, many of the far-right election deniers that participated in critical races also lost elections, which signals that the influence of misinformation is not as detrimental as experts feared.

Speaking to the news outlet, Jared Holt, a senior research manager for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, weighed in with his perspective of misinformation. Although there is still a mass circulation of misinformation, Holt has emphasized that the impact of it is not as apparent.

READ MORE: How anti-vaxxers are finding 'clever workarounds' to Instagram’s anti-misinformation algorithms: report

"Denialism narratives are still out there circulating," Holt said. "The difference here is that they just don't seem to be exciting people like they did in 2020."

"It's hard to say how much of that is attributable to [actions from] tech platforms, and how much is just general public sentiment," Holt said.

Experts also noted that misinformation was more of a driving force in 2020 as opposed to now. The news outlet noted, "Though misinformation remains present in large quantities, this time it had less reach, was more spread out, and was harder to find."

During the Stanford Law School's "Moderated Content" podcast last week, Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory who also oversees the non-partisan coalition Election Integrity Partnership, also weighed in with similar sentiments.

READ MORE:Watch: Former Fox News anchor explains how network's viewers have been brainwashed into believing conspiracy theories

:{*:{"The amount of content we saw that you could call kind of election disinformation was actually larger than what we saw in 2020 — but overall, the effects were much more muted," Stamos said.}:

*}:

The news outlet also noted that five factors have also helped to diminish the impact of misinformation: De-platforming, too many new apps, an overall rejection of election deniers, defamation fears, more education.

READ MORE: 'No evidence': Reporter confronts Kari Lake after she dangles a conspiracy theory about voting machines

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/what-expect-climate-disinformation-ahead-cop27

11 22 mma

The year’s most important international climate talks are fast approaching, and the fossil fuel industry and its right-wing media allies are seizing the opportunity to ramp up climate disinformation and delay climate action.

The 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) will be held in Egypt from November 6-18, bringing together politicians and delegates from nearly 200 countries to set goals and present plans for addressing climate change and report on their countries’ current progress toward achieving these goals.

In the months leading up to COP27, statements from right-wing media figures suggest that misinformation about transitioning to clean energy will play a large part in this year’s campaign to undermine the conference both in the U.S. and around the world.International events that aim in part to address the climate crisis, such as Davos and the United Nations’ Conference of Parties, often fuel conspiracy theories claiming that climate change is a crisis fabricated by international institutions like the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. This cycle of false claims, misinformation, and conspiracy theories gives right-wing media and other bad actors ammunition for attacks on climate policies and leaders affiliated with these intergovernmental organizations, further weaving the climate discourse into broader culture wars.

Here are just some of the ways right-wing media and fossil fuel industry shills can be expected to undermine the case for climate action around COP27.

Fossil fuel industry-aligned media will insist that oil and gas expansion is necessary in light of Europe’s energy crisis and the war in Ukraine

One of the biggest concerns climate advocates have about COP27 is that geopolitical tensions resulting from the Russian war in Ukraine will decrease momentum for cooperation on climate goals, and right-wing media will likely exploit these tensions.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, conservatives have exploited the war to reinforce the idea that U.S. energy independence only comes from more oil and gas drilling. The rising costs of food and energy in the wake of Russia’s attack have also created fodder for far-right conspiracy theories such as the “Great Reset,” which contends that these challenges are the result of a tyrannical one-world government or “globalist cabal” using emergencies such as COVID-19 and climate change in order to take away people’s personal freedoms. Right-wing media and politicians across the globe have blamed “the rush to ‘net zero’” emissions for the latest energy crisis, and they will likely continue to push this misleading point during COP27 to discourage steps to aggressively implement clean energy targets.

In reality, the International Energy Agency’s annual world energy outlook found that the global energy crisis has likely hastened the transition away from fossil fuels — the agency predicted that because of a massive increase in the deployment of renewables, demand for fossil fuels will peak in 2025, sooner than anticipated. The report also found “scant evidence to support claims from some quarters that climate policies and net zero commitments contributed to the run-up in energy prices.”

Despite this, right-wing media figures are claiming that the European energy crisis has permanently deterred countries from meeting their climate goals. Fox News commentator and longtime climate denierSteve Milloyinsisted on October 24 that “after 34 years of climate idiocy, ahead of#COP27 and ahead of World War III, coal burning is at a record (as are prices). Emissions are never going down and the climate agenda is dead.”

Climate contrarians Jordan Peterson, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Epsteinwere recently identified as key amplifiers in a reportlooking at climate disinformation around COP26, and they have already started taking aim at issues that will be central to COP27.

Peterson wrote in The Telegraph in August that the net zero “agenda, justified by emergency, will instead make everyone poorer, particularly those who are already poor,” in addition to making “the lives of the working men upon whom we all depend for our daily bread and shelter more difficult and less rewarding.” He concluded,“There is simply no pathway forward to the green and equitable utopia that necessitates the further impoverishment of the already poor.”

In a September 27 Facebook post, Peterson claimed that “globalist utopians demand that we fall in line with their ‘cure’ for climate change,” which he also suggested was to blame for the European energy crisis.

On Twitter, Shellenberger has acknowledged that the European energy crisis began after Russia “started curtailing nat gas as retaliation for EU sanctions & its military support for Ukraine” but insisted that “the underlying reason is Germany's delusional belief that it could rely on renewables.”

Epstein similarly claimed in September that increasing oil and gas production is the real solution “to help ourselves and our allies” facing an “energy crisis—specifically a crisis of lack of fossil fuel supply, which has increased the cost of energy and increased Europe’s dependence on Russia.”

Right-wing media will misleadingly use large developing countries' energy policies to delegitimize climate action elsewhere

Right-wing media have long argued that because countries like China and India have large carbon footprints as they continue to expand and industrialize using the dirtiest energy sources, such as coal, it would be futile for the U.S. and other countries to transition to cleaner forms of energy. If right-wing media follow their past playbook in covering COP27, any commitments that large developing countries do or do not make are likely to be weaponized against climate action.

At COP26, countries including Saudi Arabia, South Africa, China, and India sought to water down language in the final agreement to avoid eliminating fossil fuel subsidies and completely phasing out coal. Without the cooperation of these governments, it would indeed be nearly impossible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. As a new U.N. report warned, even if countries follow through with climate commitments, the world would be on track for at least 2.5 C of warming. However, this cynical thinking that discounts any and all progress and ignores the fact that every bit of warming governments are able to prevent will save lives, particularly those who have barely contributed to the climate crisis yet are disproportionately affected by its harmful impacts.

On Facebook, climate denier and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck posted a video on October 24 claiming that the Inflation Reduction Act — which includes more than $360 billion in spending to address climate change — really “isn’t about the climate” because China's new plan to increase coal production “would wipe out any gains from Biden's climate plan multiple times over.” (Though China is expanding coal production, the country is also making massive investments in renewable energy, expanding its solar capacity, and is predicted to overachieve the emissions reductions targets it promised internationally for 2030.) 

In August, avid fossil fuel shill Daniel Turner wrote on Twitter: “Spending $369 billion on climate initiatives won't stop China from emitting more emissions than the entire developed world combined.”

Republican operative, QAnon conspiracy theorist, and anti-Muslim extremist Scott Presler said on September 18, “The ‘green movement is a scam & democrats need to realize that — so long as we’re doing business w/ China — they’re funding climate change.”

Writing for the New York Post, climate skepticBjorn Lomborg on the other hand applauded China, India, and other developing countries for “balking at the expectation they emulate these terrible policies” aiming for net-zero emissions.

Climate contrarians will frame fossil fuel expansion as the only viable option to address energy poverty in developing nations

The African Union, which represents 55 member states, reportedly plans to use COP27 to push for fossil fuel expansion. Right-wing media will misleadingly frame massive oil and gas expansion as the only viable solution for people in African nations who are suffering from energy poverty, famine, and drought, driven in part by climate change.

To be sure, criticism that the West is hypocritical in its climate policies is warranted: Rich nations have yet to fully deliver on their promise of $100 billion in mitigation and adaptation funds for developing nations annually that were set to begin in 2020. Now, Europe is rushing to buy natural gas from Africa in place of Russia, and some energy-producing African countries are questioning why they can’t expand and directly benefit from these resources when rich countries haven’t delivered on promises to help finance green projects that could replace fossil fuels.

However, those who back fossil fuel expansion have made the astonishing claim that green energy policies themselves are the true source of oppression in the Global South and the main obstacle keeping poor nations in poverty.

Michael Shellenberger, who is known for bashing renewable energy, recently took to Twitter to back coal production in South Africa in response to supposed climate hypocrisy from Germany. Last year, Germany gave roughly $810 million in an agreement to help South Africa end its use of coal, a move Shellenberger decried as “green imperialism.”

On September 13, former Trump appointee Ryan Maue, who has previous ties to the Koch-funded Cato Institute, said, “China lifted a billion people out of poverty through industrialization powered by fossil fuels. India is doing the same. Why can't Africa?”

“At this point in history, any nation, organization, or person standing in the way of another impoverished nation seeking to develop its own natural resources like oil, gas, and coal in the name of climate change  deserves a special place in hell,” Maue added, concluding that “Western enviro groups involved in these efforts are pure evil.”

A September 29, Western Journal op-ed claimed that “for those in the Third World, colonialism is a living experience, courtesy of restrictive energy policies forced upon them by Western political leaders.”

"This modern form of enslavement — to the West’s so-called green agenda — is variously known as climate colonialism, carbon imperialism and other monikers. Whatever the nomenclature, the reality is suppression of access to fossil fuel energy sources in the name of saving the planet from a made-up climate emergency."

The anti-science agenda driving this stance is clear: The author, Vijay Jayaraj, also writes for the CO2 Coalition, an organization dedicated to climate change denial.

Right-wing media will use claims of climate hypocrisy and elitism to dismiss the urgency of climate action

Right-wing media frequently and inaccurately label wealthy, privileged people as representatives of the entire climate movement, attacking their supposed hypocrisy based on their individual actions in order to help oil and gas companies shirk responsibility for hindering climate action and extending the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. (Climate advocates have repeatedly condemned the not-so-climate-friendly methods of travel adopted by politicians and celebrities.) With leaders arriving from around the world, attacks can be expected to ramp up around international climate conferences to distract media consumers from negotiations.

Conservative British political commentator Sophie Corcoran recently noted on Twitter that the COP27 summit is “where all of theworld leaders are going to fly over to Egypt in their private jets, in order to tell us that we should stop flying. Can't wait.”

The Washington Examiner claimed in a recent editorial that politicians “do not believe a word they say about climate change,” but “they are dead serious about you sacrificing your lifestyle.” The piece smeared “climate hypocrites” who “are the very same ones maximizing their own carbon footprints by flying on private jets.”

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry has been a frequent target of such attacks from right-wing media. “U.S. climate envoy John Kerry warned African nations last week not to rely too heavily on natural gas in their efforts to modernize and bring electricity to millions,” said a September FoxNews.com article. “Federal data obtained by Fox News in July showed that Kerry’s family jet had emitted 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide since the Biden administration began.”

How to combat climate disinformation related to COP27

A new report from the Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition aims to help journalists respond to and disarm misleading claims about energy and climate change.

The report highlights the importance of avoiding elevating bad content and repeating manipulative language and provides journalists and advocates with guidance for thinking about when to strategically ignore disinformation, when to simply provide accurate information, and when to debunk. It is key to contextualize disinformation to expose the real intentions of the bad actors spreading it, as well as identify potentially discredited sources. Is the person who wrote this being bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry? Do they have a history of climate change denial? The report provides tons of helpful resources for that purpose, as well as a variety of case studies and toolkits that would also be helpful for anyone who wants to make sure their online communities are informed about climate change adaptation and mitigation.

If it were a country, the fossil fuel industry would have been the largest delegation at COP26, while climate activists from the Global South struggle to gain access to the talks. Disinformation and greenwashing have unfortunately become part and parcel of the climate talks, and COP27 will be no exception. Now is the time to push back on the falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and misinformation from the fossil fuel industry and its right-wing media allies seeking to influence this year’s conference.

ref report

https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/deny-deceive-delay-documenting-and-responding-to-climate-disinformation-at-cop26-and-beyond-full/

june 2022

Deny, Deceive, Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 and Beyond

Report authors: Jennie King, Lukasz Janulewicz, Francesca Arcostanzo

Contributing partners: CASM Technology, Conscious Advertising Network, Climate Nexus, Eco.Bot-Net, Friends of the Earth, Purpose, Reset Australia and Stop Funding Heat

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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• Glossary of Terms

• Part 1: Discourses of Delay

o Hypocrisy and Elitism

o Absolutionism

o Unreliability of Renewables

o Ineffective Electric Vehicles

• Part 2: Understanding the Network - A Structural Analysis of Accounts on Twitter

o Network Overview (Graphika analysis)

o Key Communities (Graphika analysis)

o Key Actors

• Part 3: A Policy Response to Climate Mis- and Disinformation

Policy Ask 1 - Implement a unified definition of climate mis- and disinformation within key institutions

(e.g. IPCC, UNFCCC) and reflect these criteria in tech company Community Standards or Terms of Service

• Definition

• Current actions by platforms

• Indicative examples of content

Policy Ask 2 - Enforce platform policies against ‘Repeat Offender’ accounts

• Repeat Offender Network(Graphika analysis)

• Case studies

o Peter Imanulesen

o John Stossel

o Michael Shellenberger

o Bjorn Lomborg

o Tony Heller

o Patrick Moore

• Key takeaways

Policy Ask 3 - Limit media exemption loopholes within legislation

• Case Study 1: Recommendation algorithms on Facebook (Global Witness analysis)

• Case Study 2: Labelling misleading content on Facebook (Media Matters analysis)

• Case Study 3: A comparison of climate sceptic actors and Facebook’s Climate Sc...

policy Ask 4 - Improve transparency on climate disinformation trends and the role played by algorithmic

amplification

• Most cited media outlet

o The Daily Mail

o The Guardian

o The Telegraph

o Watts Up With That (WWUT)

o The Wall Street Journal

• In-depth case study: Sky News Australia (ISD and Purpose analysis)

Policy Ask 5 - Strengthen platform labelling on ‘missing context’ and the re-posting of old or recycled

content

• Overview of the Ad Tech ecosystem (CAN analysis)

• Case study 1: ExxonMobil (Eco.Bot-Net analysis)

• Case study 2: American Petroleum Institute (Eco.Bot-Net analysis)

Policy Ask 6 - Restrict paid advertising and sponsored content from fossil fuel companies, known front

groups, and/or actors repeatedly found to spread disinformation around climate

• Case study 1: The Daily Mail during COP26

• Case study 2: PragerU opposition to EVs

Policy Ask 7 - Enable API image-based searched to support research on viral disinformation

• Case study 1: Private jets in Glasgow

• Case study 2: Attacks on Txai Surui (Avaaz analysis...

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...

JOHN STOSSELOn the other side of the spectrum is John Stossel. Starting his career as a primetime TV host on ABC’s 20/20 segment, he sparked controversy for using child interviewees to push an anti-environmental stance. Stossel transitioned to Fox Business News from 2009-2016, after which his own production company became one of the top contractors for the Charles Koch Institute. The company secured over $1.5 million in Koch contracts from 2017-2019, in addition to nearly $500,000 of Koch donations to Stossel’s non-profit. He is currently suing Facebook for defamation after a fact checker debunked one of his posts, stating it contained a video with active climate disinformation. This has resulted in a reduction of ad revenue and traffic to his page. However, on Twitter Stossel received the highest average interaction per post among the 16 key accounts monitored. His 9 posts about COP26 drew an average of 905 interactions each - three times greater than the average (though this is likely due to his sparse posting relative to others, rather than any inherent quality of his content.) 

On 1 November, as COP26 officially began in Glasgow, Stossel posted a “Paris Climate Fraud” video that amassed over 300,000 views on Twitter. Three days later, he tweeted a video of a panel presentation he hosted in 2019, organised by the polluter-funded and frequently fact checked Heartland Institute. It featuredPatrick Michaels, who once guessed that around 40% of his research funding came from fossil fuels;David Legates, whose climate denial led him to be reassigned under the Trump administration; and Willie Soon, who in 2015 was outed by the New York Times for receiving over a million dollars from the fossil fuel industry to produce climate disinformation. This lineup of climate deniers was not new, and the video itself had already been fact checked by ClimateFeedback where it was rated to have “very low” credibility and said to use “imprecise language that misleads viewers about the scientific understanding of climate change”. However, since Twitter lacks a climate disinformation policy that would recognise and action fact checks, the clip could once again gain traction online. On 1 November, Stossel also posted a video to Facebook which has garnered over 900,000 views and frames nuclear energy as “the ONLY technology” which could help mitigate climate change. The clip once again repurposed old content which had already been fact-checked, featuring individuals who create and/or propagate climate disinformation regularly.

Stossel has not slowed down with his climate disinformation efforts since COP26. On 30 November 2021, he posted a* YouTube video attacking Poynter, the highly esteemed journalism institution that oversees the fact checking organisations used by Facebook (including ClimateFeedback). The transcript of the video was quickly picked up by right-wing and/or polluter-funded outlets like theDaily Signal, Heartland, TownHall and PatriotPost. In it, Stossel interviews other figures known for spreading anti-science misinformation: a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, as well as Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg who are covered in further detail below. *

MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Producing 203 climate-focused tweets duringCOP26, Michael Shellenberger was a key influencer during the summit,

garnering over 124,000 interactions for content attacking COP26 or the premise of climate change p 67-8

On 28 October, before the summit had even begun, Shellenberger shared Bjorn Lomborg’s article

in the Wall Street Journal which questioned the impacts of climate change and was retweeted

a thousand times. He featured continually in our dataset throughout the event, often achieving

some of the highest engagement figures in a given day. On November 11, as negotiations neared

their climax, he tweeted a graphic entitled “Woke Religion: A Taxonomy” which was co-authored

with academic Peter Boghossian and positions climate change alongside other contentious issues

such as racism, gender identity, crime and mental illness. Under the ‘Myths’ column for climate

are statements such as “The Earth’s climate was safer in the past”, “We can power world with

renewables” and “Human civilization is unsustainable”, while ‘Supernatural Beliefs’ (defined as

beyond scientific understanding or known laws of nature) include “Humans causing sixth mass

extinction”, “Prosperity doesn’t depend on high energy use” and “Study of ‘tipping points’ is

scientific”. In the same diagram, ‘Taboo Facts’ and ‘Taboo Speech’ (things which are supposedly

censored from mainstream debate) encompass “Deaths from natural disasters have declined 90% since 1900”, “Renewables are dirty to produce and distribute”, “Fracking reduces carbon emissions” and “Economic development outweighs impact of climate change”. The taxonomy also implies that oil and gas companies, the Koch Brothers and “climate deniers” have been unfairly cast as villains in the climate debate, while actors like Greta Thunberg, climate scientists and UN officials are uncritically chosen to lead....

Page 67

DENY, DECEIVE, DELAY Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 and Beyond

Shellenberger’s taxonomy was liked over 6.5k times and retweeted over 2k times, including

from a number of influential accounts across media and politics. Like others highlighted in this

section, he has become central to so-called ‘anti-woke’ networks on social media, who in turn

expose their audiences to such climate sceptic or actively misleading content. Posts like the one

described above have been shared by figures such as journalist Glenn Greenwald (1.7m followers),

former OANN correspondent and far-right activist Jack Posobiec (1.6m followers), Fox News host

Bret Baier (1.3m followers) and contributor Brit Hume (1.2m followers), Republican Congressman

Dan Crenshaw (1.1m followers), conspiracy theorist and ‘alt-right’ agitator Mike Cernovich (847k

followers), Spanish People’s Party politician Toni Cantó (425k followers), right-wing content mill

PragerU (617k followers), and Sky News Australia host Rita Panahi (284k followers). The breadth

and cumulative reach of these accounts is notable, as is their potential to influence public opinion

at a transnational level. This further reinforces how a handful of individuals can serve as engines

for a wider movement, providing content or lines of attack which are easily repurposed in different

geographic contexts.

DENY, DECEIVE, DELAY Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 and Beyond

BJORN LOMBORG

Lomborg has cultivated a strong presence in both legacy and social media, most notably via his regular column in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and frequent platform in outlets across the globe including Fox News, The Daily Mail, the New York Post, Sky News Australia, talkRADIO and Forbes. One of Lomborg’s first columns for WSJ was fact checked by PolitiFact, but this did not prevent their editorial page editor Paul Gigot from interviewing him on Fox News, a clip which Lomborg then posted to his Facebook page. During COP26, an old video of Lomborg was repurposed by right-wing propaganda hub PragerU to attack electric vehicles, garnering millions of interactions on Facebook - this case study is documented fully in Policy Ask 6. He also appeared in The Washington Post thanks to a column by Marc Thessein (itself fact checked), who is affiliated with a group funded partially by polluters and tobacco companies and has a history of platforming climate disinformation. While the fact-checks may have slowed Lomborg’s spread on Facebook, he still garnered over a thousand interactions for one post alone. Meanwhile on Twitter, where there were no parallel measures to curb reach, Lomborg neared 20,000 interactions for his 60 climate posts over the COP period. The Daily Mail also appeared as a top performing domain in our overall dataset, within which Lomborg’s COP26 op-ed was the second most shared link. Across the monitored timeframe, key amplifiers of Lomborg’s content included Fox News contributor Brit Hume (1.2m followers), talkRADIO host Julia Hartley-Brewer (367k followers), conservative Canadian YouTuber Lauren Chen (325k followers), Sky News Australia host Rita Panahi (284k followers), British MP and member of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group Steve Baker (152k followers), and prominent Polish climate denier Łukasz Warzecha (130k followers).

TONY HELLER A retired computer engineer turned video producer, Heller posted nearly 300 tweets to his nowsuspended account and garnered almost 30,000 interactions during COP26. Heller is commonly known by the pseudonym ‘Steven Goddard’ and formerly contributed to climate denial blog WattsUpWithThat - he has previously described global warming as “the biggest scientific fraud in history”. In addition to content on COVID-19 conspiracy theories, which led to his suspension from Twitter in mid-December 2021, Heller also pushed the debunked conspiracy that temperature records are being manipulated to justify climate action. He has been repeatedly fact-checked for such claims, including by ClimateFeedback and Politifact, but remained a key influencer online during the Glasgow summit. While Heller’s content has earned him temporary suspensions from YouTube and Twitter, previous bans were lifted and do not seem to have affected his general rhetoric - the most recent suspension from Twitter appears to be permanent, but came after he had amassed hundreds of thousands of interactions on topics including COVID-19 and climate change.

PATRICK MOORE Canadian activist Patrick Moore is another individual whose online reach has not been curbed by repeated fact-checks. He presents himself as a Greenpeace “Co-Founder”, although the organisation has strongly distanced itself from any former affiliation and Moore’s more recent stances on climate. He now oversees the CO2 Coalition. Moore self-describes as a ‘sensible environmentalist’, and achieves continually high engagement on Twitter in particular. A week before COP26 began he achieved nearly 45k likes and 16k retweets for one post, sharing a Sky News Australia segment in which the host condemned youth climate activists as “selfish, badly educated virtue-signalling little turds”. His most popular content tends to push back against ‘woke media’ who dismiss those sceptical of the climate crisis/emergency as ‘eco-traitors’. Similar to Shellenberger and Lomborg, Moore’s success is partially dependent on branding himself a pro-climate ‘liberal’, although his content is frequently debunked or rated false by entities like ClimateFeedback, The Tyee and PolitiFact. Despite such comprehensive fact-checks, Moore’s social media presence remains unfettered and high-traction. For example, over 6000 users liked his erroneous claim that COP26 was running on diesel fuel, with nearly 3000 retweets. An official fact-check by the COP Presidency team (commented under Moore’s post) received only 70 likes and less than 20 retweets - a stark reminder of the attention disinformation can gain in the face of verified sources. During COP26 alone, key amplifiers of Lomborg’s content included Jordan B. Peterson (2.4m followers), Rebel News journalist Ezra Levant (353k followers), and conservative Canadian politician Maxime Bernier (186k followers).

These case studies are by no means exhaustive, but highlight a few key features of the ‘repeat offender’ cohort: 1) The network is mutually reinforcing, with many actors cross-referencing, sharing or making appearances in each other’s content. This creates an impression of consensus and ‘critical mass’ on social media, and confers false legitimacy on individuals in the wider media landscape. 2) Accounts are repeatedly fact-checked without any meaningful response from platforms. Many of the largest tech companies tout their partnership with ‘independent, third-party’ fact-checkers, certified via bodies like the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), to identify, review and take action on questionable content. As Facebook highlights on its website, this model is intended to combat viral misinformation, with a focus on false claims that are ‘timely or trending and important to the average person’. The company also states that ‘pages, groups, accounts and websites that repeatedly share misinformation will face some restrictions, including having their distribution reduced’, among other punitive actions. Our analysts found some instances where fact-checking labels had been applied to content, or where users were directed to more reliable content hubs and sources. However, beyond this lowest-tier measure there is little evidence of any enforcement against known disinformers, even during critical moments like a global climate summit or extreme weather event. 3) Repeat offenders have often spread mis- or disinformation on multiple topics. This is most clearly observed in the number of high-traction accounts sharing misleading claims on climate and COVID-19, but encompasses a wider range of issues - from anti-vaxx sentiment and genocide denial to conspiracies such as QAnon, the Great Reset and electoral fraud. This should provide an even greater incentive for platforms to act, since an effective response against such accounts could have a ‘force multiplier’ effect and mitigate harm in multiple areas.

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