vulnerability exploit
prolly belated
term from hacker but refers to place to infiltrate anything, lack of filter/gate-keeper (or broader, regulations)
see evil crypto mirror
see op-ed ltr ed
see local news newspapers close
note dereg/ loopholes eg nutrit suppl
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CHE BLOG?
aha seniors uniquely vulnerable to grift b/c not soc med savvy, ppl get more conserv as age, easy to scare /hype thus con; also hype fear in escalator echo bubble
note no left equiv
see goldline
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SCAIFE
AI Overview GGL 6 26
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (TribLIVE) frequently publishes climate-skeptic content, primarily through its opinion pages. The publication has faced criticism for providing space for columns and letters to the editor that dispute the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
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Chevron’s faux news site exploits local journalism’s decline, epitomizing the fossil fuel industry’s insidious greenwashing strategies
Special ProgramsClimate & Energy
Written by Evlondo Cooper
:{Published 08/28/24
Chevron-sponsored “news” site Permian Proud represents one of the fossil fuel industry's latest and most insidious greenwashing strategies, exploiting the decline of local journalism to shape public opinion in oil-rich regions. This tactic epitomizes a broader trend of deceptive practices by Big Oil, which — combined with national TV news’ failure to scrutinize the industry amid the escalating climate crisis — highlights an urgent need for robust accountability reporting.
Chevron's PR firm published a local “news” site without journalists
Felicia Alvarez's investigation for Floodlight, published in the Louisiana Illuminator, exposed Chevron's Permian Proud as a calculated ploy to manipulate public opinion under the guise of local journalism. The site, devoid of actual reporters or editors, is crafted by a San Francisco PR firm and a Chevron public affairs adviser, eliminating any pretense of editorial independence or journalistic integrity.
A search of the Permian Proud’s two-year-old website shows just a smattering of stories about climate change or greenhouse gas emissions — despite the oil and gas industry’s leading role in causing the climate crisis. As of Aug. 12, there were two stories mentioning climate change; one is a recap of a Texas Tribune series about training oil and gas workers and the other quotes a Chevron official about new techniques for measuring methane emissions.
The site has plenty of articles boasting of the importance of the Permian Basin and Chevron, sprinkled in with coverage of events, sports and awards given to local residents.
One story reported on Chevron receiving the highest environmental rating in the Permian Basin. Another announced that Chevron plans to boost its production to meet U.S. energy needs.
And the site reported on a $145,000 company donation to help students in Carlsbad, New Mexico — to pursue careers in energy and natural resources.
Notably absent is any critical coverage of the oil industry's environmental impact or role in the escalating climate crisis — and an eroding local media landscape leaves local residents vulnerable to a distorted view of the oil industry's true impact on their communities and the planet.
“Many of the counties within the Permian Basin are considered ‘news deserts,’ or areas with limited access to local, credible news sources,” Alvarez writes. “Of the 61 counties considered part of the Permian Basin region in Texas, 13 counties had no local newspapers, and the majority had only one newspaper, according to the news desert map maintained by the University of North Carolina.”
Alvarez reveals that Permian Proud isn't an isolated experiment:
It is also part of a network of Chevron-owned news outlets amplifying the company's viewpoint while publishing feel-good stories about local events and people. The same San Francisco public relations firm that provides content for Permian Proud runs the Richmond Standard news site in Richmond, California. It also operates an English-language website in Ecuador, where the energy giant has fought back decades of litigation.
This model, replicated across Chevron's operational areas, forms part of a broader strategy to control the narrative as the fossil fuel industry faces mounting scrutiny.
Permian Proud ignores climate crisis as Texas faces escalating climate disasters and environmental injustice
Texas recently endured a record-breaking heat wave, with temperatures soaring above 110 F in multiple cities. The Washington Post reported that Abilene shattered its all-time high at 113 F, while other cities set new August records. This extreme heat isn't just uncomfortable, it's potentially deadly — and it’s straining the state's power grid to its limits.
This recent crisis is just the latest example of Texas’ extreme vulnerability to climate change. A stark analysis from Public Citizen reveals that between 1980 and 2022, a staggering 44% of all billion-dollar climate and weather disasters in the country affected Texas. The state faces an onslaught of heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires that are increasing in both frequency and intensity.
The climate crisis is also creating significant financial impacts for Texas residents. Erin Douglas of The Texas Tribune reported that insurance rates in Texas have skyrocketed by 22% in 2023, twice the average national increase. Even more troubling, “many areas of the state are likely underpriced relative to their climate risk, according to a model created by the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit group of academics and experts that quantifies climate risks,” suggesting that the financial strain on homeowners is only set to worsen.
Notably, the fossil fuel industry operating in Texas bears outsized responsibility for climate change, amplifying the risks facing communities across the state:
Texas emits more greenhouse gas emissions than any other state, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It accounts for 14% of the nation’s climate-warming emissions, and produces more than twice the total emissions of California, the next largest greenhouse gas emitter. Texas is also the nation’s largest oil and gas producing state, accounting for more than 40% of the nation’s oil production.
Beyond the climate impacts of the fossil fuel industry, Texas also faces severe environmental justice challenges. Low-income communities and communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of industrial pollution — in Port Arthur and Houston, the concentration of petrochemical facilities and other polluting industries near residential areas is a direct result of historical segregation and discriminatory land-use practices. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's permitting decisions, particularly for facilities like concrete batch plants in Harris County, have further entrenched these disparities, leading to ongoing health risks for vulnerable populations.
The fossil fuel industry deploys multifaceted deception campaigns like Permian Proud to delay climate action
As the climate crisis intensifies, the fossil fuel industry has shifted from outright denial to a broader PR campaign employing more insidious forms of deception. This multifaceted approach, exemplified by Chevron's Permian Proud, aims to manipulate public opinion and delay climate action.
Recent investigations reveal oil giants are targeting youth via gaming platforms, exploiting inconsistent social media ad labeling, and rebranding as “clean energy providers” while promoting false solutions. In addition, The Guardian exposed the industry's funding of legal efforts to block climate action, with the Republican Attorneys General Association receiving $5.8 million from oil and gas interests since 2020.
These coordinated efforts — from exploiting declining local journalism to influencing younger generations and funding legal challenges — demonstrate the fossil fuel industry’s determination to shape public opinion and policy in its favor. As climate change impacts worsen, the industry's tactics aim to preserve its dominance in a decarbonizing world despite scientific evidence demanding a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. Outlets like Permian Proud are just one facet of this larger industry campaign, underscoring the urgency of recognizing and counteracting these corporate greenwashing strategies.
Local news vacuum enables corporate narrative control
The erosion of local journalism in the United States has reached crisis levels, creating dangerous information vacuums. A Media Matters analysis in May starkly illustrated this problem: Donald Trump's recent corrupt offer to Big Oil executives, asking them to raise $1 billion for his presidential campaign while assuring that they'd be getting a “deal” due to the taxation and regulation they would avoid if he is reelected, was almost entirely ignored by top local newspapers and TV markets in key battleground states.
The 2023 Medill Local News Initiative report quantifies this crisis: Over 50% of U.S. counties now have just one local news source, or none at all. The rate of newspaper closures averages more than two per week, with 2,900 papers having shuttered since 2005 — and “all but about 100 were weeklies, which are often the sole provider of local news in small and mid-sized communities.” Most significantly, 43,000 newspaper journalists representing two-thirds of the industry's workforce have lost their jobs.
This systemic erosion of local news coverage is creating information vacuums across the country, leaving communities vulnerable to misinformation and unchecked corporate narratives — with far-reaching implications for public information and democracy. The absence of robust local journalism directly impacts civic engagement, political accountability, and public understanding of critical issues like climate change and climate solutions.
National TV news fails to consistently connect climate dots, enabling industry narratives
As local journalism crumbles, the responsibility of national media to provide comprehensive reporting about critical issues such as global warming becomes even more crucial.
However, recent Media Matters studies reveal that national outlets are falling short, particularly in their coverage of climate-related extreme weather events in places such as Texas. This failure at both the local and national level creates a dangerous information vacuum that fossil fuel companies like Chevron are eager to exploit.
In February, only 2% of cable and corporate broadcast news segments about the Texas wildfires mentioned climate change. Similarly, just 3 out of 21 broadcast news segments connected January’s Texas flooding to climate issues, while 5% of national TV news segments about the June 2023 Texas heat wave mentioned climate change.
This pattern of omission extends far beyond extreme weather coverage, undermining public understanding of the broader climate crisis. In 2023, for example, a mere 12% of climate segments on corporate broadcast networks mentioned fossil fuels. This persistent failure to connect the dots between fossil fuel consumption, global warming, and their cascading harms leaves viewers uninformed about the true drivers of climate change.
The information vacuum created by this lack of context in extreme weather reporting enables misleading narratives from the fossil fuel industry to flourish unchallenged. Chevron's Permian Proud, for instance, exploits this gap to further its Big Oil agenda, shaping public opinion in oil-rich regions without meaningful counterbalance from mainstream media. This vacuum also allows broader industry greenwashing campaigns to go largely unexamined.
Better news reporting on climate change and corporate accountability is crucial to combating industry narratives
Amid declining local journalism and inadequate national coverage, Chevron’s Permian Proud demonstrates that fossil fuel companies are increasingly willing to fill the void left by traditional journalism with their own content.
In the face of these corporate-sponsored narratives, real news outlets must be pressured to provide coverage that consistently connects extreme weather events and fossil fuels to climate change and potential solutions. This comprehensive approach is essential for public understanding of the climate crisis and for holding the fossil fuel industry accountable, empowering news audiences to cut through Big Oil's propaganda and understand the true scale of the challenge we face.
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dark $ in general but inaug in partic is a bribery/corruption loophole vuln exploit by gop trump kelpto -kaki
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trump judge 5th circuit
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ref the hill
federal judge blocked Bidenadministration officials Tuesday from communicating with social media companies, astwo Republican state attorneys general challenge the legality of the administration’s efforts to curb disinformation.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, [ vax for rx workers?! offshore oil]who was appointed by former President Trump, granted a preliminary injunction barring a wide swath of officials from theDepartment of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Justice, the State Department and the FBI from communicating with the companies.
The Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri are suing the administration over what they describe as a “campaign of censorship,” in which the Biden administration allegedly “coordinated and colluded with social-media platforms to identify disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.”
They argued that administration officials’ public and private communications with social media companies about removing content related to COVID-19 vaccines and public health measures, election integrity and other topics violated the First Amendment.
The attorneys general pointed to various calls by the 2020 Biden campaign and later the Biden administration, as well other Democratic lawmakers, to reform Section 230 over the spread of disinformation, which the lawsuit characterized as “threats” and a “campaign of pressure.”
Section 230 waives social media companies’ liability for content posted on its platforms by third parties.
They also cited efforts by the Biden administration to work with social media companies to rein in COVID-19 and election disinformation, which the suit described as “collusion.” [fauci said deworm no work, tho no causal link]
Under the injunction, Biden administration officials cannot email, call, send letters, text or meet with social media companies “for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms,” Doughty ruled.
However, Biden administration officials are still permitted to communicate with the platforms about criminal activity, national security threats,threats to public safety [but not health?]and posts “intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures.”
TAGS BIDEN ADMINISTRATIONFIRST AMENDMENTFREE SPEECHJOE BIDENSOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMSTERRY DOUGHTY
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scotus intercept
Now, IWF and IWV have turned their attention to pushing for the rapid confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, including staging an “I’m With Her” rally outside of the Supreme Court on October 17, at the same time as a Women’s March. They have been quick to place op-eds in support of Barrett for the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and the National Review. On Fox News,where IWF and IWV are regular commentators, Kelsey Bolar, a senior policy analyst at IWF,criticized the Women’s March for “advocating against women, protesting a highly qualified female nominee to the Supreme Court” — part of a broader strategy of casting criticism of Barrett as anti-woman. IWF and IWV did not return a request for comment.
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aha uniquely vulnerable to grift b/c not soc med savvy, ppl get more conserv as age, easy to scare /hype thus con
note no left equiv; bullion no regs
https://www.alternet.org/gold-ira-right-wing-media/
no ln 7 23
How 'gold IRA' industry ads became a 'mainstay of right-wing media': report
Fox News' Laura Ingraham In July 2022 (Gage Skidmore).
Alex Henderson July 25, 2023
For many years, right-wing media outlets have been aggressively promoting gold as a safe haven for retirees. Anyone who has spent a lot of time consuming right-wing media, be it Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax TV or AM talk radio, has likely come across gold commercials.
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In a report published by the Washington Post on July 25, journalists Jeremy B. Merrill and Hanna Kozlowska stress that the "gold retirement investment industry" has "become a mainstay of right-wing media."
"An analysis by The Post of political newsletters, social media, podcasts and a national database of television ads collected by the company AdImpact found that pitches to invest in gold coins are a daily presence in media that caters to a right-wing audience and often echo conservative talking points about looming economic and societal collapse," Merrill and Kozlowska explain. "The Post found no similar ads for gold retirement investments in mainstream or left-wing media sources in the databases."
READ MORE: Fox News' relationship with Turning Point USA is 'basically over': report
Lawsuits against "gold IRA" companies, according to Merrill and Kozlowska, are not uncommon. One of the companies that has been sued is Lear Capital, a Fox News advertiser that sells gold and silver coins.
The Washington Post reporters note that "over the past decade, more than 30 customers in 20 states have sued a dozen gold IRA companies."
Terry White, a disabled retiree, told the Post he invested $174,000 in gold coins with Lear and found out the company charges a 33 percent commission. White said he lost almost $80,000.
"For years," Merrill and Kozlowska report, "gold IRA industry advertising has echoed accusations against Democratic politicians commonly found in news segments on conservative outlets. The ads tout the coins as a safe haven from economic uncertainty and social upheaval. Most of the coins are manufactured by the Royal Canadian Mint, which says they're bullion — a kind of coin whose value is determined by the underlying metal. As such, they meet IRS rules for retirement investments."
READ MORE: 'They must comply': Newsmax employees subpoenaed in Smartmatic defamation lawsuit
According to Merrill and Kozlowska, an "analysis of ad data and financial records" shows that the"gold IRA" industry "spends millions of dollars a year to reach viewers of Fox, Newsmax and other conservative outlets."
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"Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have promoted the coins," the Post reporters observe, "while ads for Lear's competitors have appeared on a podcast hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Newsmax broadcasts of former President Donald Trump's political rallies."
READ MORE: Tucker Carlson's Twitter viewership falling as battle with Fox News stalls: report
Find the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).
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no lnx
Republican neofascists are playing a dangerous game that will rip America apart
Thom Hartmann April 28, 2022
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney, while his colleague in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, is on a jihad against the parents of trans children.
This is how fascism progresses through its later stages toward tyranny.
Democracies typically don’t turn into fascist oligarchies by being invaded or losing wars. It usually happens from within, and is driven by an alliance between demagogic politicians, corrupt religious leaders, bigoted street brawlers, and some of the wealthiest people in society.
First, fascists identify groups of people they believe are both vulnerable and sufficiently powerless that they won’t be able to fight back. Typically, these are racial, religious, political or gender/sexuality minorities.
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Enormous efforts go into demonizing the people the fascists have identified; members of the group who’ve committed crimes are heavily publicized, while “think tanks” and fascist allies in the media identify malicious “reasons” for those folks’ “deviance.”
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Efforts by members of the demonized groups to achieve parity or equality in society are characterized as a “theft” of privilege and assets from the majority, legitimizing both verbal, legal, and physical attacks on members of the group.
For example, the billionaire Murdoch family’s top-rated morning show, Fox & Friends, recently wandered into a discussion about white people being “marginalized” by the possibility of our public schools teaching the actual racial history of America.
“[T]hey are not only trying to raise up minorities and make sure the playing field is even,” Brian Kilmeade said, “they’re trying to take down the white culture!”
Kilmeade, in full “White people are the victims!” mode, went on:
“Why are we being marginalized on a daily basis…? And it’s not even subtle! It’s actually out there! It is written in black-and-white!”
It’s played out this way in every democratic country that has fallen to tyranny from within. It’s how it happened in the 1930s in Italy, Germany, Japan and Spain, and today in Hungary, Poland, Egypt, Russia, The Philippines, and Turkey, among others.
More recently, Swanson Food Heir Tucker Carlson went on a rant about the Great Replacement Theory.
After identifying targeted minorities — for today’s GOP that includes Black people, trans kids (and their parents), pregnant women, and Democrats — and encouraging legal and physical violence against them, fascists move to the second major step: seizing enough economic and political power that they can reshape society itself.
This requires bringing in morbidly rich people and enlisting the aid of big business.
So, first, they go after the biggest businesses. One of the biggest businesses in Florida is Disney, so Ron DeSantis tried to get them on his bigoted side. They didn’t go along with it, so now, in typical strongman fashion, DeSantis feels he has to destroy them to save face.
As German industrialist Fritz Thyssen writes in his book I Paid Hitler, he pressured German President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, and then lobbied the Association of German Industrialists, that country’s and era’s version of the US Chamber of Commerce, to donate 3 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party for the 1933 election. It brought Hitler to power.
Hitler’s sales pitch to the German people was that Jews, gays, and socialists had “stabbed Germany in the back” and were trying to “strip” good white Christian Germans of their “rights” and twist society to conform with their “perverted” ideas and lifestyles.
Hitler blamed the 1933 economic crisis on German minorities, Jews and gays, and accused Germany’s second largest political party of complicity with them; the German people went along with him. Once the Nazis took power, they changed election laws in such a way that they would never again lose.
Republicans and rightwing billionaires, of course, are doing much the same thing right now in America. One wonders if they’ll have the retrospective angst that haunted Thyssen until the day he died. He wrote about it in I Paid Hitler:
“I am not a politician, but an industrialist, and an industrialist is always inclined to consider politics a kind of second string to his bow — the preparation for his own particular activity. In a well-ordered country, where the administration is sound, where taxes are reasonable, and the police well organised, he can afford to abstain from politics and to devote himself entirely to business.
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“But in a crisis-ridden state, as Germany was from 1918 to 1933, an industrialist is drawn, willy-nilly, into the vortex of politics. After 1930 the aspirations of German industry may be summed up in one phrase: ‘a sound economy in a strong state.’ This was, I remember, the slogan of a meeting of the Ruhr industrialists in 1931. …“I, too, approved this slogan, 'To surmount the crisis it was necessary to reinforce the authority of the state.’ … I believed that by backing Hitler and his party I could contribute to the reinstatement of real government and of orderly conditions, which would enable all branches of activity — and especially business — to function normally once again.”
Unlike Thyssen, who volunteered to support Hitler’s rise to power with massive financial and business backing, Disney is pushing back against DeSantis’ efforts to remake society in an American neofascist mode.
Unless they soon cave in, Disney’s executives probably won’t one day write in their memoirs, as Thyssen did in his:
“But it is no use crying over spilled milk. The strong state of which I then dreamed had nothing in common with the totalitarian state or, rather, caricature of a state, erected by Hitler and his minions.
“Not for an instant did I imagine that it was possible, one hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution and the proclamation of the Rights of Man, to substitute arbitrary action for law in a great modern country, to strangle the most elementary rights of the citizen, to establish an Asiatic tyranny in the heart of Europe, and to foster anachronistic aspirations of conquest and world dominion.”
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This is not America’s first brush with oligarchic fascism, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. President Franklin Roosevelt and Vice President Henry Wallace struggled with it in the 1930s with Charles Lindberg’s infamous Nazi-aligned America First movement.
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”
As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”
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But Disney refused to use their media platform to advance the fascists’ agenda. It has only, however, slowed them down a bit.
Ultimately, as fascists gain more power and grow bolder, nothing is off the table. This is the threshold we’re approaching today, where they don’t just trash minorities and march through the streets displaying weapons and huge flags, but began asserting justification for violence and even murder.
Alleging crimes against the majority’s children is a fascist favorite,as Hitler charged with his repeated attacks on Jewish teachers, leading 15% of the nation’s teachers and professors (including a guy named Albert Einstein) to flee the country when he began his attacks on education in 1933.
Fascist politicians start alleging the most vile of crimes by the groups they hope to destroy: words like “grooming” roll off their lips with a smarmy ease.
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Soon vigilante groups set out to destroy those accused, sometimes politically, sometimes physically.
German Nazis were particularly fond of accusing people they intended to destroy or kill of sexual “crimes.” As Thyssen wrote:
“General von Fritsch’s affair is also a good sample of the peculiar methods used by the Hitler regime. Fritsch was to be ‘liquidated.’ To achieve this, it is said, the head of the Gestapo personally reproached him with practising homosexuality.
“Fritsch, who denied this from the very start, was ordered to call at the chancellery of the Reich, where he was to be unmasked in the presence of the Supreme Leader. … It seems certain that General von Fritsch has subsequently committed suicide. I can at least say that whatever the actual circumstances of his death may have been, he was anxious to die.”
While history usually sides with the victims of fascists, as we’re seeing today with the people Putin is starving to death in Mariupol, that’s small comfort as they confront terror and death.
DeSantis, Abbott and the other Republican neofascists are playing a dangerous game, using Disney as a proxy for the racial and gender minorities they want as whipping boys. It’s a high-stakes political game that has torn societies apart and destroyed millions of lives in the past.
Standing against them are their victims and the Democratic Party, albeit hobbled in their efforts by the perfidy of Manchin and Sinema. This autumn’s elections may well be the last chance for people of good will who believe in American values and eschew fascism to rise in opposition.
Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, regularly double-check your own registration to make it through a voter purge if you live in a Republican-controlled state, and volunteer to help out inside the Democratic Party or through any of the great groups fighting for a more just America.
Time is short, as Fritz Thyssen and Vice President Wallace would tell you were they alive today.
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good pt hard to filter deplat if no text 20 intimacy --> trust
an 1 22
Rogan's controversial interview with anti-vaccination virologist Dr. Robert Malone caused such an uproar that more than scientists, doctors, and other health professionals signed an open letter to Spotify as a petition for his podcast to be removed from the platform.
While Rogan's spread of misinformation is quite alarming, a new analysis published by NPR's Shannon Bond explains how the controversy surrounding his situation underscores a bigger problem; one that appears to be a bit more difficult to regulate. In the open letter, health professionals and members of the scientific community argue that online platforms like Spotify have enabled right-wing figures who have become adept at spreading misinformation.
"We are in a global health emergency, and streaming platforms like Spotify that provide content to the public have a responsibility not to add to the problem," said Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago's School of Public Health.
"Their friends and family were sending it to them as evidence that the vaccines are dangerous and that they shouldn't get it," she said. "It provides a sense of false balance, like there's two sides to the scientific evidence when, really, there is not. The overwhelming evidence is that the vaccines are safe and that they're effective."
Researchers specializing in the study of misinformation have suggested that it was inevitable for podcasts to become a point of contention. Like social media platforms, Bond notes that podcasts give individuals the ability to reach build large audiences. But despite the long reach, podcasts have not faced the type of scrutiny social media platforms have. So, why is that? Podcasts give influencers the ability to spread misinformation by way of audio.
Evelyn Douek, a research fellow for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, explained why podcasts are far more difficult to regulate as it becomes a matter of words compared to audio.
"Wherever you have users generating content, you're going to have all of the same content moderation issues and controversies that you have in any other space," said Douek.
According to Bond, Douek also noted that "it's also harder to ferret out falsehoods and hate speech in podcasts compared with posts written on Facebook and Twitter."
Valerie Wirtschafter, a senior data analyst at the Brookings Institution, also weighed in with a similar perspective noting the distinction of audio and the potential problem it poses in the podcast world. "Audio can be a powerful way to spread misinformation because of all the qualities that make the format so compelling to listeners," said Wirtschafter.
Wirtschafter also stressed the importance of scrutinizing audio in the same manner written social media posts are.
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