"Falun Gong-backed newspaper used aggressive Facebook tactics and misinformation to create an anti-China, pro-Trump media empire" - from a "low-budget newspaper ... handed out free on New York street corners" to "one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers... a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation"…

Facebook deleted post where Trump claimed Covid-19 was "less lethal" than the flu, while Twitter hid it behind a warning about "spreading misleading and potentially harmful information". Covid-19 thought to be up to 10 times more lethal than most flu strains. Trump's reaction: "REPEAL SECTION 230!!!" His propo…

It's 2020 in the US: "a pandemic, economic collapse and a society-wide reckoning over racism [and] an election in which voter suppression, foreign interference, online disinformation and a bitterly contested supreme court vacancy ... an incumbent president who has spent months spreading disinformation and discrediting what he calls “the …

"the greatest threat to a credible vote is homegrown... Trump has falsely claimed that mail-in ballots “lead to massive corruption and fraud,” that foreign powers will “forge ballots” and that the “only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” ...Bullshit, of course: he said this in 2016, but now with the weight of…

Facebook’s Preferential Treatment Of US Conservatives Puts Its Fact-Checking Program In Dangeremployees and fact-checking partners ... left in the dark about how the company decides what content stays up and what comes down... PragerU’s second strike for false content that month ... should have triggered “repeat offender” penalties ... false labe…

As the internet lit up ... Accounts identified as belonging to Latino social media users voiced outrage about politically correct “mob” bullying ... activists immediately grew suspicious... thousands of posts were coming from ... bots... activists cooked up a counteroffensive... exposed “recipes” for disinformation and distorting facts... educatio…

The president’s reelection campaign ... multimillion-dollar ad blitz ... shaping Americans’ understanding of ... impeachment ... micro-targeted ads ... portraying Trump as a heroic reformer ... while Democrats plotted a coup... An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape ... I wanted to see it from the inside...I was surprised by the effec…

Twitter account claiming to belong to a national “antifa” organization and pushing violent rhetoric related to ongoing protests has been linked to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa... hashtags that trended worldwide ... to insinuate that protesters have been silenced ... "coordinated attempts to disrupt the public conversation"…

coronavirus i... global rallying cry for ... white supremacists and anti-vaxxers in the U.S. to fascist and anti-refugee groups across Europe ... far-right populists on both continents ... using the outbreak to push their political agenda ...barrage of false messages [risk] ... feeding ... “infodemic” that makes it hard to separate fact from ficti…

McNamee has mentored many of the people who have transformed Silicon Valley... advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s offer... a billion dollars... encouraged Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg...Ten days before the Presidential election... “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,”... I was expecting them to take it seriously... t…

big tech companies have spent the past three years working to avoid a repeat of 2016... struggling to handle the new challenges of 2020...foreign governments ... are now using ... bots that are nearly impossible to distinguish from hyperpartisan Americans... partisan groups in the United States have borrowed Russia’s 2016 playbook ... tough calls …