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Surfin’ USA | Vincent Bevins
thebaffler.com
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Interesting longread on " Why the internet remains a tool of American hegemony", pointing out that " The internet was built by the U.S. military at the height of the Cold War and privatized into corporate America at the peak of anglophone neoliberal hegemony."There was a moment of freedom, when there were "millions of diff…

The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure | Knight First Amendment Institute
knightcolumbia.org
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Today's social platforms' business models are not inevitable, but because we see them as such we constrain "the solution space we consider for combatting mis-/disinformation, polarization, and promotion of extremism... we need to consider what technologies [and] digital media to have a productive role in democratic societies".H…

How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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"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 Stymied Traffic to Left-Leaning News Outlets: Report
gizmodo.com

Facebook's 2017 newsfeed algorithm tweak intentionally reduced traffic to left-leaning outlets " to avoid adding fuel to critics’ argument that the platform has an anti-conservative bias"... and overcorrected."Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue"

A Theory About Conspiracy Theories
www.nytimes.com
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"psychologists tried to get a handle on the personality types that might be prone to outlandish beliefs" as over a third of Americans believe the Chinese "engineered the coronavirus as a weapon", and around half "firmly believe at least one discredited conspiracy theory... conspiracy theories are playing a bigger role in p…

09/10/2020
Trump Covid post deleted by Facebook and hidden by Twitter - BBC News
www.bbc.com
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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…

How Memes, Lulz, and "Ironic" Bigotry Won the Internet - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com
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This article had me hooked from Line One - "Remember when the internet used to be fun?" - because I do. It tracks how "ironic, meme culture" (d)evolved from when "There was an assumption that everyone in the room “got it,” that they understood who was being satirized—the racists and the homophobes—and that everything was j…

06/10/2020
Recipe for chaos: 2020 election threatens to snap a US already pushed to the limit | US elections 2020 | The Guardian
www.theguardian.com
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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 …

US election campaign technology from 2008 to 2018, and beyond | MIT Technology Review
www.technologyreview.com
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Tours election technology from 2008 to 2018 "and beyond".2008: Obama integrated e-mail, cell phones and websites to both convey the candidate’s message and enable his supporters to connect and self-organize - supporting grassroots community. MyBarackObama allowed users to form groups, raise money, organise events, get info on local vote…

How Donald Trump's Attacks on Mail-In Voting Hurt Democracy | Time
time.com
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"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…

The 2020 Election, a Race in Which Everything Happens and Nothing Matters | The New Yorker
www.newyorker.com
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Unless Biden stumbles, he'll win, but the amazing thing is that ~40% of Americans will support Trump no matter what. Trump is talking and acting crazy while over 1000 Americans die of covid19 on many days - compared to around half that in the worst week of the Vietnam war. Yet there seems to be no electoral consequence: the Trump-Biden gap ha…

Facebook Arbiter Of Truth Already, Employees Say
www.buzzfeednews.com
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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…

Motivated Reasoning and Allegiance Bias, Explained | Elemental
elemental.medium.com
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counties that had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 exhibited 14% less physical distancing... higher Covid-19 infection and fatality growth rates ...the hormone oxytocin... promotes bonding... plays a role in trust... When participants trusted and felt trusted, oxytocin levels ... jumped... Trust just feels good... But risky if we give it to the w…

A ‘war room’ that arms Black and Latino voters against disinformation
www.latimes.com
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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…

How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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time to rethink “election night.”... Pennsylvania may be counting mail-in ballots for weeks, while President Trump tweets false allegations about fraud ... already ... called mail-in voting into question with false claims about fraud ...[in the US] the media actually assembles the results from 50 states... declares a victor... establishes the narr…

What Is QAnon: Explaining the Internet Conspiracy Theory That Showed Up at a Trump Rally - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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Q claims to be a government insider exposing an entrenched, international bureaucracy that is secretly plotting all sorts of nefarious schemes against the Trump ... military or intelligence background ... various, but connecting, conspiracy theories... Trump ... battling a cabal of anti-American saboteurs ... overarching goals ... not clear... “…

06/08/2020
The 2020 Election Will Be a War of Disinformation - The Atlantic
www.theatlantic.com
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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…

The winners and losers of the big tech congressional hearings | Technology | The Guardian
www.theguardian.com
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“This hearing has made one fact clear to me. These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up. All need to be properly regulated ... their control of the marketplace allows them to do whatever it takes to crush independent business and expand their own power. This must end.”

Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google Prepare for Their ‘Big Tobacco Moment’ - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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Amazon is accused of abusing its role as both a retailer and a platform hosting third-party sellers ... Apple ... unfairly using ... App Store to block rivals and to force apps to pay high commissions.... Facebook has a monopoly in social networking... Google... multiple antitrust allegations ... dominance in online advertising, search and smartph…

1,913,369 Ballots Thrown Away - Greg Palast
www.gregpalast.com
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It’s official: 1,913,369 ballots were cast but never counted in the 2016 presidential race. That’s from the US Elections Assistance Commission... your chance of having your vote simply go uncounted, “spoiled,” is 900% higher if you're Black than if you're white...Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes... 75,355 ballots were never cou…

26/07/2020
Andrew Sullivan: See You Next Friday
nymag.com
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my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost... The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem... A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me ... orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in …

Opinion | The Future of Nonconformity
www.nytimes.com
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marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

We’re Not Polarized Enough | The New Republic
newrepublic.com
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Many of our political forebears pined for more polarization... fretted about the incoherence of their identities ... There were liberal Republicans ... opponents of civil rights and big government in the Democratic Party... 1976 ... Richard Nixon... proposed a universal health care ... created the Environmental Protection Agency... tighter i…

The narrative power of “abolish the police” - Vox
www.vox.com
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don’t think about “abolish the police” as merely a policy proposal... Think about it as a narrative ... to change how people think... an objective to rally behind... a lesson in how... the broader left ... needs to work on its storytelling skills as much as its policy proposals...“storytelling” [is] ... a three-act structure ... a character with a…

White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter
www.nbcnews.com
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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"…

Opinion | Trump Is Staking Out His Own Universe of ‘Alternative Facts’ - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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In less than a year... weekly church-attending white Protestants convinced that Donald Trump was anointed by God to be president grew from 29.6 percent to 49.5 percent... Capitalizing on that devotion is integral to Trump’s re-election ...all-enveloping digital campaign website... campaign app... a self-contained, self-reinforcing arena where Trum…

Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown | Financial Times
www.ft.com
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When the history is written of how America handled the global era’s first real pandemic ... Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself...a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings…

‘Conspiracy bingo’: Transatlantic extremists seize on the pandemic – POLITICO
www.politico.eu
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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…

Book Review: Sarah Kendzior, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’
medium.com
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Kendzior pulls no punches... detailed ... a true crime work, with the President ... benefactor of a criminal machine so powerful and immense ... every institution ... and media has, in some way, been compromised...every page brought fresh anguish...Other than Trump... the players? Russians... Israel, and Americans in business and government... all…

30/04/2020
This thread summarizes the major-media investigative reporting on the TRUMP-CHINA SCANDAL
threadreaderapp.com
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thread summarizes ... reporting on the TRUMP-CHINA SCANDAL, a bribery scandal involving Trump's hunt for dirt on Joe Biden in China, his debts to the Chinese government, and his decision to ignore life-saving COVID-19 intel...the Trump-Russia scandal was at its heart a *bribery* scandal... Trump-Ukraine scandal was another bribery scandal... …

28/04/2020
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