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50 Resources and five editions later (US2020 Disinformation news, ed. 5)
mathewlowry.medium.com

What did I learn from Hubbing 50 resources and writing five editions on disinformation during the US elections?

Evaluating contradictory foreign interference allegations in the 2020 U.S. election | by @DFRLab | DFRLab | Oct, 2020 | Medium
medium.com
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DFRLab’s Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker (FIAT) database (see Interference2020.org) "captures allegations of foreign #us2020 interference... and assesses their credibility, bias, evidence, transparency, and impact".80 allegations were catalogued: a "sharp increase from 2016... vary widely in their evidence and objectivity, …

How Some Conservatives Have Switched to Parler, Rumble and Newsmax (FN)
www.nytimes.com
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Fleeting Note (FN): the creation of Fediverse-based alternatives might suddenly become an urgency.

More than 8 in 10 Trump voters think Biden’s win is not legitimate - The Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com

Trump's delegitimisation disinformation campaign bears fruit: while 60% of those polled by Economist/YouGov thought Biden legitimately won:86% of Trump voters said he hadn’t, with 80% saying he shouldn’t concede, and most thinking the courts will overturn the resultsover 75% think there was sufficient fraud to influence the outcome - although…

Facebook Quietly Suspended Political Group Recommendations Ahead Of The US Presidential Election
www.buzzfeednews.com
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"Facebook quietly stopped recommending that people join online groups dealing with political or social issues", and will "assess when to lift them afterwards, but they are temporary." This part of the Facebook's AI plays a key role in pushing "people down a path of radicalization... groups reinforce like-minded views …

Thread by @kevinroose on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App
threadreaderapp.com
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An interesting corrective: here's the Tech columnist for the New York Times, claiming Facebook is flooded with right-wing misinformation, not all labelled as such - and "it's not clear that labels are doing much". Most people - including, usually, me - will read that tweet, have their beliefs confirmed and move on. What's…

Meet the researchers and activists fighting misinformation - Protocol
www.protocol.com
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the Election Integrity Partnership and Disinfo Defense League ... two initiatives among hundreds ... reflect two mutually reinforcing sides of the same ecosystem... people devoting their livelihoods to combatting online misinformation and disinformation... These are their stories...EIP is uniquely close to the platforms, using Jira to communicate …

How Facebook and Twitter Handled Their First Major Election Day Tests | by Sarah Emerson | Nov, 2020 | OneZero
onezero.medium.com
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Several of the president’s tweets overlaid with disclaimers ... invoking Twitter's Civic Integrity Policy, which prevents users from manipulating elections. Trump’s tweets also effectively throttled by preventing other users from amplifying them. Facebook’s measures were less accusatory, attaching an informational label.Neither stopped Trump …

Disinformation in the Presidential Election: Latest Updates - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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Every day, Times reporters will chronicle and debunk false and misleading information that is going viral online... Whole collection of individual stories, all worth a look. Some key points:Twitter flagged half of President Trump’s 14 posts on Thursday for including disputed or misleading information. But hundreds of other accounts - over 150 of w…

Facebook Seeks Shutdown of NYU Research Project Into Political Ad Targeting - WSJ
www.wsj.com

Facebook threatens with legal action NY academics seeking to study Facebook's political ad targeting because their Ad Observer is a "scraping tool". The project collects data unavailable on Facebook's political ad archive: targeting data, geography, political contest, etc.., which they say now violates their rules established i…

Social Media and the Hunter Biden Report - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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The platforms started doing what people concerned about disinformation have been asking for, and immediately came under fire from people concerned about censorship.When The New York Post published a story supposedly incriminating Hunter Biden "YouTube largely did nothing, Facebook deprioritized the Post story (slowing spread until 3rd party f…

Domestic v. foreign disinformation: A question of timing (US2020 Disinformation news, ed. 4)
medium.com
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There are two possible reasons why we are not talking as much about foreign interference. Both could be true. Only one is good news.

YouTube Toughens its Rules Around Dangerous Conspiracy Theories, with a Focus on QAnon Content | Social Media Today
www.socialmediatoday.com
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A few days after Facebook, Youtube bans "content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence... such as QAnon or Pizzagate", although they may except "news coverage on these issues or content discussing them without targeting individuals or protected groups".&q;…

Unofficial ballot drop boxes popping up throughout the state worry elections officials – Orange County Register
www.ocregister.com

"church officials don’t have a key to the box and that GOP officials picks up the ballots". Meanwhile, none of the ballot collection locations listed on the local Republican Party's website are official - instead they list their HQ, gun shops and other local businesses.They win either way: they can pass on Republican votes and suppr…

Twitter Will Turn Off Some Features to Fight Election Misinformation - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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Most of the changes will start on Oct. 20, incl.:extra friction on retweeting, encouraging quote RTs adding the users' own thoughtspre-sharing warnings about flagged contentlabelling early election result claims disabling the algorithmic timelineAlso increasing factchecking and additional context on trending tweets.

A new study shows how Trump and the RNC duped traditional media into covering mail-in voter fraud » Nieman Journalism Lab
www.niemanlab.org
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Berkman Klein Center analyzed 55,000 news stories, five million tweets, and 75,000 public Facebook posts to discover that it's "Trump, the Republican National Committee, and Fox News — not Facebook spammers and Russian trolls — who are the primary drivers of misinformation around mail-in voting fraud", taking advantage of three stan…

Deepfake democracy: Here's how modern elections could be decided by fake news | World Economic Forum
www.weforum.org
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WEF examines the impact deepfakes could have on US2020. Not a lot of the analysis is new, except perhaps:how deepfakes could be used subtly: making small changes to "how a candidate delivers an otherwise authentic speech ... [to call] character, fitness and mental health into question"some examples from Gabon, Malaysia & Belgium(?)Ca…

The Biggest Risk to This Election Is Not Russia. It’s Us. - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com
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"Americans must recognize that the United States is ripe for manipulation. With a month to go before Election Day, we are ripping ourselves apart."Covers ground covered earlier, but with an inside perspective from someone on the National Security Council 2017-2019: "Russian operatives wanted to weaken [Clinton] ... delighted when s…

Six Disinformation Threats in the Post-Election Period
www.justsecurity.org
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"perhaps it’s not the runup to the election we should be chiefly concerned about"Someone trying to mess with America probably realises they can't get Trump re-elected, so they are better off focusing on the post-election period, which offers a "better chance to push more Americans to extremes than ever before". Identifies …

Recommendations for Media Covering the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election | Election Coverage and Democracy Network
mediafordemocracy.org
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The fact that this is actually necessary is saddening: "practical, nonpartisan, evidence-based recommendations to journalists covering the 2020 U.S. presidential election", including how to cover an election amid attempts to undermine it; what to do in the case of a contested result or Trump doesn't concede; and "what to do if …

QAnon shows that the age of alternative facts will not end with Trump - Columbia Journalism Review
www.cjr.org
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With more than a dozen congressional candidates appearing on ballots in November, Qanon is mainstream. While it looks like a lot of other conspiracy theories, this research provides a fascinating look at how the conspiracy's "Bakers" co-create their knowledgescape."QAnon doesn’t simply offer readers insider insight into current…

Facebook completely bans QAnon and labels it a ‘militarized social movement’ - The Verge
www.theverge.com
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All forms of content related to QAnon are banned, excepting posts from individual profiles, "even if they contain no violent content" - a significant update of Facebook's anti-Q August sweep - effectively treating it as an “identified Militarized Social Movement... no different than an extremist militia group, but not quite on the l…

A crease in Biden's shirt spawns a debate conspiracy theory - CNN
edition.cnn.com
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Short video, filmed at a Trump rally, on two major disinfo trends: the Joe Biden earpiece, and Q.The "smoking gun" video - flagged false by factcheckers - "shared more than 22,000 times and viewed 800,000 times by Thursday night... one of the most widespread false narratives his team had handled this year"... another video &quo;…

Revealed: Trump campaign strategy to deter millions of Black Americans from voting in 2016 – Channel 4 News
www.channel4.com
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"3.5 million Black Americans were categorised by Donald Trump’s campaign as ‘Deterrence’ – voters they wanted to stay home on election day."Part 1 of a Channel4 series on #DetteringDemocracy, analysing "data used by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign... almost 200 million American voters... 5 terabytes of data... separated by…

Trump and the Limits of Content Moderation | WIRED
www.wired.com
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Criticisms of social media platforms for allowing disinfo and hate speech to flourish are accurate, but sometimes also wishful thinking: "if only Mark Zuckerberg got his act together, American politics would get back to normal"A disinfo video gone viral may get half a million views - the first Trump-Biden "debate was probably seen b…

Facebook pledged to remove misinformation about voting posted by Trump. It's not following through.  - Popular Information
popular.info
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The new label makes clear that Facebook understands Trump is posting misinformation about whether votes are counted. But it is not fulfilling its stated policy to remove the post. 

Breaking democracy to hold power (US2020 Disinformation news, ed. 3)
medium.com
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How a decades-long election delegitimisation campaign, amplified by social media disinformation, intersects with the death of a Chief Justice in a GoT-worthy season finale of “US democracy: Endgame”.

‘“Holy s---” is what we’re thinking’: Inside Facebook's reckoning with 2020 - POLITICO
www.politico.com
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A tour of the year from Zuckerberg's original position - that private companies should not be censoring politicians or the news in a democracy - to the most recent U-turn, after a year of exploring options: from continuing to do nothing through to Twitter's position - banning all political ads."field testing revealed that none of th…

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 …

While Facebook works to create an oversight board, industry experts formed their own
www.nbcnews.com
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a group to analyze and critique Facebook's content moderation decisions, policies and other platform issues in the run-up to the presidential election... Facebook's own won't be ready for the election...The name - "Real Facebook Oversight Board" - is misleading: it won't hear users' claims or appeals; more of an …

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