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Category: Social media

Musk’s Twitter: ‘This is exactly what many of us were worried about’

Musk’s Twitter: ‘This is exactly what many of us were worried about’

Politico reports: A day after Elon Musk seemed to confirm critics’ worst fears about his ownership of Twitter by tweeting out right-wing misinformation from his personal account, political leaders and operatives wrestled with a loaded question: Would the most important social-media platform in the political world survive his ownership? And if it did, should they stay on it? “This is exactly what many of us were worried about,” said Mark Jablonowski, the managing partner of Democratic digital advertising firm DSPolitical….

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Alt-tech social media platform, Rumble, backed by J.D. Vance, promotes Russian propaganda

Alt-tech social media platform, Rumble, backed by J.D. Vance, promotes Russian propaganda

The New York Times reports: In June, two American veterans fighting as volunteers in Ukraine, Alex Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, were captured by Russian forces. They were taken to a black site where they were beaten, run into walls with bags over their heads and hooked up to a car battery and “electrocuted,” the men said after being freed in late September. Between beatings, they told the New York Times, they were interviewed on Russian media outlets, including…

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What if Rumble is the future of the social web?

What if Rumble is the future of the social web?

Kaitlyn Tiffany writes: When Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in January 2021, it was obvious that he would have to find somewhere else to post. His own platform, Truth Social, was still a distant dream, so he had to choose one of the “alt-tech” platforms hosting professed free-speech absolutists, vaccine skeptics, Hunter Biden obsessives, and MAGA shitposters. He could have gone to Parler, where much of the pregaming for the January 6 riot took place, or Gab, where an…

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Like Trump, Elon Musk reveals a vapid mind super-charged by wealth and ego

Like Trump, Elon Musk reveals a vapid mind super-charged by wealth and ego

Siva Vaidhyanathan writes: It took less than 48 hours for Elon Musk to reveal just how dangerous his new toy can be to this world. Replying to a tweet from former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the man worth more than $210bn with more than 112 million Twitter followers spread a dangerous conspiracy theory intended to distract people from an attempted political assassination just one week before a major US election. Clinton had warned that “the Republican party and…

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Prominent conservatives share online disinformation about Paul Pelosi assault

Prominent conservatives share online disinformation about Paul Pelosi assault

Politico reports: Even as Republican leaders condemn the brutal assault on Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s husband, other GOP figures are broadcasting a much different message on social media — at turns downplaying, mocking and trading in disinformation about the attack. Former Republican President Donald Trump has so far remained silent online about the Pelosi home invasion, but his son Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a proposed “Paul Pelosi” Halloween costume featuring men’s underwear and a hammer, saying “The Internet remains undefeated.” Rep….

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Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her

Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her

The Washington Post reports: In 2010, Republicans launched a “Fire Pelosi” project — complete with a bus tour, a #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) engulfed in Hades-style flames — devoted to retaking the House and demoting Pelosi from her perch as speaker. Eleven years later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joked that if he becomes the next leader of the House, “it will be hard not to hit” Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel. And…

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Twitter roils with hate speech as trolls test Musk’s self-described free speech absolutism

Twitter roils with hate speech as trolls test Musk’s self-described free speech absolutism

Bloomberg reports: In the wake of Elon Musk buying Twitter Inc., a tide of slurs and racist memes swelled on the platform, sparking concern that the site is entering an era of hateful speech. Twitter has long wrestled with how to enforce content policies fairly on its platform in order to appease the advertisers, users and powerful world leaders that use its service. But as Musk, a self-styled “free speech absolutist,” took over ownership of the company, some conservative officials,…

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Overt U.S. antisemitism returns with Trump, Kanye West: ‘Something is different’

Overt U.S. antisemitism returns with Trump, Kanye West: ‘Something is different’

The Washington Post reports: Longtime watchdogs of antisemitism say there is nothing new about the kinds of derogatory comments about Jews that the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, former president Donald Trump, sundry far-right political candidates and others have made in recent weeks. But what has struck some experts is how blatant the comments about Jews are at a time when incidents of harassment, vandalism and violence against them have been at their highest levels since at least…

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Saudi Arabia sentences U.S. citizen to 16 years in prison for tweets

Saudi Arabia sentences U.S. citizen to 16 years in prison for tweets

Josh Rogin writes: The Saudi government has sentenced a 72-year-old U.S. citizen to 16 years in prison for tweets he posted while inside the United States, some of which were critical of the Saudi regime. His son, speaking publicly for the first time, alleges that the Saudi government has tortured his father in prison and says that the State Department mishandled the case. Many dictatorships unjustly imprison Americans. But while the Biden administration has gone to considerable effort to secure…

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Whistleblower, Will Wilkerson, reveals the turmoil inside Trump’s start-up media company

Whistleblower, Will Wilkerson, reveals the turmoil inside Trump’s start-up media company

The Washington Post reports: Will Wilkerson, then an executive at former president Donald Trump’s start-up Trump Media & Technology Group, was at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., coffee shop with company co-founder Andy Litinsky last October when Trump called Litinsky with a question: Would he give up some of his shares to Trump’s wife, Melania? Trump Media, the owner of the fledgling social network Truth Social, had just been boosted by a huge merger agreement and a flood of investment that…

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Zuckerberg hopes to stoke metaverse enthusiasm by threatening to layoff unenthusiastic Meta employees

Zuckerberg hopes to stoke metaverse enthusiasm by threatening to layoff unenthusiastic Meta employees

The New York Times reports: Last October, when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, announced that the company would change its name to Meta and become a “metaverse company,” he sketched a vision of a utopian future many years off in which billions of people would inhabit immersive digital environments for hours on end, working, socializing and playing games inside virtual and augmented worlds. In the year since, Meta has spent billions of dollars and assigned thousands of employees…

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How a single Texas ruling could change the web forever

How a single Texas ruling could change the web forever

Charlie Warzel writes: Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the…

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‘They are watching’: Inside Russia’s vast surveillance state

‘They are watching’: Inside Russia’s vast surveillance state

The New York Times reports: Four days into the war in Ukraine, Russia’s expansive surveillance and censorship apparatus was already hard at work. Roughly 800 miles east of Moscow, authorities in the Republic of Bashkortostan, one of Russia’s 85 regions, were busy tabulating the mood of comments in social media messages. They marked down YouTube posts that they said criticized the Russian government. They noted the reaction to a local protest. Then they compiled their findings. One report about the…

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How Russian trolls helped keep the Women’s March out of lock step

How Russian trolls helped keep the Women’s March out of lock step

Ellen Barry reports: Linda Sarsour awoke on Jan. 23, 2017, logged onto the internet, and felt sick. The weekend before, she had stood in Washington at the head of the Women’s March, a mobilization against President Donald J. Trump that surpassed all expectations. Crowds had begun forming before dawn, and by the time she climbed up onto the stage, they extended farther than the eye could see. More than four million people around the United States had taken part, experts…

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Chomsky, Greenwald, and left-wing apologists for Putin are looking very foolish right now

Chomsky, Greenwald, and left-wing apologists for Putin are looking very foolish right now

Noah Berlatsky and Aaron Rupar write: Ukraine’s successes have made right wing Putin apologists look like fools, bounders, and quislings. Tucker Carlson, all-purpose fascist shill, has constantly insisted that Putin’s victory is inevitable — refusing to change his line even after the most recent defeat. Tucker: By any actual reality based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine. He is winning the war in Ukraine pic.twitter.com/8uBlud3az4 — Acyn (@Acyn) August 30, 2022 Former Trump aide and fascist…

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Trump’s not even pretending to hide his support for QAnon any more

Trump’s not even pretending to hide his support for QAnon any more

Vice News reports: Former President Donald Trump has now shared his most explicit endorsement of the QAnon conspiracy movement to date. Trump shared a picture of himself wearing a Q lapel pin, overlaid with the QAnon phrases “The Storm is Coming” and “WWG1WGA,” on his Truth Social account on Monday evening. The post was originally shared on Truth Social by an account called “Patriots in Control,” before Trump re-shared it. “How much more obvious can it get?” one QAnon follower…

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