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Category: Social media

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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Trump’s Truth Social in limbo as merger partner grapples with another failed vote

Trump’s Truth Social in limbo as merger partner grapples with another failed vote

The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump has failed to win another vote — this time, from the shareholders of an investment ally his social network Truth Social had been counting on for cash. Digital World Acquisition, a special-purpose acquisition company, said Thursday it had not yet gained enough shareholder votes to extend its deadline for merging with Trump’s start-up — a necessary step to unlock $1.3 billion in raised funds. The company was scheduled for liquidation Thursday unless…

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The North Atlantic Fellas Organization is fighting the Kremlin’s propaganda machine — and winning

The North Atlantic Fellas Organization is fighting the Kremlin’s propaganda machine — and winning

Mark Scott writes: Ivana Stradner opened her iPhone and typed a simple call-to-arms: Unleash the hounds. A Washington think-tanker and an expert in Russian propaganda, Stradner is also a member of NAFO — or the North Atlantic Fellas Organization — an informal alliance of internet culture warriors, national security experts and ordinary Twitter users weaponizing memes, viral videos and, yes, dog photos to push back against Russian online disinformation. “I see myself as a NAFO civilian propagandist,” said Stradner, an…

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Trump embraces conspiracy theories he only winked at before

Trump embraces conspiracy theories he only winked at before

The New York Times reports: In a 24-hour period this week, former President Donald J. Trump posted to his social media platform, Truth Social, 88 times, amplifying one conspiracy theory after another. Among his unsupported claims: A retiring F.B.I. agent was behind both the search of his Mar-a-Lago property on Aug. 8 and the investigation into his campaign’s possible ties to Russia; a forthcoming report will prove widespread corruption against his 2016 campaign; and he should be reinstalled as president…

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Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless and negligent cybersecurity policies

Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless and negligent cybersecurity policies

CNN reports: Twitter has major security problems that pose a threat to its own users’ personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy, according to an explosive whistleblower disclosure obtained exclusively by CNN and The Washington Post. The disclosure, sent last month to Congress and federal agencies, paints a picture of a chaotic and reckless environment at a mismanaged company that allows too many of its staff access to the platform’s central controls and most sensitive information…

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Influencers are whitewashing Syria’s regime, with help from sponsors

Influencers are whitewashing Syria’s regime, with help from sponsors

Sophie Fullerton writes: Last November, around the same time the Irish travel vlogger Janet Newenham was filming videos of her strolls through Damascus and Aleppo, five members of a family, including three children, were killed in a Russian airstrike in northwest Syria. But none of Newenham’s 170,000 YouTube subscribers would have learned that from her upbeat dispatches — in her videos, Syria is not a country at war. After a scorched-earth war — supported by Iranian forces, sectarian militias and…

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Don’t expect Alex Jones’s comeuppance to stop lies

Don’t expect Alex Jones’s comeuppance to stop lies

Kevin Roose writes: It would be too simple to blame (or credit) Mr. Jones for inspiring the entire modern cranksphere. But it’s safe to say that many of today’s leading conspiracy theorists have found the same profitable sweet spot of lies and entertainment value. It’s also probable that we’ve become desensitized to conspiracy theories, and many of the outrageous falsehoods that once got Mr. Jones into trouble — such as the allegations about Sandy Hook parents that were at the…

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