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Category: Social media

Misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks than factual news during the 2020 election, study says

Misinformation on Facebook got six times more clicks than factual news during the 2020 election, study says

The Washington Post reports: A new study of user behavior on Facebook around the 2020 election is likely to bolster critics’ long-standing arguments that the company’s algorithms fuel the spread of misinformation over more trustworthy sources. The forthcoming peer-reviewed study by researchers at New York University and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France has found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on…

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Social media mobs are strangling free speech

Social media mobs are strangling free speech

Anne Applebaum writes: Secretive procedures that take place outside the law and leave the accused feeling helpless and isolated have been an element of control in authoritarian regimes across the centuries, from the Argentine junta to Franco’s Spain. Stalin created “troikas”—ad hoc, extrajudicial bodies that heard dozens of cases in a day. During China’s Cultural Revolution, Mao empowered students to create revolutionary committees to attack and swiftly remove professors. In both instances, people used these unregulated forms of “justice” to…

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Vaccines could affect how the coronavirus evolves – but that’s no reason to skip your shot

Vaccines could affect how the coronavirus evolves – but that’s no reason to skip your shot

Vaccines against COVID-19 are the safest – and fastest – way to prevent the spread of variants. Luis Alvarez/ DigitalVision via Getty Images By Andrew Read, Penn State Takeaways A 2015 paper on a chicken virus showed vaccines could enable more deadly variants to spread – in chickens. But that outcome is rare. Only a minority of human and animal vaccines have affected the evolution of a virus. In most of those cases, evolution didn’t increase the severity of the…

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The right-wing Americans who admire the Taliban

The right-wing Americans who admire the Taliban

Michelle Goldberg writes: As the Taliban swept through Afghanistan in August, a Gen Z alt-right group ran a Twitter account devoted to celebrating their progress. Tweets in Pashto juxtaposed two laughing Taliban fighters with pictures meant to represent American effeminacy. Another said, the words auto-translated into English, “Liberalism did not fail in Afghanistan because it was Afghanistan, it failed because it was not true. It failed America, Europe and the world see it.” The account, now suspended, was just one…

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Ivermectin for Covid-19: abundance of hype, dearth of evidence

Ivermectin for Covid-19: abundance of hype, dearth of evidence

Peter G. Lurie writes: In striking testimony before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in December 2020, Pierre Kory, a critical care physician who formerly worked for the University of Wisconsin Health University Hospital, described the “immense potency” of ivermectin, characterizing it as effectively a “miracle drug.” “All studies are positive,” he testified, “with considerable magnitude benefits, with the vast majority reaching strong statistical significance.” Unfortunately, and not for the first time in the Covid-19 pandemic, the…

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Why the media is worse for Biden than Trump

Why the media is worse for Biden than Trump

Jonathan Chait writes: Over the last week, the media has hammered Joe Biden with relentlessly critical coverage of his pullout from Afghanistan, resulting in noticeable drops in his approval ratings. Put aside for a moment whether this reflects failures by Biden or biases by the media. One conclusion we can draw is that this sort of dynamic is a regular feature of Democratic presidencies, and — as the Trump administration showed — a near impossibility during Republican ones. But wait,…

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New Zealanders support latest Covid lockdown as Sydney faces Delta disaster

New Zealanders support latest Covid lockdown as Sydney faces Delta disaster

The Guardian reports: To overseas eyes, going into national lockdown over a single case should have been a hard sell, even for an extraordinarily popular prime minister such as Jacinda Ardern. But a disastrous outbreak of the Delta variant in Sydney has helped galvanise New Zealand’s “team of 5 million” – and across the country, the government’s tough strategy on Covid-19 has enjoyed widespread popular support. On Tuesday, New Zealand was plunged into a national, level 4 lockdown – the…

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Virus misinformation spikes as Delta cases surge

Virus misinformation spikes as Delta cases surge

The New York Times reports: In late July, Andrew Torba, the chief executive of the alternative social network Gab, claimed without evidence that members of the U.S. military who refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus would face a court-martial. His post on Gab amassed 10,000 likes and shares. Two weeks earlier, the unfounded claim that at least 45,000 deaths had resulted from Covid-19 vaccines circulated online. Posts with the claim collected nearly 17,000 views on Bitchute, an alternative video…

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Facebook let fossil-fuel industry push climate misinformation, report finds

Facebook let fossil-fuel industry push climate misinformation, report finds

The Guardian reports: Facebook failed to enforce its own rules to curb an oil and gas industry misinformation campaign over the climate crisis during last year’s presidential election, according to a new analysis released on Thursday. The report, by the London-based thinktank InfluenceMap, identified an increase in advertising on the social media site by ExxonMobil and other fossil-fuel companies aimed at shaping the political debate about policies to address global heating. InfluenceMap said its research shows the fossil-fuel industry has…

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Facebook killed research into the Capitol riot to protect itself — not its users

Facebook killed research into the Capitol riot to protect itself — not its users

Dell Cameron writes: When the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for deceiving its users on privacy, it celebrated the fine as “record-breaking and history-making.” Two years and $200 billion in revenue later, Facebook has found a way to turn lemons into lemonade, deceiving its users once again and using a seemingly powerless FTC to do it. Facebook’s Tuesday night crackdown on research into the dangerous falsehoods perpetuated by its platform was predicated on the lie that the FTC…

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Facebook is an ad tech company. That’s how we should regulate it

Facebook is an ad tech company. That’s how we should regulate it

Nathalie Maréchal writes: Another day, another Facebook accountability scandal. On Wednesday, Facebook shut down the accounts of NYU researchers Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy on the grounds that their Ad Observer tool violated Facebook users’ privacy. At first blush, this seems absurd: the users in question voluntarily installed the Ad Observer plug-in in their browser for the express purpose of sharing targeting info related to the political ads they see on Facebook with the researchers. Dig a little deeper, and…

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Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook

Facebook bans academics who researched ad transparency and misinformation on Facebook

The Verge reports: Facebook has banned the personal accounts of academics who researched ad transparency and the spread of misinformation on the social network. Facebook says the group violated its term of service by scraping user data without permission. But the academics say they are being silenced for exposing problems on Facebook’s platform. The researchers were part of NYU Ad Observatory, a project created to examine the origin and spread of political ads on Facebook. As the group explained in…

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Pro-Trump social network flooded with ISIS propaganda

Pro-Trump social network flooded with ISIS propaganda

Politico reports: Just weeks after its launch, the pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State, according to a POLITICO review of online activity on the fledgling platform. The social network — started a month ago by members of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle — features reams of jihadi-related material, including graphic videos of beheadings, viral memes that promote violence against the West and even memes of a militant executing Trump in…

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She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story

She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story

Karen Hao writes: The world first learned of Sophie Zhang in September 2020, when BuzzFeed News obtained and published highlights from an abridged version of her nearly 8,000-word exit memo from Facebook. Before she was fired, Zhang was officially employed as a low-level data scientist at the company. But she had become consumed by a task she deemed more important: finding and taking down fake accounts and likes that were being used to sway elections globally. Her memo revealed that…

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Facebook pledged to bring the world together but wound up pulling us apart

Facebook pledged to bring the world together but wound up pulling us apart

Jill Lepore writes: Facebook has a save-the-world mission statement—“to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”—that sounds like a better fit for a church, and not some little wood-steepled, white-clapboarded, side-of-the-road number but a castle-in-a-parking-lot megachurch, a big-as-a-city-block cathedral, or, honestly, the Vatican. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., announced this mission the summer after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, replacing the company’s earlier and no less lofty purpose: “to give people the power to share…

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The doctor who creates and profits from misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines

The doctor who creates and profits from misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines

The New York Times reports: The article that appeared online on Feb. 9 began with a seemingly innocuous question about the legal definition of vaccines. Then over its next 3,400 words, it declared coronavirus vaccines were “a medical fraud” and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease. Instead, the article claimed, the shots “alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch.” Its assertions were easily…

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