Browsed by
Category: Social media

Lies on social media inflame Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Lies on social media inflame Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The New York Times reports: In a 28-second video, which was posted to Twitter this week by a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appeared to launch rocket attacks at Israelis from densely populated civilian areas. At least that is what Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said the video portrayed. But his tweet with the footage, which was shared hundreds of times as the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis escalated, was not…

Read More Read More

Just 12 people are behind most vaccine hoaxes on social media, research shows

Just 12 people are behind most vaccine hoaxes on social media, research shows

NPR reports: Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. “The ‘Disinformation Dozen’ produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which identified the accounts. Now the vaccine rollout is reaching a critical stage in which most adults who want the vaccine have…

Read More Read More

Trump ‘wants cash money up front’ from an ‘indestructible’ social media platform

Trump ‘wants cash money up front’ from an ‘indestructible’ social media platform

The Wall Street Journal reports: Donald Trump, sidelined by Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., has been talking with numerous platforms as he seeks a new online megaphone. Jeff Brain, the chief executive of CloutHub, a fledgling social media network that has become popular with conservatives, thinks his company fits the bill. He took a trip to Mar-a-Lago last month and chatted with the former president, and has been talking to Mr. Trump’s advisers as they consider what his new social-media…

Read More Read More

The ringmaster is gone but the circus remains

The ringmaster is gone but the circus remains

Quinta Jurecic writes: The internet has been a bit quiet lately. Or, more specifically, it’s been quiet since the days after the Capitol riot, when Twitter, Facebook, and a string of other social-media companies banned Donald Trump from their platforms for his role in egging on the violence in Washington, D.C. And now the Facebook oversight board has ensured that social media will remain peaceful for at least a little while longer: The panel, asked by Facebook to review the…

Read More Read More

The age of misinformation in which ‘belonging is stronger than facts’

The age of misinformation in which ‘belonging is stronger than facts’

Max Fisher writes: There’s a decent chance you’ve had at least one of these rumors, all false, relayed to you as fact recently: that President Biden plans to force Americans to eat less meat; that Virginia is eliminating advanced math in schools to advance racial equality; and that border officials are mass-purchasing copies of Vice President Kamala Harris’s book to hand out to refugee children. All were amplified by partisan actors. But you’re just as likely, if not more so,…

Read More Read More

Oversight Board: ‘Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities’

Oversight Board: ‘Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities’

Will Oremus writes: [T]he problems with Mr. Trump’s presence on Facebook — the lies, the propaganda, the incitements — are not just Trump problems. They’re Facebook problems (and to be fair, Twitter problems). Manipulation, misinformation, fear and loathing are endemic to today’s social media platforms, whose engagement-driven algorithms are built to spread whatever messages tap into users’ viscera and provoke a quick “like” or an angry comment. Yet the platforms have delegated much of the work of moderating this content…

Read More Read More

The problem is Facebook

The problem is Facebook

Helen Lewis writes: Back to you, Zuck. Facebook’s oversight board earlier today declined to act as a human shield for the social network. Asked to rule on the suspension of Donald Trump’s account in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot, it passed the ultimate decision back to Facebook. For now, Trump’s suspension stays in place. But the board has given Facebook six months to “reexamine the arbitrary penalty it imposed on January 7 and decide the appropriate penalty.”…

Read More Read More

Facebook ban hits Trump where it hurts: messaging and money

Facebook ban hits Trump where it hurts: messaging and money

The New York Times reports: The decision by Facebook on Wednesday to keep former President Donald J. Trump off its platform could have significant consequences for his political operation as he tries to remain the leader of the Republican Party, thwarting his ability to amplify his message to tens of millions of followers and hampering his fund-raising ability. Facebook has increasingly become one of the most vital weapons in a political campaign’s arsenal, with its ability to juice small-dollar online-fund-raising…

Read More Read More

Facebook and the normalization of deviance

Facebook and the normalization of deviance

Sue Halpern writes: When the sociologist Diane Vaughan came up with the term “the normalization of deviance,” she was referring to nasa administrators’ disregard of the flaw that caused the Challenger space shuttle to explode, in 1986. The idea was that people in an organization can become so accepting of a problem that they no longer consider it to be problematic. (In the case of the Challenger, nasa had been warned that the shuttle’s O-rings were likely to fail in…

Read More Read More

Facebook stopped employees from reading an internal report about its role in the U.S. Capitol insurrection

Facebook stopped employees from reading an internal report about its role in the U.S. Capitol insurrection

BuzzFeed News reports: Last Thursday, BuzzFeed News revealed that an internal Facebook report concluded that the company had failed to prevent the “Stop the Steal” movement from using its platform to subvert the election, encourage violence, and help incite the Jan. 6 attempted coup on the US Capitol. Titled “Stop the Steal and Patriot Party: The Growth and Mitigation of an Adversarial Harmful Movement,” the report is one of the most important analyses of how the insurrectionist effort to overturn…

Read More Read More

Internal report shows how Facebook failed to prevent the ‘stop the steal’ movement

Internal report shows how Facebook failed to prevent the ‘stop the steal’ movement

BuzzFeed News reports: Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of a House of Representatives committee that his company had done its part “to secure the integrity of the election.” While the social network did not catch everything, the billionaire chief executive said, Facebook had “made our services inhospitable to those who might do harm” in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Less than a week after his appearance, however, an internal company report reached a far…

Read More Read More

What Facebook did for Chauvin’s trial should happen all the time

What Facebook did for Chauvin’s trial should happen all the time

Evelyn Douek writes: On Monday, Facebook vowed that its staff was “working around the clock” to identify and restrict posts that could lead to unrest or violence after a verdict was announced in the murder trial of the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. In a blog post, the company promised to remove “content that praises, celebrates or mocks” the death of George Floyd. Most of the company’s statement amounted to pinky-swearing to really, really enforce its existing community standards,…

Read More Read More

The Postal Service is running a ‘covert operations program’ that monitors Americans’ social media posts

The Postal Service is running a ‘covert operations program’ that monitors Americans’ social media posts

Jana Winter reports: The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News. The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and…

Read More Read More

China, Russia fueling QAnon conspiracy theories, reports says

China, Russia fueling QAnon conspiracy theories, reports says

Michael Isikoff reports: Foreign-based actors, principally in China and Russia, are spreading online disinformation rooted in QAnon conspiracy theories, fueling a movement that has become a mounting domestic terrorism threat, according to new analysis of online propaganda by a security firm. The analysis by the Soufan Center, a New York-based research firm focused on national security threats, found that nearly one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon-related Facebook posts between January 2020 and the end of February 2021 originated from overseas administrators. An…

Read More Read More

What QAnon documentaries reveal about how conspiracies flourish

What QAnon documentaries reveal about how conspiracies flourish

Derek Robertson writes: A media suddenly bereft of the eye-popping right-wing extremism once peddled daily by the 45th president has found its methadone: a seemingly endless stream of QAnon-centric documentaries, books and essays. There’s Vice’s “The Search for Q” series; CNN’s “Inside the QAnon Conspiracy”; Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer’s announcement of his forthcoming book based on the topic; and the buzziest of them all: “Q: Into the Storm,” HBO’s six-episode documentary miniseries produced by Adam McKay, the Oscar-winning auteur…

Read More Read More

Why humans find it so hard to let go of false beliefs

Why humans find it so hard to let go of false beliefs

Elitsa Dermendzhiyska writes: There’s a new virus in town and it’s not fooling around. You can catch it through face-to-face contact or digitally – that is, via a human or bot. Few of us possess immunity, some are even willing hosts; and, despite all we’ve learned about it, this virus is proving more cunning and harder to eradicate than anyone could have expected. Misinformation isn’t new, of course. Fake news was around even before the invention of the printing press,…

Read More Read More