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Category: Social media

How Musk threatens America’s national security, and what must be done

How Musk threatens America’s national security, and what must be done

Robert Reich writes: Shortly after the apparent second assassination attempt against Trump, Elon Musk responded in a now deleted post: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔 ????” Musk later said his post was intended as a joke. But it could be interpreted as a call to murder Biden and Harris — at least by one of the 198 million followers of Musk who initially received it. Presumably this is why the Secret Service is investigating it. Under 18…

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Labelling Trump’s lies as ‘disputed’ on X makes supporters believe them more, study finds

Labelling Trump’s lies as ‘disputed’ on X makes supporters believe them more, study finds

The Guardian reports: Labelling tweets featuring false claims about election fraud as “disputed” does little to nothing to change Trump voters’ pre-existing beliefs, and it may make them more likely to believe the lies, according to a new study. The study, authored by John Blanchard, an assistant professor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Catherine Norris, an associate professor from Swarthmore College, looked at data from a sampling of 1,072 Americans surveyed in December of 2020. The researchers published…

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Elon Musk is debasing American society

Elon Musk is debasing American society

Thomas Chatterton Williams writes: To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you wage mimetic warfare with the unsubstantiated smear you’ve got, not the one you want. It just so happens that the one most recently deployed by Donald Trump is the kind that proliferates these days on X. When Trump declared, seemingly out of nowhere, during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants living legally in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs … eating the cats ……

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Russian election interference efforts focus on the Harris-Walz campaign

Russian election interference efforts focus on the Harris-Walz campaign

Microsoft Threat Analysis Center: Russia and Iran have both undertaken cyber influence operations headed into the 2024 presidential election. In our last report, published on August 8, we detailed how Iranian cyber-enabled influence operations sought to undermine the Republican campaign through targeted hack-and-leak operations, covert social media personas, and imposter US news sites. In the past two months, Microsoft has observed a notable shift in Russian influence operations tactics reflecting the changing U.S. political environment. Specifically, we have observed Russia…

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Leaked records detail vast Russian influence campaign targeting Ukraine, EU

Leaked records detail vast Russian influence campaign targeting Ukraine, EU

RFE/RL reports: A trove of leaked records from a Russian disinformation campaign reveals how Moscow sought to discredit Ukraine and Western governments that support it while also trying to boost support for far-right political parties in the European Union. The documents obtained by a consortium of European media outlets and shared with Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, highlight the internal operations of the Social Design Agency, a Moscow-based company that the United States says has led the propaganda campaign at…

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Elon Musk is a national security risk

Elon Musk is a national security risk

Wired reports: Shortly following reports of an apparent second assassination attempt against former US president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Elon Musk decided to speak up. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔,” Musk, X’s owner, wrote in a now deleted post, in response to another person asking, “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?” After deleting the post—which could be interpreted as a call to murder President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the US…

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‘The most complex, dynamic and dangerous threat environment I’ve experienced’

‘The most complex, dynamic and dangerous threat environment I’ve experienced’

Politico reports: The toxic political climate and a complex web of threats — punctuated by Sunday’s apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump — is putting an extraordinary strain on the national security officials tasked with safeguarding American democracy. Security experts say sharp polarization and increasingly hateful political rhetoric — fanned by foreign adversaries and supercharged by social media — have combined to test the nation’s ability to protect its candidates and institutions. “The 2024 presidential election is taking place at…

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Stephen Fry: Musk and Zuckerberg are ‘the worst polluters in human history’

Stephen Fry: Musk and Zuckerberg are ‘the worst polluters in human history’

BBC News reports: Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk are “the worst polluters in human history”, Stephen Fry has said. The actor and comedian made the claim during a lecture at Kings College, London. “You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world,” he said of the…

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After Trump and Vance’s baseless claims about pet-eating immigrants, Springfield faces bomb threats

After Trump and Vance’s baseless claims about pet-eating immigrants, Springfield faces bomb threats

Parker Molloy writes: The lie was absurd, and yet it spread like wildfire. A baseless rumor, claiming Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating people’s pets, began as a fringe social media post. In a matter of days, it had evolved into a talking point at the highest levels of Republican politics. Trump mentioned it in a presidential debate, and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, repeated it without a shred of evidence. But the fallout didn’t stay…

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Taylor Swift drove nearly 338,000 people to Vote.gov with Kamala Harris endorsement post

Taylor Swift drove nearly 338,000 people to Vote.gov with Kamala Harris endorsement post

The Hollywood Reporter reports: Taylor Swift‘s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris led to a surge of visitors to Vote.gov, the U.S. government website that helps citizens understand how they can register to vote. According to a spokesperson for the U.S. Government Services Administration, Swift’s endorsement post on Instagram led directly to 337,826 people visiting vote.gov. “As of 2:00 P.M. on Wednesday, September 11, there have been 337,826 visitors to vote.gov referred from the custom URL created and shared by…

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Trump Media shares plunge after GOP nominee’s debate with Harris

Trump Media shares plunge after GOP nominee’s debate with Harris

CNBC reports: The share price of Trump Media plunged more than 13% on Wednesday, a day after majority shareholder Donald Trump gave a widely panned presidential debate performance against Vice President Kamala Harris. The company’s stock price was at its lowest intraday level since the Truth Social app owner began publicly trading as DJT on the Nasdaq in late March. Investing in Trump Media stock is often seen as a way to bet on the political fortunes of Trump, the…

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Elon Musk is uniquely dangerous as a purveyor of election misinformation

Elon Musk is uniquely dangerous as a purveyor of election misinformation

The Washington Post reports: The chairman of the board of elections in Montgomery County, Pa., was well acquainted with the regular attendees at his monthly meetings who peddled old, debunked voting conspiracy theories. But something changed after April 4, the chairman, Neil Makhija, explained in an interview. That was the day Elon Musk retweeted a false claim that as many as 2 million noncitizens had been registered to vote in Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Suddenly, the same people were coming…

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Has the tide turned against TikTok, Telegram and X?

Has the tide turned against TikTok, Telegram and X?

Alexander B. Howard writes: Three major events have shaken up the social-media world in the past two weeks. First, French authorities detained Pavel Durov, the iconoclastic billionaire behind the online platform Telegram. Then, a judge suspended the microblogging service X in Brazil. Soon after, a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania ruled that the mother of a 10-year-old child who died copying a TikTok self-asphyxiation video can sue the service, circumventing a blanket legal immunity the company has long claimed. While each of these events took place in a…

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The Russian propaganda attack on America

The Russian propaganda attack on America

Tom Nichols writes: When people think of the world of espionage, they probably imagine glamorous foreign capitals, suave undercover operators, and cool gadgets. The reality is far more pedestrian: Yesterday, the Justice Department revealed an alleged Russian scheme to pay laundered money to American right-wing social-media trolls that seems more like a bad sitcom pitch than a top-notch intelligence operation. According to a federal indictment unsealed yesterday [9/4], two Russian citizens, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, worked with a Tennessee company not named in…

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Russia secretly worms its way into America’s conservative media

Russia secretly worms its way into America’s conservative media

The New York Times reports: In early 2022, a young couple from Canada, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, registered a new company in Tennessee that went on to create a social media outlet called Tenet Media. By November 2023, they had assembled a lineup of major conservative social media stars, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin, to post original content on Tenet’s platform. The site then began posting hundreds of videos — trafficking in pointed political commentary as…

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Inside Tenet Media, the pro-Trump ‘supergroup’ allegedly funded by Russia

Inside Tenet Media, the pro-Trump ‘supergroup’ allegedly funded by Russia

The Washington Post reports: Even by the standards of right-wing social media, last year’s rollout for Tenet Media was strange. Videos of the event featured influencers such as Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin talking portentously about freedom and censorship while bathed in a nightclub-style purple light. Tim Pool, a much-followed right-wing commentator, proclaimed that Tenet would be a kind of YouTube “supergroup” that would compete with the untrustworthy mainstream media. “I worked for several massive corporate news organizations,” Pool, a…

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