Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Matthew Sheffield started his first conservative website in 2000, dedicating it to criticizing the former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who Mr. Sheffield believed was a partisan liberal and not critical enough of President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Mr. Sheffield then went on to help create NewsBusters, another right-leaning website that criticized the mainstream media for liberal bias. Later, he became the founding online managing editor of the Washington Examiner, another popular outlet…

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BuzzFeed reports: Despite attempts to drive it off the platform, a violent Ukrainian far-right group with ties to American white supremacists is using Facebook to recruit new members, organize violence, and spread its far-right ideology across the world. Although it banned the Azov movement and its leaders more than a year ago, Facebook continues to profit from ads placed by the far-right organization as recently as Monday. Since July, Azov, which sprung up during the Russian invasion in 2014, has…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: As Facebook and Twitter have taken a more assertive role in curbing content on their platforms, prominent conservatives on both platforms have responded with a frequent retort: Follow me on Parler. Launched in 2018, the libertarian-leaning social network was the most downloaded app on both Android and Apple devices for most of last week, according to data from Google and analytics firm App Annie. Its leaders envision it as a free-speech-focused alternative to the giants…

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The New York Times reports: Corey Adam, a political comedian from Minneapolis, joined a mass social media switcheroo last week. That was when Mr. Adam, 39, a conservative and libertarian, watched Twitter and Facebook add labels to social media posts from President Trump and other Republicans who falsely claimed he had won the election. Many of the labels said the assertions were disputed. And on Twitter, some of Mr. Trump’s tweets were hidden completely. To Mr. Adam, the social media…

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Kevin Roose reports: Last weekend, as jubilant Democrats danced in the streets to celebrate the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the country’s 46th president, QAnon believers were on their computers trying to make sense of it all. “Biden will NEVER be president,” wrote one QAnon believer, still firmly stuck in the denial stage of grief. “Trump knows what he is doing,” wrote a member of a QAnon forum, well on his way to bargaining. “He is letting the…

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Emily Dreyfuss writes: In the morning hours of Oct. 30, as most of the country slept, President Trump was binge tweeting again. At 2:32 a.m., he told his 87.3 million Twitter followers: “Way ahead in Texas! Watch the Great Red Wave!” Minutes later, he tweeted the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamiily, with a typo in the word “family.” That was it. No context, no link. #BidenCrimeFamily is part of a yearlong, effective disinformation campaign against Joe Biden. In the final days of the…

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The New York Times reports: After the 2016 election, engineers at YouTube went to work on changes to a YouTube algorithm that had become one of the world’s most influential lines of computer code. That algorithm decided which videos YouTube recommended that users watch next; the company said it was responsible for 70 percent of the one billion hours a day people spent on YouTube. But it had become clear that those recommendations tended to steer viewers toward videos that…

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The Washington Post reports: In the final months of the presidential campaign, prominent associates of President Trump and conservative groups with vast online followings have flirted with, and frequently crossed, the boundaries set forth by Facebook about the repeated sharing of misinformation. From a pro-Trump super PAC to the president’s eldest son, however, these users have received few penalties, according to an examination of several months of posts and ad spending, as well as internal company documents. In certain cases,…

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump launched into a tweetstorm in April, banging out nine retweets of the Centers for Disease Control’s account on the dangers of misusing disinfectant and other topics — two days after he himself had suggested that people could inject themselves with bleach to cure covid-19. But those tweets spread in an odd pattern: More than half the 3,000 accounts retweeting Trump did so in near-perfect synchronicity, so that the 945th tweet was the same number…

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Kevin Roose reports: For years, The Epoch Times was a small, low-budget newspaper with an anti-China slant that was handed out free on New York street corners. But in 2016 and 2017, the paper made two changes that transformed it into one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers. The changes also paved the way for the publication, which is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscure Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, to become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation….

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The Guardian reports: One in four people in Britain agree with conspiracies propagated by QAnon, the global movement claiming there is a secret satanic network of child-abusing politicians and celebrities, a survey has found. The research for Hope Not Hate also found that 17% of people questioned said they believed Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a “depopulation plan” by the UN or “new world order”. It found that QAnon, which originated in the US where the FBI has…

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Yahoo News reports: A full 50 percent of President Trump’s supporters now believe the bizarre, made-up claims about an international ring of child sex traffickers at the core of the extremist conspiracy theory known as QAnon, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll — a disturbing sign of how susceptible partisans have become to bogus stories in an age of rampant polarization and unbridled social media. The survey, which interviewed 1,583 registered voters from Oct. 16 to 18, shows that…

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The New York Times reports: During the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives used Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms to spread disinformation to divide the American electorate. Since then, the social media companies have spent billions of dollars and hired tens of thousands of people to help clean up their act. But have the platforms really become more sophisticated at handling misinformation? Not necessarily. People are engaging more on Facebook today with news outlets that routinely publish misinformation…

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