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Category: Social media

Facebook and Twitter fail to thwart a surge of coronavirus misinformation

Facebook and Twitter fail to thwart a surge of coronavirus misinformation

The New York Times reports: As the coronavirus has spread across the world, so too has misinformation about it, despite an aggressive effort by social media companies to prevent its dissemination. Facebook, Google and Twitter said they were removing misinformation about the coronavirus as fast as they could find it, and were working with the World Health Organization and other government organizations to ensure that people got accurate information. But a search by The New York Times found dozens of…

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Elizabeth Warren says ‘organized nastiness’ and doxing cannot be justified by political disagreements

Elizabeth Warren says ‘organized nastiness’ and doxing cannot be justified by political disagreements

  Senator Elizabeth Warren talks with Rachel Maddow about the ugliness and doxing she saw online from Bernie Sanders supporters and the problem of online abuse broadly in American political discourse, and the need for political leaders to find new creative solutions to put an end to it for the sake of a healthy democracy.

Brad Parscale used Facebook to get Trump elected in 2016. He’s poised to do it again

Brad Parscale used Facebook to get Trump elected in 2016. He’s poised to do it again

Andrew Marantz writes: In September, at a resort hotel in the Coachella Valley, the California Republican Party held its fall convention. Brad Parscale—forty-four, six feet eight, balding, prolifically bearded—walked onstage in shirtsleeves and tilted the microphone upward, mumbling a self-deprecating joke about being “awkwardly tall.” Parscale has lived in a red county in California and a blue county in Texas, and he now splits his time between Washington, D.C., and two luxury properties in South Florida, yet he still speaks…

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Major GOP donor and activist investor, seeks shake-up at Twitter

Major GOP donor and activist investor, seeks shake-up at Twitter

Bloomberg reports: Activist investor Elliott Management Corp. has taken a sizable stake in Twitter Inc. and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey, according to people familiar with the matter. The New York-based firm has nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public. There are only three seats becoming available at this year’s annual meeting but Elliott wanted…

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Bloomberg is ‘destroying norms’ on social media

Bloomberg is ‘destroying norms’ on social media

The New York Times reports: In the first few months of his presidential campaign, Michael R. Bloomberg has been as aggressive on social media as President Trump was four years ago. But with a lot more money to spend. Mr. Bloomberg has hired popular online personalities to create videos and images promoting his candidacy on social media. He is hiring 500 people — at $2,500 a month — to spend 20 to 30 hours a week recruiting their friends and…

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How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook

How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook

The Washington Post reports: Facebook created “Project P” — for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent. In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s…

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What happens when QAnon seeps from the web to the offline world

What happens when QAnon seeps from the web to the offline world

The New York Times reports: A city council member in California took the dais and quoted from QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory about “deep state” traitors plotting against the president, concluding her remarks, “God bless Q.” A man spouting QAnon beliefs about child sex trafficking swung a crowbar inside a historic Catholic chapel in Arizona, damaging the altar and then fleeing before being arrested. And outside a Trump campaign rally in Florida, people in “Q” T-shirts stopped by a tent…

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The billion-dollar disinformation campaign to reelect Trump

The billion-dollar disinformation campaign to reelect Trump

McKay Coppins writes: One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined…

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Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse

Social media was a cesspool of toxic Iowa conspiracy theories last night. It’s only going to get worse

Margaret Sullivan writes: Nature abhors a vacuum. And so does Twitter. As it became obvious late Monday night that a technical glitch would dramatically hold up the results of the long-anticipated Iowa caucuses, social media exploded with dark ideas about what had happened. The hashtag “MayorCheat” was trending, a nasty shot at Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg promoted by Mike Cernovich, the rabble-rousing pro-Trump media personality, who tweeted out his conspiracy theory in the early hours Tuesday about connections between the…

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The next big privacy hurdle? Teaching AI to forget

The next big privacy hurdle? Teaching AI to forget

Darren Shou writes: When the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a year ago, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the regulation was the “right to be forgotten”—an often-hyped and debated right, sometimes perceived as empowering individuals to request the erasure of their information on the internet, most commonly from search engines or social networks. Since then, the issue of digital privacy has rarely been far from the spotlight. There is widespread debate in governments, boardrooms,…

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As coronavirus spreads, so do misinformation and xenophobia

As coronavirus spreads, so do misinformation and xenophobia

Frankie Schembri writes: In a reversal of its decision last week, the World Health Organization on Thursday officially declared the spread of a novel coronavirus a global health emergency. The virus, which first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of December, has according to the WHO been confirmed in 7,818 cases globally, though China itself has reported higher numbers. Most infections reported by the WHO — 7,736 as of Thursday — remained in China, as have all of…

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Twitter bans Zero Hedge for doxing Chinese scientist it falsely accused of creating the coronavirus

Twitter bans Zero Hedge for doxing Chinese scientist it falsely accused of creating the coronavirus

BuzzFeed reports: A popular pro-Trump website has released the personal information of a scientist from Wuhan, China, falsely accusing them of creating the coronavirus as a bioweapon, in a plot it said is the real-life version of the video game Resident Evil. On Wednesday, far-right news site Zero Hedge claimed without evidence that a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology created the strain of the virus that has led the World Health Organization to declare a global health emergency….

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The conservatives trying to ditch fake news

The conservatives trying to ditch fake news

McKay Coppins writes: Jonah goldberg, the conservative author and longtime fixture at National Review, used to have a go-to metaphor he’d deploy whenever he found himself defending one of his noisier compatriots in the right-wing media. “I had this whole spiel about how the conservative movement is like a symphony,” he told me in a recent interview. “You need the fine woodwinds like Yuval Levin or Irving Kristol, but you also need that guy with the big gong who just…

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One year inside Trump’s monumental Facebook campaign

One year inside Trump’s monumental Facebook campaign

The Guardian reports: As the Democratic candidates for president spent 2019 battling each other in early voting states, Donald Trump’s re-election campaign built a sophisticated social media machine to communicate with conservative voters, grow its email list and fine-tune its messaging. Over the course of 2019, the Trump campaign spent nearly $20m on more than 218,000 different Facebook ads, a new Guardian analysis shows. Among the ads were some of the images and videos that made front-page news for their…

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Trump’s digital advantage is freaking out Democratic strategists

Trump’s digital advantage is freaking out Democratic strategists

Thomas B. Edsall writes: In a blog post published in November, a year before the 2020 election, Brian Burch, the president of CatholicVote.org, a socially conservative advocacy group, announced that in Wisconsin alone his organization had identified 199,241 Catholics “who’ve been to church at least 3 times in the last 90 days.” Nearly half of these religiously observant parishioners, Burch wrote, “91,373 mass-attending Catholics — are not even registered to vote!” CatholicVote.org is looking for potential Trump voters within this…

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Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade

Tech giants led by Amazon, Facebook and Google spent nearly half a billion on lobbying over the past decade

The Washington Post reports: Ten years ago, Google executives rarely spoke to Congress. Amazon employed just two of its own registered lobbyists in Washington. And Facebook had only recently graduated to a real office after running its D.C. operation out of an employee’s living room. Since then, though, these technology companies have evolved into some of the most potent political forces in the nation’s capital, a Washington Post analysis of new federal records reveals, with just seven tech giants accounting…

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