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Category: Social media

The Central Park bird watcher, that incident and his feelings on the woman’s fate

The Central Park bird watcher, that incident and his feelings on the woman’s fate

The New York Times reports: His binoculars around his neck, Christian Cooper, an avid birder, was back in his happy place on Wednesday: Central Park during migration season. He was trying to focus on the olive-sided flycatchers and red-bellied woodpeckers — not on what had happened there two days earlier. That was when Mr. Cooper, who is black, asked a white woman to put her dog on a leash. When she did not, he began filming. In response, the woman…

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Trump sees a ‘rigged election’ ahead, while Democrats see a constitutional crisis in the making

Trump sees a ‘rigged election’ ahead, while Democrats see a constitutional crisis in the making

Politico reports: First he lit into Michigan and Nevada, threatening to withhold federal funding because of his assertion that both states were preparing to commit voter fraud through mail-in ballot applications. Then President Donald Trump followed up Sunday with two more broadly-worded warnings that November would be “the greatest Rigged Election in history.” “The Democrats are trying to Rig the 2020 Election, plain and simple!” the president claimed. Trump’s increasingly amped-up rhetoric surrounding the integrity of the November election is…

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More than a fifth of people in England believe Covid-19 is a hoax

More than a fifth of people in England believe Covid-19 is a hoax

The Independent reports: More than a fifth of people believe that the coronavirus crisis is a hoax, new research suggests. The study, conducted by the University of Oxford, saw 2,500 English adults take part in the Oxford Coronavirus Explanations, Attitudes, and Narratives Survey between 4-11 May 2020. The team of clinical psychologists state that the data from the survey indicates a large number of adults in England do not agree with the scientific and governmental consensus on the Covid-19 pandemic….

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A Covid-19 vaccine hasn’t even been developed and yet the conspiracy theories are already here

A Covid-19 vaccine hasn’t even been developed and yet the conspiracy theories are already here

The Atlantic reports: In March, when a woman in Seattle volunteered for a COVID-19 vaccine trial, rumors immediately began circulating that she was a crisis actor who had received a fake vaccine. She is, in fact, real, and so is the prospective vaccine she got, as the Associated Press asserted in a follow-up story. In Oxford, England, another volunteer for a separate COVID-19 vaccine trial became the subject of a fake news story that purported she had died after a…

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Coronavirus, ‘Plandemic’ and the seven traits of conspiratorial thinking

Coronavirus, ‘Plandemic’ and the seven traits of conspiratorial thinking

No matter the details of the plot, conspiracy theories follow common patterns of thought. Ranta Images/iStock/Getty Images Plus By John Cook, George Mason University; Sander van der Linden, University of Cambridge; Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol, and Ullrich Ecker, University of Western Australia The conspiracy theory video “Plandemic” recently went viral. Despite being taken down by YouTube and Facebook, it continues to get uploaded and viewed millions of times. The video is an interview with conspiracy theorist Judy Mikovits, a…

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American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase

American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase

Adrienne LaFrance writes: The origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns—a 9-mm AR-15 rifle, a six-shot .38‑caliber Colt revolver, and a shotgun—and hopped…

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How Michael Moore became a hero to climate deniers and the far right

How Michael Moore became a hero to climate deniers and the far right

George Monbiot writes: Planet of the Humans, whose executive producer and chief promoter is Michael Moore, now has more than 6 million views on YouTube. The film does not deny climate science. But it promotes the discredited myths that deniers have used for years to justify their position. It claims that environmentalism is a self-seeking scam, doing immense harm to the living world while enriching a group of con artists. This has long been the most effective means by which…

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Doctors are fed up with harassment by coronavirus conspiracy theorists

Doctors are fed up with harassment by coronavirus conspiracy theorists

NBC News reports: At the end of another long shift treating coronavirus patients, Dr. Hadi Halazun opened his Facebook page to find a man insisting to him that “no one’s dying” and that the coronavirus is “fake news” drummed up by the news media. Hadi tried to engage and explain his firsthand experience with the virus. In reply, another user insinuated that he wasn’t a real doctor, saying pictures from his profile showing him at concerts and music festivals proved…

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The boom in coronavirus conspiracy theories

The boom in coronavirus conspiracy theories

The Atlantic reports: COVID-19 has created a perfect storm for conspiracy theorists. Here we have a global pandemic, a crashing economy, social isolation, and restrictive government policies: All of these can cause feelings of extreme anxiety, powerlessness, and stress, which in turn encourage conspiracy beliefs. For more than a month, an urban legend that the pandemic was predicted in an early-’80s Dean Koontz thriller has been circulating on social media. Meanwhile, QAnon believers are circulating the “mole children” theory, which…

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The pro-Trump media’s coronavirus distortion

The pro-Trump media’s coronavirus distortion

The New York Times reports: On Feb. 27, two days after the first reported case of the coronavirus spreading inside a community in the United States, Candace Owens was underwhelmed. “Now we’re all going to die from Coronavirus,” she wrote sarcastically to her two million Twitter followers, blaming a “doomsday cult” of liberal paranoia for the growing anxiety over the outbreak. One month later, on the day the United States reached the grim milestone of having more documented coronavirus cases…

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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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