All posts tagged: disinformation

Latin American Fact-Checkers Brace for Meta’s Next Moves

Latin American Fact-Checkers Brace for Meta’s Next Moves

Published by skeptic

This 180-degree change is a response to Donald Trump’s imminent second presidential term and to the methods of the competition, such as X’s Community Notes. Meta decided not to invest any more money in its program. Now, it hopes that Facebook and Instagram users themselves will be the ones to decide what content is disinformation or not. In the statement where Zuckerberg announced that he will dismantle the program, he said that fact-checkers succumbed to political bias, destroying more trust than they’d created in the US. However, for Laura Zommer, former director of Chequeado (one of the most important Spanish-speaking verifier organizations) and LatamChequea, and now leader of Factchequeado (a verification media aimed at the Latino community in the US), Zuckerberg’s statements are not a surprise, and he does not have scientific evidence for his claims. “Far from censoring, fact-checkers add context,” Zommer says. “We never advocate for removing content. We want citizens to have better information to make their own decisions.” Zommer, who is skeptical of how the dissolution of this program might benefit …

Flaw in Right-Wing ‘Election Integrity’ App Exposes Voter-Suppression Plan and User Data

Flaw in Right-Wing ‘Election Integrity’ App Exposes Voter-Suppression Plan and User Data

Published by skeptic

In a since-deleted VoteAlert post reviewed by WIRED, a user wrote: “I’m probably going to be fired for this but I was hired by the Riverside County Registrar of Voters as an Election Officer in Hemet, CA. Since I’m in charge at this polling center, I’m asking for citizenship ID of anyone that looks suspiciously like they’re not here legally.” The post went on to suggest that the Riverside County Sheriff’s office wouldn’t intervene in her scheme. “It’s just a drop in the bucket but I’m going to do my part to stop election fraud,” she wrote. “Wish me luck🙏” WIRED traced the email associated with the post to a California woman who describes herself as a person who is “FED UP with all the bullsh*t,” according to one app profile. “You’re only getting the hard, smack-your-face TRUTH from me.” The woman, whose name WIRED is not publishing because it was revealed through a security flaw, did not respond to requests for comment. In a phone call, Riverside County public information officer Elizabeth Florer confirmed …

Steve Bannon Is Out of Prison and Spreading Lies Online

Steve Bannon Is Out of Prison and Spreading Lies Online

Published by skeptic

Steve Bannon got out of federal prison at around 3 am Tuesday. Seven hours later, he was live on his War Room podcast to “flood the zone with shit” exactly one week before the presidential election. Flooding the zone with shit is Bannon’s own oft-quoted description of his media strategy: churning so many lies or half-truths into the stratosphere that it becomes impossible to draw a line between fact and fiction. “I am more energized and more focused than I’ve ever been in my entire life,” said Bannon on the War Room stream on Rumble, which garnered nearly 100,000 live viewers at one point. “The four months in federal prison not only didn’t break me, it empowered me.” Bannon, 70, a longtime ally of and former strategist for Donald Trump, spent four months at a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for contempt after he defied a subpoena in the congressional probe into the January 6 Capitol riot. Bannon has cast himself as a martyr—someone who, like January 6 rioters and like Trump, is being …

Election disinformation is getting more chaotic

Election disinformation is getting more chaotic

Published by José

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Earlier this month, as hurricanes ravaged parts of the Southeast, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Marjorie Taylor Greene were among those amplifying dangerous disinformation about the storms and recovery efforts. The ensuing social-media chaos, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey has written, was just a preview of what we may see on and after Election Day. I spoke with Elaine, who covers politics, about what makes this moment so ripe for conspiracy theories, the ways online campaigns shape the real world, and how this all could still escalate soon. Lora Kelley: In your recent story about the disinformation that spread after Hurricanes Helene and Milton, you warned that things would get even more chaotic around election time. What makes this moment so hospitable for disinformation? Elaine Godfrey: A lot of the things going on now were not happening in the …

How Russian disinformation is reaching the U.S. ahead of the 2024 election

How Russian disinformation is reaching the U.S. ahead of the 2024 election

Published by Sam

Johnson did not return requests for comment. Similar requests to those who spread the false assassination attempt story went mostly unanswered. Those who responded defended their posts and videos.  “We reported it as potentially being a hoax,” Dore said.  Andrew Kolvet, a representative for Kirk and a producer of his podcast, said Kirk noted at the time that it wasn’t possible to verify the claim.  “Frankly we’re glad to know that Ukraine wasn’t orchestrating an assassination attempt against Tucker,” Kolvet said of the former Fox News host. “That’s a good thing.” Storm-1516’s video production team likely operates out of an office in St. Petersburg and appears to recruit actors from diaspora communities there, researchers at Microsoft said. Based on an analysis of methods and personnel, the researchers believe the group is in part a vestige of the Internet Research Agency, a disinformation factory founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin that meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Prigozhin, a onetime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, led a quickly quashed rebellion against the Russian military in June …

Microsoft report details Russia disinformation campaign against Harris

Microsoft report details Russia disinformation campaign against Harris

Published by Sam

Mashabuba | Getty | Getty Images The video was seen millions of times across social media but some viewers were suspicious: It featured a young Black woman who claimed Vice President Kamala Harris left her paralyzed in a hit-and-run accident in San Francisco 13 years ago. In an emotional retelling from a wheelchair, the alleged victim said she “cannot remain silent anymore” and lamented that her childhood had “ended too soon.” Immediately after the video was posted on Sept. 2, social media users pointed out reasons to be wary. The purported news channel it came from, San Francisco’s KBSF-TV, didn’t exist. A website for the channel set up just a week earlier contained plagiarized articles from real news outlets. The woman’s X-ray images shown in the video were taken from online medical journals. And the video and the text story on the website spelled the alleged victim’s name differently. The caution was warranted, according to a new Microsoft threat intelligence report, which confirms the fabricated tale was disinformation from a Russia-linked troll farm. The tech giant’s report released Tuesday …

Brazil blocks social media platform X after Supreme Court ruling on disinformation

Brazil blocks social media platform X after Supreme Court ruling on disinformation

Published by Sam

A block on the social media platform X in Brazil came into effect early Saturday after the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered its suspension following a months-long standoff with Elon Musk over disinformation. X shut down its business operations in Brazil earlier this month rather than obey an order from the judge to block dozens of accounts being investigated over fake news or hate speech, an order Musk denounced as censorship. Source link

EU lawmakers step up efforts to combat AI and online disinformation

EU lawmakers step up efforts to combat AI and online disinformation

Published by Sam

FIGHT AGAINST DISINFORMATION An EU task force is working with academics, journalists and technology firms to fight foreign information interference and manipulation. A key tool in their arsenal is the EUvsDisinfo – European Union versus Disinformation – website. The platform collects and counters what it calls examples of disinformation campaigns from Russia, regarded by the bloc as the major culprit. Moscow denies the charge. Since 2015, the database has compiled over 17,000 cases, with EU officials expecting pro-Kremlin activities to intensify whenever elections come around. The EU’s statistics office EUROSTAT is also offering data and fact-checking services for the first time this election season as part of a wider effort to fight misinformation. Officials cite potential threat posed by AI as another major concern. On their part, most EU political parties have signed a voluntary code of conduct, pledging not to produce or spread unlabelled deepfakes and other AI-generated content. Under the new Digital Services Act, the EU is also working with the biggest players in social media to monitor potential threats and ensure clear …

From beef noodles to bots: Taiwan’s factcheckers on fighting Chinese disinformation and ‘unstoppable’ AI | Taiwan

From beef noodles to bots: Taiwan’s factcheckers on fighting Chinese disinformation and ‘unstoppable’ AI | Taiwan

Published by skeptic

Charles Yeh’s battle with disinformation in Taiwan began with a bowl of beef noodles. Nine years ago, the Taiwanese engineer was at a restaurant with his family when his mother-in-law started picking the green onions out of her food. Asked what she was doing, she explained that onions can harm your liver. She knew this, she said, because she had received text messages telling her so. Yeh was puzzled by this. His family had always happily eaten green onions. So he decided to set the record straight. He put the truth in a blog post and circulated it among family and friends through the messaging app Line. They shared it more broadly, and soon he received requests from strangers asking to be connected to his personal Line account. “There wasn’t much of a factchecking concept in Taiwan then, but I realised there was a demand. I could also help resolve people’s problems,” Yeh said. So he continued, and in 2015 launched the website MyGoPen, which means, “don’t be fooled again” in Taiwanese. Within two years, …

Russian disinformation campaign targets Paris Games, Microsoft says

Russian disinformation campaign targets Paris Games, Microsoft says

Published by Sam

Russia is waging a “malign” disinformation campaign aimed at the Paris Olympics and French President Emmanuel Macron, Microsoft warned on Tuesday, accusations Moscow dismissed as “slander”.  Issued on: 03/06/2024 – 22:57 2 min Russia is waging an intense disinformation campaign aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the International Olympic Committee and stoking fears of violence at this summer’s Paris Games, according to a new report from Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. According to Microsoft, the influence operations utilise a potent mix of fake videos, fictitious news stories, and AI-generated impersonations, including the faked voice of Hollywood star Tom Cruise. “Russia is ramping up these malign campaigns against France, President (Emmanuel) Macron, the IOC, and the Paris Olympics,” said Clint Watts, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, in a blog post Sunday. “While Russia has a decades-long history of targeting the Olympic Games, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center has observed old tactics blending with artificial intelligence… that may intensify as the 2024 Paris opening ceremony approaches,” he added. Prolific Russian influence actors tracked by Microsoft as Storm-1679 …