Hamas hate videos make Elon Musk Europe’s digital enemy No. 1

Elon Musk has made himself Europe's digital public enemy No. 1.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on Saturday, the billionaire's social network X has been flooded with gruesome images, politically-motivated lies and terrorist propaganda that authorities say appear to violate both its own policies and the European Union's new social media law.

Twitter’s Monetization For Blue-Check Accounts May Be Fueling Fake News On Israel-Palestine

As the world learned over the weekend of Hamas’ surprise military incursion and hostage-taking in southern Israel and Israel’s subsequent airstrikes in Gaza, millions flocked to X for news.

But the site, formerly known as Twitter, has become a massive engine for false, fake and manipulated information, clouding the reality of events on the ground. In many cases, X users appeared to be following economic and political incentives to muddy the waters. And Musk’s overhaul of the site, several experts observed, could be fueling the widespread misinformation.

China behind ‘largest ever’ digital influence operation

People with ties to China’s law enforcement agencies conducted the largest known covert digital influence operation aimed at discrediting the West and promoting Beijing's agenda across more than 50 social media and online platforms, according to a report published Tuesday by Meta.

On Facebook, clandestine users with ties to the authoritarian government racked up more than 550,000 followers by spouting lies about the United States' alleged role in creating the COVID-19 pandemic and criticizing Washington's support of Taiwan.

The Russian roots of our misinformation problem

So much of politics today feels completely divorced from reality.

Bullshit isn’t new, but the sheer volume of it, the constant flood of misleading stories, contradictory narratives, and outright disinformation, has changed the political landscape. The information space, thanks to digital technology, seems more out of control than ever.

A 2019 book by Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born ex-reality TV producer turned journalist and academic, claims that we’re experiencing a brand of reality-bending politics that really began in post-Soviet Russia. It’s a politics built on a distinctive form of propaganda, the goal of which is to confuse, not convince. 

Islamophobic U.S. Megadonor Fuels German Far-Right Party With Viral Fake News

The rise of Alternative for Germany, the new far-right political party competing in the upcoming federal election, has unsettled the consensus-driven, moderate politics of postwar Germany with its rabid anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, unabashed nationalism, and winking gestures embracing the country’s Nazi past.

Former Hillary Clinton aide fights fake news in Germany

Ben Scott is on the hunt for fake news.

As an outside technology adviser to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Scott has first-hand knowledge of how digital falsehoods can infiltrate — and, he would add, sway — an election.

Scott, who also served as a Clinton aide on technology when she was U.S. secretary of state, is part of a growing brigade of policymakers, national intelligence agencies and fact-checking agencies working to ensure the same thing does not happen in Germany as voters head to the ballot boxes.

Fake Russian intel on Lynch-Clinton collusion prompted Comey investigation into Hillary’s emails: report

A dubious Russian intelligence document that purported to show coordination between Hillary Clinton and the U.S. Justice Department, and prompted former FBI Director James Comey to disclose the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s emails, was “bad intelligence” and “possibly even fake,” the Washington Post reports.

Russia Has Weaponized Fake News to Sow Chaos

Donald Trump and his top advisers have spent the past four months under near constant scrutiny: Two congressional committees, the FBI and CIA—not to mention the entire news media—have launched separate investigations into the role Russia played in orchestrating his victory. Washington rarely sees such intense intrigue surrounding a sitting president in his first 100 days, a time traditionally devoted to policy initiatives, not police interrogations. But focusing on the election obscures the true extent of Russia’s influence: Today, months after Hillary Clinton’s emails were hacked, the Kremlin continues to deploy a host of digital tools to sow doubt and discord in the United States on an almost daily basis.

First fake news, now fake history: Glenn Beck wants to train young people to promote an alternative history

If there are two characteristics that really define Trumpism, they are a total disregard for the importance of facts and a nostalgia for a mythical, vaguely defined time of American “greatness.” That makes the Trump era ripe for Glenn Beck’s ongoing project of creating and promoting his revisionist view of American history — one that valorizes straight white men as humanity’s natural leaders and grants Christian fundamentalism a centrality to American history that it does not, in reality, have.

Paul Ryan’s alternate universe: Speaker laughably insists the budget office handed him a victory

The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the impacts of the American Health Care Act was a disaster for the bill and its Republican backers. The budget office found that the AHCA, if enacted, would result in massive coverage losses over the next decade, with some 24 million people losing their health insurance. That news has left conservatives and Republicans reeling and flailing as they try to figure out how to contain the political damage.

The Trump administration, which has been actively promoting the AHCA as a “replacement” for Obamacare, reacted harshly to the budget office’s estimate, insisting that it was incorrect, illogical and untrustworthy. Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, a friend of President Donald Trump and an ally of the administration, seized on the Congressional Budget Office report to push the White House to abandon the AHCA altogether and pursue a different course.
One AHCA backer, however, insisted that the report was actually quite good — not just good, in fact, but flat-out terrific. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has more riding on the success of the AHCA than anyone else, went on Fox News on Monday evening to lavish the Congressional Budget Office with effusive praise. “I’m pretty encouraged by it,” Ryan said of the report, “and it actually exceeded my expectations.” Ryan wasn’t bothered by the explosion of uninsured people forecasted by the budget office, saying the “government’s not going to force people to buy something that they don’t want to buy.”

Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Faced A Fake News Tsunami. Where Did It Come From?

WASHINGTON ― Last June, John Mattes started noticing something coursing like a virus through the Facebook page he helped administer for Bernie Sanders fans in San Diego. People with no apparent ties to California were friending the page and sharing links from unfamiliar sites full of anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda.

The stories they posted weren’t the normal complaints he was used to seeing as the Vermont senator and the former secretary of state fought out the Democratic presidential primary. These stories alleged that Clinton had murdered her political opponents and used body doubles.

Most Trump Voters Say The Media Is Their Enemy

A narrow majority of President Donald Trump’s supporters agree with him that the media is their enemy, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds, although most Americans overall don’t feel similarly.

Trump tweeted last Friday that the media is “the enemy of the American People,” a statement that drew criticism from many reporters and disavowals even from some members of his party.

Fake News And Russian Propaganda Will Give Populists The Upper Hand If We Don’t Act Fast

BERLIN ― After the U.S. presidential elections, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was celebrated as the “leader of the free world,” and Germany fast became the last bastion of liberal democracy. But German society is not immune to illiberal forces. On the contrary, the fact that Berlin played a central role in rebuking Russian aggression in Ukraine makes it a target for propaganda and disinformation campaigns, especially from those who reject sanctions and strive to protect Russia’s “sphere of influence” in Eastern Europe. The chancellor has already expressed concern that Russia might interfere in this year’s election campaign. And the head of Germany’s intelligence agency, Bruno Kahl, warned, “This kind of pressure ... on public discourse and democracy ... is unacceptable.”

Major Fake News Operation Tracked Back to Republican Operative

Cam Harris, a recent college graduate hoping to build a career as a political consultant, received an unwelcome email from a New York Times reporter this month. As the reporter, Scott Shane, recounted on the front page of Thursday’s Times, he had discovered that Harris was the publisher of a fake news site dedicated to smearing Hillary Clinton.

Let's call 'fake news' what it really is: propaganda

Breitbart, Fox News, Alex Jones, and countless other conservative websites practice propaganda—or what is now called “fake news.” Of course you would not know that it’s propaganda because the mainstream media refuses to call it what it really is. Most of us (myself included) had never heard the term fake news until an innocent business targeted by the purveyors of this “fake news” created a wild fantasy, a hoax story that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex abuse ring from the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor. This was not fake news: it was propaganda.

The Washington Post published a false story, but it’s not fake news

On December 30, my phone flashed with a news alert that Russian hackers gained access to the United States’ power grid. The Washington Post broke a story saying that a Vermont utility found malware code previously associated with other Russian hacks, and that it was evidence of a breach in the U.S. electricity grid. But that last part—the most important piece of news in the story—was inaccurate, and the Post ran a correction: A computer at Vermont’s Burlington Electric was hacked and implanted with malicious code, but it wasn’t attached to the state’s power grid.

Want To See Fake News? Check Out 'Russia Today'

Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly has put the menace of "fake news" on notice.

Her plans to take on this challenge across social media and internet platforms is a welcome relief, as the face of digital technology, the normal exchange of information, and the entirety of public discourse has been rapidly descending into a disorienting mess.

Noam Chomsky: Randomly Surfing the Web Is No Way to Educate Yourself

Fake news has been around long before Facebook, but it was the tech company's goal to appear like a newspaper that eventually misled its users far more than ever before.

"Technology is basically neutral," author Noam Chomsky explained. "It's kinda like a hammer...the hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house or a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull... same with modern technology [like] the internet. The internet is extremely valuable if you know what you're looking for."

This Is What It’s Like to Read Fake News For Two Weeks

A few weeks ago, perplexed by the persistence of fake news, I attempted to think like someone I wasn’t. On December 13, I created a dummy Twitter account. More of a clone, actually. I chose to emulate Michael Flynn Jr., the 33-year-old son of President-elect Trump’s choice to be national security adviser. Flynn Jr. was also one of the most prominent believers in the invented “Pizzagate” scandal that had prompted an armed man to fire shots inside a D.C. pizzeria in hopes of breaking up a child sex ring that didn’t exist. My working theory was that you can learn a lot about a fake news adherent from the company he keeps—especially on social media, where it’s possible to create bespoke echo chambers.

How Trump Made Russia's Hacking More Effective

“It’s all just an attempt to delegitimize Donald Trump.” That’s the argument you hear from Trump supporters each time new information comes to light about how hard Russian spy services worked to damage Hillary Clinton. You heard it again on Thursday.

The Trump supporters are 100 percent right: The information is delegitimizing. The president-elect of the United States reportedly owes his office in considerable part to illegal clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service. It’s hard to imagine a crisis of presidential legitimacy more extreme than that. But that’s no argument against airing this information. It’s precisely why the information must be aired.