How Anti-Asian Activity Online Set the Stage for Real-World Violence. Negative Asian-American tropes have long existed online but began increasing last March as parts of the United States went into lockdown over the coronavirus.
That month, politicians including Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, and Representative Kevin McCarthy, a Republican of California, used the terms “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese coronavirus” to refer to Covid-19 in their tweets. Those terms then began trending online, according to a study from the University of California, Berkeley.
On the day Mr. Gosar posted his tweet, usage of the term “Chinese virus” jumped 650 percent on Twitter; a day later there was an 800 percent increase in their usage in conservative news articles, the study found. Mr. In a study this week from the University of California, San Francisco, researchers who examined 700,000 tweets before and after Mr. Representatives for Mr. How three conspiracy theorists took 'Q' and sparked Qanon. In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website's message board.
Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of “Q,” the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon, and it would eventually make its way from those message boards to national media stories and the rallies of President Donald Trump. Pro-Trump outlet misreads CDC report: Expert "disturbed" by scientific misrepresentation. For those who find that Fox News isn't right-leaning enough, One America News Network (OANN) has filled that gap.
The cable show and news site, though launched three years before Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, emerged as a mainstay for pro-Trump propaganda during the course of his presidency. The network notoriously amplified Trump's meritless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Before that, it has taken Trump-friendly positions on everything from the supposed "migrant caravan" in 2018 to the claim that the novel coronavirus was developed in a Chinese bioweapons laboratory. Trump himself has praised OANN, referring to the organization as a "great network" early in his presidency and urging supporters to follow its coverage as it helped him try to overturn the 2020 election. Why some baby boomers are eating up the QAnon conspiracy. 'It let white supremacists organize': the toxic legacy of Facebook's Groups. Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletter Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, announced last week the platform will no longer algorithmically recommend political groups to users in an attempt to “turn down the temperature” on online divisiveness.
Steve Bannon Caught Running Facebook Misinformation Network. (2) Facebook. The Alt-Right’s Star Racist Propagandist Has No Regrets. Editor’s Note:White Noise, the debut feature film from The Atlantic, is in theaters now and will be available to rent in the U.S. starting October 21.
Find more information here. Updated on October 20, 2020, at 10:20 a.m. ET. The Smears Against Biden Don't Need to Make Any Sense. But this, of course, is not the point.
In releasing the 26,000 emails, Tyrmand and his collaborator, the Breitbart News contributor Peter Schweizer, are not bringing forth any evidence of actual lawbreaking, or an actual security threat, by either Hunter or Joe Biden. They are instead creating a miasma, an atmosphere, a foggy world in which misdeeds might have taken place, and in which corruption might have happened. They are also providing the raw material from which more elaborate stories can be constructed. The otherwise incomprehensible reference in last night’s debate to “the mayor of Moscow’s wife,” from whom Joe Biden somehow got rich, was an excellent example of how this works. Why Social Media Makes Us More Polarized and How to Fix It.
Every time I log onto Facebook, I brace myself.
#SaveTheChildren, QAnon, and human trafficking: How Instagram and Facebook spread misinformation. For many supporters of the #SaveTheChildren movement, face masks are part of the problem.
Rather than saving lives by slowing the spread of Covid-19, proponents argue, letting your child wear a mask makes it harder for them to cry for help, which they will need to do, because there are evil people, right now, coming to kidnap them. “Save the Children,” like so many other moral panics, sounds like such a plainly obvious force of good, that to question it feels like you are marching under the banner of “Fuck the Children.” What do you say, for instance, to someone who believes that there are 800,000 children being trafficked every year, and that the government does nothing to stop it? False claim shared by President Trump that only 6% of CDC-reported deaths are from COVID-19 is based on flawed reasoning - Health Feedback. 40 Times People Noticed These Instagrammers That Are Beyond Fake And Decided To Expose Them Online (New Pics)
"The second is one that many people don’t like to address—the insecurities of those who feel the need to edit their photos.
They’ve been editing their photos for so long it could mean losing the validation from their followers, losing followers, and maybe losing sponsors if they came clean. Who are the doctors in the viral hydroxychloroquine video? Despite social media platforms’ efforts to remove it, millions of people have seen a viral video of doctors making false and misleading claims about the coronavirus pandemic.
Breitbart, a conservative news outlet, published the 40-plus-minute-long video on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on July 27. It’s a live stream of a Washington, D.C., press conference organized by the Tea Party Patriots, a conservative group backed by Republican donors. Jonathan Haidt Explains How Social Media Drives Polarization. Untitled. Untitled. 'This is a war': Republicans ramp up bid to control election maps for next decade. A little-known Republican group is ramping up millions of dollars in funding from major US corporations such as CitiGroup and Chevron to protect the conservative stronghold on the country.
The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – which held the key to the GOP’s political takeover a decade ago – launched the Right Lines 2020 campaign last September, taglined: “Socialism starts in the states. Let’s stop it there, too.” It’s hoping to meet a $125m investment goal in an effort to retain 42 state legislature seats that the group says are key to holding power in the House of Representatives in battleground states including Wisconsin, Texas, Florida and New York. “There’s a decade of power and a decade of dominance that’s truly on the line,” RSLC president Austin Chambers, a 24-year-old Republican operative, told Sean Spicer on his Newsmax show in March. The group recently appointed party strategist Karl Rove and ousted White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to its board. Bully, coward, victim? Inside the sinister world of Trump mentor Roy Cohn.
Back in 2004, with the documentary Heir to an Execution, Ivy Meeropol began the decades-spanning project of exorcising the demon haunting her family. The Academy-shortlisted film sheds some light on the dark heritage of the Meeropol kids, descended as they are from Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the couple executed by the United States government in 1953 having been convicted of sharing military secrets with the Soviet Union.
The Iconoclast unmasked: the man behind far-right YouTube channel. He is the anonymous architect behind one of the most successful and toxic British far-right YouTube channels, responsible for disseminating racist, Islamophobic and antisemitic material. For years the individual known as The Iconoclast has managed to protect his identity despite amassing nearly 21m views and more than 218,000 subscribers. However the Observer can reveal that the figure behind one of the biggest far-right content producers in the UK – and the movement’s most prominent anonymous account – is a former media student called Daniel Atkinson. Campaigners said the unmasking of Atkinson was important because he is emblematic of the latest manifestation of the far right.
They said it is highly likely his widely disseminated racist views influenced some far-right supporters who clashed with police in central London last weekend. A field guide to Trump's dangerous rhetoric. All leaders are demagogues. You may not realize this, because we’ve come to associate the word “demagogue” with only dangerous populist leaders.
But in Greek, the word just means “leader of the people” (dēmos “the people” + agōgos “leading”). Some demagogues are good, and some are dangerous. Why It’s Important To Push Back On ‘Plandemic’—And How To Do It. By now you’ve probably heard about or even seen the video “Plandemic” that’s been spreading like wildfire through social media networks. This article is not the one you should give to your friend or relative or coworker who shared the video. (If you want that article, you won’t find a better one than this one from Beth Skwarecki at Lifehacker: “If You Found That ‘Plandemic’ Video Convincing, Read This Too.”)
(1) Social-Media Companies Threaten Democracy. TVs and Phones Trade Inaudible Ultrasonic Signals to Figure Out Who They Belong To. Verizon’s “supercookies”—a snippet of code injected into mobile users’ web requests—silently identify and track its customers, sharing the information with AOL’s wide-reaching ad network. Vizio Smart TVs tie customers’ viewing habits to a home Internet address and sell the information to advertisers. 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism. After Handing Rich $1.5 Trillion Tax Cut, Trump Reportedly Considering Slashing Medicare and Social Security as 'Second-Term Project' After Life of Incalculable Harm, Billionaire Climate Denialist and Right-Wing Villain David Koch Dead at 79.
How dangerous is Jordan B Peterson, the rightwing professor who 'hit a hornets' nest'? Fox’s 2001 special “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” Philosophy shrugged: ignoring Ayn Rand won’t make her go away. Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. NPR Choice page. Climate Undermined by Lobbying. For all the evidence that the benefits of reducing greenhouse gases outweigh the costs of regulation, disturbingly few domestic climate change policies have been enacted around the world so far. So say UC Santa Barbara professor and economist Kyle Meng, and co-author Ashwin Rode, a former UCSB Ph.D. student now at the University of Chicago, in a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change. “There is a striking disconnect between what is needed to avoid dangerous climate change and what has actually been done to date,” said Meng, a professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and in the Department of Economics.
Anti vax movement: Russian trolls fueled anti-vaccination debate in U.S. by spreading misinformation on Twitter, study finds. Russian Twitter trolls have attempted to fuel the anti-vaccination debate in the U.S., posting about the issue far more than the average Twitter user last year, a study out of George Washington University has found. Internal emails reveal how the chemical lobby fights regulation. Jayne DePotter spent almost a decade making her Michigan jewelry studio a second home for young artists seeking direction, seniors looking to exercise their hands and minds and new immigrants in search of community.
Why we need to talk about the media’s role in far-right hate. A Russian 'troll slayer' went undercover at a troll factory. The War Against Solar Energy. Trapped in a hoax: survivors of conspiracy theories speak out. Herman Cain Exemplifies Trump’s Dysfunction. How the religious right gained unprecedented access to Trump. Study: Religious fundamentalists and dogmatic individuals are more likely to believe fake news.
Anti-vaxers and Facebook: The four subgroups that fuel online attacks. Arron Banks faces criminal inquiry over Brexit campaign. How Vilification of George Soros Moved From the Fringes to the Mainstream. You Don’t Need to Go to the Dark Web to Find Hateful Conspiracy Theories. Ideologically motivated far-right extremists have killed close to 500 people since 1990 – and 10 percent were targeted based on religion. Viral video of feminist pouring bleach on manspreaders debunked as Russian propaganda. Facebook Has Removed More Than A Dozen Big Conservative And Liberal Political Pages. 10 Ways Manipulators Use Emotional Intelligence for Evil (and How to Fight Back) How feelings took over the world.
Death of a Nation: more angry nonsense from Trump's favorite film-maker. Audiences love the anger: Alex Jones, or someone like him, will be back. A Push for 3-D Weapons by One of the World’s ‘Most Dangerous People’ Death of a Nation: more angry nonsense from Trump's favorite film-maker. Fact-checking Donald Trump's talking points about the economy. Lies and Truth in the Era of Trump. Trump and Brexit: how can the US and UK media tackle a culture of lies? I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5. The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines" Chomsky on Edward Bernays Father of Propaganda.
The article removed from Forbes, “Why White Evangelicalism Is So Cruel” – Political Orphans. 'The most dangerous US company you have never heard of": Sinclair, a rightwing media giant.