Disinformation

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer

France is throwing a tantrum at Trump

France is intensifying its counter-offensive against what it calls misinformation. Earlier this month, Paris prosecutors confirmed they have opened a criminal investigation into Elon Musk and X. Musk had ignored a summons to appear for a voluntary interview on April 20. The French state requested Musk assist in an investigation into algorithmic manipulation and the spread of AI deepfakes on X. Musk responded to the criminal investigation by labeling the prosecutors “faker than a chocolate euro and queerer than a pink flamingo in a neon tutu!” On the same day, Paris unveiled its “French Response” strategy. The head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, posted a video on X (where else?

France misinformation

Friday

Cockburn

How do we stop the media from talking about itself?

The White House press corps ouroboros If there’s one thing worse than a journalist writing about the media, it’s a journalist writing about other journalists writing about the media. Cockburn hopes you can forgive him for this gross transgression – but White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend seems as good a time as any to take stock of the very odd relationship between reporters who cover the White House and the President’s press shop. Take Donie O’Sullivan’s CNN segment this week on “Trump-friendly journalists,” in which he speaks to LindellTV’s Cara Castronuova, Real America’s Voice Brian Glenn (aka Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend) and, of course, War Room’s Natalie Winters, who he groups together as “MAGA Media.

white house press corps media

Thursday

Amber Duke

The rise of BlueAnon

Someone call the disinformation police! Left-wing conspiracy theories and attempts to manipulate the media are spiraling out of control ahead of the 2024 election. From tall tales about former president Donald Trump staging his own assassination attempt to the lower-stakes speculation that Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is wearing guyliner, “BlueAnon” has reemerged in a big way. BlueAnon is a blanket term coined by some conservatives to describe liberal and left-wing conspiracy theories. It intentionally rhymes with QAnon, the arguably better-known right-wing conspiracy, and mostly arose in response to what many regard as the Russian collusion hoax, the idea that Trump colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 presidential election.

BlueAnon

Friday

Peter Wood

Disinfo-nation: the new censorship is here to stay

Lying is the great American pastime. We’ve been at it ever since some of the Pilgrim fathers shined on some of the folks back home with tales of the Eden they had found on the barren coast of Massachusetts: For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter; we have mussels; and ... As the American Socrates, P.T. Barnum, may once have said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Or he may have not said. The Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel in 1894 said he said it, but P.T. denied it.

disinformation

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Bye bye, BuzzFeed News

Good riddance to BuzzFeed News. There is no other way to put it. BuzzFeed and its subsequent news division spin-off did more harm to the online journalism industry than almost any other media outfit. It placed importance on churning out content and putting twenty-something undertrained interns in charge of some of the most socially volatile news issues on the internet and in American culture. Their journalists became churnolists and the amount of content became king, not the quality of content. As media cancel culture continues to rear its ugly head and journalists still roam the countryside to make their audiences outraged about...

buzzfeed news

Thursday

Ben Domenech

Congress’s Twitter hearings show Democrats are done with free speech

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, free speech was primarily defended by civil libertarians and the Democratic Party. This was in the 2000s, when a handful of civil libertarians on the right and many more on the left worried about how the Patriot Act would enhance the government's ability to monitor its own citizens. They also opposed the growing power of the intelligence community, which they thought could pressure companies into providing private information that the government could not legally grasp for itself. The past is a different country. Yesterday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee with three former Twitter executives illustrated as much. Democrats repeatedly made the case that the hearing was a distraction, unimportant, even conspiratorial.