Misinformation

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

Don’t mourn the death of TV

The online American right is positively obsessed with the nineties. It’s easy to establish the cause here: a surfeit of Gen X and early millennial users, many of whom are fresh converts from within the last decade. Social-media posts by conservative users depicting America’s cities, beaches, and nightclubs from this era regularly achieve staggering virality. The memorialization of these things is justified by presenting them, perhaps not wrongly, as evidence of the cultural homogeneity that America has lost in the past quarter century. There is one tendency among these that I find particularly troubling – lamenting the death of American network television.

Television

Does Trump’s platform say he would ban IVF?

The Kamala Harris campaign held a press call on Tuesday morning in which they claimed Republicans and former president Donald Trump are “attacking” access to in vitro fertilization. An email sent out advertising the call said, “Donald Trump’s own platform — linked on his campaign website — could effectively ban IVF and abortion in states nationwide.” I found this to be surprising because I read Trump’s platform — linked on his campaign website — when it became official the week of the Republican National Convention. Of course, Trump has also publicly said that he supports IVF and wants to require insurance companies to cover the treatment. I double checked Trump’s platform just in case, and confirmed my suspicions.

YouTube’s inconsistent conspiracy policy

YouTube is back up to its pandemic-era tricks with a sketchy and unexplained censorship policy — this time as it pertains to the 2024 election. By all appearances, it once again looks as though Big Tech is going to attempt to play information arbiter as it relates to our national elections. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time radical environmentalist and conspiracy theorist, just also happens to be challenging President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary — and RFK is making enough noise that people are at least paying some attention to him. Kennedy’s profile has risen in the media lately as he’s espoused skepticism in the Covid-19 vaccine. It’s nothing new for him, as he was welcomed on media platforms such as The Daily Show, MSNBC and CNN in the mid-2000s.

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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

Elon Musk makes it up as he goes

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the script has been flipped. Pontificators at all points of the ideological spectrum are spinning to figure out what his intentions are with the platform and how that pertains to platform moderation going forward. Musk is seemingly making up Twitter policy on the spot by tweet — and then asking his team to come up with a justification post-tweet. This has happened on several occasions. His actions all came to a head Thursday night when Twitter, apparently under the direct instruction of Musk, suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists from the New York Times (Ryan Mac), the Washington Post (Drew Harwell), the Intercept (Micah Lee), Mashable (Matt Binder), Voice of America (Steve Herman) and CNN (Donie O’Sullivan).

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Why we need robust free speech laws

The biggest tragedy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is, of course, the loss of thousands of Ukrainians, who have been killed because of Vladimir Putin’s insane and horrific actions. But alongside that horror are many other alarming developments. One of them is the near-total suppression of the free flow of information in both Russia and China. As you have likely read, Putin cast the war with Ukraine not as the unprovoked invasion it is but, laughably, as a “special military operation” for “de-Nazifying” the Ukrainian leadership. Russia swiftly passed a law greatly enabling Putin’s propaganda campaign.

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Beware the risks of tyrannical tech

“Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It’s in the computer, everything: your, your DMV records, your, your social security, your credit cards, your medical records. It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.” — Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, The Net, 1995 A few weeks ago, I called the local Domino’s. The man who answered asked whether my address is an apartment or a private residence. I live in a fairly remote Michigan community of about 8,000 people.

Big Tech covers up Biden’s crack pipe giveaway

A throwaway line item in an otherwise innocuous spending package unveiled one way the Biden administration and the Democratic party sees "racial equity." The Washington Free Beacon revealed a week ago that the Department of Health and Human Services would be distributing free crack pipes to drug users to promote hygiene and advance racial equity. The cost was around $30 million and the program is similar to what left-wing fiefdoms like Seattle and San Francisco already do. The story had all the elements of tabloid gold — even better in clickability than the last Biden crack pipe story: Hunter’s laptop.

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It’s not Joe Rogan who needs to apologize

We are spending too much time talking about Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan is spending too much time apologizing. “Whenever you're in a situation where you have to say, ‘I'm not racist,’ you fucked up,” Rogan apologized on February 5. “And I clearly have fucked up.” Rogan was addressing a montage that is circulating on social media, showing him saying the N-word on multiple episodes of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. When Joe describes the montage as “the most regretful and shameful thing that I've ever had to talk about publicly,” I believe him. And I don’t think Joe made a mistake apologizing. That was Joe expressing his authentic self.

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Can China save us from Prince Harry?

Cockburn is a traditional sort. He is favorably disposed toward anything that has existed for a long time, even things that don’t deserve it, like the United States Senate or the Washington Post. He therefore bears no ill will towards Britain’s vestigial royal family. There’s something admirable about any family that can do so little, possess so much and avoid a guillotine. But Cockburn does grow a tad cross when he is persistently made to weigh in on something those vestigial royals do or say. royal news is even worse than most celebrity news. If Kanye West says something insane, well, at least Kanye has made some albums people liked. But Prince Harry?

prince harry victim

What to do when Joe Biden falsely promotes the COVID vaccine

Janet Woodcock, MD Acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration 10903 New Hampshire Ave Silver Spring MD 20993-0002 Dear Dr Woodcock, You’ve got a problem. An executive is making unsupported promotional claims for a biological product, indeed one that has yet to be formally licensed by your agency. Doubtless you have dealt with such a violation before. When a pharmaceutical company tries to stretch an efficacy claim beyond the data, you can put a stop to it. You have tools: warning letters, fines, threats of criminal prosecution. But the current situation is a bit thorny. The executive is your boss’s boss. That would be President Joe Biden.

cdc vaccine

Can I join Marjorie Taylor Greene in Twitter jail?

Marjorie Taylor Greene held a press conference late last week. It took place inside, meaning the Jews with the space laser must have been at red alert once again. The raison d’être for Greene’s shindig was to announce that she’d been banned from Twitter. Which raises the question: what do I have to do to get arrested in this town? I recently reactivated my own Twitter account after a blessed hiatus and I would give anything to be banished from that cesspool. How do you get hoosegowed? Apparently all you have to do is what everyone else on Twitter is doing: Greene was banned for spreading ‘COVID misinformation’.

marjorie taylor greene

Joe Biden’s digital serfs

The Biden administration intends to notify Facebook about ‘problematic’ postings, such as questioning the COVID-19 vaccine. Jen Psaki, the White House spokesperson, suggests that if you’re problematic on one social-media site, you should be banned from them all. Big Tech, meet Big Sister. I suppose this is still America. If Donald Trump had said he’d use extra-legal leverage over Big Tech, most of the media would be crying ‘fascism’. Brian Stelter would decry an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. Jeffrey Toobin would bang one out about bypassing Congress and the law. Minor academics would op-ed in the New York Times about the classically fascist ‘collusion’ between government and big business.

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The constant Democratic existential crises

The Democratic party boasts so many heroes, it’s sometimes hard to keep up. Recently, Rep. Andy Kim revealed that he will be donating his J. Crew wool suit to the Smithsonian Institute. An AP photographer captured the congressman in the Rotunda picking up some trash after the January 6 riots. ‘So I found a roll of trash bags, got down on my knees, and just started trying to clean up a place I love.’ This kind of courage begs the question — can an Emmy award be far behind? After all, not all heroes wear capes, but one definitely wore a cobalt blue suit. Such acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty are nothing new in the modern Democratic party. Where were you on that snowy day in 2019 when you first saw that photo of Rep. Eric Swalwell?

existential crises

The ‘terrorist attack’ that wasn’t

In a tragic traffic accident at the Wilton Manors Stonewall Pride march near Fort Lauderdale, a driver lost control of his vehicle and careered into members who were marching. One person was killed and another was hospitalized. This was of course not how social media saw it, as rumors of a terrorist attack rocketed around Twitter, aided in no small part by irresponsible comments from Fort Lauderdale mayor Dean Trantalis. The mayor claimed on camera that the incident was a ‘terrorist attack against the LGBT community’. He then seemed to hint that the intended target was Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz: ‘Hardly an accident. It was deliberate, it was premeditated and it was targeted against a specific person.

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What gives the Aspen Institute the right to preach about misinformation?

The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder will soon release their interim report with recommendations for how the United States should respond to the 'modern-day crisis of faith in key institutions.’ But the partisan nature of the commissioners on the board brings the report’s credibility into question. The commission's stated goal is to 'identify and prioritize the most critical sources and causes of information disorder and deliver a set of short-term actions and longer-term goals to help government, the private sector and civil society respond to this modern-day crisis of faith in key institutions’.

aspen institute

The useful idiots of TikTok

Tyrants have always had useful idiots to whitewash their crimes but few have proven as useful and idiotic as those who support China in their oppression of the Uighurs. The northwestern region of Xinjiang is where China’s Muslim minority is persecuted, and according to Human Rights Watch, this means mass arbitrary detention, torture, forced political indoctrination and surveillance using the collection of biometric data. Religious freedoms are severely curtailed under the guise of counter-terrorism measures, the charity says, with restrictions on facial hair, clothing, religious education and online speech. A bleak investigation this week by the BBC found evidence that China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs to pick cotton for the fashion industry.

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