Misinformation

Saturday

Phillip Nieto

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

Sunday

Angus Colwell

TikTok’s fake news problem

From our UK edition

Something troubling is happening on TikTok. The video sharing app is sometimes dismissed as a place where young people go to while away the hours watching banal videos. But TikTok is more than just a quirky hobby for younger generations: it's where many come to get their news. What's more, during Covid it's become a window into a world that is effectively shut. This makes the spread of fake news and misinformation on the app something that should alarm us all. This week, a TikTok video claiming that the United States was responsible for reducing Syria to rubble spread like wildfire around the app.

Friday

Harry Shukman

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.

tiktok

Thursday

Toby Young

There’s nothing neutral about Wikipedia

From our UK edition

A couple of weeks ago Newsweek ran an article attacking Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, for engaging in a friendly Twitter exchange with me about the coronavirus pandemic. According to the article, I was a ‘eugenics advocate’. How could the apparently respectable industrial designer sully himself in this way? Didn’t he realise I was Britain’s answer to Dr Mengele? The claim that I’m a ‘eugenics advocate’ isn’t true, obviously.

Thursday

Mark Galeotti

These Russian cyber-attacks are a wake up call for the UK

From our UK edition

Days before the release of the becalmed Intelligence & Security Committee (ISC) report on Russian political interference, we suddenly started to hear news of Moscow’s meddling on Thursday. It’s almost as if the government, sensitive about appearing like it wants to bury the report, suddenly wants to steal the thunder and look serious. Surely not. Putting cynicism aside, it is worth taking a proper look at these two new stories of Russian interference and what they tell us about what Moscow is and isn’t doing – and, more to the point, what it can and cannot do. The first story is a leak about a leak.