Showing posts with label disinformation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disinformation. Show all posts
Thursday, November 12, 2026
Project 2025 had a plan to target federal data. The Trump administration obeyed
“If you are an administration that is focused on taking away people’s rights and on limiting people’s access to healthcare, then it follows you don’t want scientific evidence and data to be available to people. Because if you start chipping away at people’s faith in institutions, then you can fill the void with disinformation that’s really detrimental to people’s health and wellbeing.”…
Friday, November 6, 2026
Tuesday, November 3, 2026
A Test for Trump’s Disinformation Operation – Mother Jones
The GOP’s midterm effort that he’s leading—like his past presidential campaigns—is foremost a disinformation operation. Trump never stops pumping out extreme falsehoods...
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
AI-driven disinformation running rampant on social media before US midterms, experts warn
Social media companies including Meta have pulled back on efforts to protect voters from election-meddling lies…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/27/ai-disinformation-social-media-midterm-elections
Saturday, October 24, 2026
Putin Is Meddling in the Midterms to Help Trump by Spreading False Sex Abuse Claims – Mother Jones
One of numerous examples:
On Tuesday, an X account attributed to a Texas man named Zyron Lewis posted a video of Lewis claiming that in 2012, when he was a middle school student, he was sexually assaulted by James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas. This allegation—which zapped across the internet—was quickly debunked. Talarico was indeed a middle school teacher at that time, and a Zyron Lewis had been a student of his. But the Zyron Lewis in the video was not the real Zyron Lewis. The real Lewis told a factchecking site he had never been abused by Talarico, and X subsequently suspended the interloper…
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Elon Musk Is the Midterms’ Biggest Disinformation Risk – Mother Jones
The world’s wealthiest man pours money into GOP candidates while backing a floridly fake story about a Democrat on the platform he owns…
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/elon-musk-is-the-midterms-biggest-disinformation-risk/
Thursday, October 8, 2026
EU drops sponsorship of disinformation conference at Trump officials’ request
“What this amounts to is a purported defender of free speech at the state department using the enormous power of the US government to try to pressure Americans from criticizing their government,” said Jankowicz…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/07/trump-eu-disinformation-conference
Thursday, October 1, 2026
How I Got Dragged Into a Putin Disinformation Op – Mother Jones
Matryoshka, using old bot accounts created up to 12 years ago, spewed out at least nine sham Mother Jones videos, with each one promoting an outrageous but spurious allegation about a Democratic candidate…
Friday, July 10, 2026
Christian Nationalism and Public Education: The Cost of Disinformation (Warren Throckmorton; The Christian Past That Wasn’t: Formerly Telling Jefferson Lies podcast)
The episode begins with a role play of a teacher presenting a history lesson right out of the Christian nationalist playbook. Mrs. Johnson's students try to help her with questions but she doesn't take the help. Her disinformation campaign continues until slavery comes up and then the lesson abruptly ends. Could this happen? A better question is, what do we do now that it is happening in some schools around the nation.
In this segment, I present another excerpt from the Texas State Board of Education which illustrates how Christian nationalist disinformation permeates opposition to public education. In this scenario a parent brings in David Barton's discredited book, The Jefferson Lies, as an authority and refuses to address a challenge to it. The parent appears not to know the book was pulled from publication due to historical errors.
There is a long history of conflict in public schools over religious differences. However, if religion is kept out of public education, this conflict could be avoided. A robust doctrine of separation of church and state is beneficial for public schools and should be enforced.
Interview:
In this segment, I present another excerpt from the Texas State Board of Education which illustrates how Christian nationalist disinformation permeates opposition to public education. In this scenario a parent brings in David Barton's discredited book, The Jefferson Lies, as an authority and refuses to address a challenge to it. The parent appears not to know the book was pulled from publication due to historical errors.
There is a long history of conflict in public schools over religious differences. However, if religion is kept out of public education, this conflict could be avoided. A robust doctrine of separation of church and state is beneficial for public schools and should be enforced.
Interview:
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
Sunday, April 5, 2026
The Disinformation Dozen: Wuhan Drift (Conspirituality podcast #302)
Early in this podcast we covered the Disinformation Dozen, 12 wellness influencers and contrarian health figures responsible for spreading the lion’s share of vaccine misinformation on major social media platforms.
On a recent MAHA Action weekly call, Tony Lyons got the group back together for a victory lap after a court settlement seemed to justify their actions. Or did it?
We break down the court case, then hear from the influencers who continue to inflate their own sense of self-importance while rewriting a history that only exists in their minds.
Interview:
On a recent MAHA Action weekly call, Tony Lyons got the group back together for a victory lap after a court settlement seemed to justify their actions. Or did it?
We break down the court case, then hear from the influencers who continue to inflate their own sense of self-importance while rewriting a history that only exists in their minds.
Interview:
Wednesday, February 4, 2026
French headquarters of Elon Musk’s X raided by Paris cybercrime unit
The MP, Éric Bothorel, expressed "deep concern" at "recent algorithm changes" and "apparent interference in [X's] management" since Musk bought it in 2022. Other complaints said the changes had led to a surge in "nauseating political content"...
Saturday, December 27, 2025
US judge blocks Trump administration from deporting UK anti-disinformation campaigner
In a statement, Ahmed said: "My life's work is to protect children from the dangers of unregulated social media and AI and fight the spread of antisemitism online. That mission has pitted me against big tech executives – and Elon Musk in particular – multiple times… Roberta Kaplan, Ahmed's legal counsel, said: "The state department's actions here are unjustified and blatantly unconstitutional."…
Sunday, December 21, 2025
Dr Jessica Knurick talks MAHA and diet and nutrition misinformation (Conspirituality podcast #288)
Derek sits down with Dr Jessica Knurick at the Eudemonia Summit for this special live recording. They discuss combating health misinformation online, what MAHA gets right and wrong, whether or not "nutritionist" should be a protected term, and Jessica's possible political ambitions.
Interview:
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
Meta AI adviser spreads disinformation about shootings, vaccines and trans people
Since his appointment, Starbuck has baselessly claimed that individual shooters in the US were motivated by leftist ideology, described faith-based protest groups as communists, and without evidence tied Democratic lawmakers to murders.
Starbuck's online posts have not changed in tenor since the "anti-DEI agitator" was brought into the Meta fold, and his Trump administration connections raise broader questions about the extent to which corporate America has capitulated to the Maga movement...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/12/meta-ai-adviser-robby-starbuck
Friday, September 26, 2025
Fighting anti-science nonsense and scams: Dave Farina: The Scumbags I've Debunked (The Thinking Atheist podcast)
Science communicator Dave Farina is back to talk about the charlatans and idiots. Buckle up.
Interview:
Thursday, July 24, 2025
Tulsi Gabbard’s Dangerous Disinformation Campaign Against America – Mother Jones
"Gabbard is engaging in blatant cherry-picking and gaslighting. And she's being sloppy with her subterfuge. Her case is easy to debunk. The intelligence reporting she cites does not contradict the ICA and does not indicate there was a high-level plot to produce a bogus report to damage Trump. She is providing a phony and weak cover story, both for Trump and Vladimir Putin. After all, long after the ICA was produced, the Mueller report and two congressional investigations confirmed that the Russians had assaulted the 2016 election, facts that Gabbardneglects to mention in her memo..."
Thursday, July 3, 2025
A Trans Pilot Was Falsely Blamed for a Plane Crash. Now She’s Fighting the Right-Wing Disinfo Machine | WIRED
Experts say the falsehoods about trans people following violent events range from misinformation, where people genuinely believe the wrong information, to deliberately disseminated disinformation, which includes Ellis' case. Disinformation "is something where the goal is to deliberately lie in order to stoke hatred," says Thomas Billard, an associate professor at Northwestern University who specializes in transgender studies. "These are people who either know that the person involved isn't trans and are saying that they are anyways or have no idea who the school shooter or the pilot is; the purpose is just to make other people hate them."
Even as transgender people form less than 1 percent of the country's population, Trump has made them one of his primary targets, signing a host of executive orders, including ones that revoke funding and support for youth gender-affirming care and barring trans women and girls from participating in women's sports, along with the aforementioned military ban. So far, there have been at least 116 state anti-trans bills passed this year. Moreover, several words including "trans" and "transgender" have been purged from federal agency websites...
Wednesday, July 2, 2025
Putin is invading more than Ukraine – POLITICO
But Putin's aggression is focused on the U.S. and all its allies. He's spending millions of dollars, bombarding European voters with manipulative social media and disinformation campaigns on a mass scale. It's a new type of warfare on democracy that eliminates the need to roll tanks into capitals.
Putin's constantly evolving playbook is the result of his failed military campaign to capture Kyiv and strangle Ukrainian democracy. He ran into Ukraine's indominable resilience, and as a result, he began deploying a long-standing Russian (and Soviet) strategy to destroy Western democracies from within by supporting and cultivating pro-Putin political candidates. And TikTok, Telegram and other social media channels are now weapons in this new kind of war…
Unfortunately, too many people who should know better are still cozying up to Putin, backing his pro-Russian candidates and undermining the security of the U.S. and other democratic allies. Elon Musk protégé Mario Nawfal was in Moscow in May, while tech billionaire Elon Musk's father and controversial American right-wing commentators Jackson Hinkle and Alex Jones attended the Future 2050 forum in Moscow in June. Speaking at the forum were numerous Putin allies: right-wing Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and former president Dmitry Medvedev…
Thursday, June 19, 2025
Elon Musk’s X sues New York over hate speech and disinformation law | Elon Musk | The Guardian
The bill's authors issued a statement on Tuesday rejecting Musk's suit as an attempt to "use the First Amendment as a shield against providing New Yorkers with much needed transparency" and argued that the act does not infringe upon the free speech rights of social media companies...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/17/elon-musk-new-york-hate-lawsuit-speech-law
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