Tag: social media

Josh Hawley hits a new low for hypocrisy

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If they decide to make flip-flopping an Olympic sport, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley needs to hop on the next plane to Tokyo.

Hawley just attacked President Joe Biden for attacking Facebook. Yes, this excruciatingly annoying preppy man who has staked his repulsive young political career upon crusading against social media — through the use of social media — has decided it’s not cool for Biden to get in Facebook’s face. Really.

In the past week — publicly and without apology — the Biden administration has pressed Facebook (among other social media) to stop facilitating the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. On Friday, Biden claimed Facebook was “killing people.” The company fired back with a dismissive response telling Biden “to move past the finger-pointing.” Continue reading.

How Twitter and Facebook plan to handle Trump’s accounts when he leaves office.

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Many world leaders generally have wider latitude on Twitter and Facebook because their comments and posts are regarded as political speech that is in the realm of public interest. But what will happen to President Trump’s accounts on the social media platforms when he leaves office?

At Tuesday’s hearing, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said the company would no longer make policy exceptions for Mr. Trump after he leaves office in January. During Mr. Trump’s time as a world leader, Twitter allowed him to post content that violated its rules, though it began adding labels to some of the tweets starting in May to indicate that the posts were disputed or glorified violence.

“If an account suddenly is not a world leader anymore, that particular policy goes away,” Mr. Dorsey said. Continue reading.

How to be a good digital citizen during the election – and its aftermath

In the runup to the U.S. presidential election there has been an unprecedented amount of misinformation about the voting process and mail-in ballots. It’s almost certain that misinformation and disinformation will increase, including, importantly, in the aftermath of the election. Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information, and disinformation is misinformation that is knowingly and deliberately propagated.

While every presidential election is critical, the stakes feel particularly high given the challenges of 2020.

I study misinformation online, and I can caution you about the kind of misinformation you may see on Tuesday and the days after, and I can offer you advice about what you can do to help prevent its spread. A fast-moving 24/7 news cycle and social media make it incredibly easy to share content. Here are steps you can take to be a good digital citizen and avoid inadvertently contributing to the problem. Continue reading.

Trump campaign bets big on digital ads to counter Biden

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President Trump’s campaign is investing heavily in digital ads on Facebook and Google as it seeks to counter Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s massive advantage in television advertising.

The Trump campaign has plowed more than $170 million into Facebook and Google since 2019, compared with $90 million by the Biden campaign, according to data from Bully Pulpit Interactive.

Biden’s campaign has ramped up its spending on Facebook and Google in recent weeks, cutting into Trump’s spending advantage and matching the president’s digital spending in battleground states. The Biden campaign trounced the Trump campaign in digital fundraising in August. Continue reading.

Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.

Washington Post logoStarting as early as 2015, Facebook executives started crafting exceptions for the then-candidate that transformed the world’s information battlefield for years to come.

Hours after President Trump’s incendiary post last month about sending the military to the Minnesota protests, Trump called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

The post put the company in a difficult position, Zuckerberg told Trump, according to people familiar with the discussions. The same message was hidden by Twitter, the strongest action ever taken against a presidential post.

To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said. Continue reading.

Trump’s Order on Social Media Could Harm One Person in Particular: Donald Trump

New York Times logoWithout certain liability protections, companies like Twitter would have to be more aggressive about policing messages that press the boundaries — like the president’s.

WASHINGTON — President Trump, who built his political career on the power of a flame-throwing Twitter account, has now gone to war with Twitter, angered that it would presume to fact-check his messages. But the punishment he is threatening could force social media companies to crack down even more on customers just like Mr. Trump.

The executive order that Mr. Trump signed on Thursday seeks to strip liability protection in certain cases for companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook for the content on their sites, meaning they could face legal jeopardy if they allowed false and defamatory posts. Without a liability shield, they presumably would have to be more aggressive about policing messages that press the boundaries — like the president’s.

That, of course, is not the outcome Mr. Trump wants. What he wants is the freedom to post anything he likes without the companies applying any judgment to his messages, as Twitter did this week when it began appending “get the facts” warnings to some of his false posts on voter fraud. Furious at what he called “censorship” — even though his messages were not in fact deleted — Mr. Trump is wielding the proposed executive order like a club to compel the company to back down. Continue reading.

Researchers: Nearly Half Of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely Bots

Nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages on the social media platform about the coronavirus pandemic are likely bots, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said Wednesday.

Researchers culled through more than 200 million tweets discussing the virus since January and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans.

It is too early to say conclusively which individuals or groups are behind the bot accounts, but researchers said the tweets appeared aimed at sowing division in America. Continue reading.

Stealth political ads flourish on Facebook

More than half of Facebook pages that featured U.S. political ads failed to disclose who was behind them, NYU researchers found.

More than half of Facebook pages that displayed U.S. political ads during a recent 13-month period concealed the identities of their backers, according to research reviewed by POLITICO — a tide of deceptive messaging that raises new questions about the social network’s promises of transparency.

The stealth political ads were estimated to cost at least $37 million, equivalent to 6 percent of all the money spent on Facebook messages in the U.S. during the research period, from May 2018 until June 2019, according to estimates from New York University researchers.

The academics also found evidence that partisan groups across the political spectrum had created 16 clusters of inauthentic communities on the world’s largest social network that bought ads aimed at swaying potential voters, borrowing from tactics Russian operatives had employed during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Continue reading.

How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook

Washington Post logoFacebook created “Project P” — for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent.

In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company’s most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company.

“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships. Continue reading.