AP: Cyborgs, Trolls and bots: A guide to online misinformation
- Thread starter hanimmal
- Start date
- Status
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Oh look now the "I am not a right wing cuck" is pretending like Project Veritas/Candace Owens is reality.
https://www.rollitup.org/t/anyone-else-watching-the-kyle-rittenhouse-trial.1065377/post-16635570
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
What a creepy ad Facebook put out for their new 'meta' thing.
A bunch of kids show up so a tiger stops eating a bison and they start brainwashing the kids into a trance.
Then those kids in a trance are now in the middle of a jungle with snakes all around them.
And then at the end the predator looks at the meat and says this is going to be fun.
I don't think that this commercial could be any better of a warning for allowing Facebook have the ability to keep pumping out their poison.
Then those kids in a trance are now in the middle of a jungle with snakes all around them.
And then at the end the predator looks at the meat and says this is going to be fun.
I don't think that this commercial could be any better of a warning for allowing Facebook have the ability to keep pumping out their poison.
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
still waiting on literally any full joe biden speech, @madvillian420 !
lets see how your edited youtube propaganda alternate reality stands up
cuck
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
No joke, it is almost like they know they are full of shit and just pretending to be brainwashed into thinking someone with a speech impediment is whatever troll that Rupert Murdoch hate mongers' click bait sold them so that they don't feel like the complete shitbags they come off as.
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
i never really watched biden speak before at all until well after he became president. i was wondering if the retards like madvillian were speaking any truth at all. about 2 minutes into some random speech i was nearly falling asleep. he speaks completely normally. i was correct to assume the retards were operating in bad faith
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Agreed. Biden is so radically normal it must be hard for the Trump cultists to stay still long enough to watch due to the lack of hate mongering and overwhelming amount of honesty.
madvillian420
Well-Known Member
I posted it already. the one about Cornpop being a baaad dude and the kids touching his legs and how he loves that and them sitting on his lap. that was a full 15 minute speech. Not sure why a "full speech" is so important, The amount of gaffes and odd derailments or even complete forgetfulness is high above average regardless of the amount of normal speech. im not saying the very bewildered man cant literally complete a sentence or two, but the amount of "huh" moments (if you take your orange man blinders off) are extremely common when hes speaking. Moreso without an obvious teleprompter or the blatantly referenced to script of allowed reporters/questions (he can handle teleprompters and scripted Q&A's)
Compared to the speaking ability of Obama, current day Biden is a joke. Shit compared to HIMSELF a decade or 2 ago hes a major downgrade. The guy had 2 major brain surgeries, im not saying i dont understand WHY hes on the decline, im saying it does nobody any favors to turn a blind eye to it because regardless youd rather have this guy than the last. If you cant discuss the cognitive function of the current US president, without mentioning the last one, how impartial are you REALLY being? Everything circles back to Trump with this crowd, you dont want to have a discussion, you want to argue your tightly held clearly biased stance and harp about orange hitler.
Joe biden is a lifelong politician, hes not forgetting names and places that hes only recently learned. Trump made plenty of gaffes and mistakes, mostly due to stupidity, not a creeping undeniable dullness and confused state befitting most folks in a nursing home.
Its much easier to see when you take bias away, but ive never heard you even attempt to do so. Blue team good, red team bad. basic tribal monkey brained shit.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
All that to pretend like Biden doesn't have a stutter?
It is not a surprise that he doesn't have the public speaking ability of Obama who is the greatest public speaker I have seen.
And as for your comparing him to him 10 years ago, he wasn't POTUS in a time that people were aware of the troll chain that goes from Rupert Murdoch edited clips being put online to get spammed to scare people and he has to actually take the time to make sure that what he is saying as a least troll-able as possible while dealing with his stutter.
If you were not as big of a troll as you have proven yourself to be you might actually be able to step back and realize that it is actually pretty impressive how well he communicates to the press and the American people.
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
The cornpop speech? I posted that a year before the election as an example of why biden had staying power. I was right. He won the primary easily then stomped trump.
If that is your idea of dementia then your brain is rotten ftom youtube propaganda
Your boy trump bragged about passing a dementia test for months. Person woman man camera tv. Why the fuck were they giving him a dementia test?
You and bodegabitch are the stupidest pair of right wingers hete for a while
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
That is the wrinkliest forehead I’ve seen outside a pickling vat.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-joe-biden-entertainment-health-lifestyle-334d779a4ec41aa0eef9ea80636f9595
WASHINGTON (AP) — Before last year’s presidential election, Facebook ads targeting Latino voters described Joe Biden as a communist. During his inauguration, another conspiracy theory spread online and on Spanish-language radio warning that a brooch worn by Lady Gaga signaled Biden was working with shadowy, leftist figures abroad.
And in the final stretch of Virginia’s election for governor, stories written in Spanish accused Biden of ordering the arrest of a man during a school board meeting.
None of that was true. But such misinformation represents a growing threat to Democrats, who are anxious about their standing with Latino voters after surprise losses last year in places like South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
Heading into a midterm election in which control of Congress is at stake, lawmakers, researchers and activists are preparing for another onslaught of falsehoods targeted at Spanish-speaking voters. And they say social media platforms that often host those mistruths aren’t prepared.
“For a lot of people, there’s a lot of concern that 2022 will be another big wave,” said Guy Mentel, executive director of Global Americans, a think tank that provides analysis of key issues throughout the Americas.
This month’s elections may be a preview of what’s to come.
After Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy won New Jersey’s close governor’s race, Spanish-language videos falsely claimed the vote was rigged, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud — a fact the Republican candidate acknowledged, calling the results “legal and fair.”
In Virginia, where Republican Glenn Youngkin campaigned successfully on promises to defend “parental rights” in classrooms, false headlines around a controversial school board meeting emerged.
“Biden ordenó arrestar a padre de una joven violada por un trans,” read one of several misleading articles, translating to “Biden ordered the arrest of a father whose daughter was raped by a trans.”
The mistruth was spun from an altercation during a chaotic school board meeting months earlier in Loudoun County that resulted in the arrest of a father whose daughter was sexually assaulted in a bathroom by another student. The father claimed the suspect was “gender fluid,” which sparked outcry over the school’s policy allowing transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity.
In reality, the White House wasn’t involved with the meeting. The man was arrested by the local sheriff’s department. It’s also unclear how the suspect identifies.
Loudoun County was already the epicenter of a heated political debate over how the history of racism is taught in schools — another issue that became fodder for misinformation and political attacks on Spanish-language websites this summer, said Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, a nonprofit that mobilizes Hispanics to become politically engaged.
“It has everything to do with trust in institutions. Trust in government,” said Kumar, whose group works to combat the misinformation. “Eroding that trust will transfer not just to voting in the midterms, but just overall disengagement from your government.”
Stretched truths accusing some Democrats of being socialists or communists could also dominate the online narrative, said Diego Groisman, a research analyst at New York University’s Cybersecurity for Democracy project.
During the 2020 election, Groisman flagged Facebook ads targeting Latino voters in Texas and Florida that described Biden as a “communist.” The ads in Florida — where a majority of the country’s Venezuelan population is concentrated — compared Biden to that country’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro.
“There were clearly specific Spanish-speaking communities that were being targeted,” said Laura Edelson, the lead researcher for NYU’s program.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a Florida Democratic strategist who watches Spanish misinformation patterns, says many online narratives intentionally stoke “fear in the Spanish-speaking communities.”
One conspiracy theory mentioned on talk radio grew out of Lady Gaga’s golden bird brooch at Biden’s inauguration. Some spreading the claim noted a similar brooch once worn by Claudia López Hernandez, the first openly gay mayor of Bogota, Colombia, signaled the new president was working with foreign leftists.
“They’re not going to stop. They’re going to double down on it,” Pérez-Verdía said of the misinformation.
Critics argue that social media companies like Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, have placed outsize attention on removing or fact-checking misinformation in English over other languages like Spanish.
Facebook’s own documents, leaked by ex-Facebook employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen earlier this year, echo those concerns. Haugen said the company spends 87% of its misinformation budget on U.S. content — a figure that Meta spokesperson Kevin McAllister said is “out of context.”
An internal Facebook memo, written in March, revealed the company’s ability to detect anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation was “basically non-existent” in non-English comments.
Last year, for example, Instagram and Facebook banned “#plandemic,” a hashtag associated with a video full of COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Yet users were spreading misinformation on the platforms using “#plandemia,” the Spanish version of the hashtag, until just last month.
An analysis last year by Avaaz, a left-leaning advocacy group that tracks online misinformation, also found Facebook failed to flag 70% of Spanish-language misinformation surrounding COVID-19 compared to just 29% of such information in English.
McAllister said the company removes false Spanish-language claims about voter fraud, COVID-19 and vaccines. Four news outlets, including The Associated Press, also fact-check Spanish-language falsehoods circulating around U.S. content on Instagram and Facebook.
Meanwhile, researchers at the nonpartisan Global Disinformation Index estimated that Google will make $12 million this year off ads on websites that peddled COVID-19 disinformation in Spanish. Google has “stopped serving ads on a majority of the pages shared in the report,” company spokesperson Michael Aciman said in an email.
“Spanish-language misinformation campaigns are absolutely exploding on social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.,” New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the party’s top progressive voices, tweeted after the Nov. 2 election.
That explosion is fueled in part by a U.S.-Latin America feedback loop that allows falsehoods to fester.
Misinformation that starts on U.S. websites is sometimes translated by social media pages in Latin American countries like Colombia and Venezuela. The inaccuracies are shared back through YouTube videos or messaging apps with Spanish speakers in expatriate communities like those in Miami and Houston.
Those falsehoods are more likely to reach U.S. Latinos because they tend to spend more time on sites such as YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram, according to an October Nielsen report.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
From the article below: "But Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/us/politics/email-political-misinformation.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/us/politics/email-political-misinformation.html
A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all.
It doesn’t, and never has. But few noticed Mr. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email.
Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice.
The New York Times signed up in August for the campaign lists of the 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022 whose websites offered that option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers.
Both parties delivered heaps of hyperbole in their emails. One Republican, for instance, declared that Democrats wanted to establish a “one-party socialist state,” while a Democrat suggested that the party’s Jan. 6 inquiry was at imminent risk because the G.O.P. “could force the whole investigation to end early.”
But Republicans included misinformation far more often: in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s.
At least eight Republican lawmakers sent fund-raising emails containing a brazen distortion of a potential settlement with migrants separated from their families during the Trump administration. One of them, Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, falsely claimed that President Biden was “giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000.”
Those claims were grounded in news that the Justice Department was negotiating payments to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of immigrant families whom the Trump administration had separated, some of whom have not been reunited. But the payments, which are not final and could end up being smaller, would be limited to that small fraction of migrants.
The relatively small number of false statements from Democrats were mostly about abortion. For instance, an email from Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York said the Mississippi law before the Supreme Court was “nearly identical to the one in Texas, banning abortions after 6 weeks,” but Mississippi’s law bans abortion after 15 weeks and does not include the vigilante enforcement mechanism that is a defining characteristic of Texas’ law.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Maloney called the inaccuracy an “honest mistake” and said the campaign would check future emails more carefully.
Campaign representatives for Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Crenshaw did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Republican House and Senate campaign committees also did not respond to a request for comment.
Politicians have exaggerated and dissembled since time immemorial, including in their email dispatches. But the volume, the baldness and the reach of the false claims have increased.
The emails reviewed by The Times illuminate how ubiquitous misinformation has become among Republicans, fueled in large part by former President Donald J. Trump. And the misinformation is not coming only, or even primarily, from the handful who get national attention for it.
The people behind campaign emails have “realized the more extreme the claim, the better the response,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster.
“The more that it elicits red-hot anger, the more likely people donate. And it just contributes to the perversion of our democratic process. It contributes to the incivility and indecency of political behavior.”
The messages also underscore how, for all the efforts to compel platforms like Facebook and Twitter to address falsehoods, many of the same claims are flowing through other powerful channels with little notice.
For fact checkers and other watchdogs, “it’s hard to know what it is that politicians are saying directly to individual supporters in their inboxes,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.
“And politicians know that,” she said. “Politicians and the consulting firms behind them, they know that this kind of messaging is not monitored to the same extent, so they can be more carefree with what they’re saying.”
Representative Dan Crenshaw’s campaign claimed in an email that the Democrats’ budget bill included Medicare for all. It doesn’t.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
Email is a crucial tool in political fund-raising because it costs campaigns almost nothing and can be extremely effective: When campaigns invest in it, it routinely accounts for a majority of their online fund-raising. Supporters are bombarded — sometimes daily — with messages meant to make them angry, because strategists know anger motivates voters.
In many cases, candidates used anger-inducing misinformation directly in their requests for a donation. For instance, after his false claim about payments to immigrants, Mr. Kennedy — who began the email by declaring himself “mad as a murder hornet” — included a link labeled “RUSH $500 TO STOP ILLEGAL PAYMENTS!”
“I’m watching Joe Biden pay illegals to come into our country, and it’s all being paid for by raising YOUR taxes,” he wrote. “We can’t let Biden pass out hundreds of thousands of dollars to every Tom, Dick and Harry that wants to come into our country illegally.”
Several other Republicans, including Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, also claimed that the payments would go to all undocumented immigrants. Others, including Senator Todd Young of Indiana, tucked the context inside emails with misleading subject lines such as “BREAKING: Biden wants to pay illegal immigrants $450,000 each for breaking our laws.”
Of 28 emails that included the $450,000 figure, only eight contextualized it accurately.
Campaign representatives for Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Young did not respond to requests for comment.
Another common line was that the Justice Department was targeting parents as “domestic terrorists” for challenging the teaching of critical race theory, an advanced academic framework that conservatives are using as shorthand for how some curriculums cover race and racism — or, alternatively, for challenging pandemic-related restrictions.
“Parents are simply protesting a radical curriculum in public schools, and Biden wants the parents labeled terrorists,” read an email from Representative Jake LaTurner of Kansas. “Will you consider donating now to help us fight back against this disgusting abuse of power?”
A campaign email from Representative Elise Stefanik of New York claimed erroneously that the Justice Department was targeting parents as “domestic terrorists” for challenging the teaching of critical race theory.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
This misinformation — echoed in emails from Mr. Crenshaw, Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Young, Representative Jim Hagedorn of Minnesota and Representative Elise Stefanik of New York — emerged after Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memorandum on Oct. 4 directing the F.B.I. to address threats against school personnel and school board members. (Some opponents of curriculums and pandemic protocols have sent death threats, vandalized homes and otherwise acted menacingly.) The memo explicitly distinguished between dissent and threats, and did not call anyone a domestic terrorist. The Republican narrative conflates it with a letter the National School Boards Association, an independent group, sent to the Justice Department a few days earlier.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Looks like the GQP is pulling their CSPAN 'Morning Journal' paid troll scam in Spanish radio call in shows too. It always cracks me up when they try to attack/slander the 'Democrat' guests with the claim of 'I don't know who is paying you to be there, so I don't trust you', and can only wish one day that the guest will shoot back with 'Well, I have no idea which far right hate monger is paying you to call in, so I guess we are even'.
https://www.rawstory.com/kamala-harris-florida/
https://www.rawstory.com/kamala-harris-florida/
HGCC
Well-Known Member
Thought @hanimmal would find this interesting.
coloradosun.com
Conservative dark-money group bankrolled almost every major Republican effort in Colorado last year, tax document shows
Unite for Colorado, a conservative dark-money group that renamed to Advance Colorado Action, spent $17.2 million in Colorado last year.
coloradosun.com
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
I couldn't open that link but think I found the article.Thought @hanimmal would find this interesting.
Conservative dark-money group bankrolled almost every major Republican effort in Colorado last year, tax document shows
Unite for Colorado, a conservative dark-money group that renamed to Advance Colorado Action, spent $17.2 million in Colorado last year.
Imagine just one company being able to drop $50 million in one election year. This dark money crap needs to end.
Dark-money group bankrolled major Republican efforts in Colorado, tax docs show
A deep-pocketed conservative political nonprofit that doesn’t disclose its donors funded almost every major Republican political group and effort in Colorado last year, according to a tax document obt...www.the-journal.com
- Status