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      Steve Bannon banned by Twitter for calling for Fauci beheading

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      Twitter has banned the account of the former Donald Trump adviser and surrogate Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr Anthony Fauci and the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the posting of their heads outside the White House as a “warning”.
      Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.
      “Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.
      “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put their heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats, you either get with the programme or you’re gone.”
      Twitter banned Bannon’s War Room account permanently, saying it had suspended the podcast account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
      The same video was on Facebook for about 10 hours before it was also removed.
      Later on Friday, William Burck, an attorney for Bannon in a fraud case in New York City, told a federal judge he was withdrawing. Bannon is accused of misappropriating money from a group which raised $2m from thousands of donors to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and has pleaded not guilty. Burck did not give a reason for his withdrawal.
      There has been mounting concern over the risk of violence following this week’s US elections, amid highly inflammatory rhetoric from Trump and his allies, who have falsely said Democrats are trying to “steal the election”.
      Philadelphia police arrested two men allegedly involved in a plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Thursday night. Police were tipped off, possibly from a concerned family member of one of the men, who had driven 300 miles from Virginia.
      The moves against Bannon came hours after Facebook banned “Stop the Steal”, a group involved in organising protests this weekend throughout the US against the presidential vote count.
      One post, shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, declared: “Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.”
      The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.
      [embedded content]
      Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.
      “My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”
      “First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.” More

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      Facebook leak reveals policies on restricting New York Post's Biden story

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      Facebook moderators had to manually intervene to suppress a controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden, according to leaked moderation guidelines seen by the Guardian.The document, which lays out in detail Facebook’s policies for dealing with misinformation on Facebook and Instagram, sheds new light on the process that led to the company’s decision to reduce the distribution of the story.“This story is eligible to be factchecked by Facebook’s third-party factchecking partners,” Facebook’s policy communications director, Andy Stone, said at the time. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending factchecker review.”In fact, the documents show, the New York Post – like most major websites – was given special treatment as part of Facebook’s standard process. Stories can be “enqueued” for Facebook’s third-party factcheckers in one of two ways: either by being flagged by an AI, or by being manually added by one of the factcheckers themselves.Facebook’s AI looks for signals “including feedback from the community and disbelief comments” to automatically predict which posts might contain misinformation. “Predicted content is temporarily (for seven days) soft demoted in feed (at 50% strength) and enqueued to fact check product for review by [third-party factcheckers],” the document says.But some posts are not automatically demoted. Sites in the “Alexa 5K” list, “which includes content in the top 5,000 most popular internet sites”, are supposed to keep their distribution high, “under the assumption these are unlikely to be spreading misinformation”.Those guidelines can be manually overridden, however. “In some cases, we manually enqueue content … either with or without temporary demotion. We can do this on escalation and based on whether the content is eligible for fact-checking, related to an issue of importance, and has an external signal of falsity.” The US election is such an “issue of importance”.In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress earlier this week, we have been on heightened alert because of FBI intelligence about the potential for hack and leak operations meant to spread misinformation. Based on that risk, and in line with our existing policies and procedures, we made the decision to temporarily limit the content’s distribution while our factcheckers had a chance to review it. When that didn’t happen, we lifted the demotion.”The guidelines also reveal Facebook had prepared a “break-glass measure” for the US election, allowing its moderators to apply a set of policies for “repeatedly factchecked hoaxes” (RFH) to political content. “For a claim to be included as RFH, it must meet eligibility criteria (including falsity, virality and severity) and have content policy leadership approval.”The policy, which to the Guardian’s knowledge has not yet been applied, would lead to Facebook blocking viral falsehoods about the election without waiting for them to be debunked each time a new version appeared. A similar policy about Covid-19 hoaxes is enforced by “hard demoting the content, applying a custom inform treatment, and rejecting ads”.Facebook acts only on a few types of misinformation without involving third-party factcheckers, the documents reveal. Misinformation aimed at voter or census interference is removed outright “because of the severity of the harm to democratic systems”. Manipulated media, or “deepfakes”, are removed “because of the difficulty of ‘unseeing’ content so sophisticatedly edited”. And misinformation that “contributes to imminent violence or physical harm” is removed because of the security of imminent physical harm.The latter policy is not normally applied by ground-level moderation staff, but a special exception has been made for misinformation about Covid-19, the document says. Similar exceptions have been made to misinformation about polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to misinformation about Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Facebook also has a unique policy around vaccine hoaxes. “Where groups and pages spread these widely debunked hoaxes about vaccinations two or more times within 90 days, those groups and pages will be demoted in search results, all of their content will be demoted in news feed, they will be pulled from recommendation systems and type-ahead in search, and pages may have their access to fundraising tools revoked,” the document reads.“This policy is enforced by Facebook and not third-party factcheckers. Thus, our policy of not subjecting politician speech to factchecking does NOT apply here. If a politician shares hoaxes about vaccines we will enforce on that content.” More

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      Republicans use congressional hearing to berate tech CEOs and claim Trump is 'censored'

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      Republican lawmakers berated the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google in a hearing that was ostensibly about a federal law protecting internet companies but mostly focused on how those companies deal with disinformation from Donald Trump and other conservatives.Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai testified before Congress on Wednesday about section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law underpinning US internet regulation that exempts platforms from legal liability for content generated by its users.The hearing was meant to investigate “how best to preserve the internet as a forum for open discourse”, according to the Senate judiciary committee, but came largely in response to allegations from Republicans and the president of anti-conservative bias in the tech world. Those accusations are unsubstantiated. In fact, a recent report alleged that Facebook had suppressed progressive content to appease Republican lawmakers.Still, Republicans on the committee accused the CEOs of “censoring” the president, and questioned them about their decision-making around labeling some of the president’s social media posts as misinformation. The Republican chair of the committee, Roger Wicker, opened the hearing criticizing Twitter and Facebook’s decision to limit sharing of an unverified political story by the New York Post about the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and Twitter’s labeling of a Trump tweet casting doubt on mail-in ballots as potential misinformation.Republican after Republican accused Twitter of mishandling Trump’s tweets, with the Senator Marsha Blackburn claiming the company had “censored” Trump 65 times and Biden “zero” times.Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, responded Trump has not been “censored”.“To be clear, we have not censored the president,” he said. “We have not taken the tweets down that you are referencing, we added additional context as we do with any world leader.” More

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      I know a marriage killed by QAnon and Trump, with help from alienation | Matt Dooley

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      Everyone remembers where they were when Trump won the election. Alex and Mary* remember it especially well. It was the night their relationship fell apart.
      Alex and I first met in 2012. I went to dinner one night with him and his fiancee, Mary. I remember her as a bright, intelligent woman with a passionate interest in animal rights. Fast forward to the evening of 8 November 2016, and a gaudy reality TV star was on the verge of being elected president of the most powerful country on Earth. As Alex and Mary watched state after state fall for Donald Trump, it became clear that the beginning of this new chapter in American history would mark the end of their marriage.
      During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mary had become a dedicated conspiracy theorist, paving the way for her embrace of a bizarre conspiracy theory known as QAnon. “I had a nervous breakdown,” says Alex. “I couldn’t wrap my mind around the whole Trump thing and all the weird stuff Mary was getting into. I just fell apart.” Mary is unambiguous about the reason their marriage ended. “It is 100% my fault. I came in as one person and left as another.”
      Alex and Mary moved from Australia to California in early 2014. Alex had a job offer and they decided to take the plunge. From day one, Alex was pulling long days at the office and Mary passed a lot of her time online, frequenting a huge message board community called 4chan. A naturally inquisitive person, Mary enjoyed reading about fringe opinions with a specific focus on alternative medicine. After a series of bungled health diagnoses, Mary had lost faith in the authorities. She viewed the entire medical system as a web of malevolent conspiracies. 4chan had vibrant communities for discussing these issues and more. At the darker end of the 4chan spectrum there lurked several large groups dedicated to white supremacist hate speech, antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
      Mary’s network of 4chan friends became an increasingly important antidote to the sense of alienation she experienced in her new town. While Alex jeered Trump’s orange skin and ridiculous hair, an avid following was growing across America and the world.
      In Trump, Mary saw someone who was finally going to shake up the establishment and put an end to the hegemony of the political elite. “I was praying and meditating for Trump to win,” she says. “That is where all of my consciousness was”. Alex admits he didn’t take it seriously. “If she brought up Trump, I just tried to shut it down,” he sighs. “ I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to seriously believe in that guy’s bullshit.”
      One day in the autumn of 2016, Alex drove Mary out past the used car yards and fast-food joints to a convention centre near the airport. “I knew she had been doing some chanting or something with the Hare Krishnas and dabbling in Scientology,” says Alex. “It was her thing and I respected that. I just didn’t want to know about it”.
      Mary wasn’t on her way to a Hare Krishna meeting. She was going to a presentation by David Icke, an English conspiracy theorist whose ravings include: the existence of a nefarious reptilian race invading Earth from a parallel universe; various antisemitic nonsense; the obligatory UFO fare; and a cabal of deep state villains.
      Icke has attempted to foretell the end of the world several times (incorrectly, thus far). His predictions imagine absurd cataclysmic showdowns between good and evil. In 2019, the Australian government rejected Icke’s visa application on grounds of character. While an army of multi-dimensional lizard people may seem far-fetched, Public Policy Polling released a study in April 2013, which showed that 4% of Americans believed lizard creatures control the world. That is more than 12 million people.
      Mary describes how she felt after seeing Icke speak: “I came away smiling. I felt like everything was clear, like it all made sense”. In October 2017, an anonymous blog post turned up on the message boards. It was posted by a mysterious member, named “Q”, who claimed to be a high-level US government whistleblower with secrets to share. Again, Mary felt like puzzle pieces were falling into place. “I had been waiting for this. I knew Q was coming,” she says.
      David Singh Grewal, professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law, has published research on the dynamics of conspiracy theory. He explains how the over-simplification of a perceived enemy allows the conspiracy theorist to role-play “the one good cop that takes down the bad guys and makes America great again”. “The conspiracy theory gives the believer a feeling of empowerment,” he says. “They feel as though they have all the answers.”
      Rather than being one specific conspiracy theory, QAnon is better thought of as a constellation of conspiracy theories. At the core of this ever expanding galaxy of conspiratorial solar systems is the idea that a shady cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles are working in the shadows to bring down Trump’s presidency.
      The genius of Q is that it remains non-specific. Just about anyone can find a version of truth that suits their palate. For Mary, it was distrust in the medical system and disgust at child abuse. Others have been motivated by changing racial demographics, feminism, gun rights, Covid, 5G towers – you name it. BYO fears and grievances.
      Three years and five thousand odd messages after the original post, Q content is a rambling mishmash of obtuse clues and inane conjecture. Every post is a regurgitation of publicly available information organised into a dramatic narrative, concocted to keep millions of followers coming back for more. And Mary is all in.
      Alex and Mary’s relationship ended in divorce over their fundamental disagreements. Alex says he doesn’t think he could have changed Mary’s mind, but he is philosophical about the way society mocks conspiracy theorists. “I just couldn’t get past taking the piss out of it,” he says. “But I think that is the problem with QAnon and this whole Trump thing. Everyone on the left spends too much time making jokes.”
      Asked if she thinks the wild web of QAnon conspiracies might be bullshit, Mary pauses for a moment. “Well, I guess it could be. But it’s a great story if it is”.
      * Alex and Mary’s names have been changed for the purpose of this article.
      • Matt Dooley is an Australian writer and journalist More

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      What is QAnon and why is it so dangerous? – video explainer

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      Donald Trump has referred to QAnon followers as ‘people who love our country’ – while to the FBI considers them a potential domestic terror threat. The Guardian US technology reporter Julia Carrie Wong explains the roots – and rise – of QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory that emerged in the US in 2017, and is now spreading across the world
      The QAnon orphans: people who have lost loved ones to conspiracy theories
      ‘Quite frankly terrifying’: How the QAnon conspiracy theory is taking root in the UK

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      Amazon removes shirts with derogatory slogan about Kamala Harris

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      Amazon has removed a clothing line emblazoned with an offensive slogan referring to Kamala Harris from its website after complaints from Twitter users who branded it “unacceptable”.The T-shirts, tank tops and hoodies which had the words “Joe and the hoe” written in red, white and blue in the style of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate Harris’s campaign logo, were on sale for between $24.99 and $42.99.The derogatory phrase was also recently adopted by the conservative radio host and friend of Donald Trump Rush Limbaugh, who has a history of making abusive comments about the senator.The removal of the items followed pressure from Twitter users who urged people to complain to the retail giant.“Let @amazon know this is unacceptable,” wrote @LesaPamplin, a criminal defence attorney from Texas, with a screengrab of the clothing. “We are not sitting idly by and taking this bullshit.”An Amazon spokesperson said on Wednesday that the products had been removed, adding: “All sellers must follow our selling guidelines and those who do not will be subject to action including potential removal of their account.”While the products appear to have been removed, the seller, “The Oxygen Bandit”, still seems to be active on the site with a range of politically themed garments including a “Byedon 2020” hoodie and “Kamala smelled best” and “I’m an AmeriKaren” T-shirts.Later on Wednesday Harris is due to make US history as the first woman of colour on a major party ticket when she accepts her party’s vice-president nomination at the Democratic national convention. More