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      in US Politics

      The media has mostly not taken the bait on dubious Biden claims – with some Australia-linked exceptions | Jason Wilson

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      The big difference between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections is that this time, mainstream media outlets are mostly not taking the bait on a dubiously sourced set of digital materials associated with the Democratic candidate.Outside the rightwing bubble, the exceptions are disproportionately connected with Australia: Australian writers, Australian outlets, and/or outlets associated with News Corporation, who, like its founder, has Australian origins.The New York Post, a News Corp tabloid, has been leading the pursuit of the story of a data cache which is purportedly a copy of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden. They’ve not had much support from other established newspapers, but News Corp’s Fox News and a flotilla of lesser conservative media outlets have been dutifully amplifying and even adding their own touches to the tale.On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Wednesday night US time, for example, the host implied that documents associated with the story, which his editorial team had shipped across the country, may have been stolen by people trying to shut down reporting on the cache.The Daily Beast reported on Thursday, however, that freight company UPS had simply misdirected the package, which has been recovered.The original New York Post Biden piece had huge problems on arrival, so much so that a journalist there reportedly refused to add their byline to it.The chain of custody was one of the issues. The data supposedly came from a computer, dropped off by an unidentified person, who was presumed but not positively determined to be Hunter Biden by the owner of a computer store in Delaware.That man’s story of how he retrieved the data from the machine and how he came to give it to the authorities and Rudy Giuliani has shifted. The FBI subpoenaed a computer from the store, which is reportedly connected to a money-laundering investigation, but it’s impossible to compare that machine with the supposed copy.Anyone who reports on leaked digital materials, as I have, knows that it is trivially easy to fake, modify, subtract from or add to, and otherwise mess around with any documents in any cache. Some documents carry indelible marks, such as any emails that are signed with DKIM security signatures, but everything else can be messed with.In this case, we haven’t seen the originals, just PDF printouts, and the New York Post has not been forthcoming with any detailed or satisfactory account of its own authentication process. It hasn’t said how it determined the authenticity of the cache as a whole, or individual items it has reported on, and has continued handwaving about the FBI subpoena, and the lack of denials from the Biden camp.If it does know for sure that the material is a genuine copy of Biden’s laptop, it isn’t letting on how. At least some of the material appears to be authentic. A sex tape released last week, for example, appears to really feature Hunter Biden. But that doesn’t mean that Giuliani has it because Hunter Biden took all that data to the computer shop. We still don’t really know who put them together, how, and for what purpose.This explains the queasiness of most mainstream outlets – of whom Giuliani told the New York Times that “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” The Wall Street Journal and Fox News were both reportedly offered elements of the story, and each refused.(One of Fox’s news anchors, Chris Wallace, commented that “I can understand the concern about this story. It is completely unverified and frankly, Rudy Giuliani is not the most reliable source anymore. I hate to say that, but it’s just true.”)None of this appears to have been a concern for the leadership at the New York Post, which once again now includes Col Allan, its Australian-born one-time editor in chief, and an outspoken Trump supporter. Allan retired in 2016 but is now back there as a special adviser, and was reportedly leading the charge to publish the material quickly.Once they pushed it out, Fox News started running with the pack that the Post had whistled up.So too, at crucial moments, did Australia’s News Corp outlets. On Sunday 18 October, Sharri Markson hosted Steve Bannon on her Sunday evening program. Bannon crowed about an email from Hunter Biden’s lawyer which supposedly showed him asking for the computer back.Bannon told Markson that the lawyer called the shop owner, “and when the guy said I can’t remember, I’m going back to my shop, he sent a couple of emails in a panic saying ‘I’ve got to get my hands on this right away’”.That email was subsequently released by a Fox reporter, and merely contained a request that the proprietor “review your records” on the matter. The lawyer, meanwhile, is on record saying that the Bidens “have no idea” where the email came from.Markson’s show, like most of Sky’s fare, is not widely watched. But she’s willing to have Bannon on. One might say that he couldn’t get arrested in the US, except that he recently was, and charged with fraud in connection with a border wall crowdfunding scheme, aboard the mega-yacht of his reported employer, Guo Wengui, whose bitter fight with the Chinese government has driven him into exile.Giuliani’s material was good enough for News Corp’s post; Bannon’s record apparently posed no concerns to News Corp’s Markson. News Corp’s Australian commentariat, and expatriate New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, have all assisted in pushing the story, and pushing back on criticism.While most media outlets had a reckoning after 2016, it didn’t extend to crucial parts of News Corporation, including the most prominent faces of its Australian operation. More

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      in US Politics

      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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      in US Politics

      Despair or denial – are these the only options in the run-up to election night? | Emma Brockes

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      Four days out from the US election, and everyone is feeling tired and emotional. It is hard to focus, easy to agonise, and soothing – if the volume of pain on social media is anything to go by – to share with the group one’s inability to function. This is not limited to people living in the US, but – as with the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and ascent of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court – is felt by plenty of observers abroad as acute and very personal pain. People are, by their own admission, weeping, paralyzed, grief-stricken, terrified, frozen, nauseous and bingeing. You can’t turn it off. There is no escape.
      At least this is the impression one gets after spending too long online. How we live psychologically in relation to the news is something we are assumed not to have much control over. You can be an ostrich and happy or that guy trapped in a feedback loop of conspiracy theories on Facebook – but nobody wants to be him. Or you can be informed and miserable, on which count not feeling completely dismantled at the moment is a dereliction of civic duty. Who runs the US affects the rest of the world, and it is not outlandish for Brits – or, say, affluent New Yorkers, insulated from the worst effects of a Trump re-election – to be emotionally disturbed ahead of the election. What remains curious is whether the sheer levels of reported distress are to any degree optional, or entirely related to the trauma at hand.
      If I put down my immediate worries, I can, within about three mental leaps, get from Trump’s re-election to the ship sailing on climate breakdown, to the end of human civilisation, taking my descendants with it. The same goes for the domino run of panic around Coney Barrett’s confirmation on the supreme court, bringing with it the threat of reversals on abortion and marriage equality. These planes, always idling at the end of the runway, require a small amount of energy to get airborne, however, and with a bit of effort – staying off social media; narrowing my range of vision to the next 45 minutes – I can usually stop the thing taking off.
      The question is whether I should want to. Distress as a form of empathy is imagined to be a precursor to action, the necessary spur to political activity. Denial, meanwhile, is imagined only ever to foster apathy. I’m sure this is true in lots of contexts, and yet when we are powerless to do anything, as we are at this stage of the election, anxiety itself feels like a proxy for Doing Something, and a useless one at that. Fretting on Twitter might offer solace, but it risks exacerbating the very thing it seeks to remedy.
      And it’s an unreliable measure of anything much beyond one’s own temperature. The two sharpest responses I’ve had to an election were in 1997, when Tony Blair became prime minister, ending a Tory run that had lasted all but three years of my life, coinciding with the elation of graduating and the dawn of adult life, and seven years later, when George W Bush won a second term by defeating John Kerry. I was in Britain in 2004: the US election had nothing to do with me – or rather, it was less my concern than it would be in 2016, when Donald Trump became president of the country I lived in. But while Trump’s election was a terrible shock, I felt the disappointment of the Bush re-election more keenly. I was less politically jaded then, more inclined to believe things would turn out OK, and still recovering from the death of my mother. As in 97, my response to the election was more life than politics.
      There are broader injuries that perhaps can’t be dodged. For Americans, Trump has delivered a psychological blow in the form of besmirching the very idea of their country, an injury over-arching all others. And while, for reasons of self-preservation, it might make sense to skirt Twitter for a few days, you can’t entirely avoid these things. I used to sleepwalk – or sleep-bolt – something I haven’t done for 10 years. I am calm during the day, but one night this week, I woke up at 2.30am in my living room, eyes on the clock, heart racing, trying to figure out how I got there and why.
      • Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Glenn Greenwald resigns from the Intercept over 'editorial freedom'

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      The investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has resigned abruptly from the Intercept, the news website he co-founded, and accused the organization of seeking to censor him over a planned article critical of the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.
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      Greenwald, who was a vital part of the Guardian US team that broke the Edward Snowden whistleblower story in 2013, released a statement online that blasted the editors of the Intercept as being in hock to Biden and the Democratic party.
      “The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression,” he wrote in a lengthy resignation post.
      Greenwald is a vocal critic of the US media and American politics, with an abrasive style that has won him many admirers as well as a legion of critics. Recently, he has been especially critical of media coverage of the Russian attempt to interfere with the 2016 US election and has been criticized by some leftwing commentators for appearing on rightwing Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show.
      He co-founded the Intercept in 2014 with investment from the tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar. The website rapidly established itself as a scrappy online news organization that could punch above its weight on some issues, especially cybersecurity, politics and tech and corruption in Brazil, where Greenwald lives.
      Greenwald said the site no longer carried out the mission that he had intended when it was founded, which was to amplify voices rarely heard in American journalism. In his resignation statement Greenwald said: “The current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable when compared to that original vision.”
      He also said he would post the article on Biden that he said had been censored online.
      In a sharply worded statement, the Intercept’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, said that the charge that the Intercept was censoring its staff was “preposterous” and that Greenwald’s main problem had been a desire to have his work published unedited.
      “The narrative he presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies – all of them designed to make him look like a victim, not a grown person throwing a tantrum,” she added. More

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      in Elections

      Fox News's Tucker Carlson mocked for 'lost in the mail' Biden documents claim

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      The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been mocked for his attempt to explain why he could not produce some documents he had promised relating to Joe Biden.He said the only copy of the papers, which he claimed added to claims about Biden’s son Hunter, had been lost.In a segment delivered to camera, Carlson said:
      On Monday we received from a source a collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family. We believe those documents are authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning … We texted a producer in New York and we asked him to send those documents to us in LA … He shipped those documents overnight to California with a large national carrier brand … But the Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from the shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing. The documents had disappeared.
      He went on to say of the delivery company, which he did not name:
      They searched the plane and the trucks that carried it, they went through the office in New York where our producer dropped that package off, they combed their entire cavernous sorting facility. They used pictures of what we had sent so that searchers would know what to look for. They went far and beyond. But they found nothing, those documents have vanished. As of tonight the company has no idea – and no working theory even – about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign.
      Carlson’s show has been one of the main conduits of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, attempting to expand the narrative about his dealings in Ukraine and China and castigating other media outlets for not paying enough attention to claims made recently in the New York Post.Carson’s story of the lost documents cut little ice on social media:BREAKING: Documents Tucker Carlson never actually had that would allegedly blow up the election were so important that they were sent via DHL, and now can’t be found despite copiers, iPhone cameras and security cameras. 😂😂😂 https://t.co/9yKkDAUh2v— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) October 29, 2020 More

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      in US Politics

      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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      in US Politics

      Fears of crackdown on US journalism as Trump ally removes editorial 'firewall'

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      The US diplomats’ union has denounced an attempt by a Trump appointee to remove the “firewall” protecting the editorial independence of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and other US overseas broadcasters, warning that it marked an attempt to turn them into vehicles for “government propaganda”.
      The CEO of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Michael Pack, announced overnight on Monday that he would be rescinding the “firewall rule” insulating journalists from editorial direction from politically appointed management.
      The rule, Pack argued, was “in tension with the law and harmful to the agency and the US national interest”.
      “The rule threatened constitutional values because the constitution gives the president broad latitude in directing the foreign policy of the United States,” Pack wrote in a message to his staff.
      The move follows several steps already taken by Pack, an ally of the rightwing ideologue Steve Bannon, to exercise greater political control USAGM broadcasters that include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. Since taking up the job in June, he has conducted a purge on senior journalists and refused to renew the visas of foreign reporters.
      The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) said it stood in solidarity with USAGM staff in opposition to the move
      “This action runs counter to the tradition of independence and non-partisanship of US public broadcasting … and tarnishes America’s tradition of a free press that goes back to the founders,” AFSA said in a statement. “Government propaganda has no place in official US news reporting. Truth is the best antidote to foreign disinformation.”
      Eliot Engel, the chair of the House foreign affairs committee, said Pack had no legal authority to rescind the “firewall rule”.
      “Congress created that firewall by law and although Mr Pack can huff and puff, he can’t blow that wall down. The rule he rescinded yesterday clarified the legal protections. The firewall remains,” Engel said in a statement.
      In another potential threat to independent journalism, the Department of Homeland Security has proposed reducing the length of journalist visas from five years to 240 days with the possibility of just one extension, which would be contingent on a DHS review of “the content that the foreign information media representative is covering in the United States”.
      “The proposed changes by the DHS would restrict the ability of independent foreign news organizations from reporting news within the US and could lead to reprisals affecting US journalists in other countries,” the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, Matthew Hall, said.
      “Both outcomes are unacceptable.” More