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    Using Police to Clear Protesters, Universities Struggle to Calm Campuses

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    Students were arrested at N.Y.U. and Yale on Monday. But at Columbia, that approach led to a new encampment and demonstrations outside its gates.Police arrest protesters outside of New York University on Monday night. Adam Gray for The New York TimesAt New York University, the police swept in to arrest protesting students on Monday night, ending a standoff with the school’s administration.At Yale, the police placed protesters’ wrists into zip ties on Monday morning and escorted them onto campus shuttles to receive summonses for trespassing.Columbia kept its classroom doors closed on Monday, moving lectures online and urging students to stay home.Harvard Yard was shut to the public. Nearby, at campuses like Tufts and Emerson, administrators weighed how to handle encampments that looked much like the one that the police dismantled at Columbia last week — which protesters quickly resurrected. And on the West Coast, a new encampment bubbled at the University of California, Berkeley.Less than a week after the arrests of more than 100 protesters at Columbia, administrators at some of the country’s most influential universities were struggling, and largely failing, to calm campuses torn by the conflict in Gaza and Israel.Despite arrests at Columbia last week, protests continued on campus on Monday.C.S. Muncy for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Facebook Failed to Stop Ads Threatening Election Workers

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      The ads, submitted by researchers, were rejected by YouTube and TikTok.Facebook says it does not allow content that threatens serious violence. But when researchers submitted ads threatening to “lynch,” “murder” and “execute” election workers around Election Day this year, the company’s largely automated moderation systems approved many of them.Out of the 20 ads submitted by researchers containing violent content, 15 were approved by Facebook, according to a new test published by Global Witness, a watchdog group, and New York University’s Cybersecurity for Democracy. Researchers deleted the approved ads before they were published.Ten of the test ads were submitted in Spanish. Facebook approved six of those ads, compared with nine of the 10 ads in English.TikTok and YouTube rejected all the ads and suspended the accounts that attempted to submit them, the researchers said.The tests underscored the challenges that social networks face in moderating increasingly partisan and violent content around elections, especially as poll workers are facing additional threats from election deniers and far-right extremists. The Justice Department and other federal agencies warned ahead of this year’s midterm elections that threats against election workers had surged.In a statement, a spokesman for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it later disabled several accounts that had submitted the ads. The company also said that ads continue to be reviewed after they go live.“This is a small sample of ads that are not representative of what people see on our platforms,” the spokesman said in a statement. “Content that incites violence against election workers or anyone else has no place on our apps, and recent reporting has made clear that Meta’s ability to deal with these issues effectively exceeds that of other platforms.”The research adds to previous tests conducted by the same groups, including one this year in which 20 ads were submitted containing political misinformation. In that test, Facebook approved only two of the misleading ads in English from an account in the United States, while TikTok approved about 90 percent of them. YouTube suspended the account that tried to submit the ads.But this round used more overt language that tested Facebook’s largely automated moderating system. Those included direct threats of violence, which were sourced from real statements by election deniers and other far-right extremists in the United States. One ad, which was approved by Facebook, read: “We are going to kill you all.” Another ad, which threatened to abuse children, was also approved.“It was really quite shocking to see the results,” said Damon McCoy, an associate professor at N.Y.U. “I thought a really simple keyword search would have flagged this for manual review.”In a statement, researchers also said they wanted to see social networks like Facebook increase content moderation efforts and offer more transparency around the moderation actions they take.“The fact that YouTube and TikTok managed to detect the death threats and suspend our account, whereas Facebook permitted the majority of the ads to be published shows that what we are asking is technically possible,” they wrote. More

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      in Elections

      YouTube’s stronger election misinformation policies had a spillover effect on Twitter and Facebook, researchers say.

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      Share of Election-Related Posts on Social Platforms Linking to Videos Making Claims of Fraud
      Source: Center for Social Media and Politics at New York UniversityBy The New York TimesYouTube’s stricter policies against election misinformation was followed by sharp drops in the prevalence of false and misleading videos on Facebook and Twitter, according to new research released on Thursday, underscoring the video service’s power across social media.Researchers at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University found a significant rise in election fraud YouTube videos shared on Twitter immediately after the Nov. 3 election. In November, those videos consistently accounted for about one-third of all election-related video shares on Twitter. The top YouTube channels about election fraud that were shared on Twitter that month came from sources that had promoted election misinformation in the past, such as Project Veritas, Right Side Broadcasting Network and One America News Network.But the proportion of election fraud claims shared on Twitter dropped sharply after Dec. 8. That was the day YouTube said it would remove videos that promoted the unfounded theory that widespread errors and fraud changed the outcome of the presidential election. By Dec. 21, the proportion of election fraud content from YouTube that was shared on Twitter had dropped below 20 percent for the first time since the election.The proportion fell further after Jan. 7, when YouTube announced that any channels that violated its election misinformation policy would receive a “strike,” and that channels that received three strikes in a 90-day period would be permanently removed. By Inauguration Day, the proportion was around 5 percent.The trend was replicated on Facebook. A postelection surge in sharing videos containing fraud theories peaked at about 18 percent of all videos on Facebook just before Dec. 8. After YouTube introduced its stricter policies, the proportion fell sharply for much of the month, before rising slightly before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The proportion dropped again, to 4 percent by Inauguration Day, after the new policies were put in place on Jan. 7.To reach their findings, researchers collected a random sampling of 10 percent of all tweets each day. They then isolated tweets that linked to YouTube videos. They did the same for YouTube links on Facebook, using a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool, CrowdTangle.From this large data set, the researchers filtered for YouTube videos about the election broadly, as well as about election fraud using a set of keywords like “Stop the Steal” and “Sharpiegate.” This allowed the researchers to get a sense of the volume of YouTube videos about election fraud over time, and how that volume shifted in late 2020 and early 2021.Misinformation on major social networks has proliferated in recent years. YouTube in particular has lagged behind other platforms in cracking down on different types of misinformation, often announcing stricter policies several weeks or months after Facebook and Twitter. In recent weeks, however, YouTube has toughened its policies, such as banning all antivaccine misinformation and suspending the accounts of prominent antivaccine activists, including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokeswoman, said that YouTube was the only major online platform with a presidential election integrity policy. “We also raised up authoritative content for election-related search queries and reduced the spread of harmful election-related misinformation,” she said.Megan Brown, a research scientist at the N.Y.U. Center for Social Media and Politics, said it was possible that after YouTube banned the content, people could no longer share the videos that promoted election fraud. It is also possible that interest in the election fraud theories dropped considerably after states certified their election results.But the bottom line, Ms. Brown said, is that “we know these platforms are deeply interconnected.” YouTube, she pointed out, has been identified as one of the most-shared domains across other platforms, including in both of Facebook’s recently released content reports and N.Y.U.’s own research.“It’s a huge part of the information ecosystem,” Ms. Brown said, “so when YouTube’s platform becomes healthier, others do as well.” More