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      Robert Kennedy Jr., a Noted Vaccine Skeptic, Files to Run for President

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      While he has not yet announced his plans, he filed the federal paperwork for a campaign to run as a Democrat.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political activist known most recently for his campaign to discredit coronavirus vaccines, filed paperwork on Wednesday to run for president as a Democrat, offering a potential long-shot challenge to President Biden.Mr. Kennedy, the son and namesake of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated while running for president in 1968, has not made a formal announcement. However, he teased a run at a political gathering in New Hampshire last month, telling a crowd: “I’ve passed the biggest hurdle, which is, my wife has greenlighted it.” He has set up a website to solicit donations and volunteers for a potential run, and a tweet pinned to his Twitter account says he will run if “I can raise the money and mobilize enough people to win.”Mr. Kennedy, 69, was once a top environmental lawyer, but his interests veered away from the Democratic mainstream into conspiracy theories, for which he has earned the public rebuke of some members of his prominent family. A longtime vaccine skeptic, he linked childhood vaccinations to autism, a claim thoroughly rebuked by medical experts. In a recent book, he claimed that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who was President Biden’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus pandemic, and Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, conspired with drug companies to profit from vaccines. Instagram blocked Mr. Kennedy’s account for spreading vaccine misinformation in 2021.If he becomes a candidate, Mr. Kennedy wrote on Twitter, his top priority will be to “end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power.”While many Democrats express concerns about Mr. Biden as a candidate in 2024, when he would be 81 on Election Day, no major party leaders are actively exploring a primary challenge. The only well-known announced challenger to date is the author Marianne Williamson, who also ran in 2020. More

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      A Campaign Aide Didn’t Write That Email. A.I. Did.

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      The Democratic Party has begun testing the use of artificial intelligence to write first drafts of some fund-raising messages, appeals that often perform better than those written entirely by human beings.Fake A.I. images of Donald J. Trump getting arrested in New York spread faster than they could be fact-checked last week.And voice-cloning tools are producing vividly lifelike audio of President Biden — and many others — saying things they did not actually say.Artificial intelligence isn’t just coming soon to the 2024 campaign trail. It’s already here.The swift advance of A.I. promises to be as disruptive to the political sphere as to broader society. Now any amateur with a laptop can manufacture the kinds of convincing sounds and images that were once the domain of the most sophisticated digital players. This democratization of disinformation is blurring the boundaries between fact and fake at a moment when the acceptance of universal truths — that Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump in 2020, for example — is already being strained.And as synthetic media gets more believable, the question becomes: What happens when people can no longer trust their own eyes and ears?Inside campaigns, artificial intelligence is expected to soon help perform mundane tasks that previously required fleets of interns. Republican and Democratic engineers alike are racing to develop tools to harness A.I. to make advertising more efficient, to engage in predictive analysis of public behavior, to write more and more personalized copy and to discover new patterns in mountains of voter data. The technology is evolving so fast that most predict a profound impact, even if specific ways in which it will upend the political system are more speculation than science.“It’s an iPhone moment — that’s the only corollary that everybody will appreciate,” said Dan Woods, the chief technology officer on Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign. “It’s going to take pressure testing to figure out whether it’s good or bad — and it’s probably both.”OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot ushered in the generative-text gold rush, has already released a more advanced model. Google has announced plans to expand A.I. offerings inside popular apps like Google Docs and Gmail, and is rolling out its own chatbot. Microsoft has raced a version to market, too. A smaller firm, ElevenLabs, has developed a text-to-audio tool that can mimic anyone’s voice in minutes. Midjourney, a popular A.I. art generator, can conjure hyper-realistic images with a few lines of text that are compelling enough to win art contests.“A.I. is about to make a significant change in the 2024 election because of machine learning’s predictive ability,” said Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s first 2020 campaign manager, who has since founded a digital firm that advertises some A.I. capabilities.Disinformation and “deepfakes” are the dominant fear. While forgeries are nothing new to politics — a photoshopped image of John Kerry and Jane Fonda was widely shared in 2004 — the ability to produce and share them has accelerated, with viral A.I. images of Mr. Trump being restrained by the police only the latest example. A fake image of Pope Francis in a white puffy coat went viral in recent days, as well.Many are particularly worried about local races, which receive far less scrutiny. Ahead of the recent primary in the Chicago mayoral race, a fake video briefly sprung up on a Twitter account called “Chicago Lakefront News” that impersonated one candidate, Paul Vallas.“Unfortunately, I think people are going to figure out how to use this for evil faster than for improving civic life,” said Joe Rospars, who was chief strategist on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 campaign and is now the chief executive of a digital consultancy.Those who work at the intersection of politics and technology return repeatedly to the same historical hypothetical: If the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape broke today — the one in which Mr. Trump is heard bragging about assaulting women and getting away with it — would Mr. Trump acknowledge it was him, as he did in 2016?The nearly universal answer was no.“I think about that example all the time,” said Matt Hodges, who was the engineering director on Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign and is now executive director of Zinc Labs, which invests in Democratic technology. Republicans, he said, “may not use ‘fake news’ anymore. It may be ‘Woke A.I.’”For now, the frontline function of A.I. on campaigns is expected to be writing first drafts of the unending email and text cash solicitations.“Given the amount of rote, asinine verbiage that gets produced in politics, people will put it to work,” said Luke Thompson, a Republican political strategist.As an experiment, The New York Times asked ChatGPT to produce a fund-raising email for Mr. Trump. The app initially said, “I cannot take political sides or promote any political agenda.” But then it immediately provided a template of a potential Trump-like email.The chatbot denied a request to make the message “angrier” but complied when asked to “give it more edge,” to better reflect the often apocalyptic tone of Mr. Trump’s pleas. “We need your help to send a message to the radical left that we will not back down,” the revised A.I. message said. “Donate now and help us make America great again.”Among the prominent groups that have experimented with this tool is the Democratic National Committee, according to three people briefed on the efforts. In tests, the A.I.-generated content the D.N.C. has used has, as often as not, performed as well or better than copy drafted entirely by humans, in terms of generating engagement and donations.Party officials still make edits to the A.I. drafts, the people familiar with the efforts said, and no A.I. messages have yet been written under the name of Mr. Biden or any other person, two people said. The D.N.C. declined to comment.Higher Ground Labs, a small venture capital firm that invests in political technology for progressives, is currently working on a project, called Quiller, to more systematically use A.I. to write, send and test the effectiveness of fund-raising emails — all at once.“A.I. has mostly been marketing gobbledygook for the last three cycles,” said Betsy Hoover, a founding partner at Higher Ground Labs who was the director of digital organizing for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. “We are at a moment now where there are things people can do that are actually helpful.”Political operatives, several of whom were granted anonymity to discuss potentially unsavory uses of artificial intelligence they are concerned about or planning to deploy, raised a raft of possibilities.Some feared bad actors could leverage A.I. chatbots to distract or waste a campaign’s precious staff time by pretending to be potential voters. Others floated producing deepfakes of their own candidate to generate personalized videos — thanking supporters for their donations, for example. In India, one candidate in 2020 produced a deepfake to disseminate a video of himself speaking in different languages; the technology is far superior now.Mr. Trump himself shared an A.I. image in recent days that appeared to show him kneeling in prayer. He posted it on Truth Social, his social media site, with no explanation.One strategist predicted that the next generation of dirty tricks could be direct-to-voter misinformation that skips social media sites entirely. What if, this strategist said, an A.I. audio recording of a candidate was sent straight to the voice mail of voters on the eve of an election?Synthetic audio and video are already swirling online, much of it as parody.On TikTok, there is an entire genre of videos featuring Mr. Biden, Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump profanely bantering, with the A.I.-generated audio overlaid as commentary during imaginary online video gaming sessions.On “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert recently used A.I. audio to have the Fox News host Tucker Carlson “read” aloud his text messages slamming Mr. Trump. Mr. Colbert labeled the audio as A.I. and the image on-screen showed a blend of Mr. Carlson’s face and a Terminator cyborg for emphasis.The right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec pushed out a “deepfake” video last month of Mr. Biden announcing a national draft because of the conflict in Ukraine. It was quickly seen by millions.“The videos we’ve seen in the last few weeks are really the canary in the coal mine,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics. “We measure advances now not in years but in months, and there are many months before the election.”Some A.I. tools were deployed in 2020. The Biden campaign created a program, code-named Couch Potato, that linked facial recognition, voice-to-text and other tools to automate the transcription of live events, including debates. It replaced the work of a host of interns and aides, and was immediately searchable through an internal portal.The technology has improved so quickly, Mr. Woods said, that off-the-shelf tools are “1,000 times better” than what had to be built from scratch four years ago.One looming question is what campaigns can and cannot do with OpenAI’s powerful tools. One list of prohibited uses last fall lumped together “political campaigns, adult content, spam, hateful content.”Kim Malfacini, who helped create the OpenAI’s rules and is on the company’s trust and safety team, said in an interview that “political campaigns can use our tools for campaigning purposes. But it’s the scaled use that we are trying to disallow here.” OpenAI revised its usage rules after being contacted by The Times, specifying now that “generating high volumes of campaign materials” is prohibited.Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for Mr. Obama, dabbled with the A.I. tool from ElevenLabs to create a faux recording of Mr. Biden calling into the popular “Pod Save America” podcast that Mr. Vietor co-hosts. He paid a few dollars and uploaded real audio of Mr. Biden, and out came an audio likeness.“The accuracy was just uncanny,” Mr. Vietor said in an interview.The show labeled it clearly as A.I. But Mr. Vietor could not help noticing that some online commenters nonetheless seemed confused. “I started playing with the software thinking this is so much fun, this will be a great vehicle for jokes,” he said, “and finished thinking, ‘Oh God, this is going to be a big problem.’” More

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      Online Troll Named Microchip Tells of Sowing ‘Chaos’ in 2016 Election

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      The defendant in the unusual trial, Douglass Mackey, and the pseudonymous witness collaborated to beat Hillary Clinton. They met for the first time in a Brooklyn courtroom.The two social media influencers teamed up online years ago.Both had large right-wing followings and pseudonyms to hide their real identities. One called himself Ricky Vaughn, after a fictional baseball player portrayed in a movie by Charlie Sheen. The other called himself Microchip.In 2016, prosecutors say, they set out to trick supporters of Hillary Clinton into thinking they could vote by text message or social media, discouraging them from the polls.“Ricky Vaughn,” whose real name is Douglass Mackey, was charged in 2021 with conspiring to deprive others of their right to vote, and on Wednesday the men met face to face in court for the first time.Mr. Mackey sat at the defense table in Federal District Court in Brooklyn wearing a sober gray suit. He watched as Microchip, clad in a royal-blue sweatsuit and black sandals, approached the witness stand, where he was sworn in under that name and began testifying against him.This month, a federal judge overseeing the case, Nicholas G. Garaufis, ruled that Microchip could testify without revealing his actual name after prosecutors said anonymity was needed to protect current and future investigations.The sight of a witness testifying under a fictional identity added one more odd element to an already unusual case that reflects both the rise of social media as a force in politics and the emergence of malicious online mischief-makers — trolls — as influential players in a presidential election. This week’s trial could help determine how much protection the First Amendment gives people who spread disinformation.Microchip’s testimony appeared intended to give jurors an inside view of what prosecutors describe as a conspiracy to disenfranchise voters. It also provided a firsthand account of crass, nihilistic motives behind those efforts.“I wanted to infect everything,” Microchip said, adding that his aim before the 2016 election had been “to cause as much chaos as possible” and diminish Mrs. Clinton’s chances of beating Donald J. Trump.Evidence presented by prosecutors has shown how Mr. Mackey and others, including Microchip, had private online discussions in the weeks before the election, discussing how they could move votes.While Mr. Mackey made clear that he wanted to help Mr. Trump become president, Microchip testified that he was driven mainly by animus for Mrs. Clinton, testifying that his aim had been to “destroy” her reputation.In the fervid and fluid environment surrounding the 2016 election, Mr. Mackey, whose lawyer described him as “a staunch political conservative,” and Microchip, who told BuzzFeed that he was a “staunch liberal,” became allies.Online exchanges and Twitter messages entered into evidence by prosecutors showed the men plotting their strategy. Mr. Mackey saw limiting Black turnout as a key to helping Mr. Trump. Prosecutors said that he posted an image showing a Black woman near a sign reading “African Americans for Hillary” and the message that people could vote by texting “Hillary” to a specific number.Microchip testified that Mr. Mackey was a participant in a private Twitter chat group called “War Room,” adding that he was “very well respected back then” and “a leader of sorts.”Prosecutors introduced records showing that Microchip and Mr. Mackey had retweeted one another dozens of times.Mr. Mackey’s particular talent, according to Microchip, was coming up with ideas and memes that resonated with people who felt that American society was declining and that the West was struggling.Microchip testified that he was self employed as a mobile app developer. He said he had pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge related to his circulation of memes providing misinformation about how to vote. Because of his anonymity the details of that plea could not be confirmed. And he added that he had signed a cooperation agreement with prosecutors agreeing to testify against Mr. Mackey, and to help with other cases.Under cross-examination, Microchip said he had begun working with the F.B.I. in 2018. He also acknowledged telling an investigator in 2021 that there was no “grand plan around stopping people from voting.”His time on the stand included a tutorial of sorts on how he had amassed Twitter followers and misled people who viewed his messages.He testified that he had built up a following with bots, and used hashtags employed by Mrs. Clinton in a process he called “hijacking” to get his messages to her followers. He aimed to seduce viewers with humor, saying, “When people are laughing, they are very easily manipulated.”Microchip said that he sought to discourage voting among Clinton supporters “through fear tactics,” offering conspiratorial takes on ordinary events as a way to drive paranoia and disaffection.One example he cited involved the emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, which were made public by WikiLeaks during the campaign.There was nothing particularly surprising or sinister among those emails, Microchip said, yet he posted thousands of messages about them suggesting otherwise. “My talent is to make things weird and strange, so there is controversy.”Asked by a prosecutor whether he believed the messages he posted, Microchip did not hesitate.“No,” he said. “And I didn’t care.” More

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      Fox and Dominion Urge Judge to Rule on Case

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      At the start of a pretrial hearing for the $1.6 billion defamation trial, the judge said he was still weighing whether to issue a summary judgment.A Delaware judge overseeing Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News said in a pretrial hearing on Tuesday that he was still weighing whether to issue a summary judgment for either side in the case.In a hearing in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday, lawyers for Fox News and Dominion both pushed the judge, Eric M. Davis of the Delaware Superior Court, to rule on the case without a jury. Dominion, an election technology company, is accusing Fox of spreading false claims of widespread vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election.“I haven’t made a decision,” Judge Davis said.The case centers on Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election, when President Donald J. Trump and his supporters began to spread false claims about widespread voter fraud.On Tuesday, Dominion argued that a trove of internal communications and depositions it had obtained showed that Fox executives and hosts had known that some of the claims about election fraud were false but had given them airtime anyway. Fox asked Judge Davis to dismiss the case outright, saying its actions were protected by the First Amendment.A trial is scheduled to begin on April 17.The lawsuit poses a sizable threat to Fox’s business and reputation. Dominion must prove that Fox knowingly broadcast false information about the company, or was reckless enough to disregard substantial evidence that the claims were not true — a legal standard known as “actual malice.” While defamation cases have traditionally proved hard to win, legal experts say Dominion may have enough evidence to clear that high bar.Justin Nelson, a lawyer for Dominion, told the court that it had plenty of evidence that Fox knew what it was doing.Mr. Nelson cited, for example, an excerpt from a deposition by Joe Dorrego, the chief financial officer of Fox News, who was asked whether Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the top executives of Fox News’s parent company, knew that the claims were being aired on the network. Mr. Dorrego answered: “They were certainly aware that the allegations were being reported on Fox News.”“They allowed people to come on the air to make those charges, despite knowing they are false,” Mr. Nelson told the judge.Erin Murphy, a lawyer for Fox, argued in court on Tuesday that a reasonable viewer of Fox News and Fox Business would have understood that the hosts were merely reporting that the president and his lawyers were making the fraud claims, which was newsworthy, and not making factual statements.“We do not think that we are just scot-free simply because a guest said something rather than a host,” Ms. Murphy said. “What we resist is that Dominion’s position seems to be that we are automatically liable because a guest said something.”Ms. Murphy told the judge that there was more context for the shows and statements singled out by Dominion in its complaint that proved the hosts had been merely presenting statements of fact. As an example, she referred to a Dec. 12, 2020, broadcast of “Fox & Friends,” during which the hosts asked Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, about legal challenges relating to voter fraud.“I don’t see how somebody watching that show thinks that by merely asking the president’s lawyer ‘What are you alleging and what evidence do you have to support it?’ the hosts are saying we believe these allegations to be true,” Ms. Murphy said.Ms. Murphy added that there was no evidence that any Fox Corporation executive had been involved in the airing of defamatory statements.Lawyers for Fox are scheduled to finish their arguments before the judge on Wednesday. More

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      Trial of 2016 Twitter Troll to Test Limits of Online Speech

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      Douglass Mackey tried to trick Black people into thinking they could vote by text in the Clinton-Trump presidential election, prosecutors said.The images appeared on Twitter in late 2016 just as the presidential campaign was entering its final stretch. Some featured the message “vote for Hillary” and the phrases “avoid the line” and “vote from home.”Aimed at Democratic voters, and sometimes singling out Black people, the messages were actually intended to help Donald J. Trump, not Hillary Clinton. The goal, federal prosecutors said, was to suppress votes for Ms. Clinton by persuading her supporters to falsely believe they could cast presidential ballots by text message.The misinformation campaign was carried out by a group of conspirators, prosecutors said, including a man in his 20s who called himself Ricky Vaughn. On Monday he will go on trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn under his real name, Douglass Mackey, after being charged with conspiring to spread misinformation designed to deprive others of their right to vote.“The defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one of the most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution,” Nicholas L. McQuaid, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in 2021 when charges against Mr. Mackey were announced. Prosecutors have said that Mr. Mackey, who went to Middlebury College in Vermont and said he lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, used hashtags and memes as part of his deception and outlined his strategies publicly on Twitter and with co-conspirators in private Twitter group chats.“Obviously we can win Pennsylvania,” Mr. Mackey said on Twitter, using one of his pseudonymous accounts less than a week before the election, according to a complaint and affidavit. “The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.”That tweet, court papers said, came a day after Mr. Mackey tweeted an image showing a Black woman in front of a sign supporting Ms. Clinton. That tweet told viewers they could vote for Ms. Clinton by text message.Prosecutors said nearly 5,000 people texted the number shown in the deceptive images, adding that the images stated they had been paid for by the Clinton campaign and had been viewed by people in the New York City area.Mr. Mackey’s trial is expected to provide a window into a small part of what the authorities have described as broad efforts to sway the 2016 election through lies and disinformation. While some of those attempts were orchestrated by Russian security services, others were said to have emanated from American internet trolls.People whose names may surface during the trial or who are expected to testify include a man who tweeted about Jews and Black people and was then disinvited from the DeploraBall, a far-right event in Washington, D.C., the night before Mr. Trump’s inauguration; a failed congressional candidate from Wisconsin; and an obscure federal cooperator who will be allowed to testify under a code name.As the trial has approached, people sympathetic to Mr. Mackey have cast his case as part of a political and cultural war, a depiction driven in part by precisely the sort of partisan social media-fueled effort that he is accused of engineering.Mr. Mackey’s fans have portrayed him as a harmless prankster who is being treated unfairly by the state for engaging in a form of free expression. That notion, perhaps predictably, has proliferated on Twitter, advanced by people using some of the same tools that prosecutors said Mr. Mackey used to disseminate lies. Mackey supporters have referred to him on social media as a “meme martyr” and spread a meme showing him wearing a red MAGA hat and accompanied by the hashtag “#FreeRicky.”Some tweets about Mr. Mackey from prominent figures have included apocalyptic-sounding language. The Fox personality Tucker Carlson posted a video of himself on Twitter calling the trial “the single greatest assault on free speech and human rights in this country’s modern history.”Joe Lonsdale, a founder of Palantir Technologies, retweeted an assertion that Mr. Mackey was being “persecuted by the Biden DOJ for posting memes” and added: “This sounds concerning.” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, replied with a one word affirmation: “Yeah.”Mr. Mackey is accused of participating in private direct message groups on Twitter called “Fed Free Hatechat,” “War Room” and “Infowars Madman” to discuss how to influence the election.Prosecutors said people in those groups discussed sharing memes suggesting that celebrities were supporting Mr. Trump and that Ms. Clinton would start wars and draft women to fight them.One exchange in the Madman group centered on an image that falsely told opponents of Brexit that they could vote “remain” in that British referendum through Facebook or Twitter, according to investigators. One participant in the group asked whether they could make something similar for Ms. Clinton, investigators wrote, adding that another replied: “Typical that all the dopey minorities fell for it.”Last summer, defense lawyers asked that Mr. Mackey’s case be dismissed, referring to Twitter as a “no-holds-barred-free-for-all” and saying “the allegedly deceptive memes” had been protected by the First Amendment as satirical speech.They wrote to the court that it was “highly unlikely” that the memes had fooled any voters and added that any harm was in any event “far outweighed by the chilling of the marketplace of ideas where consumers can assess the value of political expression as provocation, satire, commentary, or otherwise.”Prosecutors say that Mr. Mackey focused on “intentional spreading of false information calculated to mislead and misinform voters about how, where and when to cast a vote in a federal election.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesProsecutors countered that illegal conduct is not protected by the First Amendment merely because it is carried out by language and added that the charge against Mr. Mackey was not based on his political viewpoint or advocacy. Rather, they wrote, it was focused on “intentional spreading of false information calculated to mislead and misinform voters about how, where and when to cast a vote in a federal election.”Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis ruled that the case should continue, saying it was “about conspiracy and injury, not speech” and adding that Mr. Mackey’s contention that his speech was protected as satire was “a question of fact reserved for the jury.”The prosecution’s star witness is likely to be a man known as Microchip, a shadowy online figure who spread misinformation about the 2016 election, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.Microchip was a prominent player in alt-right Twitter around the time of the election, and Judge Garaufis allowed him to testify under his online handle in part because prosecutors say he is helping the F.B.I. with several other covert investigations. Sunday, the case was reassigned to U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly.In court papers filed last month, prosecutors said they intended to ask the witness to explain to the jury how Mr. Mackey and his allies used Twitter direct messaging groups to come up with “deceptive images discussing the time, place, and manner of voting.”One of the people whom Microchip might mention from the stand is Anthime Gionet, better known by his Twitter name, Baked Alaska; he attended the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. He was barred from the DeploraBall after sending a tweet that included stereotypes about Jews and Black people.In January, Mr. Gionet was sentenced to two months in prison for his role in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More

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      YouTube Restores Donald Trump’s Account Privileges

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      The Google-owned video platform became the latest of the big social networks to reverse the former president’s account restrictions.YouTube suspended former President Donald J. Trump’s account on the platform six days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The video platform said it was concerned that Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election could lead to more real-world violence.YouTube, which is owned by Google, reversed that decision on Friday, permitting Mr. Trump to once again upload videos to the popular site. The move came after similar decisions by Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.“We carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, while balancing the chance for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election,” YouTube said on Twitter on Friday. Mr. Trump’s account will have to comply with the site’s content rules like any other account, YouTube added.After false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen circulated online and helped stoke the Jan. 6 attack, social media giants suspended Mr. Trump’s account privileges. Two years later, the platforms have started to soften their content rules. Under Elon Musk’s ownership, Twitter has unwound many of its content moderation efforts. YouTube recently laid off members of its trust and safety team, leaving one person in charge of setting political misinformation policies.Mr. Trump announced in November that he was seeking a second term as president, setting off deliberations at social media companies over whether to allow him back on their platforms. Days later, Mr. Musk polled Twitter users on whether he should reinstate Mr. Trump, and 52 percent of respondents said yes. Like YouTube, Meta said in January that it was important that people hear what political candidates are saying ahead of an election.The former president’s reinstatement is one of the first significant content decisions that YouTube has taken under its new chief executive, Neal Mohan, who got the top job last month. YouTube also recently loosened its profanity rules so that creators who used swear words at the start of a video could still make money from the content.YouTube’s announcement on Friday echoes a pattern of the company and its parent Google making polarizing content decisions after a competitor has already taken the same action. YouTube followed Meta and Twitter in suspending Mr. Trump after the Capitol attack, and in reversing the bans.Since losing his bid for re-election in 2020, Mr. Trump has sought to make a success of his own social media service, Truth Social, which is known for its loose content moderation rules.Mr. Trump on Friday posted on his Facebook page for the first time since his reinstatement. “I’M BACK!” Mr. Trump wrote, alongside a video in which he said, “Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business. Complicated.”Despite his Twitter reinstatement, Mr. Trump has not returned to posting from that account.In his last tweet, dated Jan. 8, 2021, he said he would not attend the coming inauguration, held at the Capitol. More

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      Fox’s P.R. Woes May Not Directly Translate to Legal Ones

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      Some of the unflattering private messages among the network’s hosts and executives may never become evidence when Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News goes to trial.For the past three weeks, a drip, drip, drip of disclosures have exposed widespread alarm and disbelief inside Fox News in the days after the 2020 presidential election, as the network became a platform for some of the most insidious lies about widespread voter fraud. These revelations are the most damning to rattle the Murdoch media empire since the phone hacking scandal in Britain more than a decade ago.The headlines have been attention-grabbing. Tucker Carlson, a professed champion of former President Donald J. Trump’s populist message, was caught insulting Mr. Trump — “I hate him passionately,” he wrote in a text. Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity disparaged colleagues in their network’s news division. And Rupert Murdoch said he longed for the day when Mr. Trump would be irrelevant.These examples and many more — revealed in personal emails, text messages and testimony made public as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News — are embarrassing. But whether they pose serious legal jeopardy for Fox in that case is far less clear.The messages that led to some of the biggest headlines may never be introduced as evidence when the case goes to trial next month, according to lawyers and legal scholars, including several who are directly involved in the case. Fox is expected to ask a judge to exclude certain texts and emails on the grounds they are not relevant.Laura Ingraham disparaged Fox News colleagues in private messages released recently.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesBut the most powerful legal defense Fox has is the First Amendment, which allows news organizations broad leeway to cover topics and statements made by elected officials. In court, Fox’s lawyers have argued that the network was merely reporting on what Mr. Trump and his allies were saying about fraud and Dominion machines — not endorsing those falsehoods.Media law experts said that if a jury found that to be true — not a far-fetched outcome, they said, especially if lawyers for the network can show that its hosts did not present the allegations as fact — then Fox could win.Fox News v. Dominion Voter SystemsDocuments from a lawsuit filed by the voting machine maker Dominion against Fox News have shed light on the debate inside the network over false claims related to the 2020 election.Running Fox: Emails that lawyers for Dominion have used to build their defamation case give a peek into how Rupert Murdoch shapes coverage at his news organizations.Behind the Curtain: Texts and emails released as part of the lawsuit show how Fox employees privately mocked election fraud claims made by former President Donald J. Trump, even as the network amplified them to appease viewers.Tucker Carlson’s Private Contempt: The Fox host’s private comments, revealed in court documents, contrast sharply with his support of Mr. Trump on his show.A Show of Support: In his first public remarks since the recent revelations on Fox News, Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan, the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, issued a full-throated show of support for Suzanne Scott, who is at the helm of Fox News Media.“I think the case really will come down to a jury deciding whether the company or the commentators did or didn’t endorse — that really is the key question,” said George Freeman, a former New York Times lawyer who is now executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, which assists news organizations with legal issues.“It gives Fox, I think, a fighting chance,” he added.Despite the ways Fox could prevail with a jury, legal scholars say Dominion’s case is exceptionally strong.Lawyers for Dominion argue that the claims made by Fox’s hosts and guests about its machines and their supposed role in a nonexistent conspiracy to steal votes from Mr. Trump was anything but dispassionate, neutral reporting.“Truth and shared facts form the foundation of a free society — even more so here,” its lawyers said in a brief, filed with the court on Thursday. “The false idea that Dominion rigged the 2020 presidential election undermines the core of democracy.”It is rare for First Amendment lawyers to side against a media company. But many of them have done just that, arguing that a finding against Fox will send an important message: The law does not protect those who peddle disinformation. And it would help dispel the idea, First Amendment experts said, that libel laws should be rewritten to make it easier to win defamation suits, as Mr. Trump and other conservatives, including Justice Clarence Thomas, have suggested.In its most recent filings, Dominion argued that the law was more than adequate to find Fox liable.“If this case does not qualify as defamation, then defamation has lost all meaning,” Dominion argued in a legal filing made public on Thursday.But legal experts said that the case would rise or fall not based on how a jury considered lofty concerns about the health of American democracy. Rather, they said, Dominion’s challenge will be to persuasively argue something far more specific: that Fox News either knowingly broadcast false information or was so reckless that it overlooked obvious evidence pointing to the falsity of the conspiracy theories about Dominion.Though the coverage of the case has largely focused on the disparaging comments the network’s star hosts and top executives made in private — about Mr. Trump, his lawyers and one another — those remarks could only help Dominion’s case if they pointed to a deeper rot inside Fox, namely that it cynically elevated false stories about Dominion machines because its ratings were suffering.The one episode of Mr. Carlson’s show that Dominion cited as defamatory included an interview with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.Fox News“When I see the headlines that are primarily about Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, those are conversations that the litigation was designed to spur,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a First Amendment scholar and law professor at the University of Utah.“At least some of that evidence is going to be important atmospherically,” Ms. Andersen Jones added. But what will be more important to the outcome of the case, she said, is “what drove the narrower decisions at the individual shows.”Fox’s lawyers could ask the judge, for instance, to keep the jury from seeing most of Mr. Murdoch’s deposition on the grounds that he was the chairman of the company and played no direct role in decision-making at the show level. However, during his deposition, Mr. Murdoch did concede a key point of Dominion’s. He acknowledged that some Fox hosts had endorsed false claims of malfeasance during the election. And when Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, presented Mr. Murdoch with examples of how Fox went beyond merely providing a platform for election deniers, the Fox chairman agreed. “I think you’ve shown me some material in support of that,” Mr. Murdoch testified.Fox also plans to argue that the network’s coverage of the aftermath of the 2020 election needs to be considered as a whole, including the hosts and guests who insisted that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.And the more Fox lawyers can show instances in the coverage where its hosts rebutted or framed the allegations as unproven, the stronger their case will be.A lawyer working on Fox’s defense, Erin Murphy, said Dominion did not “want to talk about the shows where there was a lot of commentary coming from different perspectives.”Especially when those shows were ones “that had higher viewership and were the more mainstream,” Ms. Murphy added.Dominion would be on the strongest legal footing, defamation experts said, whenever it could point to specific examples when individual Fox employees responsible for a program had admitted the fraud claims were bogus or overlooked evidence that those claims — and the people making them — were unreliable.Dominion cites only a single episode each from Mr. Carlson and Mr. Hannity as defamatory: Mr. Carlson’s interview of Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive, on Jan. 26, 2021, and Mr. Hannity’s interview of Sidney Powell, a lawyer who made some of the most outrageous fraud allegations, on Nov. 30, 2020.Dominion’s defamation claims against three far more obscure shows with much lower ratings are more substantial and extensively documented: “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo” and the now-canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” both of which ran on Fox Business in 2020; and “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” which was Jeanine Pirro’s Saturday evening talk show on Fox News before the network canceled it and promoted Ms. Pirro to a regular slot on “The Five,” a weekday round-table talk show.Some of the most damning evidence to emerge involves Maria Bartiromo, legal experts say.Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesEspecially damaging, legal experts said, is the evidence against Ms. Bartiromo. Dominion has accused her of recklessly disregarding evidence that a key source for Ms. Powell, who appeared several times on Ms. Bartiromo’s show, was mentally unstable — a “wackadoodle” by the source’s own admission.In an email, the full text of which was released last Tuesday along with thousands of pages of depositions and private messages of Fox employees, is from someone who claims to be a technology analyst named Marlene Bourne. Ms. Powell forwarded Ms. Bourne’s email to Ms. Bartiromo on the evening of Nov. 7, and Ms. Bartiromo forwarded it to her producer.In the email, Ms. Bourne describes numerous conspirators in a plot to discredit Mr. Trump, including some who had been dead for years like Roger Ailes, the former chief executive of Fox News. She writes that she is capable of “time-travel in a semiconscious state” and that when she is awake she can “see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear.” She also says she has been decapitated and that “it appears that I was shot in the back” once after giving the F.B.I. a tip.“If we’re really zeroing in on where the strongest evidence is,” Ms. Andersen Jones said, “it’s the wackadoodle email. Because the real question is whether you had subjective awareness of the likely falsity of the thing you were platforming on your show.” More

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      in Elections

      Little-Known Lawyer, a Trump Ally, Draws Scrutiny in Georgia

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      A special grand jury looking into election meddling interviewed Robert Cheeley, a sign that false claims made by Donald J. Trump’s allies loom large in the case.ATLANTA — At a Georgia State Senate hearing a few weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost his bid for re-election, Rudolph W. Giuliani began making outlandish claims. “There are 10 ways to demonstrate that this election was stolen, that the votes were phony, that there were a lot of them — dead people, felons, phony ballots,” he told the assembled legislators.After Mr. Giuliani’s testimony, a like-minded Georgia lawyer named Robert Cheeley presented video clips of election workers handling ballots at the State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta. Mr. Cheeley spent 15 minutes laying out specious assertions that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes, saying their actions “should shock the conscience of every red blooded Georgian” and likening what he said had happened to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.His comments mostly flew under the radar at the time, overshadowed by the election fraud claims made by Mr. Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and by other higher-profile figures. But Mr. Cheeley’s testimony did not end up in the dustbin. He was among the witnesses questioned last year by a special grand jury in Atlanta that investigated election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies, the grand jury’s forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said in an interview last month.Robert Cheeley reads through Georgia law during a hearing at the Henry County Courthouse in McDonough, Ga., in 2021.Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe fact that Mr. Cheeley was called to appear before the special grand jury adds to the evidence that although the Atlanta investigation has focused on Mr. Trump’s biggest areas of legal exposure — the calls he made to pressure local officials and his involvement in a scheme to draft bogus presidential electors — the false claims made by his allies at legislative hearings have also been of significant interest. Mr. Giuliani has been told that he is among the targets who could face charges in the investigation.“He did testify before us,” Ms. Kohrs said of Mr. Cheeley in the interview.His appearance left such an impression that Ms. Kohrs began reciting from memory the beginning of Mr. Cheeley’s remarks at the State Senate hearing. Asked if his testimony to the special grand jury had been credible, she said, “I’m going to tell you that Mr. Cheeley was not one that I’m going to forget.”Mr. Cheeley did not return calls for comment for this article, and he was not present when a reporter visited his office on Wednesday in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. The fact that he testified before the special grand jury was not previously known.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5A legal threat to Trump. More