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      4,789 Facebook Accounts in China Impersonated Americans, Meta Says

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      The company warned that the inauthentic accounts underscored the threat of foreign election interference in 2024.Meta announced on Thursday that it had removed thousands of Facebook accounts based in China that were impersonating Americans debating political issues in the United States. The company warned that the campaign presaged coordinated international efforts to influence the 2024 presidential election.The network of fake accounts — 4,789 in all — used names and photographs lifted from elsewhere on the internet and copied partisan political content from X, formerly known as Twitter, Meta said in its latest quarterly adversarial threat analysis. The copied material included posts by prominent Republican and Democratic politicians, the report said.The campaign appeared intended not to favor one side or another but to highlight the deep divisions in American politics, a tactic that Russia’s influence campaigns have used for years in the United States and elsewhere.Meta warned that the campaign underscored the threat facing a confluence of elections around the world in 2024 — from India in April to the United States in November.“Foreign threat actors are attempting to reach audiences ahead of next year’s various elections, including in the U.S. and Europe,” the company’s report said, “and we need to remain alert to their evolving tactics and targeting across the internet.”Although Meta did not attribute the latest campaign to China’s Communist government, it noted that the country had become the third-most-common geographic source for coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and other social media platforms, after Russia and Iran.The Chinese network was the fifth that Meta has detected and taken down this year, more than in any other nation, suggesting that China is stepping up its covert influence efforts. While previous campaigns focused on Chinese issues, the latest ones have weighed more directly into domestic U.S. politics.“This represents the most notable change in the threat landscape, when compared with the 2020 election cycle,” the company said in the threat report.Meta’s report followed a series of disclosures about China’s global information operations, including a recent State Department report that accused China of spending billions on “deceptive and coercive methods” to shape the global information environment.Microsoft and other researchers have also linked China to the spread of conspiracy theories claiming that the U.S. government deliberately caused the deadly wildfires in Hawaii this year.The latest inauthentic accounts removed by Meta sought “to hijack authentic partisan narratives,” the report said. It detailed several examples in which the accounts copied and pasted, under their own names, partisan posts from politicians — often using language and symbols indicating the posts were originally on X.Two Facebook posts a month apart in August and September, for example, copied opposing statements on abortion from two members of the U.S. House from Texas — Sylvia R. Garcia, a Democrat, and Ronny Jackson, a Republican.The accounts also linked to mainstream media organizations and shared posts by X’s owner, Elon Musk. They liked and reposted content from actual Facebook users on other topics as well, like games, fashion models and pets. The activity suggested that the accounts were intended to build a network of seemingly authentic accounts to push a coordinated message in the future.Meta also removed a similar, smaller network from China that mostly targeted India and Tibet but also the United States. In the case of Tibet, the users posed as pro-independence activists who accused the Dalai Lama of corruption and pedophilia.Meta warned that while it had removed the accounts, the same networks continued to use accounts on other platforms, including X, YouTube, Gettr, Telegram and Truth Social, warning that foreign adversaries were diversifying the sources of their operations.In its report, Meta also weighed in on Republican attacks on the U.S. government’s role in monitoring disinformation online, a political and legal fight that has reached the Supreme Court in a challenge brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.While Republicans have accused officials of coercing social media platforms to censor content, including at a hearing in the House on Thursday, Meta said coordination among tech companies, government and law enforcement had disrupted foreign threats.“This type of information sharing can be particularly critical in disrupting malicious foreign campaigns by sophisticated threat actors who coordinate their operations outside of our platforms,” the report said. More

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      Can Taiwan Continue to Fight Off Chinese Disinformation?

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      Ahead of a presidential election in January, Taiwanese fact checkers and watchdogs say they are ready for Beijing. But they are still worried.Suspicious videos that began circulating in Taiwan this month seemed to show the country’s leader advertising cryptocurrency investments.President Tsai Ing-wen, who has repeatedly risked Beijing’s ire by asserting her island’s autonomy, appeared to claim in the clips that the government helped develop investment software for digital currencies, using a term that is common in China but rarely used in Taiwan. Her mouth appeared blurry and her voice unfamiliar, leading Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau to deem the video to be almost certainly a deepfake — an artificially generated spoof — and potentially one created by Chinese agents.For years, China has pummeled the Taiwanese information ecosystem with inaccurate narratives and conspiracy theories, seeking to undermine its democracy and divide its people in an effort to assert control over its neighbor. Now, as fears over Beijing’s growing aggression mount, a new wave of disinformation is heading across the strait separating Taiwan from the mainland before the pivotal election in January.Perhaps as much as any other place, however, the tiny island is ready for the disinformation onslaught.Taiwan has built a resilience to foreign meddling that could serve as a model to the dozens of other democracies holding votes in 2024. Its defenses include one of the world’s most mature communities of fact checkers, government investments, international media literacy partnerships and, after years of warnings about Chinese intrusion, a public sense of skepticism.The challenge now is sustaining the effort.“That is the main battlefield: The fear, uncertainty, doubt is designed to keep us up at night so we don’t respond to novel threats with novel defenses,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s inaugural digital minister, who works on strengthening cybersecurity defenses against threats like disinformation. “The main idea here is just to stay agile.”Taiwan, a highly online society, has repeatedly been found to be the top target in the world for disinformation from foreign governments, according to the Digital Society Project, a research initiative exploring the internet and politics. China was accused of spreading rumors during the pandemic about the Taiwanese government’s handling of Covid-19, researchers said. Representative Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island as speaker of the House last year set off a series of high-profile cyberattacks, as well as a surge of debunked online messages and images that fact checkers linked to China.For all of Beijing’s efforts, however, it has struggled to sway public opinion.In recent years, Taiwan’s voters have chosen a president, Ms. Tsai, from the Democratic Progressive Party, which the Communist Party views as an obstacle to its goal of unification. Experts and local fact checkers said Chinese disinformation campaigns were a major concern in local elections in 2018; the efforts seemed less effective in 2020, when Ms. Tsai recaptured the presidency in a landslide. Her vice president, Lai Ching-te, has maintained a polling lead in the race to succeed her.China has denied interloping, instead saying it is the “top victim of disinformation.”News about the presidential race on a television in a Taipei noodle restaurant. Many Taiwanese have internal “warning bells” for disinformation, a founder of a group called Fake News Cleaner said.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesMs. Tsai has repeatedly addressed her government’s push to combat Beijing’s disinformation campaign, as well as criticism that her strategy aims to stifle speech from political opponents. At a defense conference this month, she said: “We let the public have knowledge and tools that refute and report false or misleading information, and maintain a cautious balance between maintaining information freely and refusing information manipulation.”Many Taiwanese have developed internal “warning bells” for suspicious narratives, said Melody Hsieh, who co-founded Fake News Cleaner, a group focused on information literacy education. Her group has 22 lecturers and 160 volunteers teaching anti-disinformation tactics at universities, temples, fishing villages and elsewhere in Taiwan, sometimes using gifts like handmade soap to motivate participants.The group is part of a robust collective of similar Taiwanese operations. There is Cofacts, whose fact-checking service is integrated into a popular social media app called Line. Doublethink Lab was directed until this month by Puma Shen, a professor who testified this year before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent agency of the U.S. government. MyGoPen is named after a homophone in the Taiwanese dialect for “don’t fool me again.”Taiwan’s anti-disinformation groups include Doublethink Lab, formerly led by Puma Shen.Chiangying-Ying/Associated PressMascots at the entrance of the Taiwan Fact Check Center in Taipei.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesCitizens have sought out fact-checking help, such as when a recent uproar over imported eggs raised questions about videos showing black and green yolks, Ms. Hsieh said. Such demand would have been unthinkable in 2018, when the heated emotions and damaging rumors around a contentious referendum inspired the founders of Fake News Cleaner.“Now, everyone will stop and think: ‘This seems odd. Can you help me check this? We suspect something,’” Ms. Hsieh said. “This, I think, is an improvement.”Still, fact-checking in Taiwan remains complicated. False claims swirled recently around Mr. Lai, an outspoken critic of Beijing, and his visit to Paraguay this summer. Fact checkers found that a memo at the center of one claim had been manipulated, with changed dates and dollar figures. Another claim originated on an English-language forum before a new X account quoted it in Mandarin in a post that was shared by a news website in Hong Kong and boosted on Facebook by a Taiwanese politician.China’s disinformation work has had “measurable effects,” including “worsening Taiwanese political and social polarization and widening perceived generational divides,” according to research from the RAND Corporation. Concerns about election-related fake news drove the Taiwanese government last month to set up a dedicated task force.A banner in Taipei depicts Sun Yat Sen, the first president of the Republic of China, and Taiwan’s flag.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesTaiwan “has historically been Beijing’s testing ground for information warfare,” with China using social media to interfere in Taiwanese politics since at least 2016, according to RAND. In August, Meta took down a Chinese influence campaign that it described as the largest such operation to date, with 7,704 Facebook accounts and hundreds of others across other social media platforms targeting Taiwan and other regions.Beijing’s disinformation strategy continues to shift. Fact checkers noted that Chinese agents were no longer distracted by pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, as they were during the last presidential election in Taiwan. Now, they have access to artificial intelligence that can generate images, audio and video — “potentially a dream come true for Chinese propagandists,” said Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, a RAND researcher.A few months ago, an audio file that seemed to feature a rival politician criticizing Mr. Lai circulated in Taiwan. The clip was almost certainly a deepfake, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice and the A.I.-detection company Reality Defender.Chinese disinformation posts appear increasingly subtle and organic, rather than flooding the zone with obvious pro-Beijing messages, researchers said. Some false narratives are created by Chinese-controlled content farms, then spread by agents, bots or unwitting social media users, researchers say. China has also tried to buy established Taiwanese social media accounts and may have paid Taiwanese influencers to promote pro-Beijing narratives, according to RAND.Disinformation that directly addressed relations between China and Taiwan grew rarer from 2020 to 2022, the Taiwan Fact Check Center said last month. Instead, Chinese agents seemed to focus more on stoking social division within Taiwan by spreading lies about local services and health issues. Sometimes, other experts said, questionable posts about medical remedies and celebrity gossip guided viewers to conspiracy theories about Taiwanese politics.The ever-present menace, which the Taiwanese government calls “cognitive warfare,” has led to several aggressive attempts at a crackdown. One unsuccessful proposal last year, modeled after regulations in Europe, would have imposed labeling and transparency requirements on social media platforms and forced them to comply with court-ordered content removal requests.Critics denounced the government’s anti-disinformation campaign as a political witch hunt, raising the specter of the island’s not-so-distant authoritarian past. Some have pointed out that Taiwan’s media ecosystem, with its diverse political leanings, often produces pro-Beijing content that can be misattributed to Chinese manipulation.At an event in June, President Tsai stressed that “well-funded, large-scale disinformation campaigns” were “one of the most difficult challenges,” pitting Taiwanese citizens against one another and corroding trust in democratic institutions. Disinformation defense, she said, must be “a whole-of-society effort.”Fact checkers and watchdog groups said public apathy was a concern — research suggests that Taiwanese people make limited use of fact-checking resources in past elections — as was the risk of being spread too thin.“There’s mountains of disinformation,” said Eve Chiu, the chief executive of the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which has around 10 fact checkers working each day. “We can’t do it all.”From left, Lu Hong-yu, Lee Tzu-ying and Cheng Hsu-yu placed third as a team in a Taiwan fact-checking competition.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesAttempts to increase interest in media literacy have included a nationwide campaign, “humor over rumor,” which leveraged jokey meme culture and a cute dog character to debunk false narratives. In September, the Taiwan FactCheck Center also held a national virtual competition for youths that drew students like Lee Tzu-ying, Cheng Hsu-yu and Lu Hong-yu.The three civics classmates, who finished in third place, acknowledged that Taiwan’s raucous politics allowed disinformation to breed confusion and chaos. Their Taiwanese peers, however, have learned caution.“If you see something new, but don’t know if it is true or false, you need to verify it,” Ms. Lee, 16, said. “I just want to know the truth — that’s very important to me.” More

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      in US Politics

      Did the assassination of JFK kickstart the conspiracy theory movement? – podcast

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      This week marked 60 years since President John F Kennedy was shot dead as he travelled in the back of a car through the streets of Dallas, Texas. From the moment the news broke, people had their theories about what happened.
      So why did the assassination of JFK spawn dozens of conspiracy theories that have persisted for decades? Is there a reason why Americans are quick to believe their government is covering something up? And despite multiple examples of when conspiracies turn dangerous, are politicians today, including Kennedy’s own nephew, using conspiracy theories for political gain?
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Prof Kathryn Olmsted, author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      in Elections

      Georgia Judge Weighs Revoking Bail for a Trump Co-Defendant, Harrison Floyd

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      Prosecutors say the defendant, Harrison Floyd, has been intimidating potential witnesses in the racketeering case with his social media posts.In a fiery courtroom presentation, the prosecutor overseeing the Georgia racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump argued on Tuesday that one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants had intimidated potential witnesses on social media and should be sent to jail.But Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court chose not to revoke the bond of Harrison Floyd, the co-defendant. Instead, he signed off on modified terms prohibiting Mr. Floyd from posting further comments about witnesses in the case.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., took the unusual step of personally arguing on behalf of the prosecution, a few days after she filed a motion accusing Mr. Floyd of intimidating an elections worker and other witnesses for the state — including Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — through his posts on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers noted that Mr. Trump himself had issued provocative social media posts about the Georgia case, and that no action had been taken against him. That, they argued, made “the state’s decision to go after Harrison Floyd hard to justify.”They also argued that Mr. Floyd had not been trying to intimidate or threaten anyone with his posts. But they acknowledged by the end of Tuesday’s hearing that he had “walked up close to the line” of violating the terms of his bond.Mr. Floyd, once the head of a group called Black Voices for Trump, was paid by the 2020 Trump campaign. He is one of 19 people, including the former president, who were named as defendants in a 98-page racketeering indictment in August.The indictment charges them with orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. Four of the defendants have pleaded guilty and have promised to cooperate with prosecutors.In addition to a state racketeering charge, Mr. Floyd faces two other felony counts in the case, for his role in what the indictment describes as a scheme to intimidate Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County elections worker, and pressure her to falsely claim that she had committed electoral fraud.Ms. Freeman and her daughter were part of a team processing votes in Fulton County on election night in November 2020. Soon after, video images of the two women handling ballots were posted online, and Trump supporters falsely claimed that the video showed them entering bogus votes to skew the election in President Biden’s favor.Ms. Freeman became the target of so many threats that she was forced to leave her home.Her lawyer was a witness for the prosecution at Tuesday’s hearing, producing a report that he said showed a recent “spike” in online mentions of Ms. Freeman. That spike led her to adopt a fresh set of security measures, her lawyer said.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers, John Morrison and Chris Kachouroff, called the effort to revoke his bond “a retaliatory measure” — in part, they said, because Mr. Floyd recently turned down a plea agreement offered by the state. They argued that “tagging” people in posts did not constitute contact with witnesses, and was no different from yelling “a message to someone else sitting on the opposite side of a packed Mercedes-Benz stadium during the middle of an Atlanta Falcons football game.” Ms. Willis responded that “this notion that tagging someone doesn’t get a message to them is really lunacy,” She also called Mr. Floyd’s posts “disgusting,” adding that “what he really did is spit on the court.”And she was explicit about the stakes as she saw them: Election workers, she said, should not be intimidated for doing their jobs.Judge McAfee said that it appeared that Mr. Floyd had committed a “technical violation” of his bond by communicating with witnesses in the case, but seemed reluctant to take the step of jailing Mr. Floyd. “Not every violation compels revocation,” he said.Ms. Willis’s forceful stance on Mr. Floyd’s posts could have repercussions for Mr. Trump, who is enmeshed in battles over gag orders in other civil and criminal cases against him. Mr. Trump’s bond agreement in Georgia specifies that he “shall perform no act,” including social media posts, “to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a co-defendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.”Mr. Floyd was the only one of the original 19 co-defendants in Georgia to spend days in jail in August while waiting to make bond. At Tuesday’s hearing, he cut a colorful figure at the defense table, wearing a green blazer adorned with polo horses. Before the hearing began, he appeared to be reading a book about the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.As the two sides worked out the new terms of the bond agreement, Ms. Willis made a reference to “Trump,” prompting Mr. Floyd to interject, “President Trump.”The judge told Mr. Floyd that it was not his place to talk. More

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      in Elections

      An Old Hate Cracks Open on the New Right

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      A dam burst last week on the right, and a wave of grotesque antisemitism poured out all over the internet.In August, I wrote about the “lost boys” of the American right, many of them young and relatively unknown, who were outed for having secret or anonymous online profiles and using those profiles to spread raw bigotry, including antisemitism. Some of these people worked for the right wing’s biggest names, including Tucker Carlson, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.What started in the shadows is now right in the open. It’s being advanced by some of the most powerful and influential people in America, and there is nothing subtle about it. The latest eruption started with a fight between the Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire colleague Candace Owens. Both are immensely popular right-wing stars. Owens, for example, has more than four million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, and more than five million on Instagram.On Nov. 3, Owens posted on social media, “No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever. There is no justification for a genocide. I can’t believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.” Many of her followers interpreted this as a criticism of Israel, and Shapiro, who staunchly supports Israel in its present conflict with Hamas, was later caught on tape at a private event saying Owens’s behavior during the war has been “disgraceful.”Daily Wire drama should be of little interest to anyone outside The Daily Wire, but what happened next was truly alarming. First, Jason Whitlock, a leading personality at The Blaze, one of the largest right-wing websites, accused Shapiro of dual loyalties: “The guy has multiple loyalties. He loves America, but he loves Israel too. And maybe he loves Israel and he loves America too.” Owens, he said, “is a bit more America first. She only has one loyalty.”Then Owens went on Carlson’s show on X, where he ranted against the “biggest donors at, say, Harvard,” asking where they were when members of the Harvard community “were calling for white genocide.”“White genocide” is a term of art on the racist right and is linked to the so-called great replacement theory, the notion that leftists (including Jewish progressives) are trying to import people of color to replace America’s white majority. This is the theory that motivated the shooter in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. It is false, evil and very dangerous.The same day, an obscure far-right personality posted the same conspiracy theory on X: “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”“I’m deeply disinterested,” he continued, “in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”The post wouldn’t be notable, except as yet another example of the bigoted filth that dominates discourse on X, but Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and the owner of X — responded with an endorsement. “You have said the actual truth,” he replied.Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, one of the largest right-wing youth organizations in the country, jumped in the next day to defend both the original post and Musk on “The Charlie Kirk Show.” While he hedged by saying that he doesn’t like to generalize, Kirk argued that “the first part” of the original post “is absolutely true.” He then reread the post and repeated the old Jews-and-money trope: “It is true that some of the largest financiers of left-wing anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans.”While there are more examples of right-wing antisemitism spilling into the public square, I’m going to stop there. I by no means want to minimize the antisemitism we’ve seen from the far left, including on campuses and in the streets, but I am focusing on the people I just mentioned because they are some of the most prominent figures on the right.What is going on? For the past several decades, the Republican Party has been a strong ally of Israel, so much so that the regard evangelical voters have for Israel has been the subject of considerable criticism. In my years as a Republican and a conservative lawyer, I never witnessed a trace of antisemitism. The answer to my question, however, is clear. The “new” American right isn’t that new at all. It has rejected Reaganism, yes, but in doing so, it’s reconnecting with older and darker forces on the right.The ghost of Charles Lindbergh is haunting us. Lindbergh, readers may recall, was the hero aviator who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. He later grew to admire German fascism and gave a famous speech in September 1941 in which he accused Jews of attempting to push America into World War II.“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war,” he said, “are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” And while Lindbergh expressed sympathy for Jews facing Nazi persecution, he went straight to the same tropes that were deployed last week, claiming that the Jewish people’s “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”More recently, we see the influence of Pat Buchanan, a former Richard Nixon speechwriter and so-called paleoconservative whom William F. Buckley Jr. denounced for his antisemitism in 1991. A central part of the case against Buchanan once again related to matters of war and peace. In the run-up to the first Iraq war, Buchanan said, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” And that was a benign comment compared with many of his later pronouncements. In 2010 he wrote that if Elena Kagan were to be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, “Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this Democrats’ idea of diversity?”Buchanan is no minor figure. As Nicole Hemmer wrote in 2022, his presidential campaigns in the 1990s forecast the present moment in Republican politics. The party “traded Reaganism for Buchananism,” she contended. The evidence that she was correct grows by the day.Everything about the New Right mind-set told us that this devolution was inevitable. It scorns character, decency and civility in the public square, often turning cruelty into a virtue. This was a necessary precondition for the entire enterprise. Decent people can be misguided, certainly, but they are not consumed with hate. Decent people do not indulge bigots.The New Right rejects the norms and values of what it calls the uniparty or the cathedral: the center-left and center-right American elite. And one of those values is a steadfast opposition to racism and prejudice. The rejection first manifests itself in the form of just asking questions, then it veers into direct challenge of conventional norms, followed by a descent into true darkness.Hostility unmoored from character quickly turns conspiratorial, and the world of conspiracy theories is where antisemites live and thrive. And finally, the term “America First,” popular with the New Right and the older, Lindbergh right, has always been misleading. It actually means some Americans first or “real” Americans first, and “real” Americans do not include the ideological or religious enemies of the New Right.It is no coincidence, for example, that after the Owens-Shapiro confrontation, many New Right figures began posting “Christ is king,” an obvious shot at Shapiro’s Jewish beliefs.Evolution is a concept that applies to biology, not human nature. It turns out that humanity does not grow out of the darkness of the past. It has to be contested by every generation. We are neither imprisoned by darkness nor ever fully captured by light.America is no exception. From before the founding, our so-called new world has been plagued by all the sins of the old. Set against that human depravity, however, are the great aspirations of the founding, including the central declaration that “all men are created equal.”American progress was never inevitable. It took immense courage to move haltingly to the more just, more fair country we live in today. We can’t presume that progress is permanent. It never is. No one is more aware of that than America’s most marginalized and vulnerable communities. They feel the effects very keenly when we take steps backward, when our commitment to our principles falters in the face of our own sin.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Nikki Haley Renews Call for TikTok Ban After Bin Laden Letter Circulates

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      The presidential candidate has argued that social media platforms should better police certain users and content, prompting backlash from some Republican rivals.Nikki Haley ratcheted up her calls this week for the U.S. government to ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform, after some users, weighing in on the war between Israel and Hamas, promoted “Letter to America,” a text written by Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.Ms. Haley, a Republican presidential contender and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Donald J. Trump, argued that the document was another example of foreign adversaries using social media to spread anti-American propaganda to young people.“That’s why you have to ban TikTok,” Ms. Haley said at a town hall in Newton, Iowa, on Friday. “Nepal just came out yesterday, and they’re banning it because they see what’s happening in their country. India did it. Why are we the last ones to do it?”In bin Laden’s letter, the mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed nearly 3,000 people, defended the terrorists’ actions. He wrote that American taxpayers had been complicit in harming Muslims in the Middle East, including destroying Palestinian homes. He also said that Americans were “servants” to Jews, who controlled the country’s economy and media. Bin Laden was killed by U.S. military and intelligence operatives in 2011.In a statement on X, TikTok responded to Ms. Haley’s calls for a ban — which she also posted on social media Thursday — by saying that the circulation of bin Laden’s letter violated the platform’s rules banning support for terrorism and that it was policing related content accordingly.“We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform,” the company said. “The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.”A spokesman for the company told The New York Times on Thursday that most of the views of the videos came after news organizations wrote about them, and that the letter had also “appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”Ms. Haley’s crusade against TikTok has become a flashpoint in the Republican presidential race, coinciding with her rise in the polls. Mr. Trump, her former boss, continues to be the overwhelming front-runner, but Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor, is trying to overtake Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for second place.At the Republican debate last week in Miami, she clashed with Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur, over calls for a TikTok ban. He mentioned that her daughter had an account on the platform, drawing Ms. Haley’s ire and leading her to call Mr. Ramaswamy “scum.”Ms. Haley has knocked Mr. Ramaswamy for joining TikTok after he had previously referred to the app as “digital fentanyl.” In the days following the debate, she has contended that social media platforms should better police certain users and content, prompting criticism from some of her rivals. Her call on Tuesday for social media companies to verify the identity of users and to bar people from posting anonymously was panned by Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Ramaswamy and others as unconstitutional and a threat to free speech.“You know who were anonymous writers back in the day?” Mr. DeSantis wrote on X. “Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison when they wrote the Federalist Papers.”Ms. Haley told CNBC a day later that her comments were directed at foreign adversaries, not Americans.At town halls for her campaign in Iowa on Thursday and Friday, Ms. Haley continued to press on TikTok and brought up the letter by bin Laden.“Now you have members of our younger generation, they’re saying now they understand why he did it. That’s disgusting,” she said at a town hall in Newton on Friday. “That’s not America doing that. That’s China doing that.”Ms. Haley has assailed what she calls “foreign infiltration” into American society by hostile governments. She has particularly focused on propaganda and disinformation, which she says is being distributed by China, Russia and Iran to young Americans through TikTok and other social media platforms. She has also argued that young Americans are more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause because of “pro-Hamas videos on TikTok.”She has also hammered the rise of Chinese investment in communities across the country, particularly the acquisition of farmland and agricultural technology — an acute anxiety in rural states like Iowa.Linda Schroeder, of Dubuque, said Ms. Haley’s focus on the issue is what put the candidate over the top as her choice.“Why are we allowing it? For them to be here,” Ms. Schroeder said after hearing from Ms. Haley. “I grew up with 14 other siblings on a farm, and we still have the farm, and we’ll keep it.” More

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      in Elections

      Biden Faces Economic Challenges as Cost-of-Living Despair Floods TikTok

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      Economic despair dominates social media as young people fret about the cost of living. It offers a snapshot of the challenges facing Democrats ahead of the 2024 election.Look at economic data, and you’d think that young voters would be riding high right now. Unemployment remains low. Job opportunities are plentiful. Inequality is down, wage growth is finally beating inflation, and the economy has expanded rapidly this year.Look at TikTok, and you get a very different impression — one that seems more in line with both consumer confidence data and President Biden’s performance in political polls.Several of the economy-related trends getting traction on TikTok are downright dire. The term “Silent Depression” recently spawned a spate of viral videos. Clips critical of capitalism are common. On Instagram, jokes about poor housing affordability are a genre unto themselves.Social media reflects — and is potentially fueling — a deep-seated angst about the economy that is showing up in surveys of younger consumers and political polls alike. It suggests that even as the job market booms, people are focusing on long-running issues like housing affordability as they assess the economy.The economic conversation taking place virtually may offer insight into the stark disconnect between optimistic economic data and pessimistic feelings, one that has puzzled political strategists and economists.Never before was consumer sentiment this consistently depressed when joblessness was so consistently low. And voters rate Mr. Biden badly on economic matters despite rapid growth and a strong job market. Young people are especially glum: A recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that 59 percent of voters under 30 rated the economy as “poor.”President Biden’s campaign is working with content creators on TikTok to “amplify a positive, affirmative message” on the economy, a deputy campaign manager said.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThat’s where social media could offer insight. Popular interest drives what content plays well — especially on TikTok, where going viral is often the goal. The platforms are also an important disseminator of information and sentiment.“A lot of people get their information from TikTok, but even if you don’t, your friends do, so you still get looped into the echo chamber,” said Kyla Scanlon, a content creator focused on economic issues who posts carefully researched explainers across TikTok, Instagram and X.Ms. Scanlon rose to prominence in the traditional news media in part for coining and popularizing the term “vibecession” for how bad consumers felt in 2022 — but she thinks 2023 has seen further souring.“I think people have gotten angrier,” she said. “I think we’re actually in a worse vibecession now.”Surveys suggest that people in Generation Z, born after 1996, heavily get their news from social media and messaging apps. And the share of U.S. adults who turn to TikTok in particular for information has been steadily climbing. Facebook is still a bigger news source because it has more users, but about 43 percent of adults who use TikTok get news from it regularly, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center.It is difficult to say for certain whether negative news on social media is driving bad feelings about the economy, or about the Biden administration. Data and surveys struggle to capture exactly what effect specific news delivery channels — particularly newer ones — have on people’s perceptions, said Katerina Eva Matsa, director of news and information research at the Pew Research Center.“Is the news — the way it has evolved — making people view things negatively?” she asked. It’s hard to tell, she explained, but “how you’re being bombarded, entangled in all of this information might have contributed.”More Americans on TikTok Are Going There for NewsShare of each social media site’s users who regularly get news there, 2020 vs. 2023

      Source: Pew Research Center surveys of U.S. adultsBy The New York TimesMr. Biden’s re-election campaign team is cognizant that TikTok has supplanted X, formerly known as Twitter, for many young voters as a crucial information source this election cycle — and conscious of how negative it tends to be. White House officials say that some of those messages accurately reflect the messengers’ economic experiences, but that others border on misinformation that social media platforms should be policing.Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Biden, said the campaign was working with content creators on TikTok in an effort to “amplify a positive, affirmative message” about the economy.A few political campaign posts promoting Mr. Biden’s jobs record have managed to rack up thousands of likes. But the “Silent Depression” posts have garnered hundreds of thousands — a sign of how much negativity is winning out.In those videos, influencers compare how easy it was to get by economically in 1930 versus 2023. The videos are misleading, skimming over the crucial fact that roughly one in four adults was unemployed in 1933, compared with four in 100 today. And the data they cite are often pulled from unreliable sources.But the housing affordability trend that the videos spotlight is grounded in reality. It has gotten tougher for young people to afford a property over time. The cost of a typical house was 2.4 times the typical household income around 1940, when government data start. Today, it’s 5.8 times.Nor is it just housing that’s making young people feel they’re falling behind, if you ask Freddie Smith, a 35-year-old real estate agent in Orlando, Fla., who created one especially popular “Silent Depression” video. Recently, it is also the costs of gas, groceries, cars and rent.“I think it’s the perfect storm,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s this tug of war that millennials and Gen Z are facing right now.”Inflation has cooled notably since peaking in the summer of 2022, which the Biden administration has greeted as a victory. Still, that just means that prices are no longer climbing as rapidly. Key costs remain noticeably higher than they were just a few years ago. Groceries are far more expensive than in 2019. Gas was hovering around $2.60 a gallon at the start of 2020, for instance, but is around $3.40 now.Young Americans Are Spending More and Earning MoreIncome after taxes and expenditures for householders under 25

      Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey By The New York TimesThose higher prices do not necessarily mean people are worse off: Household incomes have also gone up, so people have more money to cover the higher costs. Consumer expenditure data suggests that people under 25 — and even 35 — have been spending a roughly equivalent or smaller share of their annual budgets on groceries and gas compared with before the pandemic, at least on average.“I think things just feel harder,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, explaining that people have what economists call a “money illusion” and think of the value of a dollar in fixed terms.And housing has genuinely been taking up a bigger chunk of the young consumer’s budget than in the years before the pandemic, as rents, home prices and mortgage costs have all increased.Housing Is Eating Up Young People’s BudgetsShare of spending devoted to each category for people under 25

      Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure SurveyBy The New York TimesIn addition to prices, content about student loans has taken off in TikTok conversations (#studentloans has 1.3 billion views), and many of the posts are unhappy.Mr. Biden’s student-loan initiatives have been a roller coaster for millions of young Americans. He proposed last year to cancel as much as $20,000 in debt for borrowers who earn less than $125,000 a year, a plan that was estimated to cost $400 billion over several decades, only to see the Supreme Court strike down the initiative this summer.Mr. Biden has continued to push more tailored efforts, including $127 billion in total loan forgiveness for 3.6 million borrowers. But last month, his administration also ended a pandemic freeze on loan payments that applied to all borrowers — some 40 million people.The administration has tried to inject more positive programming into the social media discussion. Mr. Biden met with about 60 TikTok creators to explain his initial student loan forgiveness plan shortly after announcing it. The campaign team also sent videos to key creators, for possible sharing, of young people crying when they learned their loans had been forgiven.The Biden campaign does not pay those creators or try to dictate what they are saying, though it does advertise on digital platforms aggressively, Mr. Flaherty said.“It needs to sound authentic,” he said. More

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      Trump’s Truth Social Platform Could Struggle to Survive Without New Cash

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      Truth Social, the online platform at the core of Trump Media, has had challenges attracting advertising revenue.Former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company is running on fumes and could be at risk of folding if it doesn’t find new funds in a hurry.In a regulatory filing this week, auditors for Trump Media & Technology Group expressed doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a “going concern” without new financing. The filing also made clear that Trump Media desperately needs to complete its long-delayed merger with a cash-rich shell company so that it can tap $300 million in cash, especially if its flagship online platform, Truth Social, has any chance of surviving.The document, which offers the first detailed look at Trump Media’s finances, was filed with regulators as part of the company’s pending deal with Digital World Acquisition Corporation, the publicly traded shell company it agreed to merge with in 2021.If the transaction goes through, it could value Trump Media at $1 billion based on Digital World’s share price of $16.60. Yet, the rich valuation is no guarantee that the company, which largely relies on advertising revenue from Truth Social — and Truth Social itself — will be a viable business. Trump Media had little cash on hand by the end of June, and it has exhausted most of the $37 million in private financing it has raised since 2021, according to the filing.“Contrary to the relentless mainstream media campaign peddling false information about Truth Social, we’ve given millions of Americans their voices back using technology operated at a fraction of the cost of the Big Tech platforms,” Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Truth Social, said in a statement. Ms. Devine added that “Truth Social continues to move forward toward completing its merger, which we believe will enable important new ventures for the company.”Since its founding, Truth Social has been a personal megaphone for Mr. Trump, who uses the platform frequently to rail against his critics as he makes another run for president and confronts an array of criminal and civil lawsuits. The platform is popular with some of his most ardent supporters. But on any given day, much of the advertising on the platform comes from weight loss products, gold coins and “natural cures” for a variety of medical ailments.During the first six months of this year, Trump Media took in just $2.3 million in advertising revenue, according to the filing.“Truth Social is obviously not surviving on ad dollars,” said Shannon McGregor, a professor of journalism and media at the University of North Carolina who has studied social media platforms. “And the ads that are being sold are not robust or sustainable.”The former president’s platform of choice remains a relative minnow in the social media universe. This year, the Truth Social app has been downloaded three million times, according to Sensor Tower, a data provider. By comparison Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has been downloaded 144 million times and Meta’s Threads has been downloaded 171 million times in the nearly five months since it debuted.In all, Truth Social has been downloaded seven million times since its launch in early 2022, according to Sensor Tower.Mr. Trump has 6.5 million followers on Truth Social, compared with the 87 million he had on Twitter when he was prohibited from posting on the platform after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Musk, after buying Twitter, let Mr. Trump return to the platform, but the former president has posted only one message on X.Ms. McGregor said other social media platforms had tried to increase their audience reach by reaching deals with media personalities and influencers who bring with them a ready made group of followers.If the merger is completed, Trump Media would have the cash on hand to retain the services of conservative media influencers. But Ms. McGregor said some people might be reluctant to join a platform that was so identified with Mr. Trump, whose political future remained uncertain.“What is the future vision for a platform that is built on being a microphone for one person,” is the obvious question for any social media influencer who might be thinking of joining Truth Social, she said.The glimmer of good news for Mr. Trump is that this week’s filing of the updated merger document is an indication the deal with Digital World is moving along after being held up for nearly two years because of a regulatory investigation.The filing of a revised prospectus was one of the requirements Digital World had agreed to as part of an $18 million regulatory settlement it reached this summer with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The settlement resolved an investigation into an allegation that Digital World had flouted securities rules governing special purpose acquisition companies by engaging in early merger talks with Trump Media before its I.P.O.Trump Media, in a post on Truth Social, called the filing of the revised merger document “a major milestone toward completing our merger.”The push to complete the merger comes as Mr. Trump’s real estate business in New York is being threatened by Attorney General Letitia James’s civil fraud lawsuit against the former president, his adult sons and their family business. In September, a New York judge considering the challenge ruled that Mr. Trump had committed fraud by inflating the value of some of his real estate assets and stripped him of control over some of his signature properties.For the past several weeks, the same judge has been hearing testimony from witnesses — including Mr. Trump — to determine what kind of ultimate punishment should be meted out.With the future of some of his real estate business on shaky ground, Trump Media suddenly has become a more important piece of the former president’s business empire and calculating his personal net worth. If the merger is completed, Mr. Trump, as chairman, stands to become the single largest shareholder of Trump Media.The company’s possible $1 billion valuation after the merger is a far cry from the roughly $10 billion price tag investors had given the deal shortly after it was announced in October 2021. Still, it is significantly higher than the $5 million to $25 million valuation Mr. Trump had put on Trump Media in a financial disclosure form this year. More