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      in Elections

      The misinformation media machine amplifying Trump's election lies

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      The networks have made their calls, world leaders have begun paying their respects, and even Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s other media outlets appear to have given up on a second term for Donald Trump. But in a video posted on Facebook on 7 November and viewed more than 16.5m times since, NewsMax host and former Trump administration official Carl Higbie spends three minutes spewing a laundry list of false and debunked claims casting doubt on the outcome of the presidential election.
      “I believe it’s time to hold the line,” said Higbie, who resigned from his government post over an extensive track record of racist, homophobic and bigoted remarks, to the Trump faithful. “I’m highly skeptical and you should be too.”
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      The video, which has been shared more than 350,000 times on Facebook, is just one star in a constellation of pro-Trump misinformation that is leading millions of Americans to doubt or reject the results of the presidential election. Fully 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not “free and fair”, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted since election day. Among those doubters, large majorities believe two of Trump’s most brazen lies: that mail-in voting leads to fraud and that ballots were tampered with.
      Trump himself is the largest source of election misinformation; the president has barely addressed the public since Tuesday except to share lies and misinformation about the election. But his message attacking the electoral process is being amplified by a host of rightwing media outlets and pundits who appear to be jockeying to replace Fox News as the outlet of choice for Trumpists – and metastasizing on platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
      Since election day, 16 of the top 20 public Facebook posts that include the word “election” feature false or misleading information casting doubt on the election in favor of Trump, according to a Guardian analysis of posts with the most interactions using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. Of those, 13 are posts by the president’s own page, one is a direct quote from Trump published by Fox News, one is by the rightwing evangelical Christian Franklin Graham, and the last is the Newsmax Higbie video.
      The four posts that do not include misinformation are congratulatory messages by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama for Biden and Kamala Harris and two posts by Graham, including a request for prayers for Trump and a remembrance by Graham of his father, the televangelist Billy Graham.
      On YouTube, hosts such as Steven Crowder, a conservative YouTuber with more than 5 million followers, have also been pushing out content questioning the election results. A video from Crowder called Live Updates: Democrats Try to Steal the Election was viewed 5m times, and a nearly two-hour video headlined Fox News is NOT your friend has already racked up more than a million views. More

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      in US Politics

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

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

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      'Who the hell elected you?' Big tech CEOs grilled in US Senate hearing – video

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      Republican and Democrat lawmakers grill the CEOs of tech giants Twitter, Facebook and Google in a hearing about a federal law protecting internet companies from legal liability for content generated by its users. While Republicans focused on disinformation and the ‘censoring’ of Donald Trump, Democrats accused their rivals of politicising the hearing, while also questioning the mechanics of the platforms that promoted content they deemed divisive
      Republicans use congressional hearing to berate tech CEOs and claim Trump is ‘censored’ More

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      in Elections

      Facebook removes Trump campaign ads with misleading claims about refugees

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      Facebook has removed a number of ads from the Trump campaign for making misleading and inaccurate claims about Covid-19 and immigration.On Wednesday the social media platform took down the Trump-sponsored advertisements which claimed, without evidence, that accepting refugees would increase Americans’ risk of Covid-19. The ad, which featured a video of Joe Biden talking about the border and asylum seekers, claimed, also without evidence, that the Democratic candidate’s policies would increase the number of refugees from Syria, Somalia, and Yemen by “700%”. More than 38 versions of the ad were run on Facebook and were seen by hundreds of thousands of people before the company removed them.Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment, but said in a statement to NBC news the ads violated its policies. A version of the advertisement can still be seen in Facebook’s library but is now inactive, meaning it is not being run across any Facebook products.“We rejected these ads because we don’t allow claims that people’s physical safety, health, or survival is threatened by people on the basis of their national origin or immigration status,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told NBC News in a statement.The removal is the latest action taken against the Trump administration as social media platforms attempt to rein in misinformation ahead of the 2020 elections. It follows other removals of Trump ads including one in June, which featured a Nazi symbol. The company removed another Trump ad in 2018 saying it violated its rules against “sensational content”.Facebook is also changing its policies to prevent ads that delegitimize election results, project manager Rob Leathern tweeted on Wednesday. Under the new policies, ads cannot prematurely declare victory, present any method of voting as fraudulent or corrupt, or make accusations of voter fraud. The changes to these policies apply to both Instagram and Facebook and apply immediately as of Wednesday, he said.Following the removal of the ad on Wednesday, Courtney Parella of the Trump campaign doubled down on the advertisement’s claims in a statement. She did not cite the source of the 700% figure featured in the ad. “While President Trump took decisive action to restrict travel from China to slow the spread of coronavirus and saved countless lives, Joe Biden was busy calling the president xenophobic and arm-chair quarterbacking his pandemic response,” she said.The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Although Facebook removed the ads regarding refugees and Covid-19, other misleading advertisements remain on the platform. One ad shows Joe Biden with a headphone photoshopped to his ear, perpetuating the false claim that the presidential candidate somehow cheated in the debates.The advertisement appears to have been launched on the day of the debate but remains active on the platform, with more than 800 versions still active. The ads have been viewed by more than 3.6m people, the majority of whom are in the key election states of Florida and Pennsylvania, according to Facebook data.The Trump campaign’s ads have led to the “earpiece” conspiracy theory spreading organically on other social media platforms, including TikTok, according to the watchdog group Media Matters. The group has found four examples of TikTok videos espousing the theory that have been viewed more than 560,000 times. A spokesperson for TikTok said the videos violate its policies on disinformation and it is working to remove them as they are posted.“You would not have seen the proliferation of conspiracy theories on TikTok today if there was not already an intense saturation of this idea from the Trump campaign yesterday,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters. “They sort of seeded the ground with this idea until the users themselves were driving it.” More

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      in Elections

      Facebook's long-awaited oversight board to launch before US election

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      The long-awaited Facebook Oversight Board, empowered to overrule some of the platform’s content moderation decisions, plans to launch in October, just in time for the US election.The board will be ready to hear appeals from Facebook users as well as cases referred by the company itself “as soon as mid- or late-October at the very latest, unless there are some major technical issues that come up”, said Julie Owono, one of the 20 initial members of the committee who were named in May, in an interview on Wednesday.“The board is paying attention, and is, of course, aware of the worries around this election and the role that social media will play,” said Owono, who is also the executive director of the digital rights organization Internet Sans Frontières. “When we launch, we will be ready to take requests, wherever they come from, and from whoever they come from, as long as it’s within our mandate.”The launch will come at a time of intense scrutiny and pressure for the company that has lurched from controversy to controversy since it was used by Russia to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election. The consequences of Facebook’s failures in addressing hate speech and incitement, which have for years been linked to violence in several countries and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, have become increasingly apparent in its home country in recent months. During a summer of civil unrest in the US, Facebook was linked to the growth of the violent Boogaloo movement and a militia’s “call to arms” on the night two Black Lives Matter protesters were shot and killed in Kenosha, Wisconsin.The limits of the oversight board’s mandate have been a key point of controversy since the independent institution was proposed by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2018. The board’s initial bylaws only allowed it to consider appeals from users who believe that individual pieces of content were unfairly removed, prompting criticism from experts, including Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies online speech regulation.“We were told this was going to be the supreme court of Facebook, but then it came out more like a local district court, and now it’s more of a traffic court,” Douek told the Guardian. “It’s just been steadily narrowed over time.”Crucial areas where Facebook exercises editorial control include the algorithms that shape what content receives the most distribution; decisions to take down or leave up Facebook groups, pages and events; and decisions to leave certain pieces of content up.The board would be considering “leave up” decisions as soon as it launched, Owono said, but only if Facebook referred a case to it. She said technical and privacy challenges had delayed the launch of a system for Facebook users to appeal “leave up” decisions, but that one would be available “as soon as possible”.Facebook’s decisions to leave certain content up, such as its decision not to remove a post by Donald Trump threatening Black Lives Matter protesters that “when the looting starts the shooting starts”, have become as controversial, if not more so, than its decisions to take certain content down.Owono said “checks and balances are needed everywhere”, including across the aspects of Facebook not included in the oversight board’s mandate, and she expressed some optimism that the institution was “agile” enough to change and adapt. Her own concern over Facebook’s “inaction” on hate speech and incitement was a major factor in her decision to join the board, she said.“The unwillingness to deal with these problems is leading increasingly to governments around the world, particularly in Africa, saying that to curb incitement to violence, they need to cut off the internet entirely,” she said. “For me it was important to be part of an institution that would be able not only to say whether or not Facebook’s decisions are in line with their community standards and international law, but also whether Facebook’s inaction is, because we will be able to look at content takedown but also content left up.”Asked whether she agreed with Facebook’s decision to leave the Trump “looting-shooting” post up, Owono demurred, noting that the board at the time had been in its earliest stages. When Owono was asked for her personal opinion, a PR representative interjected to refer to a statement the board issued at the time, which noted that the board had significant work to do before it could begin considering cases.That work has included making sure all board members are fully versed in Facebook’s community standards and international human rights law and getting technical training on the case management tool that will allow board members to receive and consider the appeals, Owono said.The tool was built by Facebook engineers with considerable input from oversight board members, according to a person familiar with the matter. One detail requested by the board members was to format user-submitted appeal statements with line numbers, so they will look similar to legal filings. At launch, it will be available in 18 languages, though that number includes both US and UK English and two types of Spanish.Owono said she wanted to ensure that the board’s work and decisions reflected both the diversity of Facebook’s users and the “diversity of the impact and where those impacts are occurring”, noting that a large majority of Facebook’s users are outside of the US.“There will be many other elections at the end of 2020 in which the role of platforms will also be scrutinized and should be scrutinized as well,” Owono said, including a general election in Myanmar on 8 November. “If we receive requests related to these elections, we’ll also pay the same attention and make the decisions that are being asked from us thoroughly and in accordance with international law principles.” More