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      Rightwing 'super-spreader': study finds handful of accounts spread bulk of election misinformation

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      A handful of rightwing “super-spreaders” on social media were responsible for the bulk of election misinformation in the run-up to the Capitol attack, according to a new study that also sheds light on the staggering reach of falsehoods pushed by Donald Trump.A report from the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that includes Stanford and the University of Washington, analyzed social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok during several months before and after the 2020 elections.It found that “super-spreaders” – responsible for the most frequent and most impactful misinformation campaigns – included Trump and his two elder sons, as well as other members of the Trump administration and the rightwing media.The study’s authors and other researchers say the findings underscore the need to disable such accounts to stop the spread of misinformation.“If there is a limit to how much content moderators can tackle, have them focus on reducing harm by eliminating the most effective spreaders of misinformation,” said said Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the psychology of fake news but was not involved EIP report. “Rather than trying to enforce the rules equally across all users, focus enforcement on the most powerful accounts.” The report analyzed social media posts featuring words like “election” and “voting” to track key misinformation narratives related to the the 2020 election, including claims of mail carriers throwing away ballots, legitimate ballots strategically not being counted, and other false or unproven stories.The report studied how these narratives developed and the effect they had. It found during this time period, popular rightwing Twitter accounts “transformed one-off stories, sometimes based on honest voter concerns or genuine misunderstandings, into cohesive narratives of systemic election fraud”.Ultimately, the “false claims and narratives coalesced into the meta-narrative of a ‘stolen election’, which later propelled the January 6 insurrection”, the report said.“The 2020 election demonstrated that actors – both foreign and domestic – remain committed to weaponizing viral false and misleading narratives to undermine confidence in the US electoral system and erode Americans’ faith in our democracy,” the authors concluded.Next to no factchecking, with Trump as the super-spreader- in-chiefIn monitoring Twitter, the researchers analyzed more than more than 22 million tweets sent between 15 August and 12 December. The study determined which accounts were most influential by the size and speed with which they spread misinformation.“Influential accounts on the political right rarely engaged in factchecking behavior, and were responsible for the most widely spread incidents of false or misleading information in our dataset,” the report said.Out of the 21 top offenders, 15 were verified Twitter accounts – which are particularly dangerous when it comes to election misinformation, the study said. The “repeat spreaders” responsible for the most widely spread misinformation included Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and influencers like James O’Keefe, Tim Pool, Elijah Riot, and Sidney Powell. All 21 of the top accounts for misinformation leaned rightwing, the study showed.“Top-down mis- and disinformation is dangerous because of the speed at which it can spread,” the report said. “If a social media influencer with millions of followers shares a narrative, it can garner hundreds of thousands of engagements and shares before a social media platform or factchecker has time to review its content.”On nearly all the platforms analyzed in the study – including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – Donald Trump played a massive role.It pinpointed 21 incidents in which a tweet from Trump’s official @realDonaldTrump account jumpstarted the spread of a false narrative across Twitter. For example, Trump’s tweets baselessly claiming that the voting equipment manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems was responsible for election fraud played a large role in amplifying the conspiracy theory to a wider audience. False or baseless tweets sent by Trump’s account – which had 88.9m followers at the time – garnered more than 460,000 retweets.Meanwhile, Trump’s YouTube channel was linked to six distinct waves of misinformation that, combined, were the most viewed of any other repeat-spreader’s videos. His Facebook account had the most engagement of all those studied.The Election Integrity Partnership study is not the first to show the massive influence Trump’s social media accounts have had on the spread of misinformation. In one year – between 1 January 2020 and 6 January 2021 – Donald Trump pushed disinformation in more than 1,400 Facebook posts, a report from Media Matters for America released in February found. Trump was ultimately suspended from the platform in January, and Facebook is debating whether he will ever be allowed back.Specifically, 516 of his posts contained disinformation about Covid-19, 368 contained election disinformation, and 683 contained harmful rhetoric attacking his political enemies. Allegations of election fraud earned over 149.4 million interactions, or an average of 412,000 interactions per post, and accounted for 16% of interactions on his posts in 2020. Trump had a unique ability to amplify news stories that would have otherwise remained contained in smaller outlets and subgroups, said Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America.“What Trump did was take misinformation from the rightwing ecosystem and turn it into a mainstream news event that affected everyone,” he said. “He was able to take these absurd lies and conspiracy theories and turn them into national news. And if you do that, and inflame people often enough, you will end up with what we saw on January 6.”Effects of false election narratives on voters“Super-spreader” accounts were ultimately very successful in undermining voters’ trust in the democratic system, the report found. Citing a poll by the Pew Research Center, the study said that, of the 54% of people who voted in person, approximately half had cited concerns about voting by mail, and only 30% of respondents were “very confident” that absentee or mail-in ballots had been counted as intended.The report outlined a number of recommendations, including removing “super-spreader” accounts entirely.Outside experts agree that tech companies should more closely scrutinize top accounts and repeat offenders.Researchers said the refusal to take action or establish clear rules for when action should be taken helped to fuel the prevalence of misinformation. For example, only YouTube had a publicly stated “three-strike” system for offenses related to the election. Platforms like Facebook reportedly had three-strike rules as well but did not make the system publicly known.Only four of the top 20 Twitter accounts cited as top spreaders were actually removed, the study showed – including Donald Trump’s in January. Twitter has maintained that its ban of the former president is permanent. YouTube’s chief executive officer stated this week that Trump would be reinstated on the platform once the “risk of violence” from his posts passes. Facebook’s independent oversight board is now considering whether to allow Trump to return.“We have seen that he uses his accounts as a way to weaponize disinformation. It has already led to riots at the US Capitol; I don’t know why you would give him the opportunity to do that again,” Gertz said. “It would be a huge mistake to allow Trump to return.” More

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      Biden reverses Trump actions on green cards, architecture and 'anarchist jurisdictions'

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden has formally reversed a series of executive actions taken by Donald Trump, including a proclamation that blocked many green card applicants from entering the United States.Trump issued the ban last year, saying it was needed to protect US workers amid high unemployment due to the coronavirus pandemic. Biden rejected that reasoning in a proclamation rescinding the visa ban on Wednesday. The president said it had prevented families from reuniting in the United States and harmed US businesses.Other actions undone by the president included one that sought to cut funding from several cities Trump had deemed “lawless” and “anarchist jurisdictions”, and another mandating that federal buildings should be designed in a classical aesthetic.The reversals come as the new president seeks to press forward with his own agenda and undo key aspects of his predecessor’s legacy. Since taking office last month, Biden has revoked dozens of Trump orders and issued dozens more of his own.Immigrant advocates had pressed in recent weeks for him to lift the visa ban, which was set to expire on 31 March. Biden left in place another ban on most foreign temporary workers.Curtis Morrison, a California-based immigration attorney who represents people subject to the ban, said Biden will now have to tackle a growing backlog of applications that have been held up for months as the pandemic shut down most visa processing by the state department. The process could potentially take years, he said.“It’s a backlog that Trump created,” Morrison said. “He broke the immigration system.”The latest slate of revocations targeted a grab-bag of issues, including a few that Trump signed in his last months in office.Trump issued a memorandum in September that sought to identify municipal governments that permit “anarchy, violence and destruction in American cities.” The memorandum followed protests over George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. The justice department identified New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle as three cities that could have federal funding slashed.Those cities in turn filed a lawsuit to invalidate the designation, and fight off the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold federal dollars.Pete Holmes, the city attorney of Seattle, welcomed the Biden revocation, saying he was “glad to have this nonsense cleared from the decks”.Another reversed order included one issued by Trump in his waning days, which mandated federal buildings return to a more classical style of architecture. The memorandum added that architects should look to “America’s beloved landmark buildings” such as the White House, the US Capitol, the supreme court, the Department of the Treasury and the Lincoln Memorial for inspiration.Biden also revoked a 2018 order that called for agency heads across the government to review welfare programs – such as food stamps, Medicaid and housing aid – and strengthening work requirements for certain recipients. More

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      The Ten Year War review: Obamacare, Trump and Biden's battles yet to come

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      Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was unpopular, viewed by many as welfare redux. Barack Obama’s promise that “If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan”, didn’t exactly work out. By the middle of the 2010s, so-called Obamacare had cost the Democrats both houses of Congress.
      Yet one great recession and one raging pandemic later, the ACA is liked, if not necessarily loved, by a majority of Americans.
      The political process “doesn’t stop just because a bill becomes a law”, according to Jonathan Cohn.
      As if to prove Cohn’s point, the US awaits a ruling by the supreme court on another challenge to Obamacare, this one brought by the Trump administration and Republican state attorneys general. If they prevail, more than 20 million Americans may lose health coverage. Nearly a half-million have died from Covid. Markets don’t always deliver what is needed.
      The Ten Year War is a look back at the “crusade” for universal healthcare coverage, and a sequel to Cohen’s earlier book, Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Healthcare Crisis. Cohn is a senior correspondent at the Huffington Post. His take remains informed and nuanced, not breathless. The Ten Year War also captures acrid and tectonic shifts in US politics.
      Cohn persuasively argues that the combatants in the healthcare fight operated with less than perfect knowledge, and that preconceived convictions too often clouded their judgment. Cohn aims at both policy wonks and political junkies. Laced with interviews and quotes from both sides of the aisle, his book is definitely newsworthy.
      Obama and Tom Price, Donald Trump’s short-tenured health secretary, speak on the record. David Axelrod, Obama’s counselor, and Michael Carvin, a veteran conservative litigator who unsuccessfully argued against Obamacare’s constitutionality, also talk to the author. Years earlier, in the 2000 election, Carvin was on brief in George W Bush’s winning supreme court gambit.
      Obama admits his surprise over Republicans not moving on after the ACA passed, unlike Medicare in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson. “We got no take-up on any of that stuff,” he says. Left unsaid is that blue and red are more than just colors – they are tribes.
      By the same measure, Obama acknowledges “that there were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy”. That is an understatement.
      One of those “outsiders” was Chuck Schumer, now the Senate majority leader. Even then, Cohn writes, the New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all-in on healthcare amid a meltdown in the jobs and housing markets.
      Indeed, after the Democrats lost the Senate in 2014, New York’s senior senator unloaded on Obama before the National Press Club: “After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs.” Said differently, the ACA highlighted the inherent instability of the Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition.
      Instead, in Schumer’s telling, “we took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem – healthcare reform.” Apparently, there are few things more gratifying in politics than telling a sitting president: “I told you so.”
      Of course, political myopia is not the sole province of any one party. Price admits that Republicans too operated in their own universe.
      “I think there was a lack of appreciation on the part of all of us in the administration about how difficult” repealing Obamacare would be, he says. Price is a physician as well as a former Georgia congressman.
      Price criticizes Trump for fashioning policy to comport with the last voice to whisper into his ear, and for a fundamental lack of understanding of healthcare and insurance.
      “We would make concrete decisions about what we were going to do,” he says, “get presidential sign-off, and then within 24 hours the decision would change.”
      For Price’s boss, pulling the rug out from under others was standard operating procedure. More

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      Trump ally Nunes sees CNN Ukraine lawsuit thrown out by New York judge

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      A defamation lawsuit brought against CNN by the California Republican Devin Nunes, a leading ally of former president Donald Trump, was tossed out by a Manhattan judge on Friday.The lawsuit seeking more than $435m in damages was rejected by US district judge Laura Taylor Swain, who said Nunes failed to request a retraction in a timely fashion or adequately state his claims.Nunes alleged the cable news company intentionally published a false news article and engaged in a conspiracy to defame him and damage his personal and professional reputation. His lawsuit said CNN published a report containing false claims that Nunes was involved in efforts to get “dirt” on the then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.Lawyers for Nunes said in court papers CNN knew statements made by Lev Parnas and included in their report were false.Parnas, an associate of former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, has pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court to making illegal contributions to politicians. His trial is scheduled for October.Parnas and another defendant worked with Giuliani to try to get Ukrainian officials to investigate Biden’s son, prosecutors said. Giuliani has said he knew nothing about the political contributions by the men. He has not been charged.The Ukraine affair led to Trump’s first impeachment, in which the Senate acquitted him in February last year. Trump was acquitted again last week, after being impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol riot.The Nunes lawsuit said Parnas was telling lies to try to get immunity.“It was obvious to everyone – including disgraceful CNN – that Parnas was a fraudster and a hustler. It was obvious that his lies were part of a thinly veiled attempt to obstruct justice,“ the lawsuit said.CNN lawyers said Nunes and his staff had declined to comment before publication on whether Nunes had met with a Ukrainian prosecutor.“Instead of denying the report before it was published, Representative Nunes waited until it appeared and then filed this suit seeking more than $435m in damages – labeling CNN ‘the mother of fake news’,” lawyers for CNN wrote. “In his rush to sue, however, Representative Nunes overlooked the need first to request a retraction.”The lawyers noted that California law, which Judge Swain said was appropriate for the case, requires that a retraction be demanded in writing within 20 days of the publication of a story. Messages seeking comment were sent to lawyers for Nunes and CNN. More

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      US makes official return to Paris climate pact

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      The US is back in the Paris climate accord, just 107 days after it left.While Friday’s return is heavily symbolic, world leaders say they expect the US to prove its seriousness after four years of being mostly absent. They are especially keen to hear an announcement from Washington in the coming months on the US’s goal for cutting emissions of heat-trapping gases by 2030.The US return to the Paris agreement became official on Friday, almost a month after Joe Biden told the UN that the US intended to rejoin.“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” Biden said in his inaugural address. “A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear now.”The president signed an executive order on his first day in office that reversed the withdrawal ordered by his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump.The Trump administration had announced its departure from the Paris accord in 2019 but it did not become effective until 4 November 2020, the day after the election, because of provisions in the agreement.The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Thursday the official US re-entry “is itself very important”, as was Biden’s announcement that the US would return to providing climate aid to poorer countries, as promised in 2009.“It’s the political message that is being sent,” said Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief. She was one of the leading forces in hammering out the 2015 mostly voluntary agreement where countries set their own goals to reduce greenhouse gases.One fear was that other countries would follow the US in abandoning the climate fight, but none did, Figueres said. She said the real issue was four years of climate inaction by the Trump administration. US cities, states and businesses still worked to reduce heat-trapping carbon dioxide, but without the federal government.“From a political symbolism perspective, whether it’s 100 days or four years, it is basically the same thing,” Figueres said. “It’s not about how many days. It’s the political symbolism that the largest economy refuses to see the opportunity of addressing climate change. We’ve lost too much time,” Figueres said.The UN Environment Programme director, Inger Andersen, said the US had to prove its leadership to the rest of the world, but she said she had no doubt it would when it submits its required emissions-cutting targets. The Biden administration promises to announce them before a summit in April.“We hope they will translate into a very meaningful reduction of emissions and they will be an example for other countries to follow,” Guterres said.More than 120 countries, including the world’s biggest emitter, China, have promised to have net zero carbon emissions around mid-century.The University of Maryland environment professor Nathan Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s Paris goal, said he expected a 2030 target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions between 40% and 50% from the 2005 baseline levels. A longtime international target, included in the Paris accord with an even more stringent goal, is to keep warming below 2C above pre-industrial levels. The world has already warmed about 1.2C since that time. More

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      Rush Limbaugh, controversial conservative radio personality, dead at 70 – video obituary

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      Rush Limbaugh, the conservative US radio host whose nastily personal and bigoted riffs on the daily news won millions of devoted fans and altered the landscape of American media and politics, has died. At the height of his influence in the mid-1990s, Limbaugh commanded a daily radio audience of millions, known as ‘dittoheads’, who tuned in to hear him dissect the sins of the Bill Clinton administration and wage battle against the ‘commie libs’ he accused of plotting to destroy the country. Limbaugh, 70, had been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer a year ago.
      Rush Limbaugh, influential rightwing talk radio host, dies at age 70
      Rush Limbaugh obituary More

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      Fauci says he worried getting Covid at Trump White House

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      Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert and chief medical and coronavirus adviser to Joe Biden, revealed on Monday that he had been nervous entering the White House when many there were coming down with Covid-19 late in Donald Trump’s presidency.Fauci is 80 years old and said that as such he was acutely aware that he was at high risk of suffering a “serious outcome” if he became infected by coronavirus, he told Axios in an interview clip posted online.“I didn’t fixate on that, but it was in the back of my mind because I had to be out there,” he said, adding: “I mean, particularly when I was going to the White House every day, when the White House was sort of a super-spreader location. I mean, that made me a little bit nervous.”Last October Donald Trump contracted Covid-19 and was taken by helicopter to Walter Reed military medical center, just outside Washington DC, where he was hospitalized and underwent treatment before being released.His falling ill followed a crowded Rose Garden ceremony during which the then president announced Amy Coney Barrett as his supreme court nominee, which was later criticized as a super-spreader event, with many not wearing masks while sitting side-by-side and congregating in crowded rooms inside the White House.At least seven figures in attendance tested positive for coronavirus, including Trump, his former counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, and two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Mike Lee.Fauci was not at that particular event but as the leading public health official on Trump’s White House coronavirus task force, he had to go to the White House frequently.Trump played down the coronavirus from the start, despite knowing its dangers, repeatedly claimed it would disappear, discouraged face masks and exhorted businesses and schools to stay open. More

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      Sounds about right: why podcasting works for Pence, Bannon and Giuliani

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      What do Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Mike Pence and Anthony Scaramucci all have in common?
      They worked for Donald Trump, obviously, and several have been implicated in alleged crimes connected to the former president, but as of this month, each of these one-time high-profile Trump acolytes also has his own podcast.
      Pence became the most recent to announce his own show this week, with the announcement that the oft-derided former vice-president will launch a podcast to “continue to attract new hearts and minds to the conservative cause”.
      Like his one-time associates, Pence will enjoy the benefits of a regulation-free platform to share his thoughts on any topic of his choosing, and similarly to Bannon et al, Pence will also be able to keep himself in the public sphere – although the dry, mild-mannered Pence is likely to differ in tone from the Bannons and Giulianis of the podcast world.
      On his War Room podcast, Bannon has called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci – something Pence is unlikely to do – while Giuliani’s Common Sense podcast has been used to further often unhinged claims of political fraud, which Pence might leave alone.
      Cohen and Scaramucci’s podcasts, which are critical of Trump, may not fit in with the Trump worshippers’ efforts, but the fact that five of Trump’s most prominent acolytes chose this format for propagating their views – over television, radio or the written word – is pretty remarkable.
      So, why podcasts? One major factor is one of the oldest in politics: money.
      “I think in part it’s because it’s an easier medium to get into than something like radio or television. The overhead costs are much much lower. If you have an avid base, and the Trump base tends to be an avid base, you can make a ton of money doing this,” Nicole Hemmer, author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, said.
      “So there’s a real revenue opportunity for them.”
      Bannon et al will get paid through advertising, the amount varying depending on how many downloads they get.
      “If you have audience of just 35,000 people, you can make a profitable podcast,” Hemmer said. “If you have an audience of 100,000 people, now you’re starting to talk real money, and if you’re getting millions of downloads, you can build kind of an empire.”
      Everyone likes money, but Bannon, Giuliani and Pence will also be pushing their version of conservative politics.
      Meanwhile, the very title of Cohen’s podcast, Mea Culpa, sets out his own, different goal – specifically, an earnest attempt to re-enter polite society. The aims of the notoriously self-promoting Scaramucci – his podcast is co-hosted with his wife and is called Scaramucci and the Mrs – probably include keeping himself famous.
      Podcasts give their hosts the freedom to push all those agendas to a potentially huge audience.
      Bannon, who was pardoned by Donald Trump on the former president’s last day in office, recently claimed that his podcast, Bannon’s War Room, had been streamed 29m times. Bannon is known to lie, but the architect of Trump’s “America first” policies has undoubtedly found an audience, including among those who ransacked the US Capitol on 6 January.
      “It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow. It’s going to kick off, it’s going to be very dramatic,” Bannon told his listeners on 5 January. “It’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is strap in. You have made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day.”
      Bannon’s podcast was banned from YouTube after the insurrection, while Giuliani has also had episodes removed, but the power of podcasting is that there is always somewhere for the series to run – both shows are still available on Apple Podcasts, on Bannon’s and Giuliani’s websites, and elsewhere.
      “You have an independence and a freedom if you have a podcast – you’re not going to get de-platformed by social media, you’re not going to get kicked off of Fox News, you’re not going to get kicked off of radio stations,” Hemmer said.
      “You have control and independence, which is a big selling point right now on the right.” More