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AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Great ReadHe Pretended to Be Trump’s Family. Then Trump Fell for It.For months, a 21-year-old Trump supporter impersonated Trump family members on Twitter, spreading conspiracy theories, asking for money and eventually drawing the attention of the president.Credit…Raphaelle MacaronBy More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHumans Can Help Clean Up Facebook and TwitterComputers are good at spreading lies. People can help stop them and mitigate the damage they cause.By More
Donald Trump has been losing Twitter followers since he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden – while the Democratic president-elect has been adding them.According to Factbase, a website dedicated to tracking Trump’s public utterances, the president has lost 133,902 followers since 17 November while the president-elect has gained 1,156,610.In a Sunday tweet, CNN host and media reporter Brian Stelter said that while Twitter followers were “surely not the most important metric in the world”, it was “still worth noting: for the first time since 2015, Trump is consistently losing followers”.Factbase, he pointed out, had “measured small declines for 11 days in a row”.Trump has 88.8 million followers, to whom he continues to tweet baseless claims of electoral fraud and all-out conspiracy theories surrounding his loss to Biden.His most recent message at the time of writing accompanied video of a crowd at a rally and said: “NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION!”Trump has complained about his treatment by Twitter, alleging it is biased against conservatives. Many observers expect that once he leaves office, the site will stop giving him the benefit of the doubt regarding his false and inflammatory messages.Biden has 20.2 million followers.On Monday morning, his most recent message read: “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, and listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.” More
The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook appear before a US Senate hearing to testify about allegations of anti-conservative bias and their handling of the 2020 election. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg face questioning for the second time in as many months, with Republican lawmakers alleging – without evidence – censorship of conservative views
Twitter and Facebook CEOs testify on alleged anti-conservative bias More
The chief executive officers of Twitter and Facebook took the stand on Tuesday to testify, again, about allegations of anti-conservative bias on their platforms.
Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were subpoenaed in October to appear at Tuesday’s hearing with the Senate judiciary committee in order to “review the companies’ handling of the 2020 election”.
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Republican lawmakers frequently allege – without evidence – censorship of conservative views, but this particular hearing was called in response to the companies’ handling of a New York Post article about Joe Biden.
When the story was published in October, Twitter took unprecedented steps to limit its circulation, blocking users from posting links or photos of the report. At the time, Twitter said the measures were taken due to “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which were allegedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. Twitter policies prohibit “directly distribut[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information”.
The company later walked back on its response, tweeting that the communication around the actions on the article “was not great”. It also changed its hacked materials policies in response to the outcry. Facebook took a less aggressive stance, placing some limitations on the article due to questions about its validity.
In his opening statement, Dorsey explained again the company took action against the New York Post tweet due to “the origins of the materials” included in the article and said that Twitter upon further review decided that action was wrong. “I hope this illustrates the rationale behind our actions and demonstrates our ability to take feedback,” Dorsey said. “Mistakes and changes were all transparent to the public.” More
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrumpSAD, I just heard that the ILLEGALS who built the White House did VERY SUBPAR work! Very reliable people are saying the West Wing could COLLAPSE any day! @seanhannity. So First Lady Melania & I will be temporarily moving out so we won’t be in way of renovation …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… which will add INCREDIBLE five-story addition to First Family’s living quarters! Project was estimated to cost billions. They said no way a developer could do it for a PENNY LESS that $1.5 BILLION. But I negotiated a …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… BEAUTIFUL deal with a INCREDIBLE developer who will do the WHOLE project for $1.2 billion, a TREMENDOUS Bargain! So I am HONORED to announce that the Trump Corp. will begin work on January 20, and should be done by …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… end of 2024 at the LATEST. In the meantime, VERY LOW-IQ tenant will occupy the White House during renovation, spending most of the time in the BASEMENT struggling to put simple sentences together. We have the BEST workers who will make sure the basement dweller …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… stays out the way and doesn’t interfere with the daily work, which I’ll be directing from a UNBELIEVABLE sublet that HUGELY SUCCESSFUL friends found for me in walking distance from the Kremlin. I will also be overseeing construction of a PHENOMENAL golf course on outskirts of …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… sunny Pyongyang. Such a clean city, no HUGE rats and ANTIFA SCUM like in Philadelphia. Sad to say, but no city on the WHOLE planet is as STUPID and FAILED as Philadelphia except for maybe Chicago and Detroit and Atlanta, which are all run by …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… the same Dopey Democrats who forced police to give their guns to TERRORISTS and brought in HUGE caravans of rapists and CORPSES from HONDURAS to vote in election that I won with more …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… votes than VERY OVERRATED George Washington and HIGH-TAX Abraham Lincoln COMBINED. Even with the Chinese “virus”, which people tell me I beat in RECORD TIME, I won every state and also carried …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… Greenland, Poland, Hungary AND Turkey, first president in HISTORY to sweep former Soviet RED STATES. But FAKE news won’t report. FOX now run by Cuckoo Chris Wallace, worse than Psycho Joe Scarborough. Journalists are very UNWASHED, they don’t report that …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… Jihadist Pelosi and Hunter Biden printed BILLIONS of FAKE ballots in Georgia FIVE DAYS AFTER QAnon declared me the winner. And these LYING DUMMIES ask for a concession??? If they weren’t so STUPID & DISHONEST, they’d know …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… a concession is where you buy GREASY hot dogs from ILLEGAL vendors. So our historic VICTORY celebration with GREAT ice cream & the BEST TANKS will have to wait until my return to the White House, which will …Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump… be BIGGER and WHITER than ever! In the meantime, I will also be tweeting my autobiography, HUGE!!!!. People say it will SELL 1000x more than BORING Barack’s DOESN’T MATTER “memoir.” Very mediocre reviews @LimbaughBookReview! KAGA!! Lawrence Douglas is the James J Grosfeld professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He is the author of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, published in May by Hachette. He is also a contributing opinion writer for Guardian US
Nancy Pick is a writer based in western Massachusetts More
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
