misinformation – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Techdirt Podcast Episode 422: The Political Power Of Mockery

from the point-and-laugh dept

In a world awash with misinformation and disinformation, those who spread and benefit from the chaos have worked hard to brand fact-checking and counterspeech as a form of censorship — and it’s a worryingly effective tactic. But there’s one type of counterspeech that is very hard to evade: mockery and satire. One person who knows that very well is Ben Collins, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, which purchased The Onion last year. This week, Ben joins us on the podcast to talk about the incredible power of mockery in the social and political landscape.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: ben collins, disinformation, fact checking, misinformation, podcast, satire, the onion

In The Vax Wars, RFK Jr. Predictably Wields Misinformation As A Weapon

from the down-with-the-sickness dept

The second most frustrating aspect of RFK Jr.’s performance as the head of Health and Human Services has been just how predictable the actions he’s taken are. When you start with a simple premise, that Kennedy is a vehement anti-vaxxer, the view that measles is less harmful than the MMR vaccine makes sense. The appointment of other wellness charlatans tracks perfectly. The pulling back on COVID vaccination guidance fits like a puzzle piece. And it should be no surprise that Kennedy decided to fire every single vaccine expert on the ACIP panel to clear the way for his anti-vaxxer views.

But really, truly, the most frustrating part of his reign thus far has been Congress’ complete unwillingness to end this era of malfunction, or in any way attempt to control it. From Kennedy’s nomination hearings all the way to the present, our representatives in Washington have sat back, arms folded, completely disinterested in the very real harm and, yes, deaths that are and will occur due to Kennedy’s incompetence.

But, god damn it, I have to believe that Congress at least might have a problem being lied to directly by Kennedy. And that appears to be what he did when he sent a report to back up his changing of the COVID vaccine guidance. The report is reportedly filled with studies that are either unpublished, under current dispute, or which don’t actually say what he says they say. Misinformation, in other words, fed directly by the HHS Secretary to a Congress that is supposed to oversee his work.

Titled “Covid Recommendation FAQ”, the document has not been posted on the HHS website, though it is the first detailed explanation of Kennedy’s announcement from the agency. Medical experts who reviewed all the citations in the FAQ said it distorts some legitimate studies and cites others that are disputed and unpublished.

One of the studies the HHS document cites is under investigation by its publisher, Sage Journals, regarding “potential issues with the research methodology and conclusions and author conflicts of interest,” according to a link on the study’s webpage.

“This is RFK Jr.’s playbook,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “Either cherry-pick from good science or take junk science to support his premise — this has been his playbook for 20 years.”

To that end, there are more issues with the research and studies powering this document of bullshit. Rather than just published studies that are under current dispute, some of the studies cited haven’t even been published yet. That means no peer review. Kennedy has been quite fond recently of the phrase “gold standard science”, as though he just learned it. He doesn’t seem to know what it means, however. Peer reviewed studies are the gold standard in science and medical research, for what should be painfully obviously reasons. Even the NIH’s own site acknowledges this. If your research or paper cannot survive the scrutiny of your peers, how good can it really be?

Other studies, including unpublished studies, are cited in support of the CDC’s new guidance despite those studies explicitly stating that they should not be.

Another study cited in the document is a preprint that was made available online a year ago, and has still not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Under the study’s title is an alert that “it reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.”

The FAQ draws on the preprint to claim that “post-marketing studies” of COVID vaccines have identified “serious adverse effects, such as an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis” — conditions in which the heart’s muscle or its covering, the pericardium, suffer inflammation.

While research early in the pandemic did find that, new research not included in the memo indicates that the risk has fallen with new vaccine protocols.

More cherry picking, it seems, along with a complete disregard for the very researchers that performed the research as to how it is used. Kennedy recently claimed his HHS would follow the science and scientists wherever the data leads. He is not, because it doesn’t conform to his agenda.

And then there are the bald-faced lies.

In two instances, the HHS memo makes claims about dangers to pregnant women that are actively refuted by the papers it cites to back them up. Both papers support the safety and effectiveness of COVID vaccines for pregnant women.

The HHS document says that another paper it cites found “an increase in placental blood clotting in pregnant mothers who took the vaccine.” But the paper doesn’t contain any reference to placental blood clots or to pregnant women.

“I’ve now read it three times. And I cannot find that anywhere,” said Turrentine, the OB-GYN professor.

If he were grading the HHS document, “I would give this an ‘F,'” Turrentine said. “This is not supported by anything and it’s not using medical evidence.”

Folks, there ought to be zero instances of our government operating on lies when it comes to creating policy. But that’s all this is. An agenda-driven madman heading up HHS changing policy and programs with a wave of a hand to comport with his misguided agenda, all while it’s being supported by either AI-generated slop or whatever the hell this FAQ-of-lies is.

So, to members of Congress on one side of the political aisle, I merely ask this: have you no pride? You’re okay with being spoon-fed lies from a former democrat simply because Dear Leader says so? You’re okay with having blood on your hands as a result of your inability to do your job performing oversight? You’re okay with being the useful idiot in Kennedy’s agenda?

Filed Under: cdc, covid, data, disinformation, fake studies, guidance, health and human services, misinformation, rfk jr., vaccines

State Department Gadfly Looks To Use Twitter Files Playbook For Vengeance

from the the-reveal-matters-more-than-the-evidence dept

Earlier this year, soon after Elon Musk began stripping away parts of the government he had no constitutional authority to destroy, we warned that it appeared officials in the White House were gearing up to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government.

The basics of the playbook are as follows:

  1. Search through copious amounts of internal messaging and documents for anything that can be positioned (usually misleadingly) to be spun by ignorant idiots as damning.
  2. Feed that work to a group of the most credulous, simping journalists that can be found.
  3. Let them run with reports on those “released” documents, which will massively misrepresent the reality within them.
  4. Sit back and relax as the totally false made-up narrative is considered “accepted truth” by a large segment of the population (even those outside of the MAGA brainwash cult).

As Charlie Warzel aptly explained, this approach works because “what mattered more was the mere existence of a dump of primary-source documents — a collection of once-private information that they could cast as nefarious in order to justify what they believed all along.”

The evidence itself is secondary to the performance of “revelation.”

And now it appears this playbook is set to play out at the State Department.

Darren Beattie is a top State Department official who had been in the first Trump administration before being fired for speaking at a white nationalist conference, and who later founded an independent news site mostly known for having effectively no credibility and pushing utter nonsense that somehow always seems to align with the MAGA cult view of the world.

Last week, MIT’s Tech Review revealed that one of the things Beattie has done at the State Department is begin a total witch hunt for documents he can use to mislead the public in Twitter Files-like fantasyland.

The document, originally shared in person with roughly a dozen State Department employees in early March, requested staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation—including Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum, former US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, and the Stanford Internet Observatory—or have criticized President Donald Trump and his allies, such as the conservative anti-Trump commentator Bill Kristol.

The document also seeks all staff communications that merely reference Trump or people in his orbit, like Alex Jones, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In addition, it directs a search of communications for a long list of keywords, including “Pepe the Frog,” “incel,” “q-anon,” “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory,” “far-right,” and “infodemic.”

For several people who received or saw the document, the broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” one official says—one that could put the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations at risk.

Specifically, Beattie went looking at the internal documents for the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub, which was set up to — as it says on the tin — counter foreign information manipulation.

As we’ve discussed for quite some time now, the MAGA world insists that any discussion of “countering foreign manipulation” is really a cover story for “censoring domestic truths.” That’s never been the case, and it makes MAGA people look very foolish every time they make this claim, but it won’t stop them.

People within the State Department who have called this out as problematic are drastically understating what’s really happening. They’re treating this like a simple records request gone wrong, rather than recognizing it as part of a calculated disinformation campaign (which is ironic, since they’re supposed to be the disinfo experts):

Several State Department staffers call the records requests “unusual” and “improper” in their scope. MIT Technology Review spoke to three people who had personally seen the document, as well as two others who were aware of it; we agreed to allow them to speak anonymously due to their fears of retaliation.

While they acknowledge that previous political appointees have, on occasion, made information requests through the records management system, Beattie’s request was something wholly different.

Never had “an incoming political appointee” sought to “search through seven years’ worth of all staff emails to see whether anything negative had been said about his friends,” says one staffer.

Another staffer calls it a “pet project” for Beattie.

While it certainly is improper for Beattie to be doing this, it seems likely that it’s about a lot more than finding out whether or not anyone in this group said anything mean about Beattie and his friends. Assuming this follows from past practice around the Twitter Files or Jim Jordan’s weaponizing of his congressional committee against anyone he believes is insufficiently willing to suck up to Trump, it appears that the intent here is to publish out of context, misleading versions of what they find to try to justify the false claims that operations like R/FIMI are actual part of the “censorship industrial complex.”

Tech Review has published an excerpt of Beattie’s “sensitive but unclassified” request for records, which shows just how unserious this is:

That’s literally “please do a search of previous records for any time anyone mentioned me or my shit-peddling friends.”

It also asks for any documents with a long list of “keywords” or “phrases” related to topics that the MAGA world obsesses over:

If you don’t soak your brain regularly in the vats of the MAGA world’s distortion field, you might not realize there are specific stories behind most of these, but you can tell that this is a mass fishing expedition, to see if the State Department was calling out the absolutely constant flood of bullshit that Beattie and his friends were peddling throughout the majority of the Biden administration, while also checking to see if the State Department folks had been calling out how the nonsense peddlers were coming from inside house.

It’s likely that some of these topics came up at some point or another, though generally under the context of whether foreign adversaries were looking to use domestic culture war controversies to stir up more anger and divisiveness. But if there are any mentions of any of this we’ll be hearing for days upon days from the names listed that it was an example of the government being “weaponized” against them, when the reality will likely be more along the lines of “get a load of this useful idiot pushing nonsense again.”

Meanwhile, rest assured that this fishing expedition is, itself, an example of an illegal weaponization of the government against people for their own speech and expression regarding how best to respond to things like purposeful disinformation. That’s because many of Beattie’s targets appear to be the voices most associated with researching disinformation and the ways to counter it (which, again, don’t mean “censorship” and quite frequently mean “with more speech.”)

Also included among the nearly 60 individuals and organizations caught up in Beattie’s information dragnet are Bill Gates; the open-source journalism outlet Bellingcat; former FBI special agent Clint Watts; Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister; Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland; Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation who led research at Stanford Internet Observatory; and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the US Department of Homeland Security.

[….]

Labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” the document lays out Beattie’s requests in 12 separate, but sometimes repetitive, bullet points. In total, he sought communications about 16 organizations, including Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as with and about 39 individuals.

Notably, this includes several journalists: In addition to Bellingcat and Applebaum, the document also asks for communications with NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny.

The Tech Review article says that it’s unlikely there will be all that much responsive to these requests because that’s not what these organizations actually do:

(Staffers say they doubt that Beattie will find much, unless, one says, it’s “previous [FOIA] queries from people like Beattie” or discussions about “some Russian or PRC [Chinese] narrative that includes some of this stuff.”)

But, again, just as with the Twitter Files, that is unlikely to matter that much. Something will be found that can be presented out of context or surrounded with a bunch of misinformation to make it appear like something it is not. We’ve seen this before.

And, as the article notes, that’s definitely in the works:

Five weeks after Beattie made his requests for information, the State Department shut down R/FIMI.

An hour after staff members were informed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a blog post announcing the news on the Federalist, one of the outlets that sued the GEC over allegations of censorship. He then discussed in an interview with the influential right-wing Internet personality Mike Benz plans for Beattie to lead a “transparency effort.”

“What we have to do now—and Darren will be big involved in that as well—is sort of document what happened … because I think people who were harmed deserve to know that, and be able to prove that they were harmed,” Rubio told Benz.

This is what Beattie—and Benz—have long called for. Many of the names and keywords he included in his request reflect conspiracy theories and grievances promoted by Revolver News—which Beattie founded after being fired from his job as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration when CNN reported that he had spoken at a conference with white nationalists.

Ultimately, the State Department staffers say they fear that a selective disclosure of documents, taken out of context, could be distorted to fit any kind of narrative Beattie, Rubio, or others create.

Actual people with knowledge of what’s going on or how this works will have two choices:

  1. Put in the ridiculous amount of work and effort to debunk the misleading narratives that will come out of this, while at a disadvantage of not having all of the details or documents
  2. Just shut up and let the narrative overwhelm the wider ecosystem, even breaking out of MAGA confines into the general public

Neither is a great situation — and that’s by design. The Muskian/MAGA world knows that manufacturing bullshit takes minutes, while properly debunking it takes days or weeks of painstaking work. The asymmetry is the point.

Tom Nichols wrote about this at The Atlantic, suggesting that this whole thing is “strange” given that the Twitter files “revealed very little” and assumes that it’s more about creating a kind of blacklist of “bad people” in the government or that he’s trying to “chill any contact between his office and people or organizations who have not passed the administration’s political purity tests.”

That might have something to do with it, but I think it misreads the MAGA world’s steadfast belief that the Twitter Files actually “revealed” a vast, horrendous, “censorship industrial complex” in which the “Biden Crime Family” would direct Twitter to delete patriotic posts of people revealing “the truth” about COVID and the 2020 election. That it did literally none of that doesn’t matter. The narrative is all that matters, and Beattie is looking for scraps to feed the narrative.

I think a different piece at The Atlantic, by Charlie Warzel, gets this part more correct:

The Twitter Files did show that the company made editorial decisions—for example, limiting reach on posts from several large accounts that had flaunted Twitter’s rules, including those of the Stanford doctor (and current National Institutes of Health head) Jay Bhattacharya, the right-wing activists Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and Chaya Raichik, who operates the Libs of TikTok account. Not exactly breaking news to anyone who’d paid attention. But they also showed that, in some cases, Twitter employees and even Democratic lawmakers were opposed to or pushed back on government requests to take down content. Representative Ro Khanna, for example, reached out to Twitter’s executive leadership to express his frustration that Twitter was suppressing speech during its handling of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Of course, none of this stopped Musk from portraying the project as a Pentagon Papers–esque exercise in transparency. Teasing out the document dump back in December 2022, Musk argued that the series was proof of large-scale “violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment,” but then later admitted he had not read most of the files. This was fitting: For the Twitter Files’ target audience, the archives and their broader contexts were of secondary importance. What mattered more was the mere existence of a dump of primary-source documents—a collection of once-private information that they could cast as nefarious in order to justify what they believed all along. As I wrote in 2022, Twitter had been quite public about its de-amplification policies for accounts that violated its rules, but the screenshots of internal company documents included in the Twitter Files were interpreted by already aggrieved influencers and posters as evidence of malfeasance. This gave them ammunition to portray themselves as victims of a sophisticated, coordinated censorship effort.

For many, the Twitter Files were just another ephemeral culture-war skirmish. But for the MAGA sympathetic and right-leaning free-speech-warrior crowds, the files remain a canonical, even radicalizing event. RFK Jr. has argued on prime-time television that “I don’t think we’d have free speech in this country if it wasn’t for Elon Musk” opening up Twitter’s archives. Similarly, individuals mentioned in the files, such as the researcher and Atlantic contributor Renée DiResta, have become objects of obsession to MAGA conspiracy theorists. (“One post on X credited the imaginary me with ‘brainwashing all of the local elections officials’ to facilitate the theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump,” DiResta wrote last year.) Simply put, the Twitter Files may have largely been full of sensationalistic claims and old news, but the gambit worked: Their release fleshed out a conspiratorial cinematic universe for devotees to glom on to.

So, as Warzel points out, Beattie’s efforts are “an attempt to add new characters and updated lore to this universe.”

The MAGA cinematic universe is about as connected to reality as the Marvel or Star Wars cinematic universes, yet they’re taken as true by a huge segment of the population. And, worse, even as it’s a matter of religious faith among the true MAGA cultists, the ideas behind them get laundered through so many people that they often breach that barrier.

To this day, I still hear from otherwise normal non-MAGA people, who think that the Twitter Files actually revealed “something bad” happening between Twitter and the government, they just think it probably wasn’t “as bad” as MAGA made it out to be. The reality that it revealed… basically nothing of interest, just doesn’t seem possible.

Beattie is trying to extend that to other parts of the government as well, and using that plan to protect his friends, and to attack and diminish the work of those who called out their bullshit.

Again, Warzel is directly on point:

Perhaps the records request could dredge up something concerning. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that there could be examples of bias or worse in a large tranche of private conversations between a government agency and outside organizations on a host of polarizing topics. But Beattie’s effort, as far as MIT described it, bears none of the hallmarks of an earnest push for transparency. Instead, it reeks of cynical politicking and using one’s privileged government position to access private information for political gain.

The point is not necessarily to find anything real, though that would be a nice bonus. The point is _the act of “revealing_” something which can then be weaponized to support prior claims, even if the actual evidence doesn’t support the claim. It’s not the evidence, but the structures that suggest evidence. Because these are “internal” communications that have been “revealed,” they must contain important valuable secrets, otherwise why would they be leaked.

It’s all part of the show, the kayfabe — a carefully choreographed performance where the trappings of revelation matter more than the substance. Beattie is following the Twitter Files playbook to the letter: gather documents, prep friendly media, and get ready for the spectacle. It’s a vibes-based narrative designed to work whether anything noteworthy is found or not. And if history is any guide, it will work again.

Filed Under: chilling effects, darren beattie, disinformation, fishing expedition, marco rubio, misinformation, narrative, state department, twitter files, witch hunt

In DOGE’s Hunt For Imaginary Censors, It Kills Actual Anti-Censorship Research

from the stupid-is-as-stupid-does dept

The people most loudly (misleadingly) complaining about censorship just… helped enable actual censorship. Not metaphorical censorship, not “they won’t let me tweet slurs” censorship, but literal “we’re going to stop research into fighting actual government censorship” censorship.

It’s painfully stupid, but that’s just what we get with the folks running the government these days.

This all starts with a fundamental misunderstanding: the belief that any research into “disinformation” must itself be a censorship program. This is a bit like assuming that studying cancer is actually a plot to give people cancer, but this is the state of the crazy world we live in today. It ignores the rather obvious fact that disinformation and foreign influence campaigns do exist, and that studying them usually aims to counter them with more speech, not less.

But you will never get that through to the truly brain-wormed among the MAGA-Musk cinematic universe. Just recently, Elon announced that “several more censorship organizations will be released” after a Steve Bannon acolyte falsely posted to ExTwitter that USAID’s non-classified efforts to fund digital literacy efforts was about censorship (she claimed the programs were “declassified,” as she’s too ignorant to know that the “U” in the description means they were always unclassified).

Of course, digital literacy has nothing to do with “censorship” at all. It’s not about “getting news solely from legacy sources.” It simply is about teaching people how to understand what they’re reading (like knowing when something is unclassified already, rather than declassified) and understanding how to recognize when you’re being lied to.

Either way, in pursuit of dumbing down Americans and making them much more susceptible to foreign influence campaigns, last week the NSF got around to pulling a bunch of grants that were (often loosely) related to mis- and disinformation. NSF put out a statement claiming these cuts are about better aligning their efforts.

Awards that are not aligned with NSF’s priorities have been terminated, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation.

While the targeting of DEI initiatives has received significant attention, the wholesale elimination of mis- and disinformation research represents an equally concerning development.

While apparently 430 such grants have been unceremoniously canceled, one academic forwarded me a spreadsheet listing out about 50 such canceled grants. I don’t want to release the whole thing, but while NSF’s email to academics claimed that each cut was carefully vetted, that’s obviously bullshit.

The most obvious example of how haphazard and stupid these cuts are is that they cut Associate Professor Eric Wustrow’s CAREER grant on “Combating Censorship from Within the Network.” You can kinda tell that some DOGE bro likely did a keyword search on “censorship” and probably just killed all such projects. But if anyone actually read even just the description of the project, they’d realize that this was about countering censorship through technology. You’d think that’s the sort of thing that the DOGE folks would support? Unless of course, they actually support censorship. (Also, canceling CAREER grants is utter bullshit, as they’re specifically designed to help out early career professors, who will be massively harmed by this).

Other canceled grants include one on “empowering fact checkers” because we can’t have that. There’s a canceled grant about “enhancing attribution, detection, and explanation” of foreign influence campaigns (you can see why MAGA might not like that one very much). Also a program on “using markets to address manipulated information online.” You’d think that the “more speech” crew would like that sorta thing, but apparently not.

The impact of these cuts will be profound: reducing America’s ability to counter actual censorship, understand foreign influence operations, and maintain technological leadership in these critical areas.

We will all be dumber because of this nonsense.

The whole thing is so stupid that even the Trump-appointed head of the NSF resigned just after these cuts were announced.

“I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership,” writes Sethuraman Panchanathan, a computer scientist who was nominated to lead NSF by then-President Donald Trump in December 2019 and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2020. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”

Although Panchanathan, known as Panch, didn’t give a reason for his sudden departure, orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the agency’s $9 billion budget next year and fire half its 1700-person staff may have been the final straws in a series of directives Panchanathan felt he could no longer obey.

As Science notes, DOGE showed up in the NSF offices a few weeks ago and basically just started slashing stuff without much concern or understanding. And Panchanathan gives a little nod towards that nonsense in his resignation letter:

Panchanathan refers obliquely to that draconian reduction in his resignation letter. “While NSF has always been an efficient agency,” he writes, “we still took [on] the challenge of identifying other possible efficiencies and reducing our commitments to serve the scientific community even better.”

This is, like so much from this administration, needless destruction of important American infrastructure and knowledge base through ignorance, anger and stupidity. We will all be worse for it, but thank goodness, no one will ever have to face being… digitally literate in the Trump universe.

Filed Under: anti-censorship, censorship, disinformation, misinformation, nsf, research

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Red Pills & Blue Checks

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Filed Under: content moderation, free speech, mental health, misinformation, verification
Companies: 4chan, bluesky, meta

RFK Jr. Blames Malnutrition For Measles Outbreak’s Severe Illnesses And Deaths

from the just-eat-more dept

Let’s stipulate something before we dive into this post so that there is no misunderstanding: the rise of the anti-vax movement did not begin with Donald Trump’s foray into American politics. It’s been around since well before 2016, slowly but surely gaining momentum among a strange combination of West Coast liberal elites and a certain portion of conservatives. It gave rise to once-eradicated diseases for some time and was then supercharged by the bevy of misinformation and speculation around the COVID vaccines.

But Trump hasn’t helped. The eradication of truth as replaced by speculation, the “I’m just asking questions” routine, and a willingness to say anything that comes to mind with no thought to the consequences have all combined to propel the anti-vax crowd further than it has ever gotten. That is especially obvious with Trump putting the living avatar for the anti-vax movement, RFK Jr., in charge of the health of our nation.

Is RFK Jr. anti-vax? It depends on which day you ask him and where you are doing that questioning, it appears.

Kennedy said in his NPR interview that vaccines were “not going to be taken away from anybody”. He says he wants to improve the science on vaccine safety which he believes has “huge deficits” and that he wants good information so people “can make informed choices“.

While Kennedy has denied on several occasions that he is anti-vaccination and said he and his children are vaccinated, he has repeatedly stated widely debunked claims about vaccine harm.

One of his main false claims – repeated in a 2023 interview with Fox News, was that “autism comes from vaccines”.

His answers are so all over the map that anything can be true, which means nothing is. And that sort of thing isn’t relegated only to whatever his actual stance on vaccines is. You get the same thing when it comes to the recent outbreak of measles in the American south. Should people get vaccinated in that area, where under-vaccination is a problem? RFK Jr. said yes and with an impressive amount of force in a March 3rd post on the HHS.gov site.

Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.

The current Texas outbreak has predominantly affected children, with 116 of the 146 cases occurring in individuals under 18 years of age. The DSHS reports that 79 of the confirmed cases involved individuals who had not received the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, while 62 cases had unknown vaccine status. At least five had received an MMR vaccine.

Great, except we have a couple of problems here. The measles outbreak began in January. RFK Jr. was confirmed as the HHS Secretary on February 13th. Why did it take until March 3rd to recommend vaccination?

And why is RFK Jr. now saying some incredibly stupid things about measles and disease in general that seem to point to other strategies besides vaccination?

While vaccines are widely regarded as the first line of defense, some experts have suggested that nutrition plays a role in reducing the severity of the disease.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discussed the topic during a recent exclusive interview with Dr. Marc Siegel, clinical professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health and Fox News’ senior medical analyst.

“We need to understand the relationship between good health and chronic disease,” RFK Jr. told Siegel. “If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease, in modern times — because we have nutrition … and access to medicines. What we need is good science on all of these things so that people can make rational choices.”

Read that again. “If you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease.” I will assume that this inartfully worded statement is saying that if you’re otherwise healthy then it’s nearly impossible to die from an infectious disease. I also have zero idea as to what evidence RFK Jr. is basing that on. And the “rational choices” line is obviously a subtle nod to the anti-vax crowd, though it’s carefully worded so that Kennedy can deny that.

But come on: there are a ton of infectious diseases that can kill you quite easily, even if you’re eating habits are tip top. AIDS comes to mind. Ebola, Smallpox, and all kinds of bacterial infections as well. This isn’t secret information and the HHS Secretary saying otherwise is bonkers.

Folks, this is dangerous. A lack of clarity on the best plan to re-eradicate a disease we declared gone decades ago is going to prolong this outbreak and spur on others. The main victims of this disease are fucking children. The first death of this outbreak was a school-aged child. Measles should be a mere nightmare in 2025. Instead, the nightmare has become real through misinformation, doublespeak, and the distrust in science that has been in a supercharged state ever since the current President presided over the worst health crisis in a century during his first term. Largely because that same President decided he’d rather deny simple facts and/or find something/someone to blame than deal with reality and provide actual leadership.

Now, it’s not as though the concept that people who have access to quality nutrition will respond to measles better is wrong in and of itself, to be clear. That’s almost certainly true. The problem is several fold: the administration RFK Jr. works for is cutting nutrition programs from the government, vaccines work even for those suffering from malnutrition, and, because of the quality of our healthcare, malnutrition plays much less of a role in the United States than other countries.

Dr. Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, a San Francisco biotechnology company, agreed that measles is more likely to severely affect children in developing countries who are extremely malnourished.

“Historically, less than 1% of American children die from measles, while the Pan American Health Organization reports that as [many] as 10% of children die from measles in some developing countries, and it has been reported as high as 25% to 50% in a study of malnourished African infants,” he told Fox News Digital.

The lack of quality medical care in many areas of the developing world also contributes to disease severity, Glanville noted.

“While better nutrition is important for American children, it’s unlikely to make a difference when it comes to measles infection or severity — 90% of well-fed but unvaccinated American children exposed to measles will become infected, around 20% of those children will be hospitalized, and 0.1-1% of those children will die.”

But when it comes to RFK Jr., the man simply cannot be clear. Because, I suspect, he is an anti-vaxxer at his core. He has to pretend otherwise now, first to be confirmed as HHS Secretary and now so a larger uproar over his post there won’t begin. But responses like those below simply don’t help.

RFK also recognized the importance of vaccines, noting that the HHS is “making sure that anybody who wants the vaccine can get that vaccine.”

“The measles vaccine protects the community,” he told Dr. Siegel. “We are recommending that people in this country get vaccines … [and] we are also respectful of their personal choices.”

There was no need for the last part of that statement. It’s what the vaccine skeptics will glom onto, refusing to vaccinate their children, harming herd immunity for these solvable diseases, and endangering us all.

Filed Under: disinformation, health, health misinformation, measles, misinformation, nutrition, rfk jr., vaccines

Donald Trump Is Turning CISA Into The Embodiment Of His Election Conspiracy Theories

from the chief-petty-officer dept

Donald Trump spent the four years between presidential terms complaining about a “stolen” election. He — and his enablers — made multiple baseless claims about election fraud and claimed the entire system was rigged against him. His lawyers and supporters suggested voting machines were so insecure that the Venezuelan government itself might have been involved in his loss to Joe Biden.

These claims about a rigged system evaporated when Trump won the 2024 election. But he’s not about to let the perceived slight of the 2020 election evaporate along with his insistence the electoral system is so deeply corrupt it would never let him ascend to the Oval Office again.

But he does know there’s still plenty of performative hay to be made by re-stoking the fires of the “stolen election” conspiracy. While he and his fellow shitheels do their best to dismantle pretty much every part of the federal government Trump doesn’t like, elections are possibly on their way to being as insecure as Trump claimed they were before he urged his crowd of willing insurrectionists to raid the Capitol on January 6, 2020.

CISA (Cyber security and Infrastructure Security Agency) has been doing its best to thwart security threats and deter the spread of misinformation about government security. Trump apparently doesn’t like that. He’d rather turn the agency on itself to serve his own egotistical ends while turning CISA into just another distribution option for his “stolen election” conspiracy theories. Here’s Eric Geller, reporting for Wired.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen all of its election security work and is reviewing everything it has done to help state and local officials secure their elections for the past eight years, WIRED has learned. The move represents the first major example of the country’s cyber defense agency accommodating President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud and online censorship.

In a memo sent Friday to all CISA employees and obtained by WIRED, CISA’s acting director, Bridget Bean, said she was ordering “a review and assessment” of every position at the agency related to election security and countering mis- and disinformation, “as well as every election security and [mis-, dis-, and malinformation] product, activity, service, and program that has been carried out” since the federal government designated election systems as critical infrastructure in 2017.

There it is: CISA will now deploy its resources to investigate itself, in hopes of coaxing out some “evidence” that will allow Trump to claim the agency was utilized by the Biden Administration to silence Trump voters and mute their false claims about voter fraud. On top of that, it will be prevented from addressing election misinformation going forward, which will certainly aid whatever conspiracy theorist chooses to follow in Trump’s footsteps for the 2028 election. I mean, assuming we still have the national election option at that point.

Bridget Bean is the acting director of CISA. Prior to obtaining this position, she held an executive position at FEMA as a Trump appointee during his first term. Bean claims forcing CISA away from the important work of deterring actual election fraud and interference is non-negotiable, pointing to a Trump executive order that vaguely asserts its goal is “restoring free speech and ending federal censorship.”

What that means in this context is that CISA will no longer offer guidance to private companies when it comes to handling misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information (the “MDM” referred to in the memo). Of course, the only people complaining about CISA’s efforts were loyal Trumpists, who seemed to believe they should be allowed to make false claims without fear of reprisal, much less crowd-sourced correction. And it’s even more of a problem now, what with the nation’s most-used social media service having already abandoned fact-checking in order to more closely align its feeds (and its founder) with Trump and his supporters.

By the time this is all said and done, people who did important work in the election security/fraud field will be out of job and the agency they used to work for will be nothing more than a political weapon to be wielded against those who opposed the current president and his successors, who — if they’re from the Republican party — will be just as dishonest and self-serving as the man we are again asked to pretend is our nation’s “leader.”

Bean’s memo indicates that CISA’s internal review will cover every agency position related to election security, as well as performance plans for employees involved in that work; all support services provided to the election community; and all election security guidance and publications. Bean wrote that CISA will describe any steps necessary to “correct any activities identified as past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech,” including eliminating programs or roles.

Comply or GTFO. That’s the message. Either you’re going to do the “Dear Leader” thing or you can start updating your resume. Whatever resources Elon Musk allows CISA to utilize will be used to conduct an internal witch hunt that will only be allowed to produce evidence that supports Trump’s “stolen election” hallucinations. This country is in the hands of sociopaths who view the Night of the Long Knives as a squad goal. This is not going to end well. If you harbored any doubts about the legitimacy of past elections, you’re only going to have more doubts going forward. And that’s the entire point: to find just enough something to allow petty would-be despots to dispute any election outcome they don’t like for years to come.

Filed Under: cisa, conspiracy theories, election security, january 6th, misinformation

Katie Couric Is Wrong: Repealing Section 230 Won’t Stop Online Misinformation

from the misinformation-about-misinformation dept

Katie Couric recently claimed that repealing Section 230 would help combat online misinformation. The problem is, she couldn’t be more wrong. Worse, as a prominent voice, she’s contributing to the widespread misinformation around Section 230 herself.

A few years ago, for reasons that are unclear to me, Katie Couric chaired a weird Aspen Institute “Commission on Disinformation,” which produced a report on how to tackle disinformation. The report was, well, not good. It was written by people with no real experience tackling issues related to disinformation and it shows. As we noted at the time, it took a “split the baby” approach to trying to deal with disinformation. It described how there were no good answers, that doing anything might make the problem worse, and then still suggested that maybe repealing Section 230 for certain kinds of content (not clearly defined) might help.

The report’s recommendations were a mix of unworkable and nonsensical ideas, betraying the authors’ lack of true expertise on the complex issues and, more importantly, the tradeoffs around online disinformation.

Repealing Section 230 would not magically solve misinformation online. In fact, it would likely make the problem worse. Section 230 is what allows websites to moderate content and experiment with anti-misinformation measures, without fear of lawsuits. Removing that protection would incentivize sites to take a hands-off approach, or shut down user content entirely. The end result would be fewer places for online discourse, dominated by a few tech giants – hardly a recipe for truth.

Still, it appears that Couric is now presenting herself as an expert on disinformation. The NY Times Dealbook has a series of “influential people” supposedly “sharing their insights” on big topics of the day, and they asked Couric about disinformation. Her response was that she was upset Section 230 won’t be repealed.

What is the best tool a person has to combat misinformation today?

There are many remedies for combating misinformation, but sadly getting rid of Section 230 and requiring more transparency by technology companies may not happen.

But again, that only raises serious questions about how little she actually understands the role of Section 230 and how it functions. The idea that repealing Section 230 would be a remedy for combating misinformation is misinformation itself.

Remember, Section 230 is what frees companies to try to respond to and combat misinformation. There are many market forces that push companies to respond to misinformation: the loss of users, the loss of advertisers, the rise of competition. Indeed, we’re seeing all three of those occurring these days as ExTwitter and Facebook have decided to drop any pretense of trying to combat misinformation.

But then you need Section 230 to allow websites that actually are trying to combat misinformation to apply whatever policies they can come up with. It’s what allows them to experiment and to adjust in the face of ever sneakier and ever more malicious users trying to push misinformation.

Without Section 230, each decision and each policy could potentially lead to liability. This means that instead of having moderation teams focused on what will make for the best community overall, you have legal teams focused on what will reduce liability or threats of litigation.

The underlying damning fact here is that the vast majority of misinformation is very much protected speech. And it needs to be if you want to have free speech. Otherwise, you have people like incoming President Trump declare any news that is critical of him as “fake news” and allowing him to take legal action over it.

On top of that, the standard under the First Amendment is that if there is violative content hosted by an intermediary (such as a bookseller), there needs to be actual knowledge not just that the content exists, but that it somehow violates the law.

The end result then is that if you repeal Section 230, you don’t end up with less misinformation. You almost certainly end up with way more. Because websites are encouraged to avoid making moderation decisions, because everything will need to be reviewed by an expensive legal team who will caution against most decisions. It also creates incentives to decrease even reviewing content, out of a fear that a court might deem any moderation effort to be “actual knowledge.”

Thus, the websites that continue to host third-party user-generated content are likely to do significantly less trust & safety work, because the law is saying that if they continue to do that work, they may face greater legal threats for it. That won’t lead to less misinformation, it will lead to more.

The main thing that repealing Section 230 would do is probably lead to many fewer places willing to host third-party content at all, because of that kind of legal liability. Many online forums that want to support communities in a safe and thoughtful way will realize that the risk of liability is too great, and will exit the market (or never enter at all).

So the end result is that you have basically wiped the market of upstarts, smaller spaces, and competitors and left the market to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. I’m curious if Katie Couric thinks that’s a better world.

Indeed, the only spaces that will remain are those that take the path described above, of limiting their moderation decisions to the legally required level. Only a few sites will do this, and they will quickly become garbage sites that users and advertisers won’t be as interested in participating in.

So we have more power given to Zuck and Musk, fewer competitive spaces, and the remaining sites are incentivized to do less content moderation. Plenty of experts have explained this, including those listed as advisors to Couric’s commission.

I can guarantee that she (or whoever the actual staffers who handled this issue) was told about this impact. But she seems to have internalized just the “repeal 230” part, which is just fundamentally backwards.

That said, I actually do think that the rest of her answer is a pretty good summary of what the real response needs to be: better education, better media literacy, and better teaching people how to fend for themselves against attempts to mislead and lie to them.

As a result, it’s mostly up to the individual to be vigilant about identifying misinformation and not sharing it. This will require intensive media literacy, which will help people understand the steps required to consider the source. That means investigating websites that may be disseminating inaccurate information and understanding their agendas, second-sourcing information, and if it’s an individual, learning more about that person’s background and expertise. Of course, this is all time-consuming and a lot to ask of consumers, but for now, I ascribe to the Sy Syms adage: “An educated consumer is our best customer.”

But, of course, the semi-ironic point in all of this is that having Section 230 around makes that more possible. Without Section 230, we have fewer useful resources to help teach media literacy. We have fewer ways of educating people on how to do things right.

For example, Wikipedia has made clear that it cannot exist without Section 230, and it has become a key tool in information literacy these days (which is ironic, given that in its early days it was widely accused of being a vector of misinformation).

Combating online misinformation is a complex challenge with no easy answers. But despite Couric’s claims, repealing Section 230 is the wrong solution. It would lead to less content moderation, more concentrated power in the hands of a few tech giants, and, ultimately, even more misinformation spreading unchecked online. Policymakers and thought leaders need to move beyond simplistic soundbites and engage with the real nuances of these issues.

Katie Couric is a big name with a big platform. Misinforming the public about these issues does a real disservice to the issue.

Now, maybe the NY Times can ask actual experts who understand the tradeoffs, rather than the famous talking head who doesn’t, next time they want to ask questions about complex and nuanced subjects? I mean, that would involve not spreading misinformation about Section 230, so probably not.

Filed Under: content moderation, free speech, katie couric, misinformation, section 230

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Sorry, This Episode Will Not Cheer You Up

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor Concentrix, the technology and services leader driving trust, safety, and content moderation globally. In our Bonus Chat, Dom Sparkes, Trust and Safety Director for EMEA, and David Elliot, Head of Technology, try to lighten the mood by discussing how to make a compelling business case for online safety and the importance of measuring ROI.

Filed Under: .politics, ai, artificial intelligence, content moderation, disinformation, election, misinformation
Companies: character.ai, facebook, meta

Lies, Damned Lies, And Elon Musk

from the we-used-to-believe-in-reality dept

What do you do when the misinformation is coming from inside the house?

In the recent book Character Limit, about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, there’s an anecdote that is in the introduction. A data scientist who worked at the company (and had survived the early purge), who was horrified at how Musk had fallen for a blatantly obvious made up conspiracy theory, decided that he’d take the opportunity Musk had offered to talk to anyone personally to explain just how gullible Musk seemed:

Musk’s assistant peeked back the muttered and said he had another meeting. “Do you have any final thoughts?” she asked.

“Yes, I want to say one thing.” the data scientist said. He took a deep breath and turned to Musk.

“I’m resigning today. I was feeling excited about the takeover, but I was really disappointed by your Paul Pelosi tweet. It’s really such obvious partisan misinformation and it makes me worry about you and what kind of friends you’re getting information from. It’s only really like the tenth percentile of the adult population who’d be gullible enough to fall for this.”

The color drained from Musk’s already pale face. He leaned forward in his chair. No one spoke to him like this. And no one, least of all someone who worked for him, would dare to question his intellect or his tweets. His darting eyes focused for a second directly on the data scientist.

“Fuck you!” Musk growled.

This is a pattern. Musk has all the money in the world. He has the ability to be one of the best informed people in the world. And he’s built for himself a snowglobe of confirmation bias, making sure that a randomly floating combination of grifters and morons continue to feed him the dumbest shit imaginable, rather than take the slightest effort to actually inform himself of reality.

We just recently had a post contrasting how science educator Hank Green approached some possibly damning information about voting, compared to how Elon Musk handled it. Green was concerned, but spent the time researching it, and realized his original concerns were misplaced, and the institutions had actually done things in a smart way. Elon does no research, and assumes the worst, and simply will retweet any nonsense he comes across so long as it confirms his (very, very confused) biases.

This keeps playing out day after day on ExTwitter, the website that Elon owns. Just recently, I saw Elon post a tweet that was so egregiously wrong, it got Community Noted twice, not that Elon ever acknowledged it was false. As I write this a few days later, the tweet is still up:

That’s a quote tweet from Elon Musk saying “They are literally foaming at their mouth” in response to a tweet from some rando saying “Completely insane story in The Atlantic today” with a faked screenshot of an Atlantic piece with the false headline “Trump is Literally Hitler.” Both the original tweet and Elon’s tweet have a Community Note on it saying “this is not a real article.”

But millions of people saw the original, without the Community Note, and seem to think it’s true.

The original tweeter later admitted that he faked the headline. But because Elon wanted to believe it was true and had to retweet it, giving it a bunch of attention, even The Atlantic was forced to put out a statement noting they never published any such article.

The Atlantic concludes that statement with the following rather straightforward point:

Anyone encountering these images can quickly verify whether something is real––or not––by visiting The Atlantic and searching our site.

The bare minimum effort, which Elon couldn’t be bothered with.

Amusingly, the same day my piece comparing how Green and Musk deal with such information came out, Green released another video, this time talking about how he looked at one day’s worth of Elon tweets and was shocked to see how blatantly and easily Musk publishes easily disproven false information with the implication that Musk believes it’s true. Green found six outright lies posted in just 24 hours.

Again, this is not a one-off thing. Recently, the NY Times looked at five days’ worth of Elon’s tweets and found almost one-third of them “were false, misleading, or missing vital context.”

Nearly a third of his posts last week were false, misleading or missing vital context. They included misleading posts claiming Democrats were making memes “illegal” and falsehoods that they want to “open the border” to gain votes from illegal immigrants. His misleading posts were seen more than 800 million times on X, underscoring Mr. Musk’s unique role as the platform’s most-followed account and a significant source of its misleading content.

[….]

His most-viewed post, seen more than 100 million times, was a misleading projection of the presidential race that showed Mr. Trump winning most battleground states. The data was based on an outdated forecast from Nate Silver, an election modeler. By the time Mr. Musk shared the data, Mr. Silver’s forecast had shifted, suggesting instead that Vice President Kamala Harris was faring better than Mr. Trump. Some users quickly noted that the data was wrong, but Mr. Musk did not remove the post or make a correction.

It wasn’t just one bad week. Bloomberg just came out with an even bigger report, looking at all of Elon Musk’s tweets from 2011 through this week. It’s a really fascinating piece of data-based journalism, showing how he was a pretty ordinary tweeter in the early days, but obviously things changed after he took over Twitter.

As the report notes, in recent weeks, Musk has become obsessed with false and disproven conspiracy theories about the election and immigration.

Musk’s posts about immigration primarily promote misleading narratives: that the election will be unfair because of migrants; that migrants are dangerous, and flooding unchecked into the country; that the vast majority of immigrants have not settled into the US in the “right” way; that migrants have gotten unreasonable, special treatment from the government; and that Democrats are responsible for ushering in large numbers of migrants who go on to commit crimes in the US.

Bloomberg ran a machine learning model on the posts to identify subjects that Musk most often discusses on X, and found that about 1,300 of Musk’s posts in 2024 revolved around immigration and voter fraud. Reporters then manually reviewed hundreds of them to ensure they were properly categorized. Posts were provided by researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub and the data platform Bright Data.

Musk’s commentary on noncitizens voting is based on a “weak to non-existent” understanding of election law, said David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Federal law bars non-US citizens from voting in presidential elections, and voters must legally swear, under penalty of criminal prosecution, that they’re eligible to cast a ballot.

In order to become a US citizen and vote, undocumented immigrants have only a few viable paths, some which take years, such as securing asylum or successfully challenging a deportation order. Meanwhile, state-led investigations by both Republican and Democratic officials have repeatedly found that noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare — and it’s never been shown to affect the outcome of any election. “Given what we know about how infrequently voter fraud has occurred over the last two or three elections in the US, the odds of drawing a random ballot, and that ballot being fraudulent, approach that of winning the Powerball,” Schultz said.

It also appears that there’s some element of “audience capture” going on. Musk appears to track closely what sort of response his posts get (which is partly why he ordered the company to make his tweets get more attention) and then responds accordingly:

Any time Musk talks about immigration on X, the reposts, replies and views reliably roll in. Though Musk has written about immigration and voter fraud issues in 2024 with about the same frequency as he’s written about Tesla, the automaker he is chief executive of, his immigration-related posts have amassed more than six times the number of reposts.

The article includes a lot more, like the reporters talking to some Trump supporters who are praising Musk while repeating the easily debunked nonsense that he regularly tweets, retweets, or engages with.

There is nothing illegal in what he’s doing, though presenting potentially harmful misinformation about elections, specifically around where and how to vote, can cross the line. But it’s quite striking how Musk, driven by his insatiable desire to be “liked” on his own platform, has shown that he has zero interest in actual truth, and is happy to push any lie that works for his current support for Donald Trump’s campaign.

It’s not new that greedy, disconnected billionaires will often use the media to push lies to support their favored candidates. Yellow journalism is a thing that existed throughout American history. However, it’s pretty shocking just how frequently and how often Elon will directly promote baseless claims or outright falsehoods, never ever taking responsibility or admitting to having promoted bullshit.

This is why, though, it’s important to call it out and for people to recognize what’s happening. Musk is actively miseducating people. And people are believing what he’s posting.

People can argue over why he’s doing this. Some say that he knows he’s spreading lies to idiots and cultists who follow him, because he knows he can get away with it. However, I don’t think that’s true. Having followed the guy and his statements for a while, I honestly think he believes the shit he’s tweeting, and believes the likes and the cultists cheering him on prove that he’s correct.

That he could easily find out the truth is not particularly important to him. It’s not about the truth. It’s about the truthiness of the world he wants to inhabit, where he is the only person who matters.

Whether or not this actually has an impact on the election or other important events in the future is impossible to predict. But it hardly seems like a good state of affairs.

Filed Under: disinformation, donald trump, elon musk, hank green, lies, misinformation, propaganda
Companies: twitter, x