Our picksMarjorie Taylor Greene Is Not Alone | Planetary Doom Delayed | Next Cyberattack is Already Underway, and more
· Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued “Groups,” Now Plans Overhaul
· The Scariest Thing about Marjorie Taylor Greene? She’s Not Alone.
· How Wildfires Became Ripe Areas for Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories
· U.S. Airstrike Kills Top ISIS Leader in Iraq
· Pipe Bombs Believed to Have Been Placed Night Before Attack on U.S. Capitol
· Muslim Boy, 4, Referred to U.K. Anti-Extremism Program over Video Game Comment
· Neo-Nazis Cause Outrage in Australia
· Inevitable Planetary Doom Has Been Exaggerated
· The Key to Combating Conspiracy Theories about Coronavirus Vaccines
· The Next Cyberattack is Already Underway
· The Risk of Nuclear Cataclysm Is Increasing
Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued “Groups,” Now Plans Overhaul (Jeff Horwitz, Wall Street Journal)
Facebook Inc. FB -2.52% in 2019 redesigned its flagship product to center on what it called Groups, forums for like-minded users. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called them the new “heart of the app.” Now the social-networking giant is clamping down on Groups. The effort began after Facebook’s own research found that American Facebook Groups became a vector for the rabid partisanship and even calls for violence that inflamed the country after the election. The changes, which Facebook escalated after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, involve overhauling the mechanics of a product that was meant to be central to its future. Facebook executives were aware for years that tools fueling Groups’ rapid growth presented an obstacle to their effort to build healthy online communities, and the company struggled internally over how to contain them. The company’s data scientists had warned Facebook executives in August that what they called blatant misinformation and calls to violence were filling the majority of the platform’s top “civic” Groups, according to documents The Wall Street Journal reviewed. Those Groups are generally dedicated to politics and related issues and collectively reach hundreds of millions of users.
The Scariest Thing about Marjorie Taylor Greene? She’s Not Alone. (Molly Jong-Fast, Daily Beast)
For the United States Congress, she’s still a little on the extreme side. But out there in red America, there are millions of Marjorie Taylor Greenes. Yes, millions.
How Wildfires Became Ripe Areas for Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories (Hailey Branson-Potts, Joseph Serna and Alejandra Reyes-Velarde, Los Angeles Times / Bend Bulletin)
The Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed more than 13,900 homes in 2018, is the latest focus of conspiracy theories spread by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who speculated that the blaze might have been started by a laser beam in space. Greene made the claim in a now-deleted Facebook post that was reported last week by Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group.
