• Search Results Not Biased Along Party Lines: Study

    In recent months, questions have arisen about big tech’s unparalleled influence over what news and information people see online. Potential political bias and censorship in search engine results are a big part of the conversation. Is the concern well-founded? In an audit of search media results for every candidate running for federal office in the 2018 U.S. election, Stanford scholars found no evidence of political bias for or against either party.

  • The National Security Threat of Peddling Russian Disinformation

    The impeachment inquiry by the U.S. House Intelligence Committee has served as a forum for efforts by President Trump, Rudi Giuliani, and some GOP lawmakers to spread the lie fabricated by the Russian intelligence services that the interference in the 2016 U.S. election was not done by Russia to help Trump – but was carried out by Ukraine to Help Hillary Clinton! This Kremlin-fabricated canard has been thoroughly investigated by the U.S. intelligence community, and totally debunked. “Distrust is now being sown by American officials against the same government these officials purport to represent,” Cipher Brief writes.

  • You Can Join the Effort to Expose Twitter Bots

    In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a coordinated campaign of tweets to discourage people from voting. These automated accounts may seem authentic to some, but a tool called Botometer was able to identify them while they pretentiously argued and agreed, for example, that “democratic men who vote drown out the voice of women.” We are part of the team that developed this tool that detects the bot accounts on social media.

  • Social Media and the Populist Moment

    Many people, especially of the progressive persuasion, accept the “narrative that invokes the ‘sewer’ of social media to explain everything from climate-change skepticism to anti-immigration sentiment, portrays Russian trolls and YouTube stars as the crucial actors of the populist era,” Ross Douthat writes. Studies show, however, that because educated liberals themselves spend more time on the internet, they assume, mistakenly, that people who support populist positions are equally internet-influenced. Secondly, and more importantly, this view downgrades the obvious real-world forces driving populism’s appeal.

  • It’s Not Only Jeremy Corbyn’s Mob that Welcomes Anti-Semites. It’s the Whole Bourgeois Left

    “On a scale of one to 10, how much would it surprise you that the Labour Party’s new poster boy, the young activist featured prominently in its election campaign material, is a semi-literate anti-Semite?” Rod Liddle asks in The Times. “I think, if you’ve been watching carefully these past few years, the score is probably around the two to three area.”

  • Nazi Symbols and Racist Memes: Combating School Intolerance

    The number of Americans between the ages of 15 and 21 who saw extremist content online jumped by about 20 percent, to 70.2 percent from 58.3 percent, between 2013 and 2016, according to a new study. As more such material spills from the web to young people and into classrooms nationwide, educators increasingly find themselves under pressure to combat this new front of hate. Many educators say they feel ill-equipped to recognize what students absorb from the web, much less to address it.

  • Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies

    Scientists have been trying hard to be able to predict earthquakes, because accurately predicting an earthquake would save lives, decrease property damage, and allow people to have some measure of control over one of nature’s most frightening and unpredictable events. Scientific predictions of the location and time of specific tremors are modest in scope – which have created an opening for earthquake conspiracy theorists who “claim that they have discovered the key to accurate quake prediction, as well as the hidden secrets behind why these tremors happen,” Anna Merlan writes.

  • White Supremacists Embrace "Accelerationism"

    Accelerationism is a term white supremacists have assigned to their desire to hasten the collapse of society as we know it. The term is widely used by those on the fringes of the movement, who employ it openly and enthusiastically on mainstream platforms, as well as in the shadows of private, encrypted chat rooms. 

  • New Report on Russia’s Online Operations: Pseudo-Think Tanks, Personas

    The Kremlin used many different techniques in its effective campaigns of interference in the politics of Western democracies, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. One such technique is “narrative laundering” – the technique of moving a certain narrative from its state-run origins to the wider media ecosystem through the use of aligned publications, “useful idiots,” and, perhaps, witting participants. “Given that many of these tactics are analogs of those used in Cold-War influence operations, it seems certain that they will continue to be refined and updated for the internet era, and are likely to be used to greater effect,” a new report says.

  • Germany: Far-Right Lawmaker Punished over Anti-Semitism

    German lawmakers on Wednesday, in a move which is unprecedented in modern German history, removed a far-right politician from his position as the chairman of the powerful Legal Affairs Committee of the Bundestag. The move came after the politician, Stephan Brandner, has repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments. All the parties in the Bundestag, except his own AfD party, voted to strip him of the committee’s chairmanship.

  • Firehosing: The Systemic Strategy that Anti-Vaxxers Are Using to Spread Misinformation

    “Firehosing” relies on pushing out as many lies as possible as frequently as possible. Firehosing is effective because its goal isn’t to persuade. It’s to rob facts of their power. “The strategy is effective for those trying to hold on to political power, and it’s the same for those who gain power from engaging in science denial,” Lucky Tran writes.

  • How Fake News Spreads Like a Real Virus

    When it comes to real fake news, the kind of disinformation that Russia deployed during the 2016 elections, “going viral” isn’t just a metaphor. Using the tools for modelling the spread of infectious disease, cyber-risk researchers at Stanford Engineering are analyzing the spread of fake news much as if it were a strain of Ebola.

  • The Trolls Are Everywhere. Now What Are We Supposed to Do?

    Forget the decline of gatekeepers. Imagine a world bereft of gates and uncrossable lines, with no discernible rules. Andrew Marantz’s just published book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, offers a detailed and disturbing study of how the social media platforms, rolled out over the last decade by a group of nerdy but naïve Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been hijacked by “edge lords” — another name for a collection of nihilists, right-wing nationalists, conspiracy purveyors, white supremacists, and more, whose goal is to downgrade the discourse in a way that would soon corrode the entire system. “The ranking algorithms on social media laid out clear incentives: provoke as many activating emotions as possible; lie, spin, dog-whistle; drop red pill after red pill; step up to the line repeatedly, in creative new ways,” Marantz writes. Public discourse is being replaced by the dance of discord and enragement and noxiousness.

  • Online Disinformation and Political Discourse: Applying a Human Rights Framework

    The framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) saw human rights as a fundamental safeguard for all individuals against the power of authority. Although some digital platforms now have an impact on more people’s lives than does any one state authority, the international community has been slow to measure and hold to account these platforms’ activities by reference to human rights law. Kate Jones writes that “Although international human rights law does not impose binding obligations on digital platforms, it offers a normative structure of appropriate standards by which digital platforms should be held to account. Because of the impact that social media can have, a failure to hold digital platforms to human rights standards is a failure to provide individuals with the safeguards against the power of authority that human rights law was created to provide.”

  • Are Facebook and Google State Actors?

    In 1924, concerned about monopolization in the radio industry, the secretary of commerce said something prescient: “It cannot be thought that any single person or group shall ever have the right to determine what communication may be made to the American people. … We cannot allow any single person or group to place themselves in a position where they can censor the material which shall be broadcasted to the public.” Jed Rubenfeld writes that what Secretary Herbert Hoover warned against has now come to pass: