Big Tech’s Pandemic Power Grab | Congresswoman QAnon | NK Nukes, and more
Why Russia Will Keep Poking America’s Racial Wounds (Zach Dorfman, Axios)
The 2020 election will bring more Russian-backed online disinformation campaigns aiming to exploit American protests over police brutality and systemic racism in order to foment division and distrust, experts predict. There’s nothing new about Russia’s tactics — its intelligence agencies have been using disinformation to cynically aggravate U.S. racial tensions all the way back to the Cold War era. But we can’t resolve this problem with cyber countermeasures and informational defenses. It will require actually tackling the root problem of racial injustice itself.
Ice Cube Spreads Russian Propaganda and Anti-Semitic Conspiracy on Twitter (Madeline Charbonneau, Daily Beast)
Just when you thought 2020 couldn’t get any weirder, rapper Ice Cube has shared a meme from a Russian propaganda website that claims Europeans shot the noses off of Ancient Egyptian statues. The meme was made by “Black Matters,” a website and Facebook page that purports to be a non-profit news resource for African-Americans but was outed long ago as a Russian-run propaganda tool to manipulate Americans. According to CNN, the Egyptian statues have broken noses not because Europeans shot them off, but because pharaohs would often break the noses of the statues of their predecessors. Later Wednesday afternoon, Ice Cube shared an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on Twitter, posting an image of the Black Cube of Saturn within the Star of David. The Black Cube of Saturn refers to a cult of Satan worshippers.
Big Tech’s Pandemic Power Grab (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic)
Tech companies are helping the government respond to the crisis. What’s in it for them?
White House Eyes Travel from Mexico as Source of Virus Spike (Jill Colvin and Zeke Miller, AP)
White House officials have reportedly tried to make the case that travel from Mexico is to blame for a surge in coronavirus cases across the U.S. rather than the easing of pandemic-related restrictions. Mexico has been hit hard by the pandemic, with 133,000 confirmed cases, but that is only a fraction of the more than 2 million cases documented in the U.S. Cross-border travel has also declined substantially amid the pandemic.
No, Trump Probably Can’t List Antifa as a “Terrorist Group.” Here’s What He’s Really Doing. (Philip Bump, Washington Post)
U.S. security services are getting the message about where to focus
A Wild, Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory Group Is about to Get Its First Congresswoman (Chris Cillizza, CNN)
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon true believer, on Tuesday won the Republican primary in Georgia’s 14th District, and is likely to win the safe Republican seat in the November election.
QAnon is a broad-scale internet-based conspiracy theory begun in early 2017 which is based on a belief that there is a high-level government official — “Q” — who sprinkles clues on internet message boards like 4chan and 8chan about a massive “deep state” conspiracy (or series of conspiracies) at work in the country. QAnon backers believe that Donald Trump was recruited by the military to run for president in 2016 because he alone wasn’t beholden to the secret power brokers of the world, and could break the hold that they have on American society.
“Q is a patriot,” Greene said in a nearly 30-minute long video from 2017. She called the conspiracy theory “something worth listening to and paying attention to,” adding: “He is someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump.”
North Korea Promises to Advance Nuclear Weapons as It Turns Back to Foreign Affairs (Timothy W. Martin and Andrew Jeong, Wall Street Journal)
On the second anniversary of the Singapore summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un, country says relations with U.S. have ‘shifted into despair’
