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Texas Election Officials Are Dealing with a Flood of Challenges to Voter Registrations
Conservative groups and individual activists have targeted tens of thousands of Texans over their eligibility. But state and federal protections are in place.
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Election Deniers Secretly Pushed Rule That Would Make It Easier to Delay Certification of Georgia’s Election Results
On Monday, the GOP-controlled State Election Board is poised to adopt the rule, which would potentially allow county officials, including one who secretly backed the rule, to throw the election results of the swing state into chaos this fall.
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Red Flag Gun Laws Under Fire
Laws meant to keep firearms away from unstable people are under attack by Second Amendment radicals. An investigation by The Trace and Rolling Stone exposes the ugly campaign to undermine a bipartisan compromise to stop mass shootings.
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Foreign Actors Could Sow 'Chaos' in the 2024 Presidential Election, Cybersecurity Expert Says
In a tightly contested election, a “hack and leak” campaigns can be hugely “consequential” at the margins, says an expert.
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AI Disinformation: Lessons from the U.K. Election
The record-breaking 2024 figure of about 4 billion voters eligible to go to the polls across more than 60 countries coincided with the full-fledged arrival and widespread uptake of multimodal generative artificial intelligence (AI), which enables almost anyone to make fake images, videos and sound.
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What Is the Online Safety Act and Why Have Riots in the U.K. Reopened Debates About It?
Social media played a key role in the widespread coordination of riots in locations across the country. Online platforms have also served as a vehicle through which misinformation and hateful rhetoric has spread.
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Protecting Our Elections Against Tech-Enabled Disinformation
Electoral administrators around the world are dealing with a radically changed democratic landscape. Concerns focus on the pervasive presence of disinformation and false narratives, the rise of new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, occasional madcap conspiracy theories, threats to electoral workers, and the need to maintain citizens’ confidence in electoral outcomes.
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Study Highlights Challenges in Detecting Violent Speech Aimed at Asian Communities
A study of language detection software found that algorithms struggle to differentiate anti-Asian violence-provoking speech from general hate speech. Left unchecked, threats of violence online can go unnoticed and turn into real-world attacks.
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Election Deniers Continue Attempts to Meddle with Certification – But the Process Is Resilient
Georgia’s State Election Board made it easier to delay certification, but disputes do not mean problems with the election.
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Today's Autocracies Are Networked In Efforts To Erode Democracy, Says Author Anne Applebaum
Autocracies around the world have become increasingly mutually reinforcing in their competition with democratic societies, Pulitzer Prize winning U.S. journalist and historian Anne Applebaum said.
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A Call to Protect Democracy from Political Violence
As the nation reels from the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions say we must be clear about the threat of guns in a heated election.
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Gun Violence Legislation Would Expand Research, Collaborations
Federal legislation to establish a gun violence research program, with funds for projects, is being sought by Democratic North Carolina U.S. Rep. Valerie Foushee. If successful getting through the Republican majority chamber, the projects would examine the nature, root causes, consequences and prevention of gun violence.
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State Lawmakers Eye Promise, Pitfalls of AI Ahead of November Elections
This presidential election cycle is the first since generative AI — a form of artificial intelligence that can create new images, audio and video — became widely available. Artificial intelligence proved the ‘topic du jour’ at the largest annual meeting of state lawmakers this week in Kentucky.
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U.K. Riots Blamed on Israel by Conspiracy Theorists
Riots across the United Kingdom involving far-right elements broke out after the murder of three young girls at a dance class in the Southport knife attack was falsely attributed to a recently arrived Muslim migrant. It is predictable but still problematic to see Israel scapegoated as the cause of the riots.
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DOJ Sues TikTok and Parent Company ByteDance for Widespread Violations of Children’s Privacy Laws
U.S. law prohibits website operators from knowingly collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under the age of 13, unless they provide notice to and obtain consent from those children’s parents.
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The long view
Luigi Mangione and the Making of a ‘Terrorist’
Discretion is crucial to the American tradition of criminal law, Jacob Ware and Ania Zolyniak write, noting that “lawmakers enact broader statutes to empower prosecutors to pursue justice while entrusting that they will stay within the confines of their authority and screen out the inevitable “absurd” cases that may arise.” Discretion is also vital to maintaining the legitimacy of the legal system. In the prosecution’s case against Luigi Mangione, they charge, “That discretion was abused.”
Are We Ready for a ‘DeepSeek for Bioweapons’?
Anthropic’s Claude 4 is a warning sign: AI that can help build bioweapons is coming, and could be widely available soon. Steven Adler writes that we need to be prepared for the consequences: “like a freely downloadable ‘DeepSeek for bioweapons,’ available across the internet, loadable to the computer of any amateur scientist who wishes to cause mass harm. With Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 having finally triggered this level of safety risk, the clock is now ticking.”