• Americans Could Be a Bigger Fake News Threat than Russians in the 2020 Presidential Campaign

    Russians and others won’t stay out of 2020. But they’ll be able to amplify US-created disinformation and have more time to disrupt 2020 in other ways. While much of the public and media attention has focused on foreign attempts to influence the results of U.S. elections, the fact is actors like Russia and Iran are not the only players we need to worry about for 2020. If anything, domestic actors are poised to be the bigger information threat.

  • DHS Warns of Russian Efforts to Divide America over Pineapple Pizza -- Sort of

    The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is warning that Russian agents could seek to further divide Americans by exploiting U.S. passions over whether pineapple belongs on pizza. It’s a cheesy, playful warning — but it’s trying to deliver a serious message. Posted online Wednesday by the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the tongue-in-cheek warning aims to help Americans identify and protect against propaganda campaigns from Russia and other foreign adversaries.

  • Republican Voters Are More Likely to Believe in Bigfoot and the Illuminati, While Democratic Voters Are More Likely to Believe in Aliens

    A new Business Insider poll found that Republican voters were statistically more likely to believe in the Illuminati and creatures like Bigfoot, compared to Democratic voters. Democratic voters, meanwhile, were more likely than Republican voters to believe that extraterrestrials have visited earth. Those who self-report believing in chemtrails tend to identify as liberal. Flat-earthers are evenly distributed across the political aisle.

  • FBI, FTC asked to examine whether FaceApp is a Kremlin’s data-collection tool

    FaceApp is a selfie app designed by a Russian programmer, which uses AI-like techniques to apply various changes to faces, making them look older or younger, adding accessories and even changing their race. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) sent a letter to the FBI and Federal Trade Commission to investigate the data-collecting and data-retention mechanisms of the Russia-based app — and whether the “personal data uploaded by millions of Americans onto FaceApp may be finding its way into the hands of the Russian government.”

  • U.S. Government Agencies Want to Know More about Russian Trolling

    Two Clemson researchers have been compiling and analyzing the tactics and strategy of social media accounts created by a Russian agency whose goal is to interfere in the U.S. electoral process. The Russians’ “troll factory” is housed in St. Petersburg in the now-famous government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA). “What the IRA is attempting to do through social media channels is create a one-sided agenda through a marketing campaign,” one researcher said. “It’s not espionage, it’s essentially a guerrilla marketing campaign.” DHS, the U.S. Cyber Command, and other U.S. government agencies want to more about the researchers’ findings.

  • The Roots of Labour’s Anti-Semitism Lie Deep within the Populist Left

    “Anti-Semitism is populism in perhaps its purest and most distilled form. It says that politics is indeed a battle between the virtuous masses and a nefarious, corrupt elite – and that that elite is ‘the Jews’. That’s why anti-Semitism carries so many of populism’s distinguishing features, from the fear of an enemy within, to its insistence that the media is bent on distorting reality,” Jonathan Freedland writes. Earlier this year a global study “found that a distinguishing feature of those with a populist worldview is a willingness to believe conspiracy theories, whether on the climate crisis, vaccines, or aliens from outer space. Anti-Semitism is nothing if not an all-encompassing conspiracy theory, suggesting that Jews are the secret rulers of the world.”

  • What the Measles Epidemic Really Says about America

    The critic Susan Sontag observed that disease can serve as a metaphor—a reflection of the society through which it travels. Now, a virus is offering insights into the country’s psychic and civic condition. Two decades ago, measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. Yet in the first five months of this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 1,000 cases—more than occurred from 2000 to 2010. Three cultural conditions have contributed to the resurgence of measles in the United States. One is historical forgetting: contemporary America suffers from a dangerous lack of historical memory. The second is diminished trust in government. As distrust of government has grown, so too has distrust of vaccines. The third is a population that suffers from overconfidence in its own amateur knowledge. This third condition is especially dangerous: It’s one thing to Google a food to see whether it’s healthy. It’s quite another to dismiss decades of studies on the benefits of vaccines because you’ve watched a couple of YouTube videos.

  • A Political Murder and Far-Right Terrorism: Germany’s New Hateful Reality

    The death threats started in 2015, when Walter Lübcke defended the refugee policy of Chancellor Angela Merkel.On June 2, Mr. Lübcke was fatally shot in the head on his front porch, in what appears to be Germany’s first far-right political assassination since the Nazi era.

  • Conspiracy Theories Make Inroads in Venezuelan Politics

    Despite how predictable (and tiresome) it has become, the Maduro government’s repetitive use of elaborate plots and attributing Machiavelian-styled traits to its adversaries doesn’t come out of pure laziness; conspiracy theories have not just found their way into our political discussion for quite some time now, they’ve won acceptance.

  • Twitter Takes Down Louis Farrakhan’s 2018 Anti-Semitic Tweet after Policy Change

    Twitter said Tuesday that it was requiring anti-Semitic hate preacher and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to delete a 2018 anti-Semitic tweet that compared Jews to termites. The move came as the social media giant introduced new rules prohibiting “language that dehumanizes others on the basis of religion.”

  • YouTube removes audio copies of neo-Nazi books

    James Mason’s neo-Nazi manifesto, Siege, has inspired a generation of neo-Nazis since it was first published as a single volume in 1992. The book sparked a violent online subculture called Siege Culture, devoted to Mason’s calls for independent terror cells to carry out a race war. YouTube has now taken down uploads of both Siege and the neo-Nazi book The Turner Diaries.

  • “They Can't Stop All of Us”: Over 400,000 People Planning to Raid Area 51 All at Once

    Area 51, an Air Force base in Nevada where many conspiracy theorists have long believed the U.S. government holds top secret information about extraterrestrial life. They also allege the area to have been the site of frequent UFO sightings. 

  • Once Again, Russian Internet Propaganda Efforts Shown to Be Much Bigger than Originally Believed

    Early on, as the scope of Russia’s disinformation and hacking efforts were being revealed, there was a tendency on many fronts to downplay the depth and breadth of the problem, with many describing the Russian effort as a few harmless sods posting lame memes in broken English. In time, it became clear that the efforts were larger, broader, and far more sophisticated than initially believed. 

  • How Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories Began and Why They Persist Today

    Even if they are far-fetched in factual terms, moon landing conspiracy theories nevertheless call up the more plausible possibility that in our media-saturated age reality itself is constructed, if not actually faked. The moon landing conspiracy theories also brought to the mainstream the notion that significant events are not what they seem: they have been staged, part of an official disinformation campaign.

  • The Great Replacement, White Genocide Theories: Prevalence, Scale, Proliferation

    A new in-depth study of the Great Replacement and White Genocide, two racist conspiracy theories with hundreds of thousand followers – some of them violent — in Europe and the United States, has found that the proliferation of theses conspiracy theories was helped by their mainstreaming by elected officials, and the active promotion by alternative far-right media outlets.