Trump signed an executive order ... easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter were suppressing free speech when they suspended users or deleted posts... Twitter has doubled down... added fact-checking labels to ... spokesman for China’s foreign ministry ... tweets that falsely claimed a photo... was …

Twitter added information to refute the inaccuracies in President Trump’s tweets for the first time... urged people to “get the facts”... a CNN story ... and ... bullet points that Twitter had compiled rebutting the inaccuracies... Twitter determined that those unsubstantiated assertions could lead to voter confusion and that they merited a correc…

In less than a year... weekly church-attending white Protestants convinced that Donald Trump was anointed by God to be president grew from 29.6 percent to 49.5 percent... Capitalizing on that devotion is integral to Trump’s re-election ...all-enveloping digital campaign website... campaign app... a self-contained, self-reinforcing arena where Trum…

When the history is written of how America handled the global era’s first real pandemic ... Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself...a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings…

The rage-engage cycle is a key part of how malign narratives gain traction on social media... into traditional media... disinformation content is designed to be polarizing... exploits the business models of social media... pointing out that something is false and dangerous ... giving more oxygen to the fire... [Trump] tests and revises purposefull…

Kendzior pulls no punches... detailed ... a true crime work, with the President ... benefactor of a criminal machine so powerful and immense ... every institution ... and media has, in some way, been compromised...every page brought fresh anguish...Other than Trump... the players? Russians... Israel, and Americans in business and government... all…

thread summarizes ... reporting on the TRUMP-CHINA SCANDAL, a bribery scandal involving Trump's hunt for dirt on Joe Biden in China, his debts to the Chinese government, and his decision to ignore life-saving COVID-19 intel...the Trump-Russia scandal was at its heart a *bribery* scandal... Trump-Ukraine scandal was another bribery scandal... Trump…

big tech companies have spent the past three years working to avoid a repeat of 2016... struggling to handle the new challenges of 2020...foreign governments ... are now using ... bots that are nearly impossible to distinguish from hyperpartisan Americans... partisan groups in the United States have borrowed Russia’s 2016 playbook ... tough calls …

In 2018, I wrote ... that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come... a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19... call them Generation C... shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks...More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza... stealthier... nations must ... identify infected…

Rep. Devin Nunes ... leading ally of President Trump, dismissed concerns about the coronavirus pandemic... Bernard B. Kerik, a Trump supporter ... tweeted that “this hysteria is being created to destabilize the country, and destroy” Trump....from Italy... Newt Gingrich offered a different perspective... Inside the Republican Party... a deep divide…

68 percent of Democrats are worried that someone in their family could catch the virus, while just 40 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents share that concern.... Nearly 80 percent of Democrats believe the worst is yet to come, but just 40 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents believe that...The partisan disconnect …

Wylie ... the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool”.... In 2014 Steve Bannon ... was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer... Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor... to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then t…

we investigate the cognitive psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. We find a consistent positive correlation between the propensity to think analytically – as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) – and the ability to differentiate fake news from real news ... suggests that factors that undermine the legitimac…

the knowledge illusion is a common form of human fallibility, but Trump takes it to an exceptional degree... When asked to explain something, he changes the subject, his confidence in his knowledge unwavering... reflectivity... whether people are likely to be highly deluded about their own knowledge... Low scores on the reflectivity test correlat…

federal investigators are looking at whether the Trump campaign helped Russia disseminate “fake news.”... just as the Trump administration appears poised to ramp up its own campaign against the news media... a new phase of escalation in Trump’s “fake news” wars, in which he will counter reports ... by calling those reports “fake news.”... Trump …

to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth ... to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump... isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care... he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him …

Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances... political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself ... Social media, esp…

Yet another variation on the Top3ics format: exploring three facets of one topic, highlighting one outstanding resource (plus a few extra links) for each.  Today’s theme... psychology

Many scientists are asking themselves: What can I do?... the answer from ... 314 Action is: Get elected... most scientists view their work as pure and noble, and politics as a dirty game... since Trump’s victory, “many more scientists are realizing why their voices are needed... Scientists bring a unique perspective in how they ... think about …

To some liberals, Donald Trump’s inauguration portends doom... to many conservatives, it’s a crowning moment ... as if each side is living in ... a different reality.... information avoidance... all of us ... ward off any new information that makes us feel bad, obligates us to do something we don’t want to do or challenges our worldview... we’re …

The festering European economic crisis was joined by two additional crises in 2015 – the refugee crisis and the security crisis that public terrorist attacks generated. All of this was played out in mass media and provided the final push for nationalist parties across Europe ... In contrast to Trump, European populists are committed conservative…

the idea that fake news was central to the outcome of the campaign has little basis in fact... it’s mostly likely to be shared by people who have already bought into a partisan or ideological worldview... Clinton’s campaign ... problem was ... coverage that dwelled overwhelmingly on a bullshit email server scandal, devoted far fewer resources to…

Scottie Nell Hughes ... drove a stake into the heart of knowable reality: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts... So, how should Trump’s statements during the campaign have been covered? Should reporters have added something like this in the second paragraph of every news story? “Trump probably didn’t mean that he would appoin…

Do we really want to set up Facebook or Google as censors ... to decide what is real and fake, true and false?

a post for my Facebook friends about my personal experience with narcissistic personality disorder and how I view the president elect... who almost certainly suffers from it or a similar disorder.

democracies are not as secure as people may think... since 2005, Freedom House’s index has shown a decline in global freedom each year... signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.

these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy... We’ve monitored more than 7,000 social media accounts over the last 30 months and at times engaged directly with them. Trump isn’t the end of Russia’s social media and hacking …

foolish to assume that “experience” is an unalloyed asset ... In this age of rage against anything or anyone that can be depicted as “the establishment” ... a handicap to be an “insider” and a great advantage to be an “outsider”... calling them dangerous did not amount to an answer to the grievances driving substantial numbers of voters ... tell…

Power gets into our heads... give us confidence to indulge in our base urges. It can make us less empathetic, more likely to see our own success in a positive light and harshly condemn failures in others...power is only likely to magnify the negative characteristics in a man like Trump... “power simply brings our true nature out into the open”... …

information bubbles didn’t burst on 8 November, but ... mainstream media and polling systems underestimated the power of alt-right news sources and smaller conservative sites that largely rely on Facebook to reach an audience... fake news is not a uniquely Republican problem... What is ... is the validation given to fake news by the now president-…