All posts tagged "Misinformation"

In the first election Amy Burgans fully oversaw as clerk-treasurer for Douglas County, Nevada, she received a death threat.

It was 2022. Someone returned their mail-in ballot with “crazy talk” written all over it, including the threat to Burgans. That same year, law enforcement got involved over a stalker’s texts.

“It's almost par for the course, which is horrible, but you have to know that those types of things can come in with the heightened political environment that we live in when elections are involved at this point,” Burgans told Raw Story....

Former Fox News host Greta Van Susteren came under fire on Saturday for purportedly trying to "bury her role" in the spreading of a Donald Trump-based conspiracy theory.

Van Susteren, more recently host for the conservative Newsmax TV, took to social media after Judge Juan Merchan informed the parties in Trump's criminal case that a suspicious Facebook comment appeared to suggest the jury had been corrupted. The so-called internet troll at the center of the scandal later admitted it was all made up.

But before that admission, Van Susteren presented a printed copy of Merchan's notice....

Washington (AFP) - A digital tool considered vital in tracking viral falsehoods, CrowdTangle will be decommissioned by Facebook owner Meta in a major election year, a move researchers fear will disrupt efforts to detect an expected firehose of political misinformation. The tech giant says CrowdTangle will be unavailable after August 14, less than three months before the US election. The Palo Alto company plans to replace it with a new tool that researchers say lacks the same functionality, and which news organizations will largely not have access to. For years, CrowdTangle has been a game-chan......

Washington (AFP) - Coined by the World Health Organization to denote a hypothetical future pandemic, "Disease X" is at the center of a blizzard of misinformation that American conspiracy theorists are amplifying -- and profiting from. The falsehoods, including that the unknown pathogen indicates an elitist plot to depopulate the earth, appeared to originate in the United States but spilled to Asia in multiple regional languages, AFP fact-checkers found. The fast-spreading misinformation, which experts say illustrates the perils of reduced content moderation on social media sites, threatens to ......

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Thursday backed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s baseless claim that the COVID-19 vaccine played a role in baseball legend Hank Aaron’s death, The Daily Beast reports.

Kennedy in the aftermath of Aaron’s death in January tweeted that the Hall of Famer’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly closely following administration of COVID vaccines,” noting that Aaron had “received the Moderna vaccine on Jan. 5 to inspire other Black Americans to get the vaccine.”

Jordan said he was “just pointing out facts” as he expressed support for Kennedy’s conspiracy theory during the longshot Democratic party presidential candidate’s appearance before a House subcommittee on weaponization of the federal government to testify about censorship....

Washington (AFP) - The hoax that rape was legal for a day was knocked down by fact-checkers two years ago. But it went viral again this year on TikTok, illustrating what researchers call "zombie" misinformation. The stomach-churning falsehood that groups of men have declared April 24 as "National Rape Day," giving them free rein to commit sexual violence, crept its way to TikTok fame in 2021, sparking alarm in countries including the United States and Britain. In a sea of videos, many with millions of views, terrified women declared plans to lock themselves in their rooms all day and men vowed......