Utah is one of the strongholds of a growing anti-federal government movement. Thats one of the many findings of Ammons Army, a report released earlier this month by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, or IREHR.

The 13-chapter report details the inner workings of Peoples Rights, an organization that anti-federal government activist Ammon Bundy publicly launched in April, when coronavirus restrictions began going into effect across the country.

As of Sep. 1, the group had registered more than 20,000 members nationwide 1,517 of whom reside in Utah. That statistic renders the Beehive State one of the groups strongholds, alongside Washington, Oregon and Idaho. While militia movements have gained widespread public attention in the run-up to the 2020 election, there are several factors that make Peoples Rights stand out. Those include its level of interstate organization and its movement towards de-platforming from major social networks, though it has used Facebook groups to gather supporters and spread its message, said IREHR Research Director Chuck Tanner, who helped author the report.

Tanner added the studys authors gained access to the groups internal records to calculate membership totals. The move also allowed the researchers to map out the networks leadership structure, ranging from Bundy himself down to state and local organizers. Its a level of organization that seems a little more sophisticated and far-reaching than some of the other militia groups, Tanner said, warning the level of coordination is especially dangerous for a group like Bundys. It doesnt take massive numbers to cause the kind of conflict that the Bundy familys been involved in historically.

The Nevada rancher burst onto the national stage in 2016, when he and his far-right supporters engaged in a 41-day standoff with the federal government at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. That action resulted in charges against many of its participants and the death of the occupations spokesperson, Robert LaVoy Finicum, a Kanab-born rancher who was shot by law enforcement officials after fleeing a traffic stop and allegedly reaching for his weapon.

The pandemic has allowed Bundys message, which originated with a protest against federal control of public lands, to expand rapidly to a broader audience. The organizations embrace of bigoted ideas and vehement anti-government positions pose a threat to social norms and democratic institutions, Tanner said.

With Bundys track record, theres always a possibility of these organizations resorting to armed conflict or displays of arms and weapons as a means of advancing their cause, he said.

In Utah, law enforcement has special task forces dedicated to monitoring groups like Peoples Rights and other militias, said Lt. Nick Street, a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Public Safety.

Militia members are within their constitutional rights to speak out, bear arms and assemble. But they will be investigated and charged if they commit criminal acts, Street said, adding that the groups are not sanctioned by law enforcement, he added.

We arent asking for their help. We arent asking them to take up arms, Street said. In fact, quite the contrary: we would prefer that they allow the system of government thats in place to handle that.

The Department of Public Safety conducts background checks to ensure that its personnel do not belong to groups with anti-democratic aims, Street said. However, he noted he has seen instances in which local law enforcement agencies in Utah have not conducted additional background checks after hiring personnel.

Read more from the original source:

More Than 1500 Utahns Have Joined Ammon Bundy's Anti-Federal Government Movement, New Report Finds - KUER 90.1

A project launched by Australian programmer Mark Ledwich, meant to shed light on politics on YouTube by classifying and labeling channels, has been criticized by those fearing that its shortcomings might ultimately turn Transparency Tube into yet another tool for censorship on Googles video giant.

Internet users who have been observing and trying to understand the use and possible consequences, and who are convinced those can be negative, have described Transparency Tube as anything from hitlist to automated libel.

The idea behind the project, as announced by Ledwich on Twitter, is to track and analyze over 8,000 YouTube channels on a daily basis and provide a visual representation of this, as a way to reveal political and cultural views behind these channels.

Double your web browsing speed with today's sponsor. Get Brave.

Although YouTube itself would be best equipped to produce such analysis, given its gargantuan machine learning apparatus, it has little incentive to do that since the results might invite more criticism of bias in the recommendation system.

Its not hard to see why this would be an interesting time to launch such a tool, just ahead of the US presidential election, and amid calls for YouTube to step up restrictions on the type of content allowed on its platform mostly around political, cultural, and pandemic topics.

Ledwich, for example, noted that data collected and analyzed as part of Transparency Tube showed YouTubes effort to censor what he called conspiracy content has not been entirely successful. And that is, it would appear, one of the labels Transparency Tube puts on channels it identifies as such. It is also offering this data to researchers, and invites journalists to work with the project in order to raise the quality of content on YouTube, which Ledwich thinks is currently poor.

From his tweets and from the projects page, it appears that the process of categorizing, indexing, and analyzing thousands of English language YouTube channels is done using an algorithm, or as Ledwich puts it, a clever model developed to discover and classify channels, and this automation has enabled Transparency Tube to go from 800, that were covered manually, to over 8,000.

But not everyone would agree the model is as clever as its authors would hope, as YouTubers keep reporting to Ledwich that their channel had been falsely classified as something it is not, usually things that can get them ostracized and deplatformed and according to online discussions about the platform, those very policies happen to be something Ledwich opposed in the past.

The way he is responding to many of these complaints has been to remove the labels and promise to update the data, but for some users, that is not enough. In one instance, a history channel was erroneously labeled as white identitarian while in another, a Twitter user was inexplicably classified as right wing and anti-SJW.

Ledwich doesnt appear to have a history of pushing censorship causes (as he previously criticized deplatforming) and his intention here was not have been to provide a hitlist for political censors but the project he launched can be turned into just that.

Some have suggested that YouTubers need a way to opt out of their channels being publicly named and shamed in this way.

However, others think that there may be intent to allow showdowns with political opponents. This scathingly critical comment accuses Ledwich of creating a tool tantamount to automated libel and urges him to abandon the project in order to avoid damaging channels and people behind them by applying false labels.

Another point this Twitter user makes is that Transparency Tube is (or could help) those looking to further silence and censor political opponents on a platform like YouTube, thats described as already partisan.

In announcing the project, Ledwich rightly pointed out that YouTube has tremendous reach and influence in the US these days, where 71 percent of people use it, while 26 percent treat it as their news source. All the more reason, then, to be extra careful when providing a tool that could be used to wrongly classify channels, depriving their owners of their livelihoods, and help ramp up censorship on the platform.

Read the rest here:

Transparency.tube categorizes YouTubers, brands them with political labels, and could be used as hitlist - Reclaim The Net

Farhad Manjoo| The New York Times

Lately, I have been putting an embarrassing amount of thought into notions like jinxes and knocking on wood. The polls for Joe Biden look good, but in 2020, any hint of optimism feels dangerously nave, and my brain has been working overtime in search of potential doom.

I have become consumed with an alarming possibility: that neither the polls nor the actual outcome of the election really matter, because to a great many Americans, digital communication has already rendered empirical, observable reality beside the point.

If I sound jumpy, its because I spent a couple of hours recently chatting with Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvards Kennedy School. Donovan is a pioneering scholar of misinformation and media manipulation the way that activists, extremists and propagandists surf currents in our fragmented, poorly moderated media ecosystem to gain attention and influence society.

Donovans research team studies online lies the way crash-scene investigators study aviation disasters. They meticulously take apart specific hoaxes, conspiracy theories, viral political memes, harassment campaigns and other toxic online campaigns in search of the tactics that made each one explode into the public conversation.

This week, Donovans team published The Media Manipulation Casebook, a searchable online database of their research. It makes for grim reading an accounting of the many failures of journalists, media companies, tech companies, policymakers, law enforcement officials and the national security establishment to anticipate and counteract the liars who seek to dupe us. Armed with these investigations, Donovan hopes we can all do better.

I hope shes right. But studying her work also got me wondering whether were too late. Many Americans have become so deeply distrustful of one another that whatever happens on Nov. 3, they may refuse to accept the outcome. Every day I grow more fearful that the number of those Americans will be large enough to imperil our nations capacity to function as a cohesive society.

Im worried about political violence, Donovan told me. America is heavily armed, and from Portland to Kenosha to the Michigan governors mansion, we have seen young men radicalized and organized online beginning to take the law into their own hands. Donovan told me she fears that people who are armed are going to become dangerous, because they see no other way out.

Media manipulation is a fairly novel area of research. It was only when Donald Trump won the White House by hitting it big with right-wing online subcultures and after internet-mobilized authoritarians around the world pulled similar tricks that serious scholars began to take notice.

The research has made a difference. In the 2016 election, tech companies and the mainstream media were often blind to the ways that right-wing groups, including white supremacists, were using bots, memes and other tricks of social media to hack the publics attention, as the researchers Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis documented in 2017.

But the war since has been one of attrition. Propagandists keep discovering new ways to spread misinformation; researchers like Donovan and her colleagues keep sussing them out, and, usually quite late, media and tech companies move to fix the flaws by which time the bad guys have moved on to some other way of spreading untruths.

While the media ecosystem has wised up in some ways: Note how the story supposedly revealing the contents of Hunter Bidens laptop landed with a splat last week, quite different from the breathlessly irresponsible reporting on the Democrats hacked emails in 2016. But our society remains profoundly susceptible to mendacity.

Donovan worries about two factors in particular. One is the social isolation caused by the pandemic. Lots of Americans are stuck at home, many economically bereft and cut off from friends and relatives who might temper their passions a perfect audience for peddlers of conspiracy theories.

Her other major worry is the conspiracy lollapalooza known as QAnon. Its often short-handed the way Savannah Guthrie did at her town hall takedown of Donald Trump last week as a nutty conspiracy theory in which a heroic Trump is prosecuting a secret war against a satanic pedophile ring of lefty elites.

But that undersells QAnons danger. To people who have been Q-pilled, QAnon plays a much deeper role in their lives; it has elements of a support group, a political party, a lifestyle brand, a collective delusion, a religion, a cult, a huge multiplayer game and an extremist network.

Donovan thinks of QAnon represents a new, flexible infrastructure for conspiracy. QAnon has origins in a tinfoil-hat story about a D.C.-area pizza shop, but over the years it has adapted to include theories about the deep state and the Mueller probe, Jeffrey Epstein, and a wild variety of misinformation about face masks, miracle cures, and other hoaxes regarding the coronavirus. QAnon has been linked to many instances of violence, and law enforcement and terrorism researchers discuss it as a growing security threat.

We now have a densely networked conspiracy theory that is extendible, adaptable, flexible and resilient to take down, Donovan said of QAnon. Its a very internet story, analogous to the way Amazon expanded from an online bookstore into a general-purpose system for selling anything to anyone.

Facebook and YouTube this month launched new efforts to take down QAnon content, but Q adherents have often managed to evade deplatforming by softening and readjusting their messages. Recently, for instance, QAnon has adopted slogans like Save the Children and Child Lives Matter, and it seems to be appealing to anti-vaxxers and wellness moms.

QAnon is also participatory, and, in an uncertain time, it may seem like a salvation.

People are seeking answers and theyre finding a very receptive community in QAnon, Donovan said.

This is a common theme in disinformation research: What makes digital lies so difficult to combat is not just the technology used to spread them, but also the nature of the societies theyre targeting, including their political cultures. Donovan compares QAnon to the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the priest whose radio show spread anti-Semitism in the Depression-era United States. Stopping Coughlins hate took a concerted effort, involving new regulations for radio broadcasters and condemnation of Coughlin by the Catholic Church.

Stopping QAnon will be harder; Coughlin was one hatemonger with a big microphone, while QAnon is a complex, decentralized, deceptive network of hate. But the principle remains: Combating the deception that has overrun public discourse should be a primary goal of our society. Otherwise, America ends in lies.

Farhad Manjoo writes for The New York Times.

Go here to read the rest:

Manjoo: How to break the hold of conspiracy theories - The Register-Guard

Using conspiracy theories that include child sex traffickers and restaurants serving human flesh, QAnon has unleashed a modern-day moral panic.

It is now more than 30 years since sociologists proposed moral panic as a way to understand the incitement of fear around a perceived enemy. In the opening paragraph of his canonical study of popular media from 1972, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, sociologist Stanley Cohen outlined his basic thesis:

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.

In President Donald Trumps America, those people are queers, racial minorities and Jews.

At the time Cohen was writing, his focus was on popular media and the manipulation of mods and rockers as moral degenerates. He argued that those in positions of authority used sensationalized headlines to enforce what they saw as threats to social order.

We find ourselves in a similar place today. The media in question is social, but the targets are as old as journalism itself.

When Trump refused to call out QAnon in his Oct. 15 town hall, preferring to show sympathy for its purported fight against pedophilia, he tapped into a moral panic with deep historical roots. The danger that QAnon poses is not that its endorsed by the president. Its the way it speaks to long-festering hatreds that transcend political affiliation.

QAnon was born digital in the age of platformed antagonism, where social media breathes new life into racist stereotypes. But its appeal owes to a longer history of animosity towards sexual and racial minorities at critical points in their quest for rights and recognition. It does this through the use of the modern-day blood libel accusation.

Charges of ritual murder were frequently waged against Europes Jewish populations as an effort to reinforce the exclusionary logic of ethnic nationalism. Jews were accused of kidnapping and murdering gentile children so as to use their blood and make matzo. Ritual murder accusations could result in mob violence, as it was in 1900 in the case of a local Jewish butcher in the West Prussian town of Konitz.

Jews were also slandered for their role in the so-called white slave trade, the luring of young white women into prostitution. This mix of sexual excess and ritualistic fervour went hand-in-hand with Jewish emancipation, visibility and new-found claims to equal citizenship.

Both the Pizzagate and Cannibal Club conspiracies in QAnon share roots with the blood libel accusation.

Suggestions that Hillary Clinton and financier George Soros were part of a global sex ring have long permeated social media networks. In 2018, these claims morphed in a new direction: children were not just being lured into a sexual underground, they were considered sources of adrenochrome, a chemical with hallucinogenic qualities harvested for satanic rituals. A cabal of elites didnt just harvest childrens blood, they consumed the flesh itself: as proof, conspiracy theorists pointed to a website that falsely claimed that Raven Chan Mark Zuckerbergs sister-in-law was involved with a fake restaurant called the Cannibal Club.

Although the story has since been debunked, its alive and well on social media, surfacing most recently in the hashtags used by Twitterers in the wake of the Trump town hall, linking Hollywood to human sacrifice, secret societies and pedophilia.

Similar moral panics accompanied the pursuit of equality by gays and lesbians, with fears around the seduction of minors frequently used as an argument against criminal justice reform. The new-found visibility of the Gay Liberation Front and lesbian, feminist and Black power movements unleashed a preoccupation with adolescence, childhood sexuality and age of consent.

While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used to define and classify mental disorders removed homosexuality from its list of paraphilias in 1973, conservatives lamented the legalization of same-sex sexuality for what they saw as a sea change in societal values. Anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryants Protect Americas Children campaign gave this moral panic a celebrity face.

The AIDS epidemic, scandals within the Catholic Church, trans rights and, most recently, the Jeffrey Epstein assaults have all cast renewed attention on the history of changing social and sexual mores brought about by the sexual revolution.

At its core, the preoccupation with pedophilia and childhood sexuality is an attempt to protect the heterosexual family as the bedrock of society, a salve against degeneration and excess. There are too many examples to list, from Pope Benedict blaming homosexual cliques for the general collapse of morality in the late 20th century to opponents of the 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage, a cause clbre in the conservative media linking gay, lesbian, and trans rights with pedophilia as a leftist plot against the family.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force was not immune from conspiracy theorists who falsely linked his wife to Epstein handler Ghislaine Maxwell.

The QAnon conspiracy theory draws together anti-Semitism, sexual excess, homophobia and race-baiting in a modern-day moral panic. They resonate because they have a place in the contemporary zeitgeist as products of long-standing animosity against change.

De-platforming QAnon is not enough. For while Trump is proving himself to be conspiracist-in-chief, the culture of folk devils and fear is of our own making.

Read more:

Folk devils and fear: QAnon feeds into a culture of moral panic - The Conversation CA

Dr. Stella Immanuel speaking from a lectern. (YOUTUBE)

A controversial doctor, pastor and conspiracy theorist who President Trump has touted for her false claims about the coronavirus is speaking at a Trump campaign event in Texas on Wednesday night.

Dr. Stella Immanuel is one of three headliners for a Trump Victory phone bank in Houston.

The event was promoted on the Republican National Committees Trump Victory website, and Immanuel tweeted to promote the event on Tuesday evening.

Her claim to fame came when Trump retweeted a late July video that featured her falsely saying that the drug hydroxychloroquine was a cure for COVID-19, and that face masks did not help stop the spread of the disease.

This virus has a cure. It is called hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zithromax. I know you people want to talk about a mask. Hello? You dont need [a] mask. There is a cure, she declared in the video, wearing a white lab coat and standing alongside other doctors.

But while Trump may have backed off a bit on touting hydroxychloroquinehe didnt take it himself when he got COVID-19Immanuel is still a big proponent.

Hydroxychloroquine works and I believe everyone in America should go on prevention [treatment], she told VICE News Wednesday evening, shortly before heading to the Trump event. We take prophylaxis. Me, my staff, and everybody.

In early July, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had already revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine because of adverse health risks including heart arrhythmia.

Multiple studies have showed the drug doesnt help with COVID, but Immanuel dismissed them as being funded by Bill Gates, who she called crazy and a college dropout. Gates is a common character in conspiracy theories.

Trumps retweet may have made Immanuel famous, but her other sermons are what made her notorious.

The Daily Beast unearthed reams of truly bonkers comments from Immanuel, including claims that a variety of health issues were caused by dream sex with spirit husbands and spirit wives. The story caused the term demon sperm to trend on Twitter, a moniker the Beast later adopted in a headline and CNN used on air.

They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm, she said. Then they turn into the man and they sleep with a man and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves.

Immanuel also warned that demonic spirits that she called nephilims, incubus and succubus caused health issues.

They are responsible for serious gynecological problems, Immanuel said in a 2013 sermon. We call them all kinds of namesendometriosis, we call them molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we call them cysts, but most of them are evil deposits from the spirit husband.

When asked about those sermons, Immanuel told VICE News the term demon sperm was made up to make her look stupidbut defended her comments.

They pulled up my sermon that I did on people that are having attacks from sexual perverted spirits, she said. I was talking about demonic spirits that sleep with women at nightThey just used demon sperm to discredit me.

She added that demonic spirits cause health problems, period, arguing that doctors havent been able to figure out what causes medical conditions like endometriosis and ovarian cysts but that Christian teachings do.

Sex with demons is a very biblical concept. It was in the book of Genesis. Its in the book of Jude, she said.

The video of Immanuel that Trump retweeted was taken at a late July event held by Americas Frontline Doctors, a GOP front group, and promoted on the right-wing Breitbart News. It went viral, garnering tens of millions of views before it was removed from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for spreading false information. Immanuel responded to the deplatforming by promising that Jesus Christ would crash Facebooks servers if her video wasnt restored.

Trump later said that he didnt know anything about Immanuel, but called her very impressive and said he didnt know why the video was taken down because theyre very respected doctors.

In other speeches, she has warned that doctors created a microchip vaccine to keep people from being religious, senior government officials inthe Obama administration werent human but had a reptilian spirit, and that doctors were using alien DNA.

Additional public talks include sermons against the gay agenda, secular humanism, Illuminati and the demonic new world order.

In early October, Immanuel blasted Trumps personal doctors for not putting him on hydroxychloroquine as a treatment while he was fighting COVID-19, saying whoever told him not to take the drug should be punched in the face.

She was invited to speak at the Wednesday Trump event by another controversial hydroxychloroquine proponent, Dr. Robin Armstrong, a physician and former Texas Republican Party vice chairman.

Shes a friend of mine so I asked her to come, Armstrong told VICE News on Wednesday. Shes not coming in as an official surrogate. Shes not. I asked her to come because people are interested in her.

Armstrong, who drew criticism for putting his patients on hydroxychloroquine early in the pandemic (including some nursing home patients whose family members with power of attorney werent informed), still insisted to VICE News that the drug was safe and effective for some patients battling COVID-19.

Hydroxychloroquine has never harmed anyone, I do know that. Its actually helped a lot of people in this pandemic, he said.

The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee did not respond to VICE News requests for comment.

Go here to see the original:

Doctor Who Warned of Demon Sex and Touts COVID Conspiracies Speaking at Trump Event - VICE

Fifteen conservative YouTubers (or as some have termed them, (QAnon influencers)sued YouTube and Google in California federal court on Tuesday, seeking an emergency injunction that would allow them to get back onto their accounts.

The users channels were deleted after YouTube announced on October 15 that it would thereafter prohibit content that threatens or harasses someone by suggesting they are complicit in one of these harmful conspiracies, such as QAnon or Pizzagate. The group of plaintiffs claimed that they have suffered a violation of their First Amendment rights to broadcast political speech on matters of public interest, as well as a breach of contract.

The complaint alleged that YouTubes massive de-platforming harmed both conservative content creators and American voters. Further, YouTube took this draconian action so swiftly that plaintiffs werent even able to download their own content, they said.

Why did YouTube dothis? the complaint asked and then answered.To frustratethe contracts and tomollify itspartner, Congress, which just days before had passed H.R. 1154, a resolution condemning the existence of conservative contentwhich it characterized as conspiracy theorieson the Internet.

For some background, the resolution to which the Complaint refers was introduced by Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) in September. It stated that the House of Representatives condemns QAnon and rejects the conspiracy theories it promotes. The resolution also encourage[d] the FBI and as well as all Federal law enforcement and homeland security agencies to strengthen their focus on preventing violence, threats, harassment, and other criminal activity by extremists motivated by fringe political conspiracy theories.

The plaintiffs also claimed that YouTube is more important than television, that YouTube hasnt done enough to combat cyberbullying, and that YouTubes removal of their content was entirely motivated by its decision to capitulate to bullying by Congress.

Recently, the complaint alleged, politicians from all areas of government have demanded that Big Tech,particularly Google and YouTube, take down content with which they disagreei.e., content that they consider harmful, offensive, conspiracy theories andthe like.Since these demandsbegan, YouTube creators and partners have been excised from the platform, most suddenly on or around October 15.

While conspiracy theories abound, particularly on todays fast-moving information superhighway, lamented the plaintiffs, never since McCarthyism have the government and its actors moved so quickly to condemn and excise them from public debate.

The filing went on to detail several conspiracy theories that turned out to be true, including that the Department of Treasury having killed people with poisoned alcohol during Prohibition, the federal government having lied about treating Black men with syphilis for 40 years, 100 million Americans having been exposed to a carcinogen through the Polio vaccine, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident never having happened, the government having tested LSD on citizens, and others.

YouTubes decision to drop their channels from its platform so soon after Congress introduced H.R. 1154, argued Plaintiffs, is proof that YouTube acted at the direct behest of and encouragement of the United States House of Representatives. Therefore, the argument went, YouTube should be held to the standard of a government actor for purposes of the First Amendment.

Part of the ousted plaintiffs argument is that YouTubes decision to throw them off its platform rests on legal drama over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That act, you may remember, is one for which President Donald Trump has been instigating a repeal. According to the plaintiffs, YouTubes haste to purge the disfavored conservative voices is simply an attempt to stay on the governments good side. With Section 230 on the books as is, YouTube, as merely a platform, is shielded from liability based on the postings of its users. Without it, though, YouTube might be liable as a publisher.

The plaintiffs in the litigation against YouTube include Jeff Pedersen, known online as InTheMatrixxx; Jordan Sather of the channel Destroying the Illusion; and Polly St. George, known as Amazing Polly. St. George is believed to be the origin of the debunked Wayfair conspiracy theory. Another plaintiff, who is listed anonymously, runs the SGT Reportwhich has been said to be responsible for spreading the baseless and false Frazzledrip conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin sexually abused a child and drank her blood.

[Image via Caitlin OHara/Getty Images]

Have a tip we should know? [emailprotected]

Link:

QAnon Influencers Sue YouTube for Deleting Their Channels, Claim Big Techs Acquiescence to Congress Is Worse Than McCarthyism - Law & Crime

Twitter on Monday announced that itwill start placing messaging at the top of users feeds that aims to preemptively counter any false tweets about voting and the election.

The unprecedented messaging format, dubbed apre-bunk, will appear at the top of all U.S. users news feeds.

Were introducing pre-bunks for some of the most common misleading claims about#Election2020, tweeted Twitters Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth (above). Research shows that getting ahead of misinformation is a powerful way to build resilience. Excited tosee this application of inoculation theory in practice.

One message reads: Election experts confirm that voting by mail is safe and secure, even with an increase in mail-inballots. Even so, you might encounter unconfirmed claims that voting by mail leads to election fraud ahead of the 2020 US elections. The message is accompanied by a link to additional votinginformation.

advertisement

advertisement

Another points out that full election results may be delayed for legitimate reasons.

The move is the most recent in a flurryof actions taken in recent weeks by Twitter and Facebook in efforts to address the flood of falsehoods about voting, including President Trumps claims that mail-in voting is rife withfraud.

Twitter which stopped taking political ads as of late last year has previously said that candidates cannot claim election wins on its platformprior to authoritative calls (from election officials or two national news outlets), and that it will put warning labels on any premature results calls, with a link to its election page.

Inaddition, Twitter says it is preventing users from liking misleading posts by politicians, and only allowing retweets of those posts if users add their own commentary; flaggingmisleading posts by politicians by requiring users to tap through a warning label before reading them; and preventing its algorithms from recommending those posts.

Originally posted here:

Twitter Adds 'Pre-Bunk' Alerts To Preempt False Voting, Election Information 10/27/2020 - MediaPost Communications

While swimming off the coast of Lady Elliot Island in Queensland, Australia, photographer Mark Fitzpatrick encountered a sea turtle coming towards him.

At just the right moment, he snapped a photo of the turtle's flipper pulling back into what appeared to be a middle finger. Coupled with the turtle's grumpy expression, it made for a hilarious shot.

As the winner of the 2020 contest, Fitzpatrick won a safari in Masai Mara, Kenya, a Think Tank photography bag, and a Nikon camera.

Advertisement

He continued, "I hope Terry the Turtle can encourage more people to take a moment and think about how much our incredible wildlife depend on us and what we can do to help them. Flippers crossed that this award puts Terry in a better mood next time I see him at Lady Elliot Island!"

Read more from the original source:

A photo of a grumpy sea turtle apparently giving the finger won the top prize at this year's Comedy Wildlife P - Business Insider India

ALBANY In an election where studies tell us more voters than ever believe this moment marks an essential choice for the future of the country, two young, Albany-area voters described their enthusiasm to cast ballots not as active, positive choices, but rather as inevitable byproducts of their political values and how awful they think the other option is.

Edwin Lawson, 21, is a Conservative who will be voting for President Donald J. Trump, while Aria Winter, 33, is a progressive who will be voting for Joe Biden.

The Times Union separately interviewed the two young voters to learn more about why they support their candidates. They identified early political memories that made an impression on them from a young age, followed later by more formative political experiences as teenagers or young adults.

For Lawson, he first remembers seeing family and friends returning from Iraq in the mid-2000s, and having a vague understanding that the war had to do with something called 9/11. Later, while in high school in 2016, he attended a program to study law and government and watched the election of Trump unfold.

For Winter, she remembers her parents outrage at how former President Bill Clinton was treated by Republicans during his impeachment investigation, and then she remembers the election of Barack Obama, whom she still points to as her foremost political hero.

But when asked whether those moments were when they began identifying with a political ideology or whether they already leaned that way they point to their families and environments as primary shapers of their political beliefs.

In both cases, it was hard for them to pinpoint whether that was when their political ideologies emerged, or whether their mindsets are instead a product of their upbringing, family and environment.

Lawson said his commitment to the Republican party over the last few years has been borne out of a gap between what he is hearing from the liberal media and from liberal politicians and what he can see in his own life.

New Yorks SAFE Act prohibits gun magazines from holding more than seven rounds. Yet Lawson grew up on a farm that his family has had for 40 years, and he is a duck hunter, an activity that requires firing a lot of shells. Lawson noted the SAFE Act makes duck hunting and acquiring ammo much more difficult. He also said his family has friends who are police officers, and who legally need to carry weapons that exceed the law's strict requirements.

What he heard from the media or from his college professors whom he feels are often liberal-leaning about political or public policy issues like guns, the Supreme Court, freedom of speech or any number of other issues didnt match up to what he knew from experience to be true or to what he felt a reasoned, careful accounting of the facts led him to.

Its that mob mentality on the left-leaning side, Lawson said. They say, This is right. And if you dont agree with it, youre wrong.' And you ask them why, and they just say, Because.

That frustration Lawson felt in political debates makes him extra cautious when reading the news, he said.

He tries to read from a variety of sources across the political spectrum, and hes skeptical about bias or any kind of slant. He said papers like the Washington Post are not fake news, contrary to what the president says, but they are biased as everyone is to some degree. He feels that the media treats the president unfairly particularly in person at his press briefings and they wont give him his share of credit when he does things right.

Lawson, who is the president of the University at Albany College Republicans, said he feels the social pressure against conservatism is particularly acute on campus.

In the classroom, students are eager to jump on anyone who doesnt say the politically correct thing in a given situation, he said. Lawson pointed to a student at Fordham University who was suspended after being pictured with a gun, as well as the de-platforming of conservative podcaster and media figure Ben Shapiro at Syracuse University.

Trump wasnt Lawsons first choice in the 2016 Republican primary, although he has come to appreciate him more over the years.

Hes like a reality star. And I mean, thats what he was. So he kind of feels out the room a little bit and says outrageous things think about all the free media attention this guy gets, he said. But at the same time, he enacts policies that are fantastic.

Lawson said he likes the conservative direction the Supreme Court has gone in over the past four years, and he thinks Trump is best suited to handle the economy. Although he disagrees with Trump's positions on climate change, which Lawson says is clearly a major issue. He also feels Trump's behavior is at times unbecoming, such as when Trump went after Megyn Kelly during the 2016 debates, or when the president uses social media.

I just really, really wish they would take away his Twitter, he said.

But at the end of the day, presidential elections are a binary choice, and Trump is his guy.

Lawson said he agrees with a description of Biden given by comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan as like a dim flashlight, and he is concerned that the former vice president could die in office if elected. That would leave California Sen. Kamala Harris in charge, whom Lawson said was too harsh on drug offenses as attorney general of California and is "just not likable."

"You know, I mean, like Joe Biden. ... You watch this man speak and you're like, what's happening?" Lawson said, referring to Biden's occasional gaffes and misstatements. "Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, these are the options were given."

Winter feels her choice is equally clear cut.

What am I going to do? Vote for Trump? Im a Black, trans woman. Im going to vote for Trump? No. So its going to be Joe Biden, Winter said. And Im not going to abdicate my responsibility by not voting, either.

Winter was born in Detroit, but she has lived all across the United States. Her mother was a psychologist, and her father a doctor who practiced internal medicine. They were both Democrats, and her mother was active in the civil rights movements of the 1960s.

Four years ago, after her mother died by suicide and her father was checked into a nursing home in the care of Winters extended family, Winter returned to Westchester County, where she lived as a teenager.

She stayed with a friend for some time, but then decided to move to Albany. Winter drives Uber here, does tarot card readings and is a co-chair of the Capital Region Democratic Socialists of America, a political organization on the left of American political discourse whose values were championed on the national stage by Sen. Bernie Sanders in his two presidential runs.

The root of her politics, she said, is compassion.

Capitalism has kind of made everybody a little more selfish. And not only is selfishness accepted, it's promoted and encouraged, Winter said. And when you do that, it automatically creates a shift of resources away from people who don't have the capability to deal with people who are trying to take advantage of them literally all the time.

She pointed to what she described as a corrosive effect that capitalism has on the health care industry.

Winter said, prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, one of her cousins grew sick and died because he didnt realize how sick he was and was too reluctant to pay to see a doctor. He had recently graduated from dental school and was thousands of dollars in debt, she said, and his health insurance wouldnt kick in until he started his residency. So he tried to wait it out.

That is unforgivable, she said. The government spent thousands of dollars in loans to even get him to that point, and you're just gonna let him die because he doesnt want to go to the hospital, because he didn't realize how sick he was?

This story is not unique, Winter said. She believes that everybody has those kind of stories of the system not being built up to help people.

She pointed to Trump as an example of a person atthe top of the capitalist system who tries to take advantage of those beneath them. The president has caused the single greatest regression in the last 50 years of social policy, she said.

Winter said she may not love Biden, but she thinks hes a decent man who will try his best, and the reality of the situation is that progressives need to make a choice between him or Trump not withhold their vote because their candidate of choice didnt win the nomination.

We're only going to get one of these two people. It's going to be Joe Biden, or it's going to be Donald Trump. We're past the point where we decided. Bernie lost so, I mean, sorry, she said.

People died to get you the right to (vote), she continued. If you want to live in a capitalist democracy or something, youve got to participate in the system. And even if you want to change the system, youve got to participate in the system.

Read more:

Young voters on supporting Biden vs Trump: Have you seen the other guy? - Times Union

Philosophy professor and liberal magazine Jacobin contributor Ben Burgis said Thursday that calls for NBC not to air President TrumpDonald John TrumpLatest Mnuchin-Pelosi call produces 'encouraging news on testing' for stimulus package China warns it will detain American nationals following DOJ prosecution of Chinese scholars: report Musician John Fogerty issues cease and desist over Trump use of 'Fortunate Son' MOREs townhall Thursday evening were not an effective strategy to deplatform the president, adding that Trump already has the biggest megaphone.

Burgis explained onHill.TVs Rising that while some people responded to NBCs announcement of the townhall by complaining that viewers would have to choose between it and ABCs townhall with Democratic presidential nominee Joe BidenJoe BidenConservatives seize on New York Post story to push Section 230 reform Trump wishes Harris 'the best' after aide tests positive for COVID-19 Pennsylvania rejects 372K mail-in ballot applications following primary confusion: report MORE, NBC staffers interviewed by the Daily Beast saidthe network should not be giving Trump a platform at all.

It almost seems like a hear no evil, see no evil thing, like that theyre going to get people to not go along with whatever Trump is saying... that theyre going to just not give him the platform in the first place, which this seems like a really extreme version of that attempt of kind of forcing a media bubble, Burgis explained.

It almost seems like this cant be the strategy to get people to not buy what hes saying or not go along with what hes saying, to just say, oh, well well just deny him the megaphone, that seems like a really bankrupt way of doing that, he added.

Its just not going to work hes the president of the United States, he continued. You cant make him go away by deplatforming him.

Thursday morning, more than 100 Hollywood stars signed onto an open letter to NBC and Comcast executives asking them to run Trumps townhall either prior to or after Bidens so that American voters can have the opportunity to watch both.

However, NBCUniversal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde stood by the decision to air the townhall at the same time as ABCs, writing in a statement that if NBC were to move our town hall with President Trump to a later timeslot we would be violating our commitment to offer both campaigns access to the same audience and the same forum.

Watch more of the interview above.

More here:

Jacobin contributor: Calls for NBC not to air Trump townhall won't succeed in 'deplatforming' the president | TheHill - The Hill