As AI tools become increasingly sophisticated and accessible, so too has one of their worst applications: non-consensual deepfake pornography. While much of this content is hosted on dedicated sites, more and more it’s finding its way onto social platforms. Today, the Meta Oversight Board announced that it was taking on …
Read More »Fake Footage of Iran’s Attack on Israel Is Going Viral
In the hours after Iran announced its drone and missile attack on Israel on April 13, fake and misleading posts went viral almost immediately on X. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a nonprofit think tank, found a number of posts that claimed to reveal the strikes and their impact, …
Read More »Election Workers Are Drowning in Records Requests. AI Chatbots Could Make It Worse
Many US election deniers have spent the past three years inundating local election officials with paperwork and filing thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests in order to surface supposed instances of fraud. “I've had election officials telling me that in an office where there's one or two workers, they …
Read More »Elon Musk Is Platforming Far-Right Activists in Brazil, Defying Court Order
A Brazilian court has announced that it will be opening an investigation into X owner Elon Musk for obstruction of justice, after Musk reactivated far-right accounts that the Brazilian government had flagged for removal. The announcement came after Musk called for Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who heads …
Read More »Antiabortion Disinformation Ads Ran Rampant on Facebook and Instagram
Ads containing abortion-related misinformation are allowed to run on Facebook and Instagram in countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, while legitimate health care providers struggle to get theirs approved, new research has found. The report, released today from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and MSI Reproductive Choices, an …
Read More »Meta Kills a Crucial Transparency Tool At the Worst Possible Time
Earlier this month, Meta announced that it would be shutting down CrowdTangle, the social media monitoring and transparency tool that has allowed journalists and researchers to track the spread of mis- and disinformation. It will cease to function on August 14, 2024—just months before the US presidential election. Meta’s move …
Read More »Today’s Supreme Court Hearing Addresses a Far-Right Bogeyman
Today, the US Supreme Court will hear a case that will determine whether the government can communicate with social media companies to flag misleading or harmful content to social platforms—or talk to them at all. And a lot of the case revolves around Covid-19 conspiracy theories. In Murthy v. Missouri, …
Read More »The House Passed the Bill That Could Ban TikTok—and It Wasn’t Close
This morning, the US House of Representatives voted to essentially ban TikTok, unless Chinese-owned Bytedance divests from the app entirely. If passed in the Senate, TikTok would have about six months to untangle itself from its China-based owner. In speeches leading up to the vote on H.R. 7521, known as …
Read More »This Senator Wants to Know What Meta and TikTok Are Doing About Parent-Run Girl Influencer Accounts
In January, the CEOs of X, TikTok, Meta, Snap, and Discord testified in front of a congressional committee about child exploitation on their platforms. “Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands,” Senator Lindsey …
Read More »AI Tools Are Still Generating Misleading Election Images
Despite years of evidence to the contrary, many Republicans still believe that President Joe Biden’s win in 2020 was illegitimate. A number of election-denying candidates won their primaries during Super Tuesday, including Brandon Gill, the son-in-law of right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza and promoter of the debunked 2000 Mules film. Going …
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