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News on Consequences of Exposure
James Murdoch, the son of Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, has spoken out against “media property owners” that spread disinformation leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. In an interview with the Financial Times on Friday, Murdoch said that the attack on the Capitol is a consequence of the election disinformation championed by […]
By Ellise ShaferSingapore – A political leader uses social media to spread misinformation and hate. Followers are spurred to violence. People are killed. It is a toxic brew that has surfaced repeatedly across the world — in Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Brazil and now the United States. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube banned President Trump from […]
By Shashank BengaliLast week, a mob incited by President Trump stormed the United States Capitol building. Rioters broke windows, beat law enforcement officers, vandalized offices and tried to track down members of Congress with mayhem in mind. At least five people died. For those of us who cover climate change for a living, the blatant lies about […]
By John SchwartzMisinformation is a big part of our current polarization because it is hard to bring the country together when each side has its own facts and attributions of responsibility. It helps that some leading social media platforms have limited or banned Trump’s posting privileges. But that will not stop the spread of misinformation as Trump […]
By Darrell M. WestAs the news broke on Wednesday that there was a riot at the U.S. Capitol, volunteer #Wikipedia editors worked to document what was happening. At 18:34 UTC (1:34 p.m. EST) on January 6, an editor created a short article titled “January 2021 Donald Trump rally” about what was at the time only a rally in […]
By Molly WhitePOSTDOCTORAL ASSOCIATE, Political Science, to join Adam Berinsky (Political Science) and David Rand (Sloan School of Management, Brain & Cognitive Sciences) in working on an NSF-Funded project (Integrating Political Science and Cognitive Science to Meet the Challenge of Promoting Accurate Information on Social Media) that seeks to integrate political science and cognitive science to understand […]
By Adam Berinsky & David RandAs a mob swarmed the Capitol building on Wednesday, images and videos of the event spread across social media in close to real time, many going viral on Twitter and Facebook before cable news networks covering the events could verify or report them. One video showed a group of rioters surrounding a pile of Associated […]
By Ian W. KarbalExaggerating the threat of foreign disinformation made the problem harder to address. As the information scholars Alexei Abrahams and Gabrielle Lim warned in a prescient article last summer, the more that the problem was described in sensational, militarized terms, the narrower the band of potential solutions. Describing online disinformation as a national-security problem tends to […]
By Emerson T. Brooking & Jacob ShapiroEven with all the warning signs that something like this could happen, there was nothing that could have mentally prepared us to watch a mob storm the halls of the US Capitol building this week, disrupting a process that is a constitutional function and threatening the safety of hundreds of elected officials and staff. But […]
By Genna ReedSociety has been transformed by a technology revolution and its 24/7 influence on so many aspects of our reality. The COVID-19 pandemic and the nationwide movement for racial justice have made it even clearer how essential these tools are for our daily lives. Silicon Valley has clearly followed through on its promise to change the […]
President Trump and his enablers in government and right-wing media will shoulder the blame for Wednesday’s insurrection at the US Capitol, but internet platforms—Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, in particular—have played a fomenting and facilitating role that no one should overlook. In their relentless pursuit of engagement and profits, these platforms created algorithms that amplify […]
By Roger McNamee