Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.
Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.
What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.
By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.
Same as instance rules, plus:
Russian State TV Reacts to the Ukraine Drone Attack
I just think it's interesting. It's political theater like Fox News, but it's interesting to see it in another cultural context and with different behaviors of argumentation being modeled for the audience and different types of false conflict to keep them engaged.
Also, Tucker Carlson sure looks like hell now. He used to look vigorous and bad like an 80s comedy villain, then he got lazy and started looking like an HOA Karen, and now he's turning into a bloated prep school Mitch McConnell. He also looks super unhappy.
Elon Musk is leaving his government role as a top adviser to President Donald Trump after spearheading efforts to reduce and overhaul the federal bureaucracy.
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65322395
Looking less likely that this is just a distraction. I think the breakup is pretty official 💔
Just to be clear though, most of what Musk was doing under DOGE was planned by Thiel during Trump's first administration, when he brought Michael Kratsios in to OSTP to help Trump with technology issues.
Speaking at EmTech Next, a conference held at MIT, Kratsios, who is deputy assistant to the president and deputy US chief technology officer, said the government is looking for ways to open up federal data to AI researchers. “Anything that we can do to unlock government data, we’re committed to,” Kratsios told MIT Technology Review. “We’d love to hear from any academic that has
The state's ban on gender-affirming pediatric care "cannot be justified" by science, a two-year review concluded.
Whenever you follow the science, the right wing will fall to pieces.
Twelve days before Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) was set to broadcast on April 15 across PBS stations nationwide as part of its strand American Masters, the filmmakers were told that a 90-second sequence—which shows the famous artist discussing an anti-Trump cartoon he created for the 2...
Twelve days before Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) was set to broadcast on April 15 across PBS stations nationwide as part of its strand American Masters, the filmmakers were told that a 90-second sequence—which shows the famous artist discussing an anti-Trump cartoon he created for the 2017 Women’s March newspaper—would be cut from the documentary.
The filmmakers, directors Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, who produced the film alongside Sam Jinishian and Alicia Sams, had a choice. According to Sams, they could choose to buy back their licensing deal, or agree to PBS’s decision and move forward with the broadcast. “We were told the film still has an anti-fascist message, and the audience can connect the dots themselves,” she says. “The irony of censoring someone who is a free speech advocate is maybe lost on PBS, but certainly not lost on us.”
Washington Post out here normalizing January 6th and the acquittal of some of the people involved behind the scenes. "The weighty lesson from Arizona’s ‘fake electors’ stumble"
I also enjoy the AI-generated summary of the comments:
What readers are saying
The comments overwhelmingly criticize the notion that the actions of "fake electors" were merely political acts rather than criminal offenses. Many commenters argue that the fake elector scheme was part of a broader conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results, which they... (Show more)
This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.
NPR Asks Starving Palestinian Living On Rubble to Denounce Hamas, Co-Sign His Own Ethnic Cleansing (Podcast 23mins)
In this News Brief, we we break down an object lesson in racist US-Israeli national security state toadyism, double standards, and runaway condescension.
In this News Brief, we we break down an object lesson in racist US-Israeli national security state toadyism, double standards, and runaway condescension.
WaPo recently exposed authoritarian like mass surveillance in my city ongoing for at least 2 years. I learned Wednesday that the mayor obliterated the city's privacy protection in 2022.
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64675314
Looks like this got deleted from the original community where I posted it, so re-posting what I can remember here.
This screenshot is from a post I made on my city's subreddit.
The ACLU is saying it is "the stuff of authoritarian surveillance states, and has no place in American policing.”
“Until now, no American police department has been willing to risk the massive public blowback from using such a brazen face recognition surveillance system,”
Network of face recognition surveillance cameras distinguishes New Orleans as the worst abuser of this technology in the nation
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64452424
This is the first known time an American police department has relied on live facial recognition technology cameras at scale, and is a radical and dangerous escalation of the power to surveil people as we go about our daily lives.
According to The Washington Post, since 2023 the city has relied on face recognition-enabled surveillance cameras through the “Project NOLA” private camera network. These cameras scan every face that passes by and send real-time alerts directly to officers’ phones when they detect a purported match to someone on a secretive, privately maintained watchlist.
New Orleans jailbreak involving 10 inmates had inside help, police say
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64252755
Archive link without paywall: https://archive.is/Wod1E
New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said city police weren’t notified about the escape until 10:30 a.m., about two hours after the routine headcount turned up short. The department then set out to inform the public so people could protect themselves and help with the search.
“We wanted to immediately notify our public because we knew these escapees would be in our city,” she said before promising a “full court effort” to track down the escapees.
Kirkpatrick declined to criticize the sheriff’s office but said the delay in reporting the escape was “concerning.” When asked whether Hutson should have let her know about the escape sooner, the superintendent demurred.
“We’ll deal with that at another time,” she said.
Last year, Hutson requested the New Orleans City Council increase her budget by 60 percent, from $55.3 million to $88.3 million
The New York Times Really Asked Ms. Rachel If She's Paid By Hamas
The house style of the New York Times is severely outdated. Depending on the topic, the newspaper’s purportedly impartial tone instead reads as smug, self-amused, and deeply lazy. The results are disastrous when applied to a recent article which sincerely considers the idea that Rachel Griffin-Accur...
If the article's intent was to let the facts speak for themselves, it forgot to invite them. Instead, Tracy leveraged the full weight of his employer, America's paper of record, to ask an entertainer who sings with Elmo about how to go to school if she would care to comment about receiving money from Hamas. Nasty work.
Trump adviser Kari Lake has announced that international broadcasting network Voice of America will include content from One America News Network, a pro-Trump propaganda network.Since Donald Trump's inauguration, OAN personalities have pushed bizarre and inflammatory foreign policy commentary, inclu...
Since Donald Trump's inauguration, OAN personalities have pushed bizarre and inflammatory foreign policy commentary, including referring to Canada as “our vassal state,” calling Greenland ”the new Africa,” and pushing for a revival of “manifest destiny.” They’ve also run cover for Trump over his planned acceptance of a luxury jet from Qatar.
"By cherry-picking anecdotes, news reports can distort our interpretation of the world."
I wrote the book Copaganda based on my years of being a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing the most vulnerable people in our society. I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.
BBC probe finds coordinated social media campaigns, originating abroad, spreading false information against and in favour of new Syrian administration
Sweeping provision would halt all local oversight of AI by US states.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/43987676
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/381055
Immigrants are the canary in the coal mine, but Americans won't understand that all of our civil liberties are under attack until it's too late.
Why many Americans are unaware of the massive event in Gaza BEFORE October 7th
U.S. media largely ignored The Great March of Return that lasted almost two years. PBS was perhaps the most egregious example. See the Frontline film that P ...
I’ve recently had conversations with a number of people who, it turned out, were completely unaware that before the October 7th attack on Israel, Gazans had tried huge non-violent demonstrations for almost two years.
Every week, thousands of unarmed men, women and children in Gaza’s open air prison had gathered in a nonviolent, Gandhian march to end the Israeli blockade that was strangling them and to return to their stolen homes and villages.
And every week Israeli snipers had shot dozens of them, killing and maiming unarmed people of all ages – men, women, children, medics, journalists. On the first day alone, atleast fifteen people were killed and 750 others were shot. (See detailed reports here. and videos below.)
Yet, US news reports mentioned these so infrequently, if at all, that many Americans have no idea that these massive weekly demonstrations even took place.
One of the most blatant and egregious examples is PBS.
PBS’s Frontline program had actually co-produced a docum
"There’s a Good Reason Why Black Women Are Sitting Out the Protests This Time Around" -Slate.com (I read it, there is nothing in it that sounds like a good reason)
For some of us, Kamala Harris’ loss felt incredibly personal.
