Latest in Disinformation
I am the founder and CEO of Bot Sentinel, a platform that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to classify inauthentic and problematic Twitter accounts. Even I was shocked by what we discovered.
On Jan. 8 at 10:30am, the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce will hold a hearing on “Americans at Risk: Manipulation and Deception in the Digital Age.” The committee will hear from Monika Bickert from Facebook, Joan Donovan of the Harvard Kennedy School, Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology and Justin Hurwitz from the University of Nebraska College of Law. The livestream of the hearing is available here and below.
The good news is that Facebook is finally taking action against deepfakes. The bad news is that the platform’s new policy does not go far enough.
The House Intelligence Committee report on impeachment engages minimally with the conspiracy theories propagated by the president’s defenders.
Amid the hubbub of L’Affaire Ukrainienne, you could be forgiven for overlooking another story that has emerged out of Congress over the past week. It’s a grubby, unpleasant story—so much so that it feels ugly to draw attention to it. But the times are ugly, after all, and the story is a concerning harbinger of what might be to come in the lead-up to 2020.
In the early 1980s, Soviet intelligence began Operation Infektion—a campaign to erode trust in the U.S. government by orchestrating a series of scientific papers and news articles arguing that the U.S. government created the HIV/AIDS virus.
In the summer of 2016, a meme began to circulate on the fringes of the right-wing internet: the notion that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was seriously ill. Clinton suffered from Parkinson’s disease, a brain tumor and seizures, among other things, argued Infowars contributor Paul Joseph Watson in a YouTube video. The meme (and allegations) were entirely unfounded.
Members of the Myanmar military have systematically used Facebook as a tool in the government’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority, according to an incredible piece of reporting by the New York Times on Oct. 15. The Times writes that the military harnessed Facebook over a period of years to disseminate hate propaganda, false news and inflammatory posts.
On Thursday, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment of seven officers in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, on charges of computer hacking, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. The charges concern a disinformation operation against international anti-doping agencies in the wake of news reports on the Russian government’s systematic doping of the country’s athletes.
At the end of November, the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump suggested to aides that he did not in fact make the offensive comments about women on the infamous “Access Hollywood” recording.