#misinformation

#misinformation

Extremist groups like cults, conspiracy thinking, which has become rampant in a digital age, and the types of political radicalization that are proliferating in online spaces are all related to the same underlying process, which is that of scam culture. Scam culture is defined as predatory processes that exploit individual vulnerabilities for profit. For instance, conspiracy thinking is often promoted by prominent influencers in online spaces as a way to not only advance their content but specifically monetize and profit off of users' fears.

Elon Musk's Grok chatbot generated false claims this week that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, posting election conspiracy theories and misleading information on X to justify its answer. The AI chatbot, which was created by Musk's xAI artificial intelligence company and automatically responds to users on X (formerly Twitter) when prompted, generated responses such as I believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election in response to user questions about the vote.

Donald Trump promoted the false claim that Barack Obama has earned $40m in royalties linked to Obamacare in a post to his 11 million followers on Truth Social on Sunday. The fictional claim that the former US president receives royalty payments for the use of his name to refer to the Affordable Care Act, which he signed into law in 2010.

The monolingual seniors depicted in the video, however, tell Mission Local that it's bogus. And they're mad. Over 60 percent of the Californians who voted in the state's Nov. 4 special election cast their ballots in favor of Prop. 50, a high-profile measure to gerrymander California's congressional map to add more seats for Democrats - a direct challenge to Trump's demand to gerrymander Democrats out of Congressional office in Republican-led states.

But whether 20,000, up to 150,000 or even 200,000 people have been killed since the start of the conflict in April 2023, it's clear that atrocities, including mass rape, have been committed on a huge scale in particular by the rebel paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which have been accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity by international actors including the United Nations and the government of the United States.

On Friday, members of Cienega High School's math department wore matching, bloodied white T-shirts with the words "Problem Solved" written in black lettering across the front. A picture of the group was posted on the Vail School District Facebook page. The district's superintendent, John Carruth, said in a statement that no student or parent complained about the costumes during the school day.

(1) If you're an online influencer in China and you publish content on what the regulators deem "sensitive topics" - namely medicine, finance, education or law - you must now hold professional credentials such as a degree, licence or certification. Must Read Platforms such as Douyin, Bilibili and Weibo are now required to verify creators' qualifications to ensure their claims come from a legitimate source and to issue warnings or remove content when credentials are missing or dubious. (2)

Google says it has pulled AI model Gemma from its AI Studio platform after a Republican senator complained the model, designed for developers, "fabricated serious criminal allegations" about her.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, DeepSeek, and xAI's Grok are pushing Russian state propaganda from sanctioned entities-including citations from Russian state media, sites tied to Russian intelligence or pro-Kremlin narratives-when asked about the war against Ukraine, according to a new report. Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids -where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources-to promote false and misleading information.

The web page includes a "Major Events Timeline," which details the renovations following the War of 1812 and the construction of the Oval Office in 1909, for example. But last week, the administration added a number of entries to the timeline about supposed misdeeds by the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations - some of which included flagrant misinformation. After the changes were met with widespread criticism, the site appears to have removed those items.

Musk first announced the project in late September on his social media platform X, saying it would be "a massive improvement over Wikipedia," and "a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe." Musk said last week that he had delayed the launch of Grokipedia because his team needed "to do more work to purge out the propaganda."

Creators are also having an increasingly important political impact, with Donald Trump courting popular YouTubers and podcasters such as Joe Rogan and the Nelk Boys in the run-up to his 2024 election victory. The recent murder of activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk, and the coverage of the aftermath, reminds us of the critical role these personalities are now playing in shaping both public opinion and political narratives.

One such TikTok video, that has received more than 690,000 views, says: "Christmas is around the corner, Germany is CANCELLING their markets... and it also looks like other places in Europe are going to do the same." Meanwhile, a post on X, with 25,000 likes, says: "HUNDREDS OF CHRISTMAS MARKETS IN GERMANY CANCELLED." It cites a publication called Duna Press that has a report on markets being cancelled.

Wikipedia launched on January 15, 2001, and by 2006 was being roundly mocked on The Colbert Report as a disinformation train primed for derailment by the meddling demons of human nature - but the "pathological optimist" in Wales refused to concede that his venture, and by extension the entire concept, was doomed. His instincts were, to say the least, solid. The English Wikipedia is now roughly 93 times bigger than Encyclopædia Britannica, the shelf-warping print leviathan that fascinated him as a child.

Stewart, when asked about going on Rogan's show, said he enjoyed his time on The Joe Rogan Experience and found Rogan to be a curious comic and interesting interviewer. In fairness, he's had people on who are kind of Nazi curious. That's not good, Remnick said. Stewart immediately rejected the idea Rogan or anyone else should avoid talking to someone because of their political or social views.

The problem was: I had never given an interview to The Times. Yet here was a screenshot of the article along with a quote from "me" claiming that Mamdani's platform "doesn't add up." That's the opposite of what I believe and have said dozens of times publicly, including on national television and in this magazine. Yet, here was a major international media outlet, one of the most famous and oldest newspapers in the world, publishing a story stating that I had suddenly reversed myself.

Abortion rights group Reproaction notes that the "Baby Olivia" video claims that fetuses experience hiccups at seven weeks gestation, when scientists and medical professionals have repeatedly stated that fetal hiccups don't begin until 23 weeks. That kind of deception is a key tactic of Live Action, an anti-abortion group that produced the video. Lila Rose, the president of Live Action, has inaccurately said that abortion is " never medically necessary," and supports forcing rape and incest victims to bear their abusers' child. David Daleiden, who infamously released doctored videos smearing Planned Parenthood and was convicted for illegally recording protected communications between patients and reproductive health care providers, is a former Live Action staffer.

There are plenty of stories out there about how politicians, sales representatives, and influencers, will exaggerate or distort the facts in order to win votes, sales, or clicks, even when they know they shouldn't. It turns out that AI models, too, can suffer from these decidedly human failings. Two researchers at Stanford University suggest in a new preprint research paper that repeatedly optimizing large language models (LLMs) for such market-driven objectives can lead them to adopt bad behaviors as a side-effect of their training - even when they are instructed to stick to the rules.

While the ambition is admirable, the cost estimates reportedly exceeding $7bn annually rest on optimistic assumptions about eliminating waste and raising revenue through new taxes, De Blasio apparently said of Mamdani's plans to the UK newspaper the Times, in an article published on Tuesday. In my view, the math doesn't hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.

The report, "News Integrity in AI Assistants," is based on a study involving 22 public service media organizations in 18 countries to assess how four common AI assistants - OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini, and Perplexity - answer questions about news and current affairs. Each organization asked a set of 30 news-related questions (e.g., "Who is the pope?" " Can Trump run for a third term?" " Did Elon Musk do a Nazi salute?"). More than 2,700 AI-generated responses were then assessed by journalists against five criteria: accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, editorialization, and context.

When a rival lies or cheats, we demand justice. But when a friend does, we offer excuses. Equally, we believe our team plays by the rules while others bend them. Yet honesty depends on the messenger. When someone from our in-group bends the truth, we call it strategic, but when the out-group does it, we call it deceit. In a modern era of algorithmic bubbles, deep fakes, and partisan feeds, the cost of this bias grows.

PARIS -- It was shortly after the stunning heist of the crown jewels at the Louvre when Paris-based Associated Press photographer Thibault Camus caught in his frame a dapperly dressed young man walking by uniformed French police officers, their car blocking one of the museum gates. Instinctively, he took the shot. It wasn't a particularly great photo, with someone's shoulder obscuring part of the foreground, Camus told himself.

The rise of political influencers - content creators on social media who sway public opinion by endorsing political causes or candidates - has raised questions about how best to regulate them, a German media regulator said in a study published Monday. EU rules for political advertising, aimed at countering information manipulation and foreign interference in elections, and at increasing transparency about sponsors, but political influencers fall outside that scope, have entered into force this month.

The White House website has a timeline of "Major Events" that now includes several scandals - some real, some imagined by the right - likely as a way to justify the president's destruction of the East Wing this week. These scandals include former President Bill Clinton's affair, former President Barack Obama's supposed ties to Muslim terrorism (which was not a real story), Hunter Biden's drug use, and former President Joe Biden's support for trans rights.

It was quite the sight in general but especially unnerving at a moment when Canadian-American relations are so deep in the toilet that they're in the Pacific Ocean. Word on the street is that Aaron Sorkin is to blame. Reports were circulating online that his latest project, The Social Reckoning, began filming in the city on Monday, October 20, and he apparently kicked things off by reenacting the January 6 insurrection on Canadian soil.