#misinformation

#misinformation

Over the weekend, Elon Musk's X rolled out a feature that had the immediate result of sowing maximum chaos. The update, called "About This Account," allows people to click on the profile of an X user and see such information as: which country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed.

Ankit Khanal gets his news from News Daddy. More than 20 times a day, Khanal, a sophomore at George Mason University, opens TikTok to have the biggest stories of the day delivered to him by a bleach-blonde 26-year-old named Dylan Page, one of the leading faces in a growing community of news influencers. Based in the United Kingdom, Page began posting content on TikTok in August 2020 and has since grown his "News Daddy Empire," his posts amassing over 1.5 billion likes.

I fall down YouTube rabbit holes sometimes as a way of unwinding. Lately, the algorithm has been sending me videos of teenagers covering rock songs from the '70s and early '80s, and some of them are better than they have any right to be. I've been particularly struck by how many of these bands choose to do covers of Rush songs.

The "Solidarity pool," an important part of the European Union's new Migration and Asylum Pact, will come into effect mid-2026. Under this framework, member states that face high migration pressures qualify for help from the pool. A recent assessment by the European Commission indicates that Germany, amongst other countries, can request an exemption from taking more asylum seekers until the end of 2026.

Grok, built by Musk's company xAI and integrated into his social media platform X, wrote in a widely shared post in French that gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were designed for "disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus" rather than for mass murder - language long associated with Holocaust denial. The Auschwitz Memorial highlighted the exchange on X, saying that the response distorted historical fact and violated the platform's rules.

A document circulating online, an iTunes-style metadata export contained within the House Oversight Committee's publicly released files, includes several TV show titles, among them RuPaul's Drag Race, Pose, and Shadowhunters. These references simply show that the titles appeared in an exported media library; they don't indicate that RuPaul, the show's creators, or any performers had any connection to Jeffrey Epstein or his crimes, no matter how much anti-LGBTQ+ pundits may wish to spin it that way.

Which? surveyed more than 4,000 UK adults about their use of AI and also put 40 questions around consumer issues such as health, finance, and travel to six bots - ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Gemini AI Overview, Copilot, Meta AI, and Perplexity. Things did not go well. Meta's AI answered correctly just over 50 percent of the time in the tests, while the most widely used AI tool, ChatGPT, came second from bottom at 64 percent. Perplexity came top at 71 percent. While different questions might yield different results, the conclusion is clear: AI tools don't always come up with the correct answer.

The Trump White House "inherited this terrible inflation crisis from the Biden administration," Vance said.

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.

The image shows an absolutely mammoth hurricane eye, punctuated by a flock of birds circling safely above. Yet as retired meteorologist and National Weather Service science and operations office Rich Grumm told Yale's CC, the scale of the image simply doesn't work - Melissa's eye was reported to be around 10 miles wide. "Based on the scale of the eye, these birds would be larger than football fields," Grumm told CC.

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.