disinformation

4Apr

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IN OTHER NEWS

Climate Disinformation In Ads Banned By Twitter

Twitter will no longer allow “misleading advertisements” that “contradict the scientific consensus on climate change,” on its platform, the company announced Friday. Earlier this month, the Climate Disinformation Coalition called on Big Tech to confront climate denial, particularly Twitter, which performed the worst on its scorecard. Days later, Pinterest announced robust new community standards to protect users from climate misinformation, and former President Obama praised the company for doing so. That was perhaps the final push Twitter needed to announce, on Earth Day, that it has formalized rules prohibiting climate disinformation in advertising. While existing policies against misleading advertisements already prevent climate denial ads in theory, Axios reported, Twitter is followin...

Combating Disinformation Targeting Black Communities

Since 2016, organizers have identified campaigns sowing falsehoods about the pandemic and the presidential election and have worked to counteract them. Earlier this year, Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor saw a friend arguing on Twitter about Black identity. Aiwuyor noticed that the Twitter account her friend was fighting with was a new one, with zero followers and also wasn’t following anyone else. She told her friend he was probably arguing with a bot or troll. The revelation stopped the online debate in its tracks: her friend stopped engaging with the suspicious account. When Aiwuyor tells others that infuriating online debates could be with bots or trolls, those incendiary exchanges begin to come into focus, and lose some of their power. “They are happy to hear they haven’t lost their min...

Disinformation campaigns are murky blends of truth, lies and sincere beliefs – lessons from the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned an infodemic, a vast and complicated mix of information, misinformation and disinformation. In this environment, false narratives – the virus was “planned,” that it originated as a bioweapon, that COVID-19 symptoms are caused by 5G wireless communications technology – have spread like wildfire across social media and other communication platforms. Some of these bogus narratives play a role in disinformation campaigns. The notion of disinformation often brings to mind easy-to-spot propaganda peddled by totalitarian states, but the reality is much more complex. Though disinformation does serve an agenda, it is often camouflaged in facts and advanced by innocent and often well-meaning individuals. As a researcher who studies how communications technologies...