This Week in Misinformation: Lying Costs Fox $787.5 Billion, 2024 Looking Not Great, Twitter Shoots Own Foot
20 April 2023
It’s been a week! We’re staying off Twitter and enjoying the Substack renaissance with the release of Notes. See you around the ‘stack?
Keeping up on misinformation is basically the best thing you can do for your brain. So glad you’re here!
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Reliability scores for media outlets cited in the summary are in parentheses for each, courtesy of the terrific folks at Ad Fontes Media.
Now, on to our top stories.
Dominion got a humongous payout from Fox News over lies about its election systems.
While Dominion went in saying Fox would pay up to $1.6 billion for defaming it (Wall Street Journal, 44.35), the two parties came to an agreement suddenly as the trial was beginning (New York Times, 42.26). The settlement is $787.5 million (CNBC, 44.96), which is several times the value of the voting-machine company.
Fox does not appear to be required to recant or apologize beyond a tepid written statement, but despite the cable channel’s efforts to redact materials (NBC News, 45.14) the reality that it made 20 specific false statements about Dominion on its air (CNN, 42.39) is in the public record forever. Depending on who you ask, the settlement itself is either the beginning of a long nightmare for Rupert Murdoch (Jeffrey Sonnenfeld via Time, 41.54) or, you know, maybe not that big a deal when you consider how much money Fox has (NBC News).
No matter where you land on that question, two things seem certain: the very similar case being brought by the much larger Smartmatic (Reuters, 47.35) looks dim for Fox, and election falsehoods will continue to circulate (Washington Post, 37.89) no matter how these lawsuits play out.
There were presidential announcements and rumors of presidential announcements.
He definitely seems to be running, but the report that Florida’s Ron DeSantis had filed to launch his campaign for president was false (Newsweek, 35.30). One tip-off: South Dakota’s Kristi Noem is supposedly named as his running mate on the form, but vice presidential candidates are *never* chosen in this way, or this early. On the real news side, Trump supporter but overall 2020 election truth-facer Larry Elder announced he would challenge the former president in the Republican primary (CNN).
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also announced that he would challenge Biden for the Democratic nomination (CBS News, 44.09), a notable turn of events for conspiracy theory-watchers because the nephew of JFK has made his name as a purveyor of vaccine disinformation (NBC News)--and offending Holocaust survivors with inappropriate comparisons--for many years. Meanwhile, we’re told that President Biden may announce his reelection bid as early as next week (New York Times).
Between DeSantis, RFK Jr., and the clownery that nowadays passes for politics (Agence France Presse, 48.05), it seems certain that polarization will continue to fuel problems like medical misinformation (Faye Flam via Washington Post) in the 2024 cycle.
Elon Musk instituted a new verification policy at Twitter that is counterproductive and apparently applied arbitrarily.
It’s been in the works for some time, and this was the week that the bird site removed the blue checks from accounts that had been verified under the old regime but refuse now to pay $8 per month for Twitter Blue (New York Times). It wasn’t the company’s only regressive change this week (PBS, 47.01), but it has deep implications for how information will be put out and received.
No one was safe. Those who lost checks included the pope, J.K. Rowling, a slew of government entity and emergency service accounts, and the IRS’s many handles--raising the prospect for confusion when these are inevitably impersonated by scammers and pranksters. One imposter posing as the New York City government official account has already boldly rolled the actual New York City government official account, which had been stripped of its verification badge.
A developing angle we’ll watch: some power users kept their blue checks despite insisting they haven’t paid (The Verge, 44.19). For the moment, Elon has copped to comping “just” Will Shatner, LeBron James, and Stephen King. No word on why these three and not others, but presumably keeping them as content producers and engagement drivers is worth more than $24 per month (he’s so close to getting it!).
One grab bag to rule them all, one grab bag to bind them: anonymous “ninjas” are on the front lines of Twitter’s climate change denialism war; TikTok commits to enforcing a ban on climate change misinformation; the Justice Department charges U.S. citizens and Russian intelligence officers with conspiring to use U.S. Citizens as illegal agents of the Russian Government; Russia makes a lot of fake social media accounts and mostly gets away with it; a journal article dives deep on COVID-19 lockdown revisionism; a conspiracy theory experts explains the American roots of QAnon; a Proud Boy defendant invokes the ol’ Ray Epps conspiracy theory at trial; and, we’re not unhappy to report, Mike Lindell will have to make good on the $5 million he promised cyber experts in exchange for demonstrating his data did not prove election fraud.
All that, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin