This Week in Misinformation: Neil Young Loses Spotify Ultimatum, Vaccines Misinformation On March, J6 Truth Battle, Gateway Pundit Fools Kari Lake, Russia-Ukraine
27 January 2022
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Now, on to our top three stories.
Neil Young found out the hard way that Spotify really doesn’t want to have a policy on misinformation content.
The classic rocker asked the streaming platform to pull either his music or the Joe Rogan Experience podcast from its offerings (Reuters, 48.79), citing Rogan’s trafficking in false information about COVID vaccines as his reason for issuing such an ultimatum (Forbes, 43.67).
Spotify chose Rogan, and it only took a couple days for them to decide (Washington Post, 43.85). As it turns out, Joe Rogan and other COVID misinformation content are key sources of revenue for the company (The Verge, 44.19)!
The newsletter site Substack also came under fire for enabling toxic content to flourish (Washington Post, 43.85), and its co-founder executives penned a blog post that defended not having a policy on grounds that “censorship” could make worse, not fix, society’s “trust problem” by inviting more bad actors to create alternative realities for others to burrow into (via Substack).
Lively demonstrations based on vaccine misinformation broke out in Washington, DC and across the pond in the UK.
The “Defeat the Mandates” rally in DC (Forbes, 43.67) was headlined by prominent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (CNN, 42.70), who along with the event’s organizers is known for repeating and amplifying a host of untrue statements about the COVID and other vaccines (NBC News, 45.79). Kennedy’s speech made headlines for comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust and Anne Frank (Times of Israel, 44.30), a statement he walked back (Forbes, 43.67) after The Auschwitz Museum and other Jewish groups voiced irritation at the disrespect entailed to actual victims of genocide (The Hill, 43.30).
The next most famous person to have attended the DC event appears to have been Marvel star Evangeline Lilly (Newsweek, 38.14). No Republican Congresspersons showed up in person, but some of them voiced support for the cause via social media (Time, 43.28).
Meanwhile, in the UK, adherents of the meritless Sovereign Citizen belief system (The Week UK, -) have been asserting themselves against vaccination efforts based on a misunderstanding of a nine-digit code (VICE, 41.49).
And the battle over the truth about January 6th escalated yet further.
Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary told the January 6th Committee about secret meetings he held in the days before the Capitol attack (The Guardian, 43.84), some of which appear to have been to discuss a never-signed executive order (Politico, 43.33) that would have had the military seize voting machines and named a special counsel to “investigate” conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election. No one is owning up to writing the document (Daily Beast, 36.23), but contextual analysis suggests Sidney Powell was one of its primary authors (@get_innocuous via Substack).
The Committee (Politico, 43.33) and the Department of Justice (New York Times, 44.72) have both begun investigating the fake slates of electors sent to the National Archives, reported this week to have been a Rudy Giuliani shenanigan (Washington Post, 43.85). Related, serious people are also looking more closely at Trump’s requests for Georgia officials to find him enough votes to win (CNN, 42.70), a plot to hand Arizona to Trump (Rolling Stone, 38.77), and Mike Flynn’s campaign to get state-level Republicans to back election audits to show Trump won (The Guardian, 43.84).
Many defenders and deniers of moves to subvert democracy for the sake of the former president have said the January 6th Committee cannot issue subpoenas because it wasn’t organized by the book and has no legislative purpose. John Eastman of the coup memo fame, though, stands out as being the one to level this accusation in a court filing to fight his subpoena. This week, the judge shot down any suggestion therein that the committee is illegitimate (Politico, 43.33), setting precedent to dismiss similar claims from those who don’t want to cooperate. The court also dictated a “production schedule” by which Eastman will hand over 1,500 or more documents per day to the Committee (@kyledcheney via Twitter).
But the pro-insurrection team attempted a counteroffensive, with Trump complaining that the committee had dared ask for information from his (adult) children (Insider, 43.32), Newt Gingrich saying committee members could face jail if Republicans win the midterms (Newsweek, 38.14), and a newly installed State of Virginia official firing a committee investigator from his post at the University of Virginia (New York Times, 44.72).
Plenty in the grab bag, too! Kari Lake lies that Wisconsin voted to “withdraw” Biden electors; the Cyber Ninjas Fine Tracker is up to $700k; State lawmakers consider measures to protect election workers; the January 6th Committee issues subpoenas for white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Patrick Casey; Alex Jones pleads the fifth in Committee appearance; YouTube permanently bans Dan Bongino, deactivates two Oath Keepers channels ,and removes a QAnon channel; TRUTH Social will use Big Tech AI to help moderate content; Scientific American reports that schoolkids are falling victim to disinformation and ”conspiracy fantasies”; Columbia Journalism Review writes on "The Information War Over Ukraine”; on cue, Putin says events in eastern Ukraine “resemble genocide” as Russia steps up its disinformation campaign; A school board in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust;and a far right podcaster is telling his listeners to harass hospitals.
That, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin