This Week in Misinformation: Such Facebook, Many Rewriting History, QAnon-Vegas, Biden-JFK, Montana (x2), Wow
28 October 2021
This Prism newsletter strives to be the paper of record for all that’s happening in misinformation. For any citizen whose life is impacted by misinformation, it helps you see how storylines evolve from multiple, sourced angles on important stories in one place. For amateur and professional misinformation watchers, it is your go-to resource for updates on peers, platforms, propagandists, and politicians. Learn more about Prism and our other products on our Substack page, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook!
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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. Just three this week; but they are plenty.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen stepped up her campaign to pressure the company to reform by giving her cache of tens of thousands of internal documents to 17 additional news organizations (New York Times, 44.76). A flood of “Facebook Papers” articles ensued, addressing major stories not yet published from the initial leak.
Working from home, Haugen took pictures of the documents that she accessed over Facebook’s internal network and, after a primary rollout with the Wall Street Journal (46.00), assembled the larger “consortium” of investigative reporters to whom she turned over the cache (Washington Post, 43.85). Notably not looped in, still: academics.
The company, including in a statement from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, complained that the conclusions drawn from even this large a sample size do not paint a full picture of its efforts, but acknowledged that the government was also interested in investigating its internal workings (CNN, 42.95).
So, what problems did the Facebook Papers highlight? Among other topics, the articles covered algorithms (Washington Post, 43.85), misinformation (Bloomberg, 45.71), radicalization (NBC News, 45.66), human trafficking (CNN, 42.95), Facebook’s disservices to users outside the U.S. (The Atlantic, 39.53), and how the company generally chooses growth over safety (Washington Post, 43.85). See the links below for our full compilation of stories.
Particularly notable for readers of this newsletter—and others following major storylines in misinformation—were accounts of open dissent within Facebook after it failed to detect and act against people who used its tools to organize the January 6th Capitol attack (Associated Press, 49.36) and that executives knew the company was doing worse managing COVID vaccine-related misinformation than they were saying publicly (CNN, 42.95).
[Editor’s note: Facebook rebranded this week to “Meta,” which we frankly find annoying. We at Prism were meta before it was trendy.]
Donald Trump and his allies kept up with efforts to rewrite the histories of the 2020 election and January 6th—this week with the help of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and an increasingly brazen, authoritarian conspiracy fringe.
The Wall Street Journal (46.00) published an editorial that correctly stated, in passing, that ballots once in question in a Pennsylvania court case were nowhere enough to have made the state go to Trump instead of Biden. The former president, in reply, penned a letter saying Pennsylvania was “rigged” and the Journal just hasn’t “figured out” about it. The paper published Trump’s letter, and the backlash for its amplification of obvious lies about the election (The Guardian, 43.62) was intense to the point that the board put out another piece defending its decision, saying readers could decide whether the man who made such “bananas” claims was fit to run for president in 2024.
Whether that man’s 2024 run can restore him to the White House will depend in part on election officials’ impartial performance of their duties. To that end, secretaries of state across the country, and their families as well, have been subjected to a barrage of threats from people who wrongly believe they helped to steal the election from Trump (CNN, 42.95). People who are particularly deep into QAnon are going so far as to organize to “control the election system” at the grassroots level (VICE, 41.42). And, if intimidation and lawful installation of election truthers both fail at the local level, many Republicans are also voicing a readiness to go to war (VICE, 41.42) and kill people with guns (@NumbersMuncher via Twitter) to reverse a future election that goes against their preference.
In an exclusive that has not yet been corroborated by other outlets, Rolling Stone (38.77) reported that two January 6th event organizers named several Republican Congresspeople and staffers as being part of “dozens” of planning meetings before the Capitol attack. (One of them, Rep. Mo Brooks, responded that he would be “proud” if his staff had been involved.) The sources also planned to tell the select committee about coordination between organizers and key figures in the Trump White House, including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who the committee may soon subpoena (CNN, 42.95). Separately, CNN reported that at least five former Trump White House staffers were cooperating with the committee’s investigation.
Tucker Carlson will soon serve up a trove of new material for January 6th conspiracy theorists with a special called “Patriot Purge” (Newsweek, 39.26), in which he will broadcast to the Fox News (35.82) prime time audience a mélange of utter nonsense: the attack was a “false flag” (how elaborate!); there is a “plot against the people” (by whom, exactly?); the Left is “hunting” the Right and sending people to Guantánamo (ummm); and a domestic war on terror—using U.S. helicopters returned from Afghanistan—is “coming after half the country” (about 650 charged with crimes in ten months, so… no). The trailer is almost entirely misinformation and visual scares set to dark-sounding music; we don’t have high hopes for the full film. Backlash to the announcement has been swift and sweeping, but then maybe that’s the kind of free publicity Carlson was hoping for (Washington Post, 43.85).
Q world’s biggest event yet was held in Las Vegas this week, as was a conference in Salt Lake City that also drew big conspiracyland names.
The Q faithful, along with some who pretended not to know (@AlKapDC via Twitter) that QAnon John’s event had anything to do with QAnon (Las Vegas Sun, -), convened at Vegas’s Ahern Hotel to speak and be spoken to, sell merchandise, hob-nob with GOP officials (Arizona Mirror, -), and cast themselves as victims of phantom cyber attacks (@2021_Karma via Twitter). Probably-Q Ron Watkins, who recently launched a campaign for Congress in Arizona, took the stage to compare himself to Rosa Parks (@AlKapDC via Twitter). Full live tweet threads from the Twitter stalwart are linked below.
Meanwhile in Salt Lake, the Western Conservative Action Network, or “WeCANact,” hosted an event to help people learn to fight “against the socialist, communist, and Marxist ideologies” that its organizers baselessly imagine “permeate our government, our schools, and the mainstream media.” The conference, hitting only about 10 percent of its target attendance (Newsweek, 39.26), saw a good deal of crossover between more traditional conservative activism and the COVID denial and QAnon fantasies of the far right (Salt Lake Tribune, 46.89). QAnon favorites Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne made appearances here instead of the Vegas event, while a couple of Arizona state senators hit up both.
This week also marked four years since Q made the first of his nearly 5,000 total posts before ceasing activity last December. That 2017 “drop” was a prediction that Hillary Clinton would be arrested within days (she wasn’t).
Ah, and what a grab bag for y’all: John Eastman disagrees, again, with himself on what he thinks Pence should have done on January 6th—and he may be subpoenaed by the select committee; Biden delays release of JFK files and conspiracy theorists sense something amiss; the Senate holds a hearing on climate disinformation with oil execs; a couple of billionaires launch a new anti-disinformation company to develop media products; an ad tech and brand safety nonprofit takes flight; a judge decides not to help Trump get back on Twitter; the Senate holds a hearing on child safety online with SnapChat, TikTok, and YouTube execs; and misinformation in Montana gets double coverage.
That, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin