This Week in Misinformation: Twitter Doesn't Know It's Bad at News Now, Tom Hanks Isn't Hawking Dental Products
12 October 2023
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.
The Middle East war has laid bare Twitter’s difficulties to tame misinformation.
Others have covered the surprise Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and Israel’s retaliation, but here we’re going to talk about the volumes of fake stuff about the outbreak of this war (PBS, 45.17). To start with, more than a few posts on Twitter (Forbes, 40.38). In the mix: videos from a realistic video game that were being passed off as real footage of the conflict. As always, when there is a crisis and especially when it’s political, please just be on your toes (Poynter, 41.01).
Some of the problem is that Elon Musk himself is exceptionally bad at knowing which sources of information are worthwhile (Rolling Stone, 28.03). But in his defense, the platform was targeted intentionally by several dozen accounts that coordinated the dissemination of disinformation about Israel and Hamas (NBC News, 44.65). And the company knows it has a problem, even if it has struggled to keep the bad content at bay (ABC News, 45.50).
But, not helpful for his defense, Elon dismantled or let break much of what used to keep garbage information at bay on the site (NBC News), with the result that among all the platforms Twitter was the worst when events started up (ABC News). So here we are.
Twitter’s negligence has business and legal consequences, too.
For the above reasons and because Twitter is generally less useful now--unlabeled clickbait ads that you can’t block are now a thing (The Verge, 44.19) and Elon took away news link headlines and just left thumbnails (Washington Post, 37.95)--many people who once spent a lot of time on the site no longer do.
The EU is investigating X for violating its rules for online content (Reuters, 46.23), along with demanding better from Facebook and TikTok for fake videos about the war.
If you’re not on Threads, now’s the time to jump in! The misinformation disaster has prompted masses of Twitter refugees to migrate (The Verge), including many of the big-name journalists who had still been giving the bird site a veneer of respectability. No word yet on if Elon thinks the ADL is to blame.
Deepfakes are wreaking havoc and threatening global democracy, and that is not an exaggeration.
Yes, there’s the splashy, silly things like the fake Tom Hanks dental ad (New York Times, 42.00) and an AI video showing SpongeBob doing 9/11 (404 Media, -). Manipulating images is getting easier all the time, including new tools built into smartphones (New York Times).
But that’s just the beginning. TikTok is seeing waves of AI-generated audio, for example that sounds like Barack Obama (New York Times), and it doesn’t seem like the new disclosure labels (TikTok) are going to do the trick.
And many Americans have not clocked this yet, but deepfakes attacking one side just before an election in Slovakia almost certainly helped tip the tight contest in favor of the other party (Wired, 44.42). Can we long govern ourselves if those who are best at deepfakes are those who get into power? This is existential for democracy.
The solution space doesn’t look promising, as I’ve written before. Fact checks are falling short (here and across the board). Some in Congress are trying, maybe futilely (Roll Call, 46.31), to get platforms to do something about deepfakes (PBS). Meanwhile Facebook isn't exactly doing great on the issue (Wired) and they’re one of the only ones even paying lip service.
Here we go ‘round the grab bag: Qanon is worried RFK Jr. will take votes away… from JFK Jr. (!); people who live in much-villified San Francisco say they're fine; NFL athlete and Taylor Swift beau Travis Kelce gets into a beef with Aaron Rodgers over vaccine endorsement; conspiracy theories may be the biggest obstacle we have to dealing with climate change (similar for ”15-minute” cities); Governor Katie Hobbs didn't step down from her position leading Arizona; Amazon AI assistant Alexa has been telling people the 2020 election was stolen, because why wouldn’t she; one Republican in the House of Representatives is making public support of the result of that election a litmus test for his support to be Speaker; Mike Lindell owes his lawyers, like, a lot of money that he doesn’t have; and prosecutors in Georgia are calling Alex Jones and RNC chair Ronna McDaniel as potential witnesses in the (severed) Georgia trial of Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro.
All that, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin