Smartmatic emailed a statement saying it is “very pleased to have secured the completion of the case against Newsmax.” The statement said Smartmatic is now shifting gears to focus on its related suits against Fox News and Fox Corp.Newsmax has settled a lawsuit brought by voting systems provider Smartmatic in connection with the channel’s airing of false claims about its software after the 2020 election, the network announced Thursday.
Elon Musk and Republican leaders have spent years decrying the previous Twitter regime's move to block the Hunter Biden laptop story under its hacked materials policy.But both companies later said the actions were a mistake, with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologizing for blocking the story and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying they were wrong to demote the article.
Now Musk's X is blocking the JD Vance dossier in exactly the same way. Curious how they justify this..
The Kremlin’s influence operations has shifted to focusing on the Harris-Walz campaign reflects a strategic move by Russian actors aimed at exploiting any perceived vulnerabilities in the new candidates," Clint Watts, the general manager of the Threat Analysis Center, wrote in a blog post accompanying the report.
As a result of RT’s efforts to “weaponise disinformation”, Blinken said, the US, UK and Canada would launch a “joint diplomatic campaign … to rally allies and partners around the world to join us in addressing the threat posed by RT and other machinery of Russian disinformation and covert influence”.
"It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation," Swift wrote in her Instagram post about the deepfake 'Old Donald' shared. While the singer isn’t new to weighing in on politics and getting out the vote, she made it clear that she found the year of the AI election particularly spooky after Trump manipulated her image.“It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter,” Swift continued. “The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”
American spy agencies have assessed that the Kremlin favors Donald J. Trump, seeing him as skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine.The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information pertaining to foreign interference in an American election and sanctioned five Russian state-funded news outlets, including RT, Ruptly and Sputnik.
Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative Media
Tenet is a Tennessee corporation founded by conservative commentator Lauren Chen, who goes by Roaming Millennial online and her husband, Liam Donovan. Chen, who also works as a host for Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV online video company and contributes to Turning Point USA, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?” Musk, who has endorsed "Old Donald's" 2024 bid for president, wrote on X on Sunday, along with the fake image.
The banning of the platform caps a months-long feud between Musk and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is spearheading efforts to combat fake news and hate speech that he says are harming Brazil’s democracy. “The pendulum has swung from public discourse being all about ‘internet as a tool for freedom’ to ‘internet as a threat,’” said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and a former Google lawyer. “So there are far fewer other governments, media, civil society, etc., taking the platforms’ side.”
A poll in the UK this summer found that two-thirds of respondents agree that companies should be held responsible for hosting content that incites riots, with the same number of respondents feeling the sites are regulated too little. Calls by politicians and judges to suspend access to a range of social media sites after periods of disorder have become almost commonplace: in France last year, amid rioting in response to police violence; in the midst of riots in the French-Pacific territory of New Caledonia; and today in Brazil, where the government threatened to block X as part of a dispute over misinformation.
One fabricated image shared by 'Old Donald' of the notoriously litigious pop star had Swift clad in red, white, and blue, posing like Uncle Sam before an American flag emblazoned with the text: 'Taylor wants YOU to vote for Trump.'I accept!' 'Old Donald' captioned the image.
'I don't know anything about them, other than somebody else generated them,' 'Old Donald' told Fox Business correspondent Gary Trimble after his campaign event in Asheboro, North Carolina, on Wednesday. 'I didn't generate them.'
The truth is hard to find anywhere, but particularly on social media. Mark Zuckerberg, the leader of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, wants to make it harder.
In Wednesday's statement, the Paris prosecutors said Mr Durov was put under formal investigation over alleged offences that included:
The biggest threat of AI is that we are summoning to Earth countless new powerful agents that are potentially more intelligent and imaginative than us, and that we don’t fully understand or control.
The test is simple – if the reflection in the person’s eyeballs matches, the image is likely of a real human. If you spot inconsistency in the reflection, they are probably deepfakes.
An A.I.-powered version of Mr. Musk has appeared in thousands of inauthentic ads, contributing to billions in fraud.
But the science of detecting manipulated content is in its early stages. An April study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that many deepfake detector tools can be easily duped with simple software tricks or editing techniques.
“We have a lot of bad things coming up. You could end up in a Depression of the 1929 variety, which would be a devastating thing, took many years– took many decades to recover from it, and we’re very close to that.”
OpenAI has had a system for watermarking ChatGPT-created text and a tool to detect the watermark ready for about a year, reports The Wall Street Journal. But the company is divided internally over whether to release it. On one hand, it seems like the responsible thing to do; on the other, it could hurt its bottom line.
Disinformation and misinformation
Five of the U.S.’s top election officials on Monday asked X owner and chief technical officer Elon Musk to ensure his AI chatbot stuck to the facts after it spread false information regarding Kamala Harris.Last month, Musk also reposted a manipulated Harris campaign video in which a voiceover mimicking her calls President Joe Biden senile, and declares that she does not "know the first thing about running the country," adding that as a woman and a person of color, she is the "ultimate diversity hire."
In January the World Economic Forum declared AI-driven misinformation one of the biggest short-term threats to the global economy. However, six months later, in the wake of Taiwanese, Indian, British, and French elections, the death of democracy and truth is starting to seem greatly exaggerated.
While there were some incidents involving AI, they didn't overwhelm societies' ability to debunk them and none of them constituted significant political disruption - even as they have become easier to make by orders of magnitude.
Elon Musk has done away with most content moderation rules on X since buying the social network in 2022. He has instead relied on a program called Community Notes, which lets a group of users write fact-checking labels and vote on whether they are helpful.Nearly 8,000 fact checks have been drafted about immigration on Community Notes, but only 471 of them have been approved by users and made public on X, according to MediaWise, a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute. Only 4 percent of Community Notes about abortion have been made visible.
Going back to the 2016 election, Russia has used troll farms -- state-sponsored networks of fake social media accounts -- to create and amplify disinformation related to U.S. elections on social media. At the same time, some political candidates and other proponents of the "big lie" used the same platforms, as well as traditional media, to make false claims that the 2020 election, which 'Old Donald' lost to Biden, was somehow rigged.
A fake website mimicking Emmanuel Macron’s party, Ensemble, claimed the president and his party were buying votes for €100 ahead of the election
While the court’s ruling was procedural, it was nonetheless a stark repudiation of two lower courts in the South, and their eagerness to embrace conspiracy theories about alleged government coercion of social media companies.Writing for a liberal-conservative coalition of six justices, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that neither the five individuals nor the two states who sued the government had legal standing to be in court at all. She said they presented no proof to back up their claims that the government had pressured social media companies like Twitter and Facebook into restricting their speech. “Unfortunately,” she said, the Fifth Circuit court of appeals “relied on factual findings that are “clearly erroneous.”
The Stanford Internet Observatory provided real-time analysis on viral election falsehoods but has struggled amid attacks from conservative politicians and activists.
Two ongoing lawsuits and two congressional inquiries into the Observatory have cost Stanford millions of dollars in legal fees, one of the people told The Washington Post. Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda.