Fires in California have grown more explosive because of climate change, which is largely driven by humans burning oil, gas and coal.
And yet prominent right wing influencers and political figures, including 'Old Donald', are falsely blaming the fires' destructiveness on the city not having enough water to fight the blazes.
On Fox News, actor and director Mel Gibson said, "I know they were messing with the water. Letting [water] reserves go for one reason or another… in the events like this, you sort of look, is it on purpose? Which it's an insane thing to think. But one begins to ponder. Whether or not there is a purpose in mind."
162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President 'Old Donald'.(NPR Aug. 2024)
'Bioweapon Labs' That Is Reposted More Than 30,000 Times On Wednesday, the notorious Libs of TikTok account shared a screenshot of a continuing resolution introduced by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) that would avert a government shutdown, set to begin on Dec. 21. The legislation would fund the government through March 14, butOn 9 October, X changed its rules so the payments made to eligible accounts with a significant reach are calculated according to the amount of engagement from premium users - likes, shares and comments - rather than the number of ads under their posts.Musk has railed against the bill, as has President-elect 'Old Donald'.
And "Old Donald"-backed bill to keep US government running fails to pass.
- A scammer impersonated a real FBI agent. It cost 13 victims $2.9 million.
Scammers count on victims not being able to discern what's authentic and what's not. We know from major corporate and government data breaches that even workers who regularly receive cybersecurity training fall victim to fake emails.At different phases of the three-month con, scammers name-dropped other legitimate members of law enforcement. Judith was tricked into believing she was on the phone with members of the Rockville police force, including then-chief, Victor V. Brito.
Judith Boivin looked online to verify some of the information provided by the scammer. (Joshua Carroll and Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
- Meta Finally Breaks Its Silence on Pig Butchering
Longtime pig butchering researchers say that Meta has been slow to publicly and directly acknowledge the problem and the role its many platforms play in connecting scammers with potential victims.Since roughly 2020, when the earliest pig butchering scams started to emerge, more than 200,000 people have been trafficked and held in compounds - mostly in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos - where they are forced to play the role of an online scammer. If they refuse, the criminals who own the scam compounds, which are typically connected to Chinese organized crime, often beat or torture them. People have been trafficked from more than 60 countries around the world - often after seeing online ads promising them jobs that are too good to be true.
- How X users can earn thousands from US election misinformation and AI images
Many social media sites allow users to make money from their posts or to share sponsored content. But they often have rules which allow them to de-monetise or suspend profiles that post misinformation. X does not have guidelines on misinformation in the same way.
While X has a smaller user base than some sites, it has a significant impact on political discourse. It raises questions about whether X is incentivising users to post provocative claims, whether they’re true or not, at a highly sensitive moment for US politics.
Bluesky describes itself as "social media as it should be", although it looks similar to other sites. The former head of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, created it.Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris votersHe even once said he wanted Bluesky to be a decentralised version of Twitter that no single person or entity owns.
But Mr Dorsey is no longer part of the team behind it, having stepped down from the board in May 2024.
He deleted his account altogether in September.
It is now run and predominantly owned by chief executive Jay Graber as a US public benefit corporation.
And we all know how that ended - a massive payday for investors when the world's richest man paid $44bn (£34.7bn) for the privilege of owning it.
For now, the future of Bluesky remains unknown, but if its growth continues, anything is possible.
Building America's Future tried to focus its spending where the 'Old Donald' campaign's top advisers publicly signaled an interest, investing heavily in Muslim communities that the campaign was targeting and seeking to magnify the candidate's appearances on podcasts with significant White male audiences.'We studied the strategy that was put in place by Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and James Blair very closely,' Peck said. 'And we did what outside groups can do. We tried to amplify and support the direction in which they were taking the earned and paid media.'
Democrats grew alarmed in the final weeks of the campaign as the ads started appearing on Facebook and Google. Priorities USA, a Harris-backing super PAC, made efforts to get spots taken down from both platforms because of their deceptive nature. Google eventually struck at least one spot in which one of the Building America's Future groups took footage from a Harris ad in Pennsylvania targeting Jews and began targeting it to Muslims with the words 'This is a real Kamala Harris ad' superimposed.
In a clear sign of its interest, the Kremlin and Russia’s military intelligence service have directed multiple disinformation campaigns targeting Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, as well as casting doubt on the validity of the vote, according to U.S. officials and documents previously reported on by The Washington Post.Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin has sought to undermine Western support for Ukraine, promoting far-right isolationist views. 'Old Donald'’s candidacy dovetails with Moscow’s agenda, as he has repeatedly criticized U.S. spending on aid for Kyiv.
A number of studies, both from conservative and left-leaning organisations, suggest instances of non-citizens having voted in US federal elections are very small.Since July, Mr Musk has posted at least 22 times about voters being "imported" from abroad.
On 20 October, in a post viewed 21 million times, he said: “Triple digit increases of illegals in swing states over the past 4 years. Voter importation at an unprecedented scale!”
In several posts, Mr Musk mentions a 1986 bill which granted amnesty to approximately three million undocumented immigrants in the US.
This was passed by Congress and signed into law by Republican President Ronald Reagan. It forgave individuals who came into the US illegally but did not give them immediate citizenship.
As of August 2024, 3.3 million immigrants had become naturalised citizens under the Biden administration.
Under 'Old Donald', the figure was around three million people.
It is also worth noting that new citizens are not guaranteed Democratic voters.
According to a recent survey, 54 percent of naturalised citizens said they would vote for Harris in November, while 38 percent said they would vote for 'Old Donald'.
We have asked X for comment and to provide further evidence for Mr Musk’s claims.
- American creating deepfakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show
A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.Disinformation researchers say Dougan’s network was probably behind a recent viral fake video smearing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, which U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday was created by Russia. It received nearly 5 million views on X in less than 24 hours, Microsoft said.
As early as June 2019 — more than two years before the invasion of Ukraine — Korovin had proposed in a letter to Russia’s Ministry of Defense that his center organize “an internet war against the U.S. on its territory.”
That summer, Dougan traveled to Azovstal, the vast Ukrainian steel plant in Mariupol that was the scene of heavy Russian bombardment. He produced a 30-minute report from the ruins as a foreign correspondent for One America News, the far-right American TV network. In the report, Dougan said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was to blame for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, saying, “He betrayed his country for his U.S. masters.” Dougan suggested the death and destruction in the city was caused entirely by Ukrainian troops, without mentioning the relentless Russian bombing, or even its invasion of Ukraine. OAN ran a headline with his piece saying the Western media was covering up atrocities by Ukrainian troops against civilians.
- Misinformation is everywhere this election. Can you tell what’s real?
Here are some steps you can take to identify misinformation so you don’t accidentally share it.
- As Election Looms, Disinformation ‘Has Never Been Worse’
The Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee has been falsely accused of sexually molesting students. The claims have been spread by a former deputy sheriff from Florida, now openly working in Moscow for Russia’s propaganda apparatus, on dozens of social media platforms and fake news outlets.
- Giuliani Goes Broke While Elon Musk Gifts Millions in 'Old Donald' Voter Sweepstakes
- Meet the 'Ghost' Woman Fox Relied on for Voter Fraud Claims st
That unhinged email to 'Old Donald' campaign lawyer Sidney Powell has now become a centerpiece of Dominion’s case, raising questions about how Fox could allow obviously fake claims from a total stranger with no credentials to make it on the air.Listen to the wind
Even Maria Bartiromo, the Fox host whose show first aired the claims, admitted in a deposition that the email was ridiculous.
“It’s kooky, absolutely,” Bartiromo said.
“Yeah, I’m crazy,” Bourne told The Daily Beast. “Crazy like a fox.”
But on the afternoon of Nov. 7, 2020, just hours after Fox and other major media outlets called the election for Joe Biden, Bourne sent Powell, Fox host Lou Dobbs, and conservative activist Tom Fitton an email laying out the case against Dominion as she saw it. In Bourne’s telling, Dominion machines used software to convert 3 percent of all votes for 'Old Donald' into votes for Biden.
OK, let’s send some information that will steer her in the right direction,” Bourne told The Daily Beast. “I was on a roll, let’s put it that way.”
- Can illegal immigrants really vote in the US election?
"According to many sources of evidence, the number of non-citizens who vote in elections is very small," says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who's written a number of reports on voter fraud."It's not zero, some people slip through the cracks for various reasons, but it's nowhere near at the level to impact the outcome of an election."
- The far right is using AI to sell Hitler to a new generation.
“Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote,” "Old Donald" said during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris.BBC Verify has identified more than 100 paid-for ads on Facebook and Instagram posted by Republicans since the start of September focusing on the issue.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 prohibits non-citizens - which includes illegal immigrants - from voting in fed One by the Brennan Center for Justice interviewed 44 election officials who worked across 12 states during the 2016 election.
It found that out of 23.5 million votes counted in these states, an estimated 30 suspected incidents of non-citizens voting were referred for further investigation.
That’s about 0.0001% of all votes cast.
- The far right is using AI to sell Hitler to a new generation.
The racist AI deepfake that fooled and divided a community
So began what appeared to be a long tirade from the principal of Pikesville High School, punctuated with racist, antisemitic and offensive tropes. It sounded like it had been secretly recorded.The speaker went on to bemoan “ungrateful black kids” and Jewish people in the community.
The clip, first posted in January, went viral nationally. But it really struck a nerve in the peaceful, leafy suburb of Pikesville, which has large black and Jewish populations, and in the nearby city of Baltimore, Maryland. Principal Eric Eiswert was put on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.
But what those sharing the clip didn’t realise at the time was that another bombshell was about to drop: the clip was an AI-generated fake.
- Newsmax settles with Smartmatic days ahead of trial
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.
- Free speech row erupts over X suspending journalist who published JD Vance dossier
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..
- Microsoft says Russia's election interference efforts have pivoted to Harris and Walz
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.
- Blinken accuses RT of being worldwide Kremlin intelligence network
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”.- Taylor Swift’s deepfake fight with "Old Donald" exposes a real legal wrinkle
"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 'Old Donald' 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.”
- U.S. Announces Plan to Counter Russian Influence Ahead of 2024 Election
American spy agencies have assessed that the Kremlin favors 'Old Donald', 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.
- Musk posts fake image of Harris in communist garb
“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.
- Musk’s Starlink backtracks and says it will comply with judge’s order to block X in Brazil
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.”
- 'My identity is stolen' Photos of European influencers used to push pro-'Old Donald' propaganda on fake X accounts
- Telegram: 'The dark web in your pocket'
- Telegram Faces a Reckoning in Europe. Other Founders Should Beware
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.- 'Old Donald' Suddenly Looks Very Afraid of Being Sued by Taylor Swift
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 'Old Donald'.'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.'
- Mark Zuckerberg's Problem Isn't Free Speech, It's Lies
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.
- Telegram boss banned from leaving France in criminal probe
In Wednesday's statement, the Paris prosecutors said Mr Durov was put under formal investigation over alleged offences that included:
- Never summon a power you can’t control - Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten democracy and divide the world
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.
- You can spot deepfakes by looking into their eyes, new study shows
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.
- How ‘Deepfake Elon Musk’ Became the Internet’s Biggest Scammer
An A.I.-powered version of Mr. Musk has appeared in thousands of inauthentic ads, contributing to billions in fraud.
- See why AI detection tools can fail to catch election deepfakes
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.
- 162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks 'Old Donald'
“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 won't watermark ChatGPT text because its users could get caught
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.
- Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America Author: Barbara McQuade
Disinformation and misinformation
- Elon Musk's Grok chatbot called out for spreading fake election news
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."
- Deepfakes Haven't Destroyed Democracy Yet
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 Wants People on X to Police Election Posts. It’s Not Working Well.
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.
- How the Rise of AI Could Rock the Vote
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.
- Russia behind fake news bot campaign to empower French far right
A fake website mimicking Emmanuel Macron’s party, Ensemble, claimed the president and his party were buying votes for €100 ahead of the election- Supreme Court allows White House to request removal of misinformation on social media
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.”
- 'Cheap fake videos'
- Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure
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.