ALM Benefits Pro: “Business-focused social media platform LinkedIn has been slapped with three digital privacy class actions contending that it illegally intercepted users’ sensitive health care information to use in targeted advertising. All three cases, filed by Bursor & Fisher in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the Santa Clara County… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Category Archives: Social Media
Foreign Malign Election Meddling Persists but Struggles to Gain Traction
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD): “In September 2024, FDD published a report documenting Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence operations targeting the 2024 U.S. elections. This follow-up report details the ongoing efforts of U.S. adversaries who seek to undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral process in the weeks leading up to the November election.… Continue Reading
Generative AI Will Increase Misinformation About Disinformation
LawFare – Speculation about disinformation by users and the media can generate harmful political effects, amplifying existing biases. “…AI is about to significantly increase uncertainty in disinformation research, in an already highly uncertain field. Disinformation operations will be harder to identify, harder to map out, and harder to attribute. People have a tendency to interpret… Continue Reading
Why millions of Americans avoid the news and what it means for the election
Nieman Lab: “We are seeing a huge divide between people who are interested in news and those who are not, and I suspect that this divide is intensifying…Benjamin Toff is one of the leading experts on the rise of news avoidance and one of the authors of this recent book on this issue, based on survey data… Continue Reading
Stress in America 2024 A nation in political turmoil
American Psychological Association (APA) latest Stress in America™ poll revealed a populace dealing with multiple stressors as the country braces for the 2024 U.S. presidential election. In the new survey, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of APA, the most commonly reported sources of stress centered on the election or were political in nature.… Continue Reading
Fact check: Debunking weather modification claims
As the southeastern United States reels from the impact of two historic hurricanes, a large amount of disinformation about nonexistent weather manipulation technology is spreading across the internet, particularly on social media platforms. Below, NOAA identifies some of the inaccurate claims circulating online and provides science-based facts and information in response. Continue Reading
Online Talk About ‘Civil War’ Could Inspire Real-World Violence, DHS Warns Cops
Wired [unpaywalled]: “The agency also cautioned that it’s unable to get a grasp on the full scale of the threat, due to extremists increasingly using encrypted chat tools…Last month, the agency’s intelligence office emphasized in a report that “perceptions of voter fraud” had risen to become a primary “trigger” for the “mobilization to violence.” This… Continue Reading
Musk and the federal government
Via Next Draft: What’s in it for Musk (and a handful of other billionaires funding the entire Trump operation)? Well, let’s narrow the answer down to this: Everything. Franklin Foer in The Atlantic( Gift Article): What Elon Musk Really Wants. “Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the… Continue Reading
Media Monitoring Guide Everything You Need to Know
Muck Rack – Media monitoring is the practice of listening, watching, and tracking media coverage and conversation about your organization, your industry, your competition, and topics that relate to your industry. Table of contents What media monitoring means in PR Why is media monitoring so hard? What to monitor and where to start What functionality… Continue Reading
How to find helpful content in a sea of made-for-Google BS
HouseFresh: “Uncovering the tactics used by big media content farms, SEO pattern makers, content thieves and AI slop creators to fool Google’s enshittified algorithm (so you don’t fall for them, too). At the beginning of 2024, we said Google was killing independent sites with its bias towards established media outlets, even in cases where these… Continue Reading
How the Malleus maleficarum fueled the witch trial craze
Ars Technica: “Between 1400 and 1775, a significant upsurge of witch trials swept across early-modern Europe, resulting in the execution of an estimated 40,000–60,000 accused witches. Historians and social scientists have long studied this period in hopes of learning more about how large-scale social changes occur. Some have pointed to the invention of the printing… Continue Reading
How rational inference about authority debunking can curtail, sustain, or spread belief polarization
Setayesh Radkani, Marika Landau-Wells, Rebecca Saxe. How rational inference about authority debunking can curtail, sustain, or spread belief polarization. PNAS Nexus, 2024; 3 (10) DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae393 In polarized societies, divided subgroups of people have different perspectives on a range of topics. Aiming to reduce polarization, authorities may use debunking to lend support to one perspective… Continue Reading
