More on Disinformation 8

It's time for another post about disinformation and misinformation. I could probably do a post a day like this if I had the time and the stomach for it.  

Imagery faked with AI’s help only added to the awfulness of Hurricane Melissa. "A Category 5 landfall during Halloween week was scary enough on its own."

The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly. "We uncover footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud that extend beyond the production of fake papers to brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards. Our analysis reveals insights into how such organizations are structured and how they operate."

Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a ‘farce’ full of misinformation. "Experts say the report being used to justify the mass rollback of climate regulations has many claims based on long-debunked research."

Symbolic Strength More Important Than Facts When It Comes To Misinformation. "Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong. Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods."

You did no fact checking, and I must scream. "Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false."

MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), Freedom, and the Lie That Canada “Kills Its Own”. "When a government program becomes a punching bag for MAGA/MAPLE MAGA Religious Cult led internet outrage, facts go missing. Let’s put them back."

Anti-vaccine myths surged on social media ahead of the CDC shooting. Before the shooting, social media companies relaxed their protocols around misinformation.

The Autism Epidemic That Never Was. "RFK Jr.'s scientific illiteracy has led the ignorant down a dangerous path."

How the Rapid Spread of Misinformation Pushed Oregon Lawmakers to Kill the State’s Wildfire Risk Map. "This is how misinformation gets accepted as fact."

A Sodom and Gomorrah Story Shows Scientific Facts Aren’t Settled by Public Opinion. "Claims that an asteroid or comet airburst destroyed the biblical Sodom captured the public’s imagination. Its retraction shows that scientific conclusions aren’t decided by majority rule in the public square."

Delusion by Design: How Conspiracy Groups And Bad Actors Are Engineering AI Platforms And Chatbots to Confirm Their Beliefs and Lies. "Chatbots and AI Models Trained on Junk Science are now Being Used to Radicalize, Recruit, and Mislead the Masses - and It's working."

Three quarters of Canadians say misinformation affected the federal election: poll. "The Leger poll, which sampled more than 1,500 Canadian adults from April 29 to May 1, suggests that 19 per cent of people think false information or misinformation had a major impact on the election."

Hot Air: the danger of climate misinformation. "Tortoise has identified more than 300 influencers who are spreading content about climate change that ranges from scepticism to misinformation. Claims made over the past three years on X, YouTube, TikTok and media sites have been compiled in a searchable database that shows how online untruths about climate are growing, changing shape and spreading."

Detecting and Fighting Disinformation

I was going to do yet another blog post with articles pointing out examples of misinformation and disinformation (there's just SO much of it right now), but instead I wanted to highlight some sites and tools that you can use to detect disinformation. 

Note: Although I use the term "disinformation" for simplicity in this and other posts, you can assume everything here applies to misinformation. 

• 20 Helpful Verification Tools for Journalists. Although aimed at journalists, the tools linked in this article will be useful to anyone. Verify location, whether an image has been modified, spot AI-generated content, and more. 
• Wikipedia's list of fake news websites. "Fake news websites are those which intentionally, but not necessarily solely, publish hoaxes and disinformation for purposes other than news satire. Some of these sites use homograph spoofing attacks, typosquatting and other deceptive strategies similar to those used in phishing attacks to resemble genuine news outlets."
• Disinformation Designed to Ingrain Erroneous Beliefs and Lies. "Google search can bring results that confirm disinformation, not debunk it." Tips on how to spot disinformation in Google Search results. 
• Joint Advisory: Cyber officials warn Canadians of malicious campaign to impersonate high-profile public figures, from the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. "Cyber security officials in the Government of Canada are warning Canadians about a spike in malicious cyber activity, where threat actors are using text and AI-generated voice messages impersonating senior officials and prominent public figures to steal money and information." Includes tips, guidelines, and links to useful resources.
• How to Spot and Combat Health Misinformation. 'While recent events have magnified the problem, misinformation “is not necessarily a new phenomenon. It has been around for centuries,” said Kylie Hall, M.P.H., Operations Director for the Center for Immunization Research and Education at North Dakota State University, during a session at ASM Microbe in June 2022. Misinformation gains traction in periods of uncertainty, as people try to make sense of events when verified facts are lacking. Various factors, including social media, contribute to the dissemination of misinformation. Learning how to spot and correct it—and help others do the same—can slow the spread of misinformation now, and in the future.'

Analyzing COVID-19 Misinformation Across Regions

Since the beginning of the pandemic,  researchers at Princeton University started collecting and analyzing misinformation about COVID-19 and the pandemic from around the world. Understanding regional trends and looking at how misinformation spread across regions will help to combat false narratives. 

Most of these stories appear to have been efforts to shape political debates. But a myriad of motivations likely prompted the misinformation we found—including people seeking ideological ends, political gain, and financial profit. An overwhelming majority—80 percent of the stories—were spread by individuals on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, while 17 percent were spread by media outlets and political figures.

It is often suggested that all politics is local; so is misinformation. Contrary to what one might expect from the globalized information environment, the salient themes in pandemic-related false narratives varied significantly across regions and countries; localized false narratives prevailed over global ones. When generating misinformation, social media users seemed to absorb a common set of COVID-19 background conditions and use them to falsify specific narratives to reflect local and regional realities.

 

More About Disinformation

Sadly, it's time to post more links to articles about disinformation and misinformation. It's clear that it's not going away any time soon; indeed, with the US election campaigns in full swing and two major wars, it's going to be a banner year. 

• The Murky Campaign to Discredit Lab-Grown Meat. "A new ad campaign is targeting the cultivated meat industry on TV and online. Industry supporters criticize it as unscientific." It appears to be sponsored by the food and drink industry. 
• Why weird ads about Sophie Trudeau, Howie Mandel — and Mary Berg — mean we're in trouble online. (archive,ph link) "They show how easy it is to borrow name recognition of news companies and celebrities and feed false information into the void."
• Since 2023, right-wing organizations, backed by Republican state attorneys general, have argued that banks are discriminating against them on religious and political grounds. But the attack on banks stuck among MAGA Republicans, especially as other financial platforms like PayPal, Venmo, and GoFundMe have declined to accept business from right-wing figures who spout hate speech, thus cutting off their ability to raise money from their followers. The attempt to create distrust of large financial institutions is part of a larger attempt to destabilize the institutions of democracy. Trump is the figurehead for that attempt, but it is larger than him, and it will outlast him."
• Interview with Jonathan Howard, author of We Want Them Infected. "A physician diligently tracked physician and researcher propagated misinformation during the pandemic."
• Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation, but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gone. 'Civil rights lawyers and Democrats are sounding alarms about Mr. Musk’s claims about voting. The Biden campaign called his posts “profoundly irresponsible.”'
• A new kind of climate change denialism has taken hold on YouTube, says research group. "Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, says the center's new report shows that climate misinformation has evolved in ways that make it possible for a lot of it to evade YouTube’s advertising ban on content that denies climate change while generating millions of dollars of revenue in the process." (podcast link)
• Deepfake Dirty Tricks Descend on New Hampshire Ahead of Primary. "Long-time fears about AI-driven misinformation are now a reality with robocalls from AI Biden."
• MAGA grifters cash in selling fake cures to imaginary disease. "This time around, the grifters are telling their suckers that Hillary Clinton and the round-earthers have cooked up a diabolical pathogen called "Disease X" to rid the planet of "excess population," "install a corporate world government," and "enslave humanity." If you don't want your body to get covered in festering boils and carbuncles the size of chicken eggs, you need to buy a "medical contagion kit" with vials of life-saving ivermectin manufactured right here in God's most favorite country in the whole universe." Of course, "Disease X" is just a placeholder used by the WHO to indicate that there will someday be another pandemic.

What Science Communication Needs

I've written here before about the onslaught of misinformation, both in the news media and on social media. Much of that is related to science, especially now while we are in the midst of a global pandemic. 

Science Daily looks at the situation and suggests a solution, and it's not what you might think.

The current implications of this battle in the United States are everywhere. The administration has promulgated the idea that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the cause of COVID-19) was engineered in China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, in part based on a non–peer-reviewed preprint that was later retracted. The misinformation about masks and social distancing is spurring dangerous bar gatherings and choir practices. Unsubstantiated claims in a “plandemic” video are convincing citizens that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime leader of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is hiding a secret business deal from which he stands to profit from COVID-19. The antiscience movement started with the environment, which could hurt our long-term survival, but in the era of COVID-19, it threatens our immediate survival.

The scientific community is losing the battle against this digital leviathan of misinformation. A well-reasoned and highly placed op-ed on this topic is not going to move the needle, no matter how well it is crafted to adhere to the best practices in science communication. Neither is a perfect trade book, television appearance, or speaking tour by a scientific leader. The only way to win this fight is to harness the same sophisticated tools in the name of science that are being used to tear science down. With social media companies afraid to challenge the misinformation machine, even when their own platforms are being misused, the task is daunting. But we can at least move on from the idea that if we could just find those perfect, persuasive words, everyone would suddenly realize that facts are facts with no alternatives.

TikTok Spreads COVID-19 Disinformation

I've seen quite a bit of press about how Facebook and YouTube lead to radicalization and spread disinformaion, especially about COVID-19. Now it seems that we have another disinformation vector: TikTok. 

On Wednesday, Media Matters published new research findings that suggest that, despite community guidelines that specifically prohibit the spread of health misinformation, TikTok’s algorithm frequently amplifies lies about COVID-19 and vaccines to the platform’s 1 billion-strong user base.

During the course of its research into Covid-19 misinformation on the platform, Media Matters engaged with anti-vaccination and COVID-19 misinformation by watching relevant videos all the way through and liking them. Sure enough, the positive engagement had the effect of filling the account’s “For You Page”—TikTok’s landing page for algorithmically recommended content—with videos that almost exclusively featured anti-vaccination and COVID-19 hoax content.

In its report, Media Matters also kept tabs on 18 specific vaccine misinformation videos and found that at the conclusion of its research, those videos had garnered a combined total of more than 57 million total views. The tracked content reportedly included a video that told viewers that “your children and elderly that are not vaccinated will be removed permanently from your home,” (3.9 million views) and a video promoting a hoax about “vaccine bandits” who will “walk up to you on the street and they ask if you’re vaccinated and if you hesitate at all, they inject you with a vaccine right on the spot,” (6.3 million views).

Older Articles About Disinformation and Misinformation

Over the last couple of years, I've become increasingly concerned about the spread of disinformation and misinformation in social media and the news media. 

The two terms are closely related. As I understand it misinformation is inaccurate information and disinformation is false information. Both are intended to mislead and can be considered propaganda, depending on their source.

I've set up a separate topic on the blog to cover both although, for simplicity, I've labelled it Disinformation. 

These links will take you to older articles on misinformation an disinformation.

The Curse of Disinformation

I've posted quite a bit about disinformation and misinformation; I've even set up a blog topic for tracking posts about it. 

Sadly there's more to it than just reading something online that is false or misleading. Disinformation, and the organized campaigns that spread it and often result in harassment, can have major effects on people's lives. Here are some examples.

Canada Day fireworks

'Murderers' and 'Criminals': "Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists." 

The '15-minute city' conspiracy spreads to Canada. "The concept of 15-minute cities — where a person's daily needs in a city are accessible within a 15-minute walk, bike or transit ride from their home — is a few years old. It's been picked up by many cities to guide urban planning and design. But in recent months, the 15-minute city idea has also been seized on by people who fear it's an elaborate conspiracy to limit individual freedoms, mobility, and to create barricaded sectors to keep them trapped." 26-minute podcast.

He Wanted to Unclog Cities. Now He’s ‘Public Enemy No. 1.’ (gifted-no paywall) "Researchers like Carlos Moreno, the professor behind a popular urban planning concept, are struggling with conspiracy theories and death threats."

After Elon Musk, Joe Rogan vaccine Twitter brawl, scientists say ‘vile rhetoric & misinformation’ is forcing them off the platform. "Scientists have long used Twitter. Now, they question its future as a tool for sharing medical information."

Death threats and harassment: 2024 election workers already are scared. "A new NPR investigation shows that election workers nationwide are already bracing for threats as the 2024 presidential race looms."

A vaccine scientist says being tag-teamed and dogpiled on by Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and RFK Jr. all at once has been 'overwhelming'. 'Hotez became the target of widespread ire after he tweeted in support of a Vice article published on Friday titled: "Spotify Has Stopped Even Sort of Trying to Stem Joe Rogan's Vaccine Misinformation." That episode featured presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who discussed his conspiracy theory-fueled stance on vaccines during a three-hour episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.'

Disinformation researchers under investigation: what’s happening and why. "Researchers who study how disinformation spreads are under investigation in the United States for allegedly helping to censor conservative opinions about COVID-19 vaccines and government elections. Jim Jordan, a US representative for Ohio, is leading the charge against the scientists. He is also one of the Republican leaders who have suggested that the Democrats have stolen the 2020 presidential election from former president Donald Trump, and who have made unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud."

More About Disinformation

Once again, I've collected links to several articles about misinformation and disinformation. Some of these are quite long, but very much worth taking the time to read. 

I'm going to start with a newsletter post from author Annalee Newitz, who has just published a book called Stories Are Weapons about the history of psychological operations, or psyops. Many modern disinformation campaigns fall into this category. If you read one article from this post, it should probably be this one. The post is titled "How to recognize a psyop in three easy steps".  Here's how it starts:

Psyops are everywhere, but not in the way that you might think. Here is a quick-and-dirty guide to recognizing these mind-warping weapons in the wild. 

As I discovered while researching my new book Stories Are Weapons, psychological warfare became a professional industry in the early twentieth century, modeled in part on the new field of public relations. The basic structure of an American psyop is cobbled together out of advertising techniques, pop psychology, and pulp fiction tropes. Using insights gleaned from these sources, the military spent the early years of the 20th century figuring out how to craft messages that can hurt, demoralize, and distract you. 

Then something terrible but predictable happened. Just as military equipment was transferred to civilian police forces during the 1990s, psyops found their way into the arsenals of culture warriors today. 

Unlike bombs, however, psyops can be dodged. Once you know what to look for, your brain can treat this cultural ordinance exactly the way your spam filter treats e-mails about CrYpT0 InVeStMeNt$ – it will throw them in your mental trashcan unread, so that you can focus on constructive information.

In a following newsletter post, she talks about two other psyop campaigns, both of which have had major effects. 

• The first was conducted by the US military in the Philippines in 2020 urging Filipinos not to use the Sinovac covid vaccine from China, and to avoid masks from Chinese manufacturers. This was particularly devastating for a country where the death toll from covid was tremendous, largely due to vaccine hesitancy." 
• The second is a right-wing campaign that resulted in the shutdown of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which "has done brilliant work studying the spread of dangerous content online, from covid misinformation to child sexual abuse material." 

The Washington Post (and other media outlets) reported on how right-wing media outlets are deceptively editing videos of President Biden to make him appear disoriented or senile. 

This past week, the RNC feed has misleadingly called attention to two video clips of Biden. One was so distorted that it resulted in a “community note” on the X platform calling out its dishonesty. But the RNC’s dismal track record — which we have highlighted on multiple occasions — has not stopped right-leaning outfits from echoing the RNC’s framing and reinforcing its narrative that Biden has lost a step.

It's a sad commentary on the current state of the news media that such blatant misrepresentations are being passed off a actual news by media outlets. 

Here's another example of disinformation, perhaps not as impactful, about videos and photos purporting to show US aircraft carriers being attacked in the Red Sea. However:

This video shows the USS Eisenhower docked at Pier 12 at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia in April 2023.

It was created by combining an image from Google Earth/Maps of the ship at dock & pasting a Shutterstock photo of a bullet hole over the flight deck as fake damage.

Here's an article about a major Russian campaign to influence news media in the West. 

“Please Check”. More than 800 organisations, among which many media outlets have been flooded with emails and social media mentions urging them to verify dubious claims undermining Ukraine, France and Germany for the most part. The issue is that these solicitations are part of a massive pro-Russian operation, still ongoing at the time of writing.

Finally, a long article from Wired about how programmatic advertising leads to the spread of misinformation. There's more going on than just ads that can load malware. The unintended consequences of the current system are wider and deeper than you might think. 

Limiting the Spread of Science Denialism

Science denialism is all around us. Moon landing hoaxers, climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers. How do you argue with these people? Should you even debate?

Ars Technica reports on a research paper about this subject published recently in Nature Human Behavior.

“Vaccines are safe and effective,” write researchers Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch in a paper published in Nature Human Behavior this week. “Humans cause global warming. Evolution theory explains the diversity and change of life.” But large numbers of people do not believe that these statements are true, with devastating effects: progress toward addressing the climate crisis is stultifyingly slow, and the US is seeing its largest measles outbreak since 2000.

Getting accurate information across in the face of this science denialism is something of a minefield, as there is evidence that attempts to correct misinformation may backfire, further entrenching the beliefs of science deniers instead. In their paper, Schmid and Betsch present some good news and some bad: rebutting misinformation reduces the ensuing level of science denialism, but not enough to completely counter the effect of the original exposure to misinformation.

This is an important article on one of the more pressing subjects of our time. No society can survive when a substantial portion of its population denies reality. 

Featured Links – February 20, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about:

Cat in a window

Cannabis Extract Shows "Remarkable" Ability To Kill Skin Cancer Cells. "The results are promising, but preliminary."

Jim Collins: Discovery of the First New Structural Class of Antibiotics in Decades, Using A.I. "Starting from >12,000 compounds to find, with explainability, new drugs effective vs methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA)"

Vaccine Confidence Falls as Belief in Health Misinformation Grows. "Americans have less confidence in vaccines to address a variety of illnesses than they did just a year or two ago, and more people accept misinformation about vaccines and Covid-19, according to the latest health survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania."

Truths, Untruths, and the Realm of Belief in Between: Misinformation & Propaganda in Science Fiction. "A science fiction author looks at how the genre examines the role of truth and mistruth in the genre."

Staring At A Red Light In The Morning Improves Worsening Eyesight, Study Shows. Staring at a deep red light for just three minutes can drastically restore declining eyesight, according to a new study in the journal Scientific Reports. Impressively, improvements from a single session of light exposure lasted for a whole week, although the treatment is only effective if administered in the morning.

Router Security. "This site focuses on the security of routers. This includes both configuration changes to make a router more secure, and, picking a router that is more secure out of the box. If you are interested in faster WiFi, there is one page on extending the range of a Wi-Fi network."

The real problem with Google's new Gemini Android assistant. "The real problem with Gemini as the Android assistant is that Google's forgotten why a phone assistant actually matters — and what we, as actual users in the real world, need from such a service." He's absolutely right and I'm not installing it on my phone until they fix it.

DOJ quietly removed Russian malware from routers in US homes and businesses. "Feds once again fix up compromised retail routers under court order."

Researchers reveal lost library of Charles Darwin for the first time. "For the first time since his death in 1882, Charles Darwin’s impressive library has been virtually reassembled to reveal the multitude of books, pamphlets and journals cited and read by the influential naturalist."

More on Disinformation 9

It's time for another post about disinformation and misinformation. I could probably do a post a day like this if I had the time and the stomach for it.  

• The War Against Misinformation Is Over. The Lies Won. "New research suggests people know images and headlines are false but share them anyway." What a journalist has to cope with. 
• "Klansplaining": A Field Guide to The Term And Language Trump/MAGA Have Perfected. 'A new word — Klansplaining — for rhetoric engineered so racists hear racism and everyone else hears "concerns about crime"'
• Russia and U.S. amplifying Alberta separatist narratives to stoke division, distrust: report. "Moscow's influence scheme is covert, while Trump-aligned meddling is overt and public." Just one of many articles on the subject: see also my blog post from earlier this week. 
• Canada Is Building a Firewall Around, Disinformation, Hate Speech And Democracy. "While the U.S. is busy letting the president sign executive orders restricting who can vote by mail, Canada just quietly dropped two of the most consequential pieces of legislation to protect democracy from foreign-funded gaslighting machines."
• AI Fakes Spread Disinformation. Is the Distrust They Create Even Worse? "Manipulated images undermine our shared reality—and the democracy built upon it."
• Scientists warn fake research is spreading faster than real science. "A major investigation found organized networks producing fake scientific papers, selling authorships, and manipulating journals to mass-publish fraudulent research."
• 5 (more) logical fallacies in the era of RFK Jr. "Common rhetorical tricks that are used to spread false health information."
• The Nursery Is No Place for Misinformation. "A basic newborn shot has become another target of the distrust machine, and the consequences can be devastating."

Disinformation About Dead Canadian Doctors Keeps Spreading

Back in October of last year, I posted about Druthers, a right-wing, conspiracy-laden "newspaper" that I received in the mail. The lead article suggested that a large number of Canadian doctors have died as a result of getting the COVID-19 vaccine. This is, of course, not true. 

Unfortunately, this conspiracy theory continues to spread. Last week I came across a long Twitter thread by Ashleigh Stewart, a Toronto journalist, who looked into the story in much more detail. Here's a bit from a couple of the early tweets in the thread.

A big conspiracy theory says the Covid vaccine could have killed 80+ Canadian doctors

I spent months investigating & speaking with the doctor's families. Most died from heart attacks, cancer or suicide

But it won't go away. And those behind it are Canadian doctors themselves.

A November iteration of the Canadian doctor conspiracy theory features 80 photographs & names. They're all real people. But none that I could find died from the Covid-19 vaccine

But many people believe it. And now the vaccine abuse is being directed at grieving families.

Of the 48 doctors I could determine the cause of death of: 10 died from cancer, 3 in car accidents, 1 while climbing K2, 1 drowned, 5 had heart attacks & 6 died by suicide. Others battled ongoing/ abrupt illnesses or the family preferred not to say. 1 was not even vaccinated."

The Twitter thread goes on to look at the source of the conspiracy theory and the effects it's having on the families of those doctors mentioned in the article. 

Global News has since published her more detailed story about it: "Kraken, Elon Musk and dead Canadian doctors: Disinformation surges 3 years into the pandemic". 

The article looks at the doctors who originated and continue to promote the theory (I'm boggled that anyone with medical training could do this, but there we have it), the response of the country's governing medical bodies and provincial and federal governments (pretty useless), and its continuing spread, especially after Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. 

After welcoming back a slew of people previously barred from Twitter for spreading COVID-19 disinformation under Musk’s new leadership, the platform went even further on Nov. 23 – quietly dismantling its policy against COVID-19 misinformation.

But disinformation didn’t quietly creep back – it exploded.

After the online release of misinformation documentary Died Suddenly on Nov. 21, the phrase “Died Suddenly” trended on Twitter for days. That helped it reach more than 10 million views on alternative video website Rumble in a little over a week.

Disinformation is now being shared by huge accounts, including those verified with Twitter Blue.

It's scary and upsetting reading. God help us if we get hit with a pandemic disease that has a death rate a couple of orders of magnitude higher than COVID-19 (H5N1 or MERS, for example). The lack of social cohesion demonstrated in this relatively mild pandemic will be our doom. (Historically, pandemics have had much higher death rates). 

Featured Links - March 25, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Colourful sunset

• We’re finally working out why the Mediterranean diet is so good for us (archive.ph link). "We have known for decades that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of heart attack and other conditions – now we are starting to understand how certain components of the diet work their magic."
• How to Convert Images to Editable Text in Microsoft Word. "Want to extract text from an image in Microsoft Word? Here's how to convert images into editable text within Word." It's a bit round about but as long since Word doesn't have a native way of doing it. 
• Media Matters publishes useful guide to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda that "represents a threat to democracy, civil rights, the climate, and more". "We need to talk more about Project 2025, the terrifyingly right-wing blueprint crafted by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation that is meant to guide the next Republican administration. If you aren't very familiar with Project 2025, it's time to school yourself and start spreading the word."
• The Publicly-Traded Presidential Candidate. From Jay Kuo: "One final note. The media needs to do a much better job warning about the dangers of such a publicly-traded candidacy and possible presidency. This is a man who has always been up for sale to the highest bidder, and who will now abuse the meme stock frenzy to achieve shocking personal financial gain while exposing our nation’s highest office to massive financial leverage. The American people need to be warned of the dangers inherent in this, far beyond the probable dispiriting headlines next week that Trump really will have become a billionaire, at least on meme stock paper."
• Women are getting off birth control amid misinformation explosion (gift link). "Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence." 
• There is a Royal Order of Adjectives, and you follow it without knowing what it is. "There is a Royal Order of Adjectives, and you follow it without knowing what it is—a particular sequence to use when more than one adjective precedes a noun. There are exceptions, of course, because English is three languages in a trenchcoat." I never thought about it much when I was working as a technical writer because I didn't use many adjectives in my documentation.
• Blocking Burning Man and Vandalizing Van Gogh: Climate Activists Are Done Playing Nice. "Disruptive protests capture clicks. But in a movement that cites mass mobilization as the goal, can activists turn eyeballs into bodies?"
• The evidence is clear: A liquid-only diet before a colonoscopy is unnecessary. "It is true that diet matters for colon cleansing. Certain foods can greatly obscure our views of the colon: corn, nuts, seeds, and many kinds of vegetables. But that leaves many solid foods that people can eat and digest without affecting the quality of their colonoscopy. A low-residue diet, one that is heavy on starch and protein and free of vegetables, is just as effective, and much less difficult to endure, than a diet restricted to clear liquids all day." The article source, StatNews, is a reputable site. 
• EVs Are Much Lower-Emitting Than Combustion Cars. "Electric vehicles’ lifecycle emissions can be 70% lower than gasoline and diesel vehicles, BNEF finds in a new analysis."

More About Disinformation

It's time to publish links to several articles about misinformation and disinformation. I don't know if it's just that there's more of it or people are paying more attention to it. As you might expect, most of the articles are about politics and not just the US election as Canada gets in there too. 

Halloween decorations

• The Russians had money. The Canadian had far-right influencers. The U.S. Department of Justice says it has a criminal case. "A U.S. indictment alleges that two Russians helped funnel millions of dollars into a media company in order to spread misinformation that would benefit Moscow."
• From the Storm to the Stormtroopers. "Today, our American fascists blame the hurricanes on the meteorologists and disrupt the government response.  Tomorrow they will blame climate change on the climate scientists and deport their enemies of choice.  And the day after tomorrow there will be no democracy and no country, just a politics of impotence and a fascist catastrophe."
• The Climate Clowns. "An outrageous new lie is being spread about hurricanes, and I can’t even." I don't know which is scarier: that a politician would have the nerve to spout garbage like that, or that people are stupid enough to believe them.
• A Disinformation Trial Run. "The conspiracies and false claims surrounding hurricane relief efforts carry an important silver lining." About the only positive side to the flood of disinformation is that the media seem to be catching on to the nonsense.
• The Media Is Finally Calling Trump Out. But Is It Too Late? "The double standard Kamala Harris is being held to by the media is mind numbing."
• A fringe party packed with conspiracy theorists could soon be leading one of Canada’s largest provinces. Here’s why I’m not surprised. "British Columbia’s provincial election is getting extremely weird, and it might be a sign something’s deeply broken in Canadian democracy. The Conservative Party of B.C. — led by a man who had to issue a mea culpa after discussing the idea of prosecuting doctors in “Nuremberg”-style COVID-19 trials — has been surging in the polls. The party now looks set to make significant gains or perhaps even replace the incumbent B.C. NDP."
• Weaponized Polling Is More Dangerous Than Ever. "Right-leaning outfits are skewing the polls for Trump for quite sinister reasons."
• What Keeps Latino Voting-Rights Activists Up at Night? Disinformation (gift link). Activists say the nefarious material is more widespread, sophisticated and complex than ever.

Fact Checking the Infodemic

It's almost impossible to keep up with current news on the COVID-19 pandemic, and even harder to separate the real news from the fake. For example, I got caught by a post on Facebook a couple of weeks ago saying that Walmart was going to close its stores and move to curbside pickup only. I don't know what the original source of that "news" was, but I should have checked into it deeper before reposting it.

Now Magazine has assembled a list of sites that you can use to the veracity of news related to the pandemic. I've posted before about fact-checking sites, but these are specific to the pandemic.

When even world leaders like U.S. president Donald Trump and Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro are spreading false information (or in Trump's favourite parlance, fake news), it can be hard to know which information to trust. The best advice is to check the source of your information, prioritizing the veracity of public health agencies, governmental bodies and trusted media sources over unsourced social media posts, YouTube videos and self-publishing platforms like Medium. It also helps to engage in lateral reading, verifying a piece of information across various sources or reports.

But practising media literacy is almost a job in and of itself. That's why public health agencies, journalism organizations (like Journalists For Human Rights, which is offering free misinformation workshops for people in media), universities and tech companies have all invested in free, publicly available fact-checking tools. We've gathered five of them and given you a sample of their debunked coronavirus claims. 

Update: Here's another site, the COVID-19 Misinformation Portal, created by researchers at Ryerson University in Toronto.

We're Toast 51

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts. 

Condo construction by night

Study finds 'catastrophic' decrease in migratory fish populations: 'A deafening wake-up call for the world' "We cannot continue to let them slip silently away."

The True Catastrophe of Our TimeaOr How to Be Destructive Beyond Compare. "I;ve been writing about climate change for so many years now but, in truth, it was always something I read about and took in globally. It was happening out there, often in horrific ways, but not what I felt I was living through myself. (It’s true that, in past winters, Manhattan’s Central Park went 653 days without producing an inch of snow, almost double any previous record, but if you’re not a kid with a sled in the closet, that’s the sort of thing you don’t really feel.) However, that’s begun to change."

Ukraine Uses Science Fiction Technology To Neutralize Russia’s Deadliest Mine. The war in Ukraine is accelerating the development of weapons, both offensive and defensive.

Agricultural enigma: A mysterious decline in his harvests leaves a farmer searching for a solution. "The first year that production fell, he assumed bad weather was to blame. The reality was much more dire."

Retreating Andean rocks signal the world's glaciers are melting far faster than predicted, report scientists. "Rocks recently exposed to the sky after being covered with prehistoric ice show that tropical glaciers have shrunk to their smallest size in more than 11,700 years, revealing the tropics have already warmed past limits last seen earlier in the Holocene age, researchers from Boston College report in the journal Science."

The climate is changing so fast that we haven’t seen how bad extreme weather could get. "Decades-old statistics no longer represent what is possible in the present day."

Anti-Mask Harassment at Nassau County’s Mask Ban Hearing. "On August 5th, two of our co-writers, along with many concerned citizens, attended the hearing on Nassau County’s proposed mask ban. Many disabled and immunocompromised mask-wearers risked their health to speak out for their right to exist in public spaces. We anticipated some hostility from those who opposed masks, but we were horrified by the level of harassment, intimidation, and blatant disregard for dignity. This behavior highlights the dangerous precedent this ban sets by opening the door to discrimination and violence."

How fascist misinformation and violence are fueling a national crisis in the UK. "Fascist mobs fueled by misinformation are wreaking havoc across the UK, exposing deep-seated issues of racism and political extremism."

Tracking Hoaxes And Misleading Posts About The Nationwide Police Brutality Protests

If you use social media to find out what's happening with the protests over the death of George Floyd, you'll likely have seen some that were disinformation or outright hoaxes. In the heat of the moment, it's very hard to winnow out the truth from a sea of misinformation especially when that misinformation is being spread by sophisticated agents with an aim to create chaos. 

Buzzfeed has assembled a page that lists many of the problematic posts that have been coming across social media. As I write this late Wednesday afternoon, there are 45 items. I recommend bookmarking the page for later reference as the list is sure to grow. 

Here's how they categorize items on the list, along with an important piece of advice:

Before passing on any online rumor, take the time to verify it. This can be done by checking how recently an account has been created, keeping a close eye on information from news outlets, or searching online to find another source.

How to read this post:

UNVERIFIED: Claims that have no concrete evidence either confirming or refuting them. This type of claim has either no sources or no evidence, and is based on conjecture with no original reporting behind it. Treat this kind of information with healthy skepticism and wait to see how it develops.

MISLEADING: Posts that take a real occurrence out of context, for example miscaptioning a video or photo from the protests. This can also include images that are presented at a deceptive angle or descriptions of events that cherry-pick facts. Avoid spreading or engaging with this type of post.

FALSE: Reporters or reliable sources with direct knowledge have contradicted this information on the record, or it is refuted by unimpeachable evidence. Examples include images or videos filmed at a different time or location but presented as recent, demonstrably false claims, and websites masquerading as news outlets publishing untrue information.

Do take some time to look through the list. While some of the items are obvious fakes, there are many that could be hard to spot without some digging. 

Mars Misinformation

I didn't get taken in by the fake video that is the subject of this article. I know enough about space science and Mars exploration that I'm pretty sure I'd have ignored it had I come across it. But I have gotten taken by stories on other subjects, so I'm quite aware of the problem of misinformation on the internet. Usually the subject is political or related to a hot-button scientific topic like COVID-19 or climate change. But until I read this article, I had no idea that there was so much crap floating around about Mars exploration.

@wonderofscienc, who imitate the account @wonderofscience, posted the video… while the “real” @wonderofscience posted a similar video around two weeks prior, but with full attribution — that the footage was from Curiosity and the sound from Insight. The imitator @wonderofscienc got less engagement than the well-attributed video from @wonderofscience, but it is also engaging in a strange form of identity theft, and one that is paying off a little — the fake Wonder of Science has more than 10,000 followers, which is only 1 percent or so the number of the real Wonder of Science (which, while often simply displaying images with a brief explanation, also source images and videos and occasionally provide link-backs.)

 So, many of the accounts are on less than the up-and-up.

Often, Mack says, they’re accounts that have scraped images from Reddit and other sites, often removing attribution, and at times stitching together things that shouldn’t be there — adding lightning to a cloud formation over the Moon, or showing a misrepresented image of an eclipse. The accounts all chase one thing: virality.

It's sad that people will misrepresent what is one of the highest achievements of the human race to gain clicks (and maybe a few bucks) from social media.  

Look for more on this subject in an upcoming post. 

Featured Links - March 18, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Light on the bay

• US Citizens Are Strikingly Bad At Sorting Facts From Opinions. "There’s a huge amount of research on misinformation. But what we found is that, even before we get to the stage of labeling something misinformation, people often have trouble discerning the difference between statements of fact and opinion." This is worrisome, though I am not at all surprised. 
• Kate Middleton’s Story Is About So Much More Than Kate Middleton (gift link). "But the frenzy around Catherine, Princess of Wales, raises important questions that go well beyond the usual concerns of royal watchers. Those questions stem from the extreme deference with which Catherine has previously been treated, in Britain at least, compared with the thrashing bestowed on her sister-in-law, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex." The Royal Family and the British Press do not come off well. 
• AI is growing in the food-service industry — and nothing will stop it. "These technologies are spreading fast, despite breaches of privacy and the biases baked into software."
  
• Covid, 4 years on. "As we recently hit—March 11, 2020—the 4-year anniversary of when WHO finally declared Covid a global pandemic, and today, March 13th, when the US declared it a national emergency, we’re still learning every day about SARS-CoV-2’s impact, its evolution, protection from vaccination, and more. Here’s a quick summary of what I think is worth reviewing."
• America's Cheyenne Mountain Complex Can Withstand A 30-Megaton Nuclear Bomb. "693,000 tons of granite were blasted out of the mountain to make the bunker at the height of the Cold War." I've been in the NORAD SAGE base in North Bay, a similar facility, now decommissioned. 
• Climate Change Is Bad for Your Health, Wherever You Are. "Rising temperatures are a threat regardless of where you live on the planet—they’re just dangerous in different ways."
• Why Does This One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much? "Comparing notes with other unsatisfied owners of the Peggy sofa." Modern furniture isn't what it used to be. 
• Las Vegas Sphere has 4,000TB SSD storage delivering 400GB/s throughput — World's only 16K display requires some exquisite technology to keep it going. "