Free Republic

Aaron Berman, a 17-year veteran of the CIA who already held a senior position in Facebook’s “misinformation” team during the 2020 election, has been promoted to “Head of Elections Policies” at the company now known as Meta. Berman served at the CIA between March 2002 and July 2019. During that time, he wrote for and edited the President’s Daily Brief, an influential top-secret document prepared by the U.S. intelligence community given to the president each morning. According to Berman’s Linkedin, he enjoyed positions of considerable influence at the agency, including “supervising teams of dozens of analysts and with multi-million-dollar budgets,”...

Online platforms spreading misinformation could face millions of dollars in penalties under new proposed government legislation that bolsters the power of Australia's media watchdog. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) would be armed with the ability to require digital platforms to keep certain records about matters regarding misinformation and disinformation and turn them over when requested. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said this would "essentially mean that the regulator is able to look under the hood of what the platforms are doing and what measures they are taking to ensure compliance". The ACMA would also be able to request the...

Barack Obama, who was instrumental in fueling the media’s “misinformation” narrative before he left office, has a new buzzword — “digital fingerprints.” The former Democrat president wants the origin of digital information such as photos and videos to be clearly traced, to fight the spread of deepfakes. “That technology’s here now,” said Obama in a discussion with his former advisor David Axelrod on the latter’s CNN podcast. “So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”

It is a tight contest over which U.S. regulatory agency is most captured by industry. But leading the pack is surely the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Many of us in the past believed the main problem with the agency was the costs it imposed on industry. The situation turns out to be more complicated. Whatever its past, it’s become an industry-dominated vending machine for drug approvals enacted with a very expensive rubber stamp.The ordeal of the COVID vaccine proved it. So long as the check cleared, the FDA was ready with committee-based approvals for which no one in particular...

Readers likely remember when in early December 2020, Google-owned social media platform YouTube began enforcing a new policy about what it considered “misinformation” about the results of the 2020 presidential election. The platform admits that due to the policy, it took down user videos numbering in the “tens of thousands.”Now, the Big Tech company has announced it’s doing an about-face on the policy—beginning immediately. YouTube wrote in a blog post Friday that it will stop its policy of removing the videos from the platform:As of June 2, 2023, YouTube has reversed that decision: The video giant announced that it “will...

Wealthy organizations with a history of backing left-wing causes are partnering with a new worldwide group of researchers to combat online misinformation. The International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) convened in Washington for its first official meeting on Wednesday, bringing together over 200 researchers from 55 countries to focus on the decline of public comprehension and confidence in science, according to The New York Times. It is partnered with groups such as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Skoll Foundation, according to its website. Many of IPIE’s backers have a history of bankrolling left-wing groups and...

...Across the tech industry...wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet's most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits. The cuts come at a time of increased cyberbullying...and as the spread of misinformation and violent content collides with the exploding use of artificial intelligence....Twitter effectively disbanded its ethical AI team in November and laid off all but one of its members, along with 15% of its trust and safety department, according to reports. In February, Google cut about one-third of a unit that aims to protect society from misinformation, radicalization, toxicity and censorship. Meta reportedly ended the contracts of about...

During an interview with NBC News aired on Tuesday’s edition of “Hallie Jackson Now,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated that one reason he visited East Palestine, Ohio in the wake of the train derailment there was “all of the misinformation that came to the people of East Palestine” and that “had I known the amount of misinformation that would be directed at the people of East Palestine, we would have taken more steps to make sure that they got more accurate information sooner in the process.

Investigative independent journalist Lee Fang weighs in on his reporting surrounding Ukrainian intelligence and disinformation

“Misinformation” is the Left’s new boogyman, up there with White Supremacists, carbon dioxide, and transphobes.We are supposed to believe that all these things are threats to human existence itself and that all of them must be ruthlessly suppressed in order to save humanity.Yeah, whatever.The FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf has apparently been traveling the country making a rather amazing claim: that misinformation is the leading cause of death in America.If so, that’s pretty shocking. A number of studies suggest that medical errors may be the third-leading cause of death in America, resulting in 250,000 to 440,000 deaths a year, depending...

The medical misinformation problem isn’t going away, with around three-quarters of physicians saying inaccurate medical information has made it harder to treat patients and has impacted patient outcomes, according to a Morning Consult poll conducted on behalf of the de Beaumont Foundation.This comes after nearly three years of a global pandemic that put healthcare in the crosshairs of medical misinformation. Indeed, medical misinformation existed before COVID-19, but the politicization of the pandemic made the issue ripe for inaccurate and misleading medical information. The more than 800 physicians included in the survey indicated that politicization and misleading medical claims have had...

Members of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) advisory committee on combating “misinformation” privately cast critics of their work, including those who raised the alarm over government censorship of free speech, as malign actors, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. An advisory panel under the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA), called the Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee, issued recommendations to CISA in June on how to address threats to “critical functions” of democracy, including public health measures, the financial system, elections and the court system. The subcommittee recommended CISA detect “informational threats,”...

This many high-profile failures in such a short time makes winning a Pulitzer look definitively like a mark of ignominy.The way the Pulitzer Prizes work seems simple enough – an Ivy league university hands out annual awards that ostensibly recognize important journalism. In practice, however, my former colleague Phil Terzian, a Pulitzer finalist who has served on the nominating committee, described the inner workings of the Pulitzers this way:The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited...

A group of professors is using taxpayer dollars doled out by the federal government to develop a new misinformation fact-checking tool called “Course Correct.” National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according to the grant abstracts, is intended to aid reporters, public health organizations, election administration officials, and others to address so-called misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

...Misinformation contains content that is false, misleading, or taken out of context but without any intent to deceive. When family members share bogus health claims or political conspiracy theories on Facebook, they’re not trying to trick you—they’re under the impression that they’re passing along legit information. In reality, they’re spreading misinformation. Examples of misinformation Misinformation ran rampant at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Consider claims of false COVID-19 treatments that spread across social media like, well, the virus they claimed to cure. Those who shared inaccurate information and misleading statistics weren’t doing it to harm people. In fact, most...

The Coalition for Trust in Health & Science today announced its formation and public launch during the 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The alliance was formed to unite leading organizations from across the entire health ecosystem to advance trust and factual science-based decision-making. The partnership aims to achieve a measurable increase in the public’s willingness – and ability – to access evidence-based information necessary to make the best personally appropriate health decisions for themselves, their families and the communities in which they live and work. Enhancing the perception and reality of...

As medical students and future pediatricians, we recognize that childhood vaccines are one of the single greatest public health achievements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet, for one of us, a pregnant cousin announced over the Thanksgiving dinner table that she wasn't going to vaccinate her unborn child. No matter the facts, research, or wealth of medical education, this cousin was firm in her beliefs that there was a better, healthier way to protect her child than vaccination. Unfortunately, her viewpoint is not at all surprising given the misinformed headlines that permeate our Instagram feeds such as "The Danger...

Johns Hopkins University professor Dr. Marty Makary blasted the federal government during the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s first hearing on Tuesday, accusing it of being “the greatest perpetrator of misinformation.” In a powerful opening statement, Makary rattled off multiple examples to support his claim. Misinformation that Covid was spread through surface transmission; that vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity; That masks were effective. Now we have the definitive Cochrane review. What do you do with that review? Cochrane is the most authoritative evidence body in all of medicine and has been for decades. Do you...

“The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government”

<p>After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will initiate a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation.</p><p>The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims. The videos will appear as advertisements on platforms like Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign in India is also in the works.</p>