Free Republic

The Government has established a working group to coordinate efforts to combat the spread of disinformation on the internet. The multi-stakeholder group will be tasked with providing a joined-up approach to reduce the creation and spread of false and harmful material. Members will aim to complete a National Counter-Disinformation Strategy by the end of the year, in a process that will also involve a public consultation. The establishment of the working group fulfills a recommendation in The Future of Media Commission report, which called for a more coordinated and strategic approach to combat the damaging impact of disinformation on Irish...

After a series of “Twitter Files” detailed Twitter’s extensive collusion with the FBI and federal agencies to control public discourse before Elon Musk took over the tech giant, the FBI on Wednesday tried to salvage its reputation by spinning the revelations as normal procedure. “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the FBI said in a statement to Fox News. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector...

Six months ago, the transatlantic alliance was on shaky ground, with President Biden’s promise of a reinvigorated NATO under U.S. leadership severely undermined by the Afghanistan debacle and a foreign policy that seemed unready for prime time. Today, Biden and his team have redeemed themselves in the eyes of many NATO allies, with a tough stance on Ukraine and the successful wrangling of the often-fractious alliance to support it. Ukraine’s fate, and Russia’s future relationship with the West, remain uncertain. Biden has said he is convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin, with more than 150,000 troops and massive weaponry amassed on...

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald Instructing journalists to keep away from the police and threatening them with arrest if they don't.Given that the target of the police in this case have the Wrong Ideology, many journalists will be not angry but grateful: Ottawa Police @OttawaPolice All media who are attending the area, please keep a distance and stay out of police operations for your safety. Anyone found within areas undergoing enforcement may be subject to arrest. There will be a media availability later today at 474 Elgin Street. #ottnews

The leftist ratings firm NewsGuard criticized a Media Research Center study of the site’s ratings, calling it “fundamentally flawed.” NewsGuard General Manager Matt Skbinski’s letter made multiple inaccurate claims about the study, which analyzed the NewsGuard ratings of media outlets. Skibinski claimed the study was “based on a tiny sample of cherry-picked data.” He continued: “NewsGuard has rated more than 7,500 news and information websites, but the NewsBusters analysis looked only at ratings of 24 websites it defines as right-leaning and 31 websites it defines as left-leaning--meaning the study examined a cherry-picked sample of just 0.7% of the websites we've...

Avoiding misinformation and supporting journalism isn’t just about brand safety or corporate responsibility. New data, from an IPG Mediabrands client launch, shows NewsGuard’s data for responsible inclusion of news leads to major improvements in campaign performance metrics.

MIT launched the Reconnaissance of Influence Operations (RIO) program to automatically detect disinformation narratives online.

A New Jersey high school teacher has been suspended with pay after profanity-laced comments to students in his class about George Floyd, the man killed by a Minneapolis police officer. A recording aired by WNBC-TV shows Dickinson High School (Jersey City) science teacher Howard Zlotkin talking about Floyd and Black Lives Matter during what was supposed to be a climate change discussion in a landscape and design Zoom class. Zlotkin, who is white, is heard to say people are “whining and crying about Black Lives Matter,” and he then refers to Floyd with a profanity as a “criminal” who “got...

Last week, many of us were surprised when President Joe Biden used the word “crisis” to describe the situation at the southern border. “We’re going to increase the number [of refugees]. The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people. We couldn’t do two things at once. ”After months of refusing to call it a “crisis,” this seemed like a stunning admission that may have indicated that things were about to change, that the Biden administration would finally treat the situation at the border as a crisis. So...

Ricky Vaughn” was among the most prolific far-right Twitter users working to spread disinformation during the 2016 election cycle. He posted racist and anti-Semitic photos and memes and routinely retweeted the @TEN_GOP account, which purported to belong to the Tennessee Republican party but, Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed two years later, was actually run from St. Petersburg by the Internet Research Agency troll farm. In the MIT Media Lab’s ranking of top political influencers in 2016, Vaughn came in at #107—above NBC and CBS. Vaughn has now been arrested—and, as it turns out, his name isn't Ricky Vaughn after all....

The New York Times has amplified claims by “experts” who are calling for Joe Biden to appoint a “reality czar,” prompting critics to compare the idea to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984. In an article entitled ‘How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis’, the NYT’s Kevin Roose cites “experts” who are calling on “the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a “reality czar.” The job of this “reality czar” would be to head up “a centralized task force could...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) - The storming of the U.S. Capitol is a jarring but natural product of years of violence and hateful rhetoric stoked by disinformation and conspiracy theories, experts on far-right extremism said as they pored over images of Wednesday’s riot. Members of far-right groups, including the violent Proud Boys, joined the crowds that formed in Washington to cheer on President Donald Trump as he urged them to protest Congress’ counting of Electoral College votes confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s win. Then they headed to the Capitol. Members of smaller white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups also were spotted in...

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo defended himself against accusations that his policies forced patients testing positive for COVID-19 into nursing homes, saying “it never happened.” Cuomo made the startling statement in an interview with Finger Lakes Daily News. In fact, the Democrat governor, whose state has seen 32,757 deaths from the virus thus far, more than double the next closest state, insisted his state had “flattened the curve effectively.” Regarding the nursing homes, Cuomo suggested his policies were not to blame. “It just never happened in New York, where we needed to say to a nursing home, ‘We need you...

Without consulting with its users, Microsoft has installed an establishment media browser extension, purportedly designed to rate the accuracy of news websites, as a default setting on mobile versions of its Edge browser. In practice, it creates a news blacklist by warning users away from sites including Breitbart News, The Drudge Report, and the Daily Mail. The browser extension, called “Newsguard,” presents users with a red warning label if they navigate to a website that it judges to be unreliable. A “green” rating is given to websites that NewsGuard considers trustworthy. A number of pro-Trump websites, including Breitbart News, are...

Veteran journalist Dan Rather said on Friday that President Trump’s false statements about and attacks on the media are "straight out of Orwell." The former longtime CBS News anchor told CNN’s Don Lemon that Trump is "authoritarian" and wants people to believe that "the one and only truth comes from him." [Snip] "As several people have said before me, he is not just attacking the truth, he wants to annihilate the truth," the former anchor added. "He wants to move us completely into the post-truth political era in which there’s no such thing as objective facts." Rather added that there...

Retired USA Today White House reporter Richard Benedetto penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on Friday titled “How Obama Gets Away With It.” He suggested “Usually when an incumbent president is leaving office and a slew of candidates are battling for his job, that departing chief executive’s record is a major campaign issue.” But Obama’s record in office is not an issue. Obviously, one reason is the Republican establishment didn’t want Obama to be an issue, which is why they moved to take any budget fight with Obama off the table for the rest of his presidency. …

Dear Readers. I received a survey request (filled in below) from the Media Research Center (MRC). Initially I was expecting just another multiple choice form that misses many of the key issues of the day. Much to my delight, this one actually had, in addition to MRC's preferred topics,  "other" as choices. And what was even more special, MRC provided a space in which to spell out the other choice(s). Burned out naif that I am, I have my doubts they will actually read what I put in the boxes. I know, many of you think I must be crazy...

Climate change is expanding Antarctica's sea ice, according to a scientific study in the journal Nature Geoscience. The paradoxical phenomenon is thought to be caused by relatively cold plumes of fresh water derived from melting beneath the Antarctic ice shelves. This melt water has a relatively low density, so it accumulates in the top layer of the ocean. The cool surface waters then re-freeze more easily during Autumn and Winter. This explains the observed peak in sea ice during these seasons, a team from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in De Bilt says in its peer-reviewed paper.

You turn the AM on and there's Rush, or Savage, or another of the army of right-wing radio talk show hosts. You may not be listening hard, just working, driving, doing busywork or the laundry. Yet if you listen day after day, year after year, your brain will begin to change. Words, even those heard casually and listened to incidentally, activate frames - structures of ideas that are physically realized in the brain. The more the words are heard, the more the frames are activated in the brain, and stronger their synapses get - until the frames are there permanently....

FBI FIELD INTELLIGENCE GROUPS Page 11 9 December 2008 Discovery of Radiological Dispersal Device Components, Literature, and Radioactive Material at the Maine Residence of an Identified Deceased US Person On 9 December 2008, radiological dispersal device components and literature, and radioactive materials, were discovered at the Maine residence of an identified deceased USPER James Cummings. Cummings had possible ties to white supremacist groups. On 9 December 2008, four one-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide, and magnesium ribbon were discovered at the Cummings’ residence. (FBI comments: Literature on constructing ‘dirty...