Wedgewood Polls said project was designed to highlight lack of scrutiny over polling sector by mainstream media
A polling firm has admitted to using fabricated data in surveys that were picked up by national media outlets in the US, claiming the project was a “social experiment” designed to expose the lack of scrutiny over the sector.
Wedgewood Polls released a statement on Tuesday on social media, after the polling and election analysis site FiftyPlusOne reached out for comment on an investigation it had conducted into their surveys and data.
Brazil spent years targeting electoral lies on the internet. Now, artificial intelligence is stumping the election authorities and reshaping a high-stakes race.
Former employees of Christianity Today say new leadership has been pushing back on independent journalism. About half of its staff members have left or been laid off over 14 months.
Bonnie Kristian, Christianity Today’s deputy editor until recently, said the outlet displays “an increasingly muddled sense of its place within American evangelicalism.”
The duo have carved out lucrative and successful careers as TV audiences elsewhere are falling. It seems they won’t be together for much longer
Troy Aikman knew when it was time to go. His aching body made the decision for him when he ended his NFL career in 2001. A quarter of a century later, with one of the top quarterbacks of the 1990s established as half of the pre-eminent broadcasting duo in American sports, his potential exit from the booth is not so clearcut.
Aikman clearly feels his voice remains in fine working order, but his bosses at ESPN may not agree. The color commentator’s Monday Night Football play-by-play partner, Joe Buck, is reported to have agreed a new deal with the network worth $108m over six seasons (his previous deal was for five years at $15m a season), yet Aikman has claimed ESPN does not want to renew his contract.
Much remains unclear about why a driver ran a car into Helen Haines, a lawmaker. Even so, fellow representatives, especially women, spoke of feeling threatened in a polarized atmosphere.
Tributes and flowers were left on Wednesday outside the electoral office of the lawmaker Helen Haines, who was struck by a car on Monday, in Wangaratta, Australia.
Draft rules on the export of artificial intelligence technology show how China is trying to balance national security risks with its desire to outpace the United States.
Draft rules on the export of artificial intelligence technology show how China is trying to balance national security risks with its desire to outpace the United States.
MAGA Inc. is now flooding the social media platforms with targeted ads as it seeks to turn out Republicans amid the president’s historically low approval ratings.
MAGA Inc. is now flooding Facebook and Instagram with targeted ads as it seeks to turn out Republicans amid the president’s historically low approval ratings.
L’idée d’une salle de rédaction où des intelligences artificielles choisissent les nouvelles, vérifient les faits et rédigent les articles sans intervention humaine n’est plus un scénario futuriste. C’est déjà une réalité dans plusieurs pays, notamment aux États-Unis, en Italie, en Croatie et au Canada. Une enquête publiée le 16 octobre par le Reuters Institute for […]
Jan Crawford had praised man who asked Democratic candidate whether he would disavow Muslim Brotherhood
CBS’s chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford has apologized for and deleted a social media post praising a man who questioned Democratic Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed about the Muslim Brotherhood during a town hall on Saturday.
On Sunday, Crawford, who initially joined CBS in 2009, wrote on X: “Earlier, I tweeted a video from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall. I deleted that tweet because it was a violation of CBS News standards. I apologize.”
In the latest surge of violence, settlers targeted Palestinians during the olive harvest, a cultural touchstone and economic lifeline in the Israeli-occupied area.
American officials say they have identified similar influence campaigns by Russia and others in years past, all trying to create discord over contentious topics.
Donald Trump has urged Katie Zacharia, his new White House press secretary, to “reconsider” taking the job after she faced intense scrutiny from news outlets, including the rightwing cable network Fox News.
Speaking with reporters outside the White House on Friday, the US president said Zacharia had been “treated very badly by the media” after she stumbled through a 14-minute press conference on Tuesday and questions arose over her legal credentials.
À compter du 30 octobre, les entreprises et les médias qui utilisent les outils professionnels de Facebook, Instagram ou WhatsApp pourraient autoriser Meta à explorer leurs sites Web et à en récupérer les contenus, notamment pour entraîner ses systèmes d’intelligence artificielle. Cette autorisation figure dans une nouvelle version des conditions commerciales de l’entreprise. Selon une […]
Google franchit une nouvelle étape dans ses relations avec l’industrie de l’information. Le géant américain annonce que plus de 400 publications à travers le monde participent désormais à son programme News AI, une initiative qui prévoit une rémunération des éditeurs en échange de contenus destinés au développement de nouvelles fonctionnalités d’intelligence artificielle. Parmi les nouveaux […]
Katie Zacharia faces mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam
Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary says it is “unknown” how much she will engage with the press, amid mounting questions over her legal credentials after admitting she did not pass the bar exam.
In a brief interview with the Guardian, Katie Zacharia detailed the whirlwind sprint to replace her predecessor Karoline Leavitt as the US president’s chief spokesperson.
Katie Zacharia, the White House press secretary, aboard Air Force One on Wednesday. “I woke up at 3 in the morning on Tuesday to prepare with what I had,” she said of her first press briefing.
Former QB says he is looking ‘for next landing spot’
Aikman and Buck said to have argued over contracts
Longtime Monday Night Football announcer Troy Aikman said he is looking for his “next landing spot” with his ESPN contract set to expire after February’s Super Bowl.
“I’ll broadcast through this season, and I’ll be a free agent at the end of the year and kind of see what happens,” Aikman said in a radio interview with KTCK of Dallas on Thursday morning.
The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different script
For the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”
In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion, decided “without prompting, that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective”. I bring this up in respect to the gathering storm of Donald Trump versus the BBC, a fight triggered by the US president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit – $10bn! It’s a wonder he didn’t go for $10 gazillion – brought against the corporation at the end of last year in response to a poorly edited episode of Panorama. The BBC was at fault, editing together comments made by the US president at a rally on 6 January 2021 to give, as the corporation’s apology put it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it is fighting the lawsuit.
When social media posts denouncing the police surfaced, they were supposed to harm a socialist’s re-election. But the democratic socialists of Portland, and other cities, are showing their strength.
Joining a global movement, President Claudia Sheinbaum signed a decree requiring the removal of a range of material for people under 18 and held out the prospect of tougher measures.
With a narrow presidential election looming, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his allies claim Meta is trying to give his right-wing rival an advantage.
The government appointed an overseer to the last big news channel critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The authorities have now replaced the leadership at five major news outlets.
The Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper headquarters in Sapporo, Japan on Wednesday. A journalist from the newspaper was arrested in Russia and accused of spying.
Some of those detained accused security forces of beating them during an intense crackdown on demonstrations in India’s capital over the weekend. Police have said they followed the law.
District court judge Timothy Kelly was ruling after Trump administration blocked access to three outlets last month
A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to continue allowing journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico to access the building as the media coalition’s lawsuit against the Trump administration plays out.
Timothy Kelly, a district court judge, had on 24 September granted a 14-day reprieve for the news organizations, which six days earlier had been banned by the president in an extraordinary move from entering the White House grounds “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS”.
The main security service said it had detained a reporter for the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper in Russia’s far east, where he had been reporting on military recruitment.
À compter du 20 octobre, les Canadiens pourront s’abonner directement à CNN sans avoir à passer par un câblodistributeur. La chaîne américaine d’information lancera son service numérique All Access au Canada et au Royaume-Uni, une première expansion internationale pour cette offre déjà disponible aux États-Unis. Pour 7,99 dollars canadiens par mois, les abonnés auront accès […]
Amid worries about children’s relationship to tech, the solution is often spending more time talking openly with each other
We have become obsessed with the idea that screens are destroying human connection.
The evidence seems to be everywhere. Each week headlines warn of teenagers addicted to phones, a lonelinessepidemic and the dangersof AI. The release of The Social Reckoning leads us to ask, “How bad were those guys at Meta?” and then ultimately wonder, “How bad am I if I still use Instagram?” In our day-to-day, we observe workers eating lunch alone while scrolling and friends choosing online games over offline gatherings.
Ms. Zacharia is a conservative commentator who is also an adviser to the company that runs President Trump’s social media site, Truth Social. She succeeds Karoline Leavitt.
A plan to house 1,250 asylum seekers on the outskirts of Piddington prompted a symbolic independence vote, highlighting a growing dilemma for the government.
Local residents unveiled a “Principality of Piddington” sign in the village of Piddington, Oxfordshire, England, after they voted to become independent in a symbolic “referendum.”
The U.S. police say a 30-year-old offered the killer advice and cash for supplies at least six months before the rampage in British Columbia that left eight dead.
Three African countries have started Tafouk TV, a Russia-partnered broadcast channel, after throwing out Western journalists and cracking down on local media.
At a news conference in Bamako, Mali, in May. Military juntas have taken over Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in recent years, cracking down on journalists and struggling to stop extremist groups like Al Qaeda.
A funny thing happened on the day OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora, its video generation app: Iran went all in on synthetic propaganda and very quickly started winning the global meme war. The timing is a coincidence, no doubt, but it is the kind of coincidence that illuminates.
Watching the explosive virality of the clips offers a powerful lesson in asymmetric media operations. They deploy cultural sophistication, an understanding of online communities and the enormously powerful creation tools made available by American tech companies, tools that give everyone on the internet access to a personal reality distortion field — drones, but for your feed.
On Wednesday, as Donald Trump was trying desperately to talk down the oil markets with hints of a deal, a stream of videos, carefully calibrated for U.S., regional and third country audiences rolled out on X via embassy accounts, Russia Today, and disaffected Maga influencers. The clips, by broad social media consensus, are good. Some lean heavily on the extremely online grammar of the U.S. right. Some remix Hollywood characters and likenesses in exactly the way that OpenAI’s now nixed billion-dollar deal with Disney was supposed to sanction. Others lean more heavily into Islamic iconography, featuring Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as worshippers of Baal, the foreign demon god who figures in both the Quran and the Hebrew Bible. The Lego movie is an especially rich resource, but so are TikTok formats, and the kind of idealized AI figures beloved of Trump administration meme makers. You can watch a few of them here.
Notably, faked war footage is far from the dominant format. All of these clips foreground and celebrate their own artificiality: some are sentimental, some triumphal, many are full of the gleeful adolescent wit of gamers on discord forums.
Researchers have long been warning that generative tools will undercut the authority of visual evidence, compounding and accelerating the damage created by slower, cruder forms of fakery: photoshop, selective editing, even gaming clips passed off as combat footage. Of course, we are already there, and have been for a while. Russia has been the paramount master of this game, in Ukraine and in its ongoing influence operations around the world. But others have learned quickly. Last year, when India and Pakistan were engaged in a brief aerial battle, social media bullshit overwhelmed and compromised traditional coverage. More recently, Israel’s obliteration of Gaza was accompanied by a sustained and comprehensive blizzard of visually compelling misinformation, propaganda, and official lies.
That continues. On March 28, Israel killed three journalists in a targeted strike in Southern Lebanon, claiming without evidence that one of them, Ali Shoaib, was a member of Hezbollah’s Radwan forces. They later distributed a photograph of him in military fatigues to reinforce the point, but explained to Fox news that in fact, they’d had to photoshop the uniform in because no such picture existed.
Meanwhile, in the Trump administration’s domestic war on immigrants and political opponents, we’ve seen a complete resetting of norms around the tone of official communication and any expectation that it is rooted in fact. Nowhere was that more evident than in the altered footage posted by the White House of the arrest of the prominent Minneapolis activist Nekima Levy Armstrong in January. In the video, shared by the official White House handle, a handcuffed Levy Armstrong is sobbing, her skin visibly darkened. In fact, she had faced arrest calmly.
Questioned by reporters about this blatant falsification, deputy White House communications director Kaelan Dorr responded: "Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.” Collapsing the distinction between a meme and the factual record with the aid of AI is the final step in this administration's insistence that its preferred narrative simply is reality.
The problem for the White House and its allies is that their choices in tech policy, official communication, and press freedom level the playing field for information war in ways that Tehran’s media strategists understand and they, for all their immersion in online worlds, do not.
Iranian propagandists know that the currency of visual information online has already been completely debased. They’ve dealt with it plenty, and no doubt practiced it themselves in regional battles for narrative dominance. Their insight is that as cheap and easy as it is to create and distribute fakes, returns on the effort of mobilizing what disinformation researchers call “coordinated inauthentic action” are diminishing. They still do it, but it isn’t where the action is.
Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have, in a very practical sense, wrought this moment in concert with Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, JD Vance and Donald Trump. At their urging, the U.S. has surrendered unrivaled dominance in scarce, expensive information and cultural assets in exchange for a political economy of media that widely distributes cheap, abundant ones.
Tech leaders and conservative politicians have worked consistently for a decade to deprecate the trustworthiness of American journalism and constrain its liberties. They have smeared its practitioners as “enemies of the people”; they have captured the commanding heights of the broadcast and culture industries through crony deals, and they have launched an assault on both press freedom and standards, two assets that once made American news outlets the envy of the world. Needless to say, the economic collapse of traditional media companies fostered by Google’s and Meta’s advertising duopoly only served to deepen the damage. Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post shuttered its Middle East bureaus just days before the war began.
Meanwhile, lying from agency podiums and the Oval Office, makes Karoline Leavitt barely distinguishable from Baghdad Bob, Iraq’s minister of information in 2003 whose surreal, truth-dodging press conferences during the U.S.-led invasion made him a global laughingstock. And the DOGEing of both the nominally independent Voice of America, as well as the state department’s Global Engagement Center leaves the administration with neither broadcast nor digital counter-propaganda assets.
When no one can be trusted with the actual truth, we are left with the AI equivalent of 19th-century editorial cartoons, produced at industrial scale and distributed globally. America has little advantage in that war, particularly when it is at a moral, political and legal nadir.
If anything, Iran, which combines repression with an enormously rich literary culture, film scene and advertising market brings serious capabilities to the fight.
Of course, the ebbing of information power was already under way during the first Trump administration, and during Joe Biden’s term in ways that are indissociable from broader democratic decline. The “trust and safety” architecture adopted by big platform companies was designed — implicitly if not always visibly — to conserve information authority, and ensure that it functioned in broadly pro-democratic ways.
After the disastrous failures of the Rohingya genocide — which rights groups and UN investigators blamed Facebook for facilitating — and the fears surrounding the manipulation of the U.S. electoral environment in 2016, there was a clear threat to the commercial and political health of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Tech companies, governments, researchers and human rights experts devised rules and norms for content moderation grounded in existing standards, tools for detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior, and a framework for crisis response.
The community of practitioners and institutions that sprung up to combat the flesh-eating virus attacking the body politic were working with bandaids in the battlefield hospital even before Covid, a coordinated attack from the right, and the second Trump victory hit them, but they succeeded in imposing some limits. That project now lies in ruins.
The Stanford Information Laboratory has been shut down. Trust and Safety teams at Meta and X have been disbanded. The national security arm of the project, centered around the State Department is gone, and private funding for countering misinformation has largely dried up.
Where are the hyperscalers, the AI titans, whose tools are being so effectively deployed, in all of this?
The trust and safety people who do work at OpenAI are dutifully putting out reports every few months. They are detailing how they foiled efforts to use ChatGPT for a Chinese influence campaign aimed at Sanae Takaichi, the Japanese prime minister, and exposing a Russian content mill feeding African newspapers. “Pro-tip for governments,” wrote Head of National Security policy Sasha Baker on LinkedIn of the February report. “Please don’t use our products to spread lies online.”
Governments, in the world of Sam Altman’s “democratic AI” do not include that of the United States. OpenAI has not mentioned a single U.S. ally — let alone the administration itself — in these reports.
OpenAI has hired multiple ex-Clinton, Obama and Biden officials, and in their work a weird, attenuated piece of the old national security approach to information integrity lives on, alongside the project of selling products to the Pentagon. The company’s leaders clearly treat these issues as a complement to messaging around Western AI, or a picayune adjunct to the bigger questions of AI risk, which are handled way up in the organizational stratosphere, as they are at Anthropic.
Perhaps the larger lesson is that you can’t really shut down Sora, or put AI-generated video back in its box. If you choose to prosecute an illegal war of choice after surrendering the hard-won high ground of a robust, democratic information environment, high tech weaponry will not offset the deficit. On the contrary, you will have compounded the risk of both tactical failure and strategic geopolitical defeat. When that happens, and in some ways it already has, those who made this war, and their enablers in Silicon Valley, will have only themselves to blame.
Il faut absolument (j’insiste) décrocher. Il y a un risque réel de se traumatiser via l’exposition aux contenus autour de cette histoire.
Donc: priorité absolue, faire autre chose. Regarder des films ou des séries. Faire un puzzle ou du nettoyage. Trouver quelqu’un qui va nous traîner dehors pour prendre l’air.
Considérez cette consigne comme une nécessité médicale, vraiment.
Prenez soins de vous et ne vous exposez pas de manière non nécessaire à des images traumatisantes. Protégez-vous, et protégez les enfants et adolescent·es sous votre responsabilité.
Les algorithmes liés aux #Reels (Insta, Facebook, Tiktok) sont susceptibles de vous inonder très rapidement de scènes tragiques et de témoignages terribles et poignants. Les algorithmes sont terriblement efficaces et il y a un risque réel de se laisser prendre dans une spirale de visionnage de contenu potentiellement traumatique #doomscrolling.
Ces vidéos, via des phénomènes d’empathie et d’engagement émotionnel, risquent de provoquer chez vous de la détresse, de l’anxiété, ou même des symptômes qui peuvent s’apparenter à ce qu’on observe suite à l’exposition à des événements traumatisants. Ces risques ont été documentés dans des études scientifiques.
Suivant la situation, on peut aussi essayer d’appeler le 143 (la main tendue) mais le mieux est vraiment, si on n’est pas directement impacté de mettre le paquet (pardon) pour se prendre par la peau des fesses afin de mettre son cerveau sur autre chose. « Mécaniquement », même si on n’a pas envie, même si on est bouleversé, même si on veut comprendre, même si on ne sait pas quoi faire de ses émotions.
Un tuyau: « arrêter » n’est pas une bonne instruction, en fait, il faut vraiment remplacer l’activité non souhaitable par une activité plus souhaitable et incompatible, comme en comportement animal.
Quelle est votre « activité plus souhaitable », même sans être motivé•e? C’est ça la chose à faire, peu importe ce que c’est, juste là. Une série, un puzzle ou une promenade c’est très bien. Et on lâche le tel et l’ordi car sur les réseaux, impossible d’y échapper pour le moment.
Connexion
