Tag Archives: misinformation

Blown-out hair, full glam, and a studio set in the background. If you’re one of the more than 150 million Americans with a TikTok account, you may have come across videos of live-shot-ready reporters delivering quick explainers of the day’s news. Maybe a friend has relayed a tidbit of this …

Anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists have joined forces in a bizarre lawsuit that accuses The Washington Post, the BBC, the Associated Press, and Reuters of violating 19th-century antitrust laws by refusing to credit bogus COVID-19 conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine misinformation. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers and the …

Kaitlyn Wade, 30, has struggled with her weight her entire life. Since she was 19 years old, she’s tried every dieting fad that’s splashed across women’s social-media feeds: Hydroxycut, Skinny Wraps, phentermine and topiramate. They all offered temporary but not long-term effects. “I’ve realized it’s a lot about the science …

Twitter has stopped enforcing its Covid misinformation policy, designed to prevent the spread of harmful false narratives about the pandemic. This has increased simmering concerns that the platform, already an echo chamber for many users, could become a misinformation super-spreader.Users are already testing the waters to see what kind of …

Merriam-Webster, the most online of the well-known dictionaries, has selected a term popularized by the internet as its word of 2022: “Gaslighting.” The verb once described a process of psychological manipulation that causes the victim to doubt their own thoughts and perceptions, but, through general overuse, has come to mean …

We all saw this one coming, Elon Musk: Twitter users are buying the $8 verified checkmarks for their accounts to spread misinformation. On Wednesday, after Musk rolled out the new paid function for everyone to have access to a blue checkmark, dozens of accounts were suspended for spreading misinformation and …

Agustín Laje winces in disgust as he tells his listeners, in graphic detail, about a controversial medical procedure young people are getting in America. There’s just one problem: He’s making a lot of it up. “Fourteen-year-olds who can’t, for example, even have a beer in the United States,” Laje says, …

Joseph Arthur has filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against theLos Angeles Times,alleging the newspaper falsely labeled him as an anti-vaxxer in a 2021 article about the singer-songwriter. Arthur, who’d questioned the safety of the Covid-19 vaccine and on his social media accounts likened vaccination requirements for entry into certain …

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has failed to follow the science for much of the pandemic, on Wednesday called Omicron, the Covid-19 variant responsible for record-setting number of positive cases, “nature’s vaccine” during an interview with Fox & Friends. “We’ve got 150 million people in our country that have already …

A 90-minute anti-child sex trafficking documentary by a Polish filmmaker promoting various tropes related to the conspiracy theory QAnon has gone viral on TikTok and YouTube, despite both platforms’ purported efforts to halt the spread of viral misinformation. A highly incendiary, sensationalized “documentary,” which Rolling Stone has chosen not to …