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Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

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An Independent article, looking at how Michael Schumacher’s family has just won a legal case against a media organization that published an ‘interview’ with him. 

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An Independent article, looking at how Michael Schumacher’s family has just won a legal case against a media organization that published an ‘interview’ with him. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What are the ethical limits of using AI to generate knowledge about the world, and how should we decide where they are?

KEY TERMS Exclusive interview, AI chatbot, Tasteless and misleading

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Michael Schumacher's family has won €200,000 (£170,287) in compensation from a German magazine after they published an 'exclusive interview' with the F1 legend based on answers generated by an artificial intelligence programme.

The seven-time Formula 1 world champion has not been seen publicly since suffering a near-fatal brain injury while skiing in December 2013 in Meribel, France. His wife Corinna has insisted on protecting Schumacher's privacy in the decade since, with his medical condition shrouded in secrecy as he continues to recover at home in Switzerland.

Yet German outlet Die Aktuelle sparked a huge backlash online after plastering Schumacher's face on the front cover of the 15 April 2023 edition of their magazine with "exclusive interview" as the accompanying tag.

The magazine stated that it was "the first interview" Schumacher has given since his accident, adding: "No meagre, nebulous half-sentences from friends. But answers from him! By Michael Schumacher, 54!"

Quotes from the piece, purporting to be from Schumacher, included: "My life has completely changed since [the accident]. That was a horrible time for my wife, my children and the whole family.

"I was so badly injured that I lay for months in a kind of artificial coma, because otherwise my body couldn't have dealt with it all. I've had a tough time but the hospital team has managed to bring me back to my family."

Yet at the end of the article, the outlet reveal that they in fact used an AI chatbot, reported to be Character.ai, to generate the answers.

"Did Michael Schumacher really say everything himself" the article concludes. "The interview was online. On a page that has to do with artificial intelligence, or AI for short."

The front cover of the 15 April 2023 edition of German magazine Die Aktuelle had a photo of Michael Schumacher with the headline 'the first interview' (Die Aktuelle )

Fans online were quick to deride the article and the magazine, with one describing it as "disgraceful" and another adding: "Well, this is awful."

Schumacher's family announced their intention to sue Die Aktuelle following the publication of the article and, on Wednesday, a family spokeswoman confirmed a Munich Labour Court judgement and €200,000 settlement by Funke media group, publishers of the magazine, without making any further comment.

The magazine's editor was sacked last year, with Funke apologising to the Schumacher family.

"This tasteless and misleading article should never have appeared. It in no way meets the standards of journalism that we - and our readers - expect," said Funke managing director Bianca Pohlmann, at the time. "As a result of the publication of this article, immediate personnel consequences will be drawn. Die Aktuelle editor-in-chief Anne Hoffmann, who has held journalistic responsibility for the paper since 2009, will be relieved of her duties."

Former Ferrari boss Jean Todt gave an update on Schumacher's health in December 2023, the same month that a five-part documentary series entitled Being Michael Schumacher aired exclusively in Germany.

"Michael is here, so I don't miss him," Todt told L'Equipe. "[But he] is simply not the Michael he used to be. He is different and is wonderfully guided by his wife and children who protect him.

"His life is different now and I have the privilege of sharing moments with him. That's all there is to say. Unfortunately, fate struck him ten years ago. He is no longer the Michael we knew in Formula 1."

Schumacher has not been seen publicly since December 2013, with his wife Corinna insisting on protecting his privacy (AFP via Getty Images)

The AI 'interview' is just the latest incident in a long-running saga between the Schumachers and Die Aktuelle.

The German magazine won a court battle in 2015 with Michael's wife Corinna after the magazine used a picture of Corinna on the front cover, headlined: "Corinna Schumacher - a new love makes her happy."

The story was about their daughter, Gina, but the lawsuit on the grounds of the cover being "misleading" was dismissed.

Another Schumacher-related article from the outlet, in 2014, put Michael and Corinna on the front cover with the title 'Awake' - yet the piece was actually focused on individuals who have woken up from a coma, as opposed to Schumacher himself.

In a Netflix documentary which aired in 2021 called Schumacher, Corinna detailed how his family have dealt with the situation and continue to "get on with their lives."

"Michael is here. Different, but he's here, and that gives us strength, I find," Corinna said. "We're together. We live together at home. We do therapy. We do everything we can to make Michael better and to make sure he's comfortable. And to simply make him feel our family, our bond. And no matter what, I will do everything I can. We all will.

"We're trying to carry on as a family, the way Michael liked it and still does. And we are getting on with our lives. 'Private is private', as he always said. It's very important to me that he can continue to enjoy his private life as much as possible. Michael always protected us and now we are protecting Michael."

Schumacher's family wins compensation for fake AI 'interview'

Schumacher's family wins compensation for fake AI 'interview'

The front cover of the 15 April 2023 edition of German magazine Die Aktuelle had a photo of Michael Schumacher with the headline 'the first interview'

Die Aktuelle

Schumacher's family wins compensation for fake AI 'interview'

Schumacher has not been seen publicly since December 2013, with his wife Corinna insisting on protecting his privacy

AFP via Getty Images

Schumacher's family wins compensation for fake AI 'interview'

The front cover of Die Aktuelle depicted an 'exclusive interview' with Michael Schumacher but the magazine was successfully sued by the F1 star's family

Die Aktuelle/Getty

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Michael Schumacher's family wins compensation for fake AI 'interview'

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German magazine Die Aktuelle last year published an 'exclusive interview' with the F1 legend, who hasn't been seen publicly for a decade since a near-fatal skiing accident, but the answers were generated by an artificial intelligence programme

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A Conversation article, offering seven steps for working out whether a knowledge claim is actually advocating a conspiracy theory. 

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A Conversation article, offering seven steps for working out whether a knowledge claim is actually advocating a conspiracy theory. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How easy is it to answer this question: “What would it take for you to believe your perception was wrong?” How will your response to this question affect your ability to distinguish theories based on valid evidence from ones based on conspiracies?

KEY TERMS Misleading narratives, Evidence, Allegation, Tangled webs, Motive, Red flags, Transparent, Supernatural

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How to tell if a conspiracy theory is probably false

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Conspiracy theories abound. What should you believe − and how can you tell?

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A Guardian article, telling the story of a reality show in which women competed to date Prince Harry - and what it tells us about brainwashing.

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A Guardian article, telling the story of a reality show in which women competed to date Prince Harry - and what it tells us about brainwashing.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What was ‘I Wanna Marry Harry’? In what way was the truth about this TV show much more complicated than it seemed? How were the contestants ‘brainwashed’ - and what insights does this give us into how people are manipulated into joining cults? Could the contestants have taken any steps to resist the manipulation, and how do you think you would have fared in their situation? To wrap up: What steps can we take to avoid being brainwashed by disinformation?

KEY TERMS Ridiculed and belittled, Truth, Cut off from the outside world, Brainwashed

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Next month marks a decade since one of the most ridiculous reality shows ever aired on television. I Wanna Marry "Harry" was a dating show in which 12 American women dated Prince Harry, then the world's most eligible bachelor. Only, obviously, it wasn't him at all. The "Harry" in question was a lookalike: according to the show, a "99% lookalike" (I will let you be the judge).

Airing on Fox in the US before making its way to ITV2, the reality show consisted of the dozen potential girlfriends being whisked to a secluded mansion in the Berkshire countryside, then going on a series of dates with the fake prince. It was constantly implied by the production team that they were in the presence of royalty: Harry was even referred to as "sir", when really he was plain old Matt Hicks, an environmental consultant from Exeter who had had his hair dyed ginger. The stunts for the ruse were quite something: from "sir" being whisked away by men in sunglasses after a "security incident", to fake paparazzi invading a date before being tackled to the ground. Fake Harry was even Photoshopped into an image alongside the real Prince William for a potential date to stumble across while Hicks went to the bathroom.

The reviews were scathing. The Guardian called the programme "a cliche wrapped in a stereotype wrapped in a button-up dress shirt that looks like something Prince Harry once wore," while the Telegraph described it as "fodder for the braindead". Comments on X (then Twitter) ridiculed and belittled the women for appearing to fall for the ruse. Yet the truth was more complex, as I discovered while making The Bachelor of Buckingham Palace, a new six-part podcast that delves into the making of the series.

Matthew Hicks AKA Prince Harry from I Wanna Marry 'Harry'. Photograph: Fox/Fox Image Collection/Getty Images

It turns out the women involved had not expected to date Prince Harry at all. Rather, they had applied for a show called Dream Date, which offered them the chance to find love (and of course appear on television and possibly build a career). They were flown to the UK with little notice. This was years before The Crown, and Harry and Meghan were not yet dominating the gossip pages: the younger prince was not as recognisable to average Americans as he is now. From the moment the women arrived at the mansion, they were cut off from the outside world. Their phones were confiscated and they were often unable to speak to one another on set when the cameras were not rolling.

Only one woman would go on a date at a time, so afterwards she would naturally go back to the group to reinforce the idea that "sir" was indeed Prince Harry. On a trip down the River Thames, members of the public were planted to shout "Harry!" from a nearby bridge. And of course, this being a reality show, there was an additional pressure for contestants to treat the situation as genuine in order to avoid being eliminated from the show.

'Your reality is being screwed with' ... the masquerade ball from I Wanna Marry 'Harry'. Photograph: Fox/Fox Image Collection/Getty Images

"It taught me a lot about brainwashing, because your reality is being screwed with," contestant Kimberly Birch told me. "You're not trusting yourself any more. It is this group consciousness believing what everyone else was believing in order to feel sane. I can see how people are very easily manipulated, even into things like cults ... I get where they're coming from."

Another contestant was called Meghan (surname Ramsey Jones), which, 10 years on, only adds to the surreality: this was two years before Meghan Markle started dating the real Prince Harry. This Meghan was similarly caught up in the brainwashing, telling me: "At the end of the day, if someone is feeding you a shitburger and every day everyone around you is telling you: 'It's ground beef, it's ground beef, it's ground beef!', you start wondering: 'Wow, is this shitburger really ground beef?'"

I Wanna Marry "Harry" was unhinged as a format, yet it revealed a lot about the state of reality television at the time. Shocking shows were often used to draw in viewers, from Bridalplasty (in which women competed for plastic surgery ahead of their wedding day) to Touch the Truck (an endurance show to find out who could touch a truck for the longest amount of time without sleeping or wetting themselves). There was also Playing It Straight, where a woman had to guess how many of the male contestants she was dating were actually gay.

'My jaw was just to the floor' ... contestants Kimberly Birch and Meghan Ramsey Jones. Photograph: Fox/Fox Image Collection/Getty Images

The show most similar to I Wanna Marry "Harry" was perhaps Joe Millionaire, in which potential suitors were encouraged to believe they were dating someone rich - the twist being that at the end of the series he was revealed to be a "a working-class Joe". Hicks, of course, wasn't just pretending to be rich. He was pretending to be fourth in line to the British throne.

The ruse didn't always work, however. Several contestants were taken to London for dates, only to spot Prince Harry masks in the window of a card shop. "It jolted me right back into reality and it opened up my eyes to what was happening," said Birch. "It was like: 'Oh my God, that is what Prince Harry looks like! This guy is not Prince Harry!' My jaw was just to the floor, because it was such a validation. I felt so justified in all my questions and my resistance to everything."

Assuming the show was called Dream Date, the women were not informed that the real name of the show would be I Wanna Marry "Harry" until it had been revealed to the viewing public. "I was like: Oh my God, is this going to be terrible?" says Ramsey Jones. "The name of the show is horrible. It's going to be awful. They're saying all these horrible things about us."

Hopefully my podcast will serve as a handy reminder: next time you're laughing at someone behaving moronically on a reality show, remember that you never know what sneaky tricks have been going on behind the scenes.

The Bachelor of Buckingham Palace is on Wondery+ on 22 April.

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'It taught me about brainwashing': how reality show stars fell for a fake Prince Harry

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A show in which women competed to date a royal lookalike was panned at the time as 'fodder for the braindead'. But the contestants had been duped, as a new podcast reveals ...

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A BBC Future article, looking at how we become desensitized to awful events in the news, and how to avoid this happening. 

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A BBC Future article, looking at how we become desensitized to awful events in the news, and how to avoid this happening. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is ‘habituation’, and why does the article argue it can be harmful to us as we try to make sense of world events? What different forms can habituation take? How could political leaders take advantage of habituation? To wrap up: What are our personal responsibilities when it comes to resisting the normalization of violence and conflict?

KEY TERMS Habituation, Lead the news, Novelty, Zoom out, Longer term, Slow violence vs. slow resistance

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When people talk about "normalising" something in 2024, it's often with a positive slant. On social media and off, I've seen calls to normalise everything from postpartum bodies to having mental health conversations at work. The idea, of course, is to break down taboos that can be unhelpful, even dangerous.

But there's another kind of normalisation, and it's one that many people are far less aware of. It is less conscious, more pernicious - and can be harmful. This is the normalisation of trends, situations and events that really shouldn't be "normal" at all. You also might hear it referred to as "desensitisation", or "habituation".

Think of the wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza. The shocking events at the start of these conflicts were new and unexpected, elements which psychologists know draws the mind's attention. As time has passed, media coverage still happens, but these events are now less likely to lead the news in countries like the US, nor arise quite as often in the cultural conversation. Sadly, when a war has lasted months or years, research suggests that an extra week of fighting does not have the impact it did on day one.

How not to be manipulated

In today's onslaught of overwhelming information (and misinformation), it can be difficult to know who to trust. In this column, Amanda Ruggeri explores smart, thoughtful ways to navigate the noise. Drawing on insights from psychology, social science and media literacy, it offers practical advice, new ideas and evidence-based solutions for how to be a wiser, more discerning critical thinker.

This desensitisation also applies day-to-day life. Inner-city youth who grow up with violence are more likely to wind up thinking violence is normal, for example, while people expressed more anxiety about Covid-19 when the death toll was low than when it climbed into the hundreds of thousands. One particularly intriguing study, meanwhile, shows that people living in countries that are more exposed to the negative impacts of climate change actually see climate change as being lower-risk.

Other research shows that you can even become habituated to your own negative behaviour: when volunteers lied repeatedly in order to get more money, their lies became bigger and bigger over the course of the experiment - and the parts of their brain associated with emotions activated less and less. The takeaway, the researchers concluded, was that the more we do something, even something we know is wrong, the less uncomfortable with it we become.

Be exposed to anything enough, in other words, and that thing winds up being normalised. Even if it's bad.

Slow changes can happen without our awareness (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images)

Of course, this has upsides: to some degree, humans need to be able to adapt to new circumstances and situations, no matter how dire. Our species likely wouldn't have got very far - or, at least, wouldn't have had the emotional capacity to problem-solve, imagine, and create - if we'd walked around in a perpetual state of shock and anxiety.

But there are clear pitfalls. For one, this adaptability may be part of why humans have difficulty grappling with what sociologists call "slow violence" - those catastrophes that unfold without seeming urgency, making it difficult to recognise how much harm has been done until months or even years later. Think of the decades-long dumping of chemical waste that created Mississippi's "cancer alley", or the rise in global emissions.

It can also perpetuate a vicious cycle. The study on inner-city violence found that participants were more likely to perpetrate violence if they thought it was normal, for example. But this applies to larger, more complex issues, too. If someone doesn't think climate change is a big deal, why would they be motivated to do anything about it? If their awareness of humanitarian disasters is fading, will they still be as likely to share their concerns with representatives or donate to relevant charities?
How normalisation happens
When it comes to media consumption, this raises two questions: how can publishers cover a topic without desensitising their audience to it? And - as a smart, informed media consumer - how can you navigate the news to make sure you're not running that same risk?

Researchers have been exploring how being exposed to the same news issue over and over affects consumers. One study, for example, found that news consumers were more likely to become annoyed by coverage, and even to avoid it, when they felt like it was repetitive.

It's not just that viewers crave novelty, the researchers write. It's also that people get especially annoyed when they perceive that nothing's changing or improving. "Some users are particularly negative about the lack of progress and long, drawn-out coverage of the issue, which is in part traceable to the political actors involved", the researchers write.

Bad news on our screens can start to fade into the background eventually (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images)

This point is concerning. There are various subjects where ignoring them upholds the status quo and the powers-that-be. Think of how much less likely businesses and governments might be to take action on climate change, for example, if no one ever talked about it. Cynically, this could mean that the more leaders make minimal progress on an issue, the more bored with hearing about it people become. Theoretically, this could lead to that issue being covered less and less - and any pressure for progress on it falling apart, too.

Then there's the other issue, especially common when viewing news reports of other people suffering: if we feel too distressed by what we see, it can lead us to feel burnt out and want to shut out the coverage altogether.
How to avoid becoming desensitised
So what can we do? How can you stay on top of the news, without getting overwhelmed or desensitised? How can we navigate the many issues facing the world today, striking a balance between refusing to accept them as "normal" but also managing to carry on, ourselves?

When it comes to news consumption, researchers suggest consuming news more mindfully, such as at more specific times, when feeling overwhelmed by a particular crisis. Given the importance of novelty, I'd also suggest that, to stay well-informed, ensure your media diet is diverse. Even if it is a particular topic or crisis that you want to know more about, expand beyond the same outlet or even type of media. If you're following the Gaza-Israel war, don't just doom-scroll breaking news headlines; seek out foreign policy analyses and first-person essays, watch documentaries, listen to audio books, read poetry. And, crucially, consume perspectives from both sides of the war.

It's also important to remind yourself to zoom out. We'll be exploring this more in future columns, but for now, remember that a different angle on the present is to think longer-term. Perhaps that's looking backwards, trying to understand how we got here by swapping out some of your daily news coverage for, say, history books or documentaries. Or it might mean looking forwards - what might this mean for tomorrow? - and seeking out analyses that think about what our current decisions might mean for one, 100, and even 1,000 years from now.

We can become normalised to both humanitarian disasters faraway and events closer to home (Credit: Javier HIrschfeld/Getty Images)

What about our tendency to adapt to circumstances that affect us most directly, even those we shouldn't just accept as "normal"?

The first step is recognising that such habituation is happening at all. Take a moment to reflect: what things are you growing accustomed to, either in your household, your community, or your country, that, really, you wish you weren't?

Only then can you plan some actions. Some researchers suggest meeting "slow violence" with "slow resistance", or with "slow nonviolence", including incremental, everyday acts as simple as sharing knowledge about a topic.

The researchers behind the lying-to-get-more-money habituation study also suggest finding emotional distance from circumstances in order to view it with fresh eyes. If something you don't like about your own country is starting to feel "normal" to you, for example, you might talk to someone who lives in a different country, read about how the issue is handled elsewhere or (for those with the means) even travel abroad.

I'd also argue that, if there's an issue that is important to you, don't assume you'll feel as emotionally committed to it in a month, or a year, as you do now. Instead, turn taking action into a habit. Put in your calendar that you'll regularly spend five minutes writing to your political representatives, for example. Or set up a monthly, recurring donation to a charity that represents a cause you care about, instead of donating piecemeal when the motivation strikes. (Bonus: research has found that taking action on something distressing makes "burnout" on that topic less likely).

Perhaps above all, I'd keep one truth in mind: from the global slave trade to South Africa's apartheid, there are plenty of horrible situations that - for decades, even centuries - felt entrenched, impossible to change and that, at some point or another, would have been the "new normal".

But they did change. And circumstances we don't want to be part of our children's futures, or our own, can too.
*Amanda Ruggeri is an award-winning science and features journalist. She posts about expertise, media literacy and more on Instagram at @mandyruggeri.
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How the abnormal gets normalised - and what to do about it

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As we browse the news, it's easy to become desensitised to awful events. Amanda Ruggeri explores the psychology, and the steps you can take to avoid it happening.

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A Wired article, looking at whether it is possible to ‘vaccinate’ people against fake news.

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A Wired article, looking at whether it is possible to ‘vaccinate’ people against fake news.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What personal motivation does Sander van der Linden have for devoting himself to the prevention of misinformation? How do ‘psychological vaccines’ work - and what examples does the article give of them? Why does success in this field depend on the cooperation of social media companies (the “guardians of the online flow of information”), and how easy is it to gain this? To wrap up: In what ways is the TOK course a ‘vaccine against brainwashing’?

KEY TERMS Controlled exposure, Misinformation, Indoctrination, Cognitive immunizing agent, psychological vaccine, psychological vaccine

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The approach hinges on the idea that by the time we've been exposed to misinformation, it's too late for debunking and fact-checking to have any meaningful effect, so you have to prepare people in advance-what van der Linden calls "prebunking." An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

When he published the findings in 2016, van der Linden hadn't anticipated that his work would be landing in the era of Donald Trump's election, fake news, and post-truth; attention on his research from the media and governments exploded. Everyone wanted to know, how do you scale this up?

Van der Linden worked with game developers to create an online choose-your-own-adventure game called Bad News, where players can try their hand at writing and spreading misinformation. Much like a broadly protective vaccine, if you show people the tactics used to spread fake news, it fortifies their inbuilt bullshit detectors.

But social media companies were still hesitant to get on board; correcting misinformation and being the arbiters of truth is not part of their core business model. Then people in China started getting sick with a mysterious flulike illness.

The coronavirus pandemic propelled the threat of misinformation to dizzying new heights. Van der Linden began working with the British government and bodies like the World Health Organization and the United Nations to create a more streamlined version of the game specifically revolving around Covid, which they called GoViral! They created more versions, including one for the 2020 US presidential election, and another to prevent extremist recruitment in the Middle East. Slowly, Silicon Valley came around.

A collaboration with Google has resulted in a campaign on YouTube in which the platform plays clips in the ad section before the video starts, warning viewers about misinformation tropes like scapegoating and false dichotomies and drawing examples from Family Guy and Star Wars. A study with 20,000 participants found that people who viewed the ads were better able to spot manipulation tactics; the feature is now being rolled out to hundreds of millions of people in Europe.

Van der Linden understands that working with social media companies, who have historically been reluctant to censor disinformation, is a double-edged sword. But, at the same time, they're the de facto guardians of the online flow of information, he says, "and so if we're going to scale the solution, we need their cooperation." (A downside is that they often work in unpredictable ways. Elon Musk fired the entire team who was working on pre-bunking at Twitter when he became CEO, for instance.)

This year, van der Linden wrote a book on his research, titled Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity. Ultimately, he hopes this isn't a tool that stays under the thumb of third-party companies; his dream is for people to inoculate one another. It could go like this: You see a false narrative gaining traction on social media, you then warn your parents or your neighbor about it, and they'll be pre-bunked when they encounter it. "This should be a tool that's for the people, by the people," van der Linden says.
This article first appeared in the September/October 2023 edition of WIRED UK.

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This Psychologist Wants To Vaccinate You Against Fake News

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Controlled exposure to misinformation can help protect people from falling for it in the future, according to new research.

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A Conversation article, which explores how we become more objective when we use social media with someone from an opposing perspective. 

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A Conversation article, which explores how we become more objective when we use social media with someone from an opposing perspective. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What example does the article open with of how different perspectives lead us to either accept or reject online information? Why does misinformation matter, and what examples does the article give of how it manifests itself? What are the difficulties of researching the way people process online information, and how has the author of the article tried to overcome these? How does To wrap up: “Understanding that different perspectives determine the way we process information is the first step in overcoming the challenge of online misinformation.” Do you agree?

KEY TERMS Fact check, Perspective, Cultural identity, Political polarization, Bringing together people, Contentiousness, Experimental situations

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People dig deeper to fact-check social media posts when paired with someone who doesn’t share their perspective – new research

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A new study unexpectedly found a way to help people assess social media posts with less bias and more care – pairing them up with partners who have a different perspective.

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A CNN article, looking at the decision by several major news agencies to ‘kill’ the latest photo of Kate Middleton and her children because of suspicions that the image was manipulated.

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A CNN article, looking at the decision by several major news agencies to ‘kill’ the latest photo of Kate Middleton and her children because of suspicions that the image was manipulated.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why did several news agencies ‘kill’ the image of Kate Middleton and her children, released to mark Mothers’ Day? What does this indicate about the “stringent” rules followed by photo agencies and news organizations concerning image-use, and why do they have these rules? How is AI making verification of images increasingly difficult to follow? Why has this story fuelled online speculation about what is going on? To wrap up: How should we decide which images to trust to tell us the truth about the world?

KEY TERMS Manipulation concerns, Evidence, Inconsistency, Stringent rules, Trust, Rumors, Speculation

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News agencies recall image of Catherine, Princess of Wales, citing manipulation concerns | CNN

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Several major news agencies have pulled an image distributed by Kensington Palace showing Catherine, Princess of Wales and her children, saying they believe the photo has been manipulated.

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A Conversation article, exploring the way in which disinformation may disrupt democratic elections around the world in 2024, and whether it’s possible to counter its effect. 

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A Conversation article, exploring the way in which disinformation may disrupt democratic elections around the world in 2024, and whether it’s possible to counter its effect. 

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With over half the world's population heading to the polls in 2024, disinformation season is upon us - and the warnings are dire. The World Economic Forum declared misinformation a top societal threat over the next two years and major news organisations caution that disinformation poses an unprecedented threat to democracies worldwide.

Yet, some scholars and pundits have questioned whether disinformation can really sway election outcomes. Others think concern over disinformation is just a moral panic or merely a symptom rather than the cause of our societal ills. Pollster Nate Silver even thinks that misinformation " isn't a coherent concept ".

But we argue the evidence tells a different story.

A 2023 study showed that the vast majority of academic experts are in agreement about how to define misinformation (namely as false and misleading content) and what this looks like (for example lies, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience). Although the study didn't cover disinformation, such experts generally agree that this can be defined as intentional misinformation.

A recent paper clarified that misinformation can both be a symptom and the disease. In 2022, nearly 70% of Republicans still endorsed the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 US presidential election was "stolen" from Donald Trump. If Trump had never floated this theory, how would millions of people have possibly acquired these beliefs?

Moreover, although it is clear that people do not always act on dangerous beliefs, the January 6 US Capitol riots, incited by false claims, serve as an important reminder that a misinformed crowd can disrupt and undermine democracy.

Given that nearly 25% of elections are decided by a margin of under 3%, mis- and disinformation can have important influence. One study found that among previous Barack Obama voters who did not buy into any fake news about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, 89% voted for Clinton. By contrast, among prior Obama voters who believed at least two fake headlines about Clinton, only 17% voted for her.

While this doesn't necessarily prove that the misinformation caused the voting behaviour, we do know that millions of black voters were targeted with misleading ads discrediting Clinton in key swing states ahead of the election.

Research has shown that such micro-targeting of specific audiences based on variables such as their personality not only influences decision-making but also impacts voting intentions. A recent paper illustrated how large language models can be deployed to craft micro-targeted ads at scale, estimating that for every 100,000 individuals targeted, at least several thousand can be persuaded.

We also know that not only are people bad at discerning deepfakes (AI generated images of fake events) from genuine content, studies find that deepfakes do influence political attitudes among a small target group.

There are more indirect consequences of disinformation too, such as eroding public trust and participation in elections.

Other than hiding under our beds and worrying, what can we do to protect ourselves?

The power of prebunking

Many efforts have focused on fact-checking and debunking false beliefs. In contrast, "prebunking" is a new way to prevent false beliefs from forming in the first place. Such "inoculation" involves warning people not to fall for a false narrative or propaganda tactic, together with an explanation as to why.

Misinforming rhetoric has clear markers, such as scapegoating or use of false dichotomies (there are many others), that people can learn to identify. Like a medical vaccine, the prebunk exposes the recipient to a "weakened dose" of the infectious agent (the disinformation) and refutes it in a way that confers protection.

For example, we created an online game for the Department of Homeland Security to empower Americans to spot foreign influence techniques during the 2020 presidential election. The weakened dose? Pineapple pizza.

How could pineapple pizza possibly be the way to tackle misinformation? It shows how bad-faith actors can take an innocuous issue such as whether or not to put pineapple on pizza, and use this to try to start a culture war. They might claim it's offensive to Italians or urge Americans not to let anybody restrict their pizza-topping freedom.

They can then buy bots to amplify the issue on both sides, disrupt debate - and sow chaos. Our results showed that people improved in their ability to recognise these tactics after playing our inoculation game.

In 2020, Twitter identified false election tropes as potential "vectors of misinformation" and sent out prebunks to millions of US users warning them of fraudulent claims, such as that voting by mail is not safe.

These prebunks armed people with a fact - that experts agree that voting by mail is reliable - and it worked insofar as the prebunks inspired confidence in the election process and motivated users to seek out more factual information. Other social media companies, such as Google and Meta have followed suit across a range of issues.

A new paper tested inoculation against false claims about the election process in the US and Brazil. Not only did it found that prebunking worked better than traditional debunking, but that the inoculation improved discernment between true and false claims, effectively reduced election fraud beliefs and improved confidence in the integrity of the upcoming 2024 elections.

In short, inoculation is a free speech-empowering intervention that can work on a global scale. When Russia was looking for a pretext to invade Ukraine, US president Joe Biden used this approach to " inoculate " the world against Putin's plan to stage and film a fabricated Ukrainian atrocity, complete with actors, a script and a movie crew. Biden declassified the intelligence and exposed the plot.

In effect, he warned the world not to fall for fake videos with actors pretending to be Ukrainian soldiers on Russian soil. Forewarned, the international community was unlikely to fall for it. Russia found another pretext to invade, of course, but the point remains: forewarned is forearmed.

But we need not rely on government or tech firms to build mental immunity. We can all learn how to spot misinformation by studying the markers accompanying misleading rhetoric.

Remember that polio was a highly infectious disease that was eradicated through vaccination and herd immunity. Our challenge now is to build herd immunity to the tricks of disinformers and propagandists.

The future of our democracy may depend on it.

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Disinformation threatens global elections - here's how to fight back

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Scientists estimate that for every 100,000 people targeted with specific political ads, several thousand can be persuaded.

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A Euronews story about the world’s first AI influencer, Aitana López, who earns €10,000 per month for her ‘work’. 

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A Euronews story about the world’s first AI influencer, Aitana López, who earns €10,000 per month for her ‘work’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Who is Aitana López, and why/how was she created? What are your impressions of her - specifically, would you be persuaded to buy products, services, and places she is promoting? What are the ethical implications of online influencers becoming artificially-created? To wrap up: Where is the line between authenticity and fakeness within the online influencer industry? Does this question matter?

KEY TERMS Reality, Story, Vision of the brands, Blank canvas

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Meet the first Spanish AI model who earns up to €10,000 per month

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Aitana, 25, a pink-haired woman from Barcelona, receives weekly private messages from celebrities asking her out. But this model is not real.

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A Vox article, looking at the way misinformation proliferates during major crises - focusing on the Israel-Hamas war. 

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A Vox article, looking at the way misinformation proliferates during major crises - focusing on the Israel-Hamas war. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What reasons does the author of the article give for people ‘flocking’ to social media during times of crisis? Why is it difficult for journalists to verify or confirm reports posted on social media? What are the implications of many social media platforms choosing ‘engagement over reliability’? What four tips does the article offer, and how effective do you think these are? Students can also explore this article, which looks at the case of two children who were killed in the conflict - and whose deaths social media users falsely insisted had been faked. To wrap up: How do we balance our natural sense of outrage at what’s going on in the world with a responsibility to ensure we don’t fuel online misinformation about events?

KEY TERMS  Trust, Verification, Misinformation, False confirmations, Engagement vs. reliability, SIFT

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Don’t believe everything you see and hear about Israel and Palestine

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Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is easy to find online. Here’s how to avoid spreading it.

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A BBC article, considering whether photo and video manipulation on social media should be regulated by the authorities. 

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A BBC article, considering whether photo and video manipulation on social media should be regulated by the authorities. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What do apps such as FaceTune and Perfect365 allow us to do? Why do some people argue that these are “unhealthy” - and how have some countries (such as France and Norway) responded to them? What are the counterarguments offered by tech firms and influencers? Which side of the argument do students belong on? Overall, does the use of digitally manipulated imagery undermine our ability to understand the world objectively? What ethical obligations (if any) should be applied to the way we use social media?

KEY TERMS Face-altering filters, Photo manipulation, Unhealthy, Unrealistic, Transparency, Distorted perceptions

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The issue of photo manipulation on social media has long been a concern for many, but with the technology now increasingly extending to videos, should authorities intervene?

Krystle Berger insists that she is "not drastically changing my features" when she posts photos and videos across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. "I'm really just digitally giving myself the perfect make-up and lighting," she says.

A young mother from the US state of Indiana, Ms Berger pays to subscribe to an app called FaceTune that has been downloaded more than 200 million times around the world.

The app allows users to both make subtle changes to their facial appearance, such as smoothing over wrinkles, or alternatively - completely transform how they look. For example, they can narrow their face, change the shape and size of their eyes, or give themselves a digital nose-job.

Originally only able to work on photos, two years ago FaceTune launched a version for short selfie videos that has increasingly grown in its effectiveness since then.

Meanwhile, another popular app that allows users to alter their social media photos - Perfect365 - is due to launch its video version later this year.

FaceTune is owned by Israeli-firm Lightricks and two years ago the company was reported to have a valuation of $1.8bn (£1.4bn).

Lightricks' founder Zeev Farbman says that "the name of the game" is making the app work as easily as possible. "You want to give people 80% of the power, with 20% of the complexity of professional software. That's the game we are trying to play."

But it has long been argued that such tools are unhealthy, in that they promote an unrealistic view of beauty that can be dangerous, particularly for impressionable children and young adults. For example, 80% of teenage girls said they had changed their appearance in an online photo by the age of 13, according to a 2021 survey by skincare brand Dove.

While no-one is calling for the tech to be banned, there have been increasing moves to force social media advertisers and influencers - people who are often being paid to promote products in a more informal way - to admit when they have altered their physical image.

Norway introduced a law in 2021 that requires these two social media groups to indicate whether a photograph has been retouched. France is now going one stage further, and is in the process of demanding the same requirement, but for both photos and videos.

Meanwhile, the UK is now looking at the same issue, as the government's Online Safety Bill continues to make its way through Parliament. However, it remains to be seen whether the law will target just adverts on social media, or influencers as well.

A spokesperson for the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: "The government recognises the threat that digitally manipulated content can pose, and takes the issue very seriously."

Conservative MP Luke Evans has long campaigned for advertisers and influencers to admit when they have altered an image on social media.

He wants to see the new law "contain future proofed regulation", so it also requires the same admission for altered videos, and any other tech developments.

"It's imperative that we have wider awareness and increased transparency surrounding these new technologies," he says. "For me this is all about honesty."

New Tech Economy is a series exploring how technological innovation is set to shape the new emerging economic landscape.

Mr Farbman's response is that while "this conversation was always there... over time the acceptance of these tools just grows". He adds that it is a free speech issue. "It's always kind of weird to me that a company will decide to limit the expressive freedom of its users, because of aesthetic or ethical sensibilities."

Sean Mao, the chief executive of San Francisco-based Perfect365, urges people to use its app "in a safe and ethical way". He adds: "We encourage people to use the app to express their creativity and not to use the app with malicious intent to deceive others or misrepresent themselves."

Psychologist Stuart Duff, a partner at UK practice Pearn Kandola, says that some social media influencers will always be tempted to use tricks to improve their online appearance - because being good-looking sells.

"Physical attraction has a very strong but often unconscious influence on our decisions when it comes to buying products and services from others," he says.

"When asked what matters most, we consciously talk down the importance of physical appearance and talk up qualities such as intelligence, values and personality, yet psychological research consistently reveals a strong positive relationship between a person's attractiveness and their ability to sell to us."

One social media influencer who goes by the name of Brandon B has 5.6 million subscribers on YouTube. He takes the view that photo and video manipulation apps should be seen in a positive light.

"I'm glad these apps exist, because I think there are a lot of people who are not body positive enough to present on social media, so they might feel left out," he says. "These tools help them get on social media."

However, Dr Shira Brown, an emergency physician at South Niagara Hospital, in Ontario, Canada, says that "distorted perceptions of body image" appear to be being "exacerbated by common social media practices".

She adds: "We see the urgent mental health consequences of social media in our departments on a daily basis, such as anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and depression."

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Should social media face-altering filters be regulated?

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The issue of photo manipulation on social media has long been a concern for many, but with the technology now increasingly extending to videos, should authorities intervene? Krystle Berger insists that she is "not drastically changing my features" when she posts photos and videos across Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.

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A Conversation article, considering whether misinformation is not just factually wrong, but ethically wrong as well. 

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A Conversation article, considering whether misinformation is not just factually wrong, but ethically wrong as well. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is epistemic humility, and how might this help us to approach the world objectively? What are WK Clifford’s two main points about belief, and how do they lead us to the conclusion that believing in something with insufficient evidence is ethically unacceptable? Do you agree that “developing and nurturing critical thinking is an ethical responsibility”? Overall, do students believe that we’re on a moral mission as TOK teachers and learners?

Key terms Disinformation and misinformation, Epistemology, Truth, Responsibility, Ethically wrong, Epistemic humility, Insufficient evidence

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The impact of disinformation and misinformation has become impossible to ignore. Whether it is denial about climate change, conspiracy theories about elections, or misinformation about vaccines, the pervasiveness of social media has given "alternative facts" an influence previously not possible.

Bad information isn't just a practical problem - it's a philosophical one, too. For one thing, it's about epistemology, the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with knowledge: how to discern truth, and what it means to "know" something, in the first place.

But what about ethics? People often think about responsibility in terms of actions and their consequences. We seldom discuss whether people are ethically accountable for not just what they do, but what they believe - and how they consume, analyze or ignore information to arrive at their beliefs.

So when someone embraces the idea that mankind has never touched the Moon, or that a mass shooting was a hoax, are they not just incorrect, but ethically wrong?

Know the good, do the good

Some thinkers have argued the answer is yes - arguments I've studied in my own work as an ethicist.

Even back in the 5th century B.C., Socrates linked epistemology and ethics implicitly. Socrates is mostly known through his students' writings, such as Plato's " Republic," in which Plato depicts Socrates' endeavors to uncover the nature of justice and goodness. One of the ideas attributed to Socrates is often summarized with the adage that "to know the good is to do the good."

The idea, in part, is that everyone seeks to do what they think is best - so no one errs intentionally. To err ethically, in this view, is the result of a mistaken belief about what the good is, rather than an intent to act unjustly.

More recently, in the 19th century, British mathematician and philosopher W.K. Clifford linked the process of belief formation with ethics. In his 1877 essay " The Ethics of Belief," Clifford made the forceful ethical claim that it is wrong - always, everywhere and for everyone - to believe something without sufficient evidence.

In his view, we all have an ethical duty to test our beliefs, to check our sources and to place more weight in scientific evidence than anecdotal hearsay. In short, we have a duty to cultivate what today might be called "epistemic humility": the awareness that we ourselves can hold incorrect beliefs, and to act accordingly.

Lectures and Essays by the Late William Kingdon Clifford, F.R.S./Wikimedia Commons

As a philosopher interested in disinformation and its relationship to ethics and public discourse, I think there is a lot to be gained from his essay. In my own research, I have argued that each us has a responsibility to be mindful of how we form our beliefs, insofar as we are fellow citizens with a common stake in our larger society.

Setting sail

Clifford begins his essay with the example of a ship owner who has chartered his vessel to a group of emigrants leaving Europe for the Americas. The owner has reason to doubt the boat is in a seaworthy-enough condition to cross the Atlantic, and considers having the boat thoroughly overhauled to make sure it is safe.

In the end, though, he convinces himself otherwise, suppressing and rationalizing away any doubts. He wishes the passengers well with a light heart. When the ship goes down midsea, and the ship's passengers with it, he quietly collects the insurance.

Most people would probably say the ship owner was at least somewhat ethically to blame. After all, he neglected his due diligence to make sure the ship was sound before its voyage.

What if the ship had been fit for voyage and made the trip safely? It would be no credit to the owner, Clifford argues, because he had no right to believe it was safe: He'd chosen not to learn whether it was seaworthy.

In other words, it's not only the owner's actions - or lack of action - that have ethical implications. His beliefs do, too.

In this example it is easy to see how belief guides actions. Part of Clifford's larger point, however, is that a person's beliefs always hold the potential to affect others and their actions.

No man - or idea - is an island

There are two premises that can be found in Clifford's essay.

The first is that each belief creates the cognitive conditions for related beliefs to follow. In other words, once you hold one belief, it becomes easier to believe in similar ideas.

This is borne out in contemporary cognitive science research. For example, a number of false conspiratorial beliefs - like the belief that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings - are found to correspond with the likelihood of a person falsely believing that climate change is a hoax.

Clifford's second premise is that no human beings are so isolated that their beliefs won't at some point influence other people.

People do not arrive at their beliefs in a vacuum. The influence of family, friends, social circles, media and political leaders on others' views is well documented. Studies show that mere exposure to misinformation can have a lasting cognitive impact on how we interpret and remember events, even after the information has been corrected. In other words, once accepted, misinformation creates a bias that resists revision.

Taking these points together, Clifford argues that it is always wrong - not just factually, but ethically - to believe something on insufficient evidence. This point does not assume that each person always has the resources to develop an informed belief on each topic. He argues it is acceptable to defer to experts if they exist, or withhold judgment on matters where one has no sound grounding for an informed belief.

That said, as Clifford suggests in his essay, theft is still harmful, even if the thief has never been exposed to the lesson that it is wrong.

An ounce of prevention

Arguing that people are ethically responsible for nonevidential beliefs doesn't necessarily mean they are blameworthy. As I have argued in other work, Clifford's premises show the morally relevant nature of belief formation. It is enough to suggest that developing and nurturing critical thinking is an ethical responsibility, without denouncing every person who holds a belief that can't be supported as inherently immoral.

Ethics is often talked about as if it were merely a matter of identifying and chastising bad behaviors. Yet, as far back as Plato and Socrates, ethics has been about offering guidance for a life well lived in community with others.

Likewise, the ethics of belief can serve as a reminder of how important it is, for other people's sakes, to develop good habits of inquiry. Learning to identify fallacious arguments can be a kind of cognitive inoculation against misinformation.

That might mean renewing educational institutions' investment in disciplines that, like philosophy, have historically taught students how to think critically and communicate clearly. Modern society tends to look for technological mechanisms to guard us against misinformation, but the best solution might still be a solid education with generous exposure to the liberal arts - and ensuring all citizens have access to it.

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Bad beliefs: Misinformation is factually wrong - but is it ethically wrong, too?

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A philosopher unpacks the 'ethics of belief' for an age awash in bad information.

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A Huffington Post article exploring the rise of a new social media platform, which claims to offer users an ‘unbiased’ environment in which to air their views. 

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A Huffington Post article exploring the rise of a new social media platform, which claims to offer users an ‘unbiased’ environment in which to air their views. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Students can begin by thinking about the extent to which we can retrieve and post objective knowledge on current social media platforms. Does the need to prevent the dissemination of hateful and harmful opinions undermine this objectivity? Is there a need to do this? Is Parler the answer to these problems? Are objective social media platforms attainable?

Key terms Unbiased, Tech tyrant, Free speech

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Parler, a social media site marketing itself as an "unbiased" alternative to Twitter, promises users "the right to express your thoughts, opinions and ideals online." But there's a catch: If Parler gets sued over something you post online, the company could make you pay its legal fees.

In recent days, several prominent conservatives have proclaimed that they will join Parler, which has been actively recruiting right-wingers who are disgruntled with the supposed anti-conservative bias on Twitter - a baseless right-wing grievance that has been accelerated by Twitter's new, albeit occasional, practice of noting that some of President Donald Trump's tweets are " misleading" or threaten or glorify violence.

The Trump campaign is reportedly considering building up a presence on Parler's platform, and Trump's 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, already has an account. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany announced on Thursday that she had created a Parler account, joining such Republican politicians and Trump allies as Reps. Devin Nunes, Thomas Massie, Jim Jordan, Elise Stefanik and Matt Gaetz, Sen. Ted Cruz, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

According to Parler, Twitter has become "a Tech Tyrant, stepping on our Freedoms to push their agenda driven narrative." Parler claims that, by contrast, its platform offers "free speech social media focused on protecting user's rights."

In fact, Parler's user agreement and community guidelines ban several forms of speech protected under the First Amendment. And it reserves the right to "remove any content and terminate your access" to the platform "at any time and for any reason or no reason."

Unlike Twitter or Facebook, Parler requires users to "agree to defend and indemnify Parler, as well as any of its officers, directors, employees, and agents, from and against any and all claims, actions, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to all attorneys fees) arising from or relating to your access to and use of the Services."

In order to use Parler, individuals must also forfeit their right to sue Parler in court or join a class-action claim and instead must settle disputes in arbitration, a secretive process that typically favors businesses over individuals bringing complaints. (Neither Twitter nor Facebook requires arbitration in their terms of service.)

Parler was founded in 2018 in Henderson, Nevada, by software engineers John Matze and Jared Thomson. The company's website says they were " exhausted with a lack of transparency in big tech, ideological suppresssion [sic] and privacy abuse " so they created their own alternative.

But as Matze and Thomson apparently realized, running a minimally regulated social media platform that allows users to spread disinformation and violent threats is a risky endeavor.

"Every time anyone tries to say, 'This is the platform that really protects free speech,' they're lying. I mean, they have the same rules and regulations as most other companies with a few more thrown in - and the indemnification clause on top of that," Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law, said in an interview. "It's a false statement to begin with to say that there's anything meaningfully different about this space."

Parler did not respond to a list of questions about its user agreement.

If enforced as written, the platform's indemnity clause could be financially devastating for the average American. Although Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act largely protects social media companies from legal responsibility for what people say and do on their platform, the companies can still be sued and it costs money to successfully fight cases in court.

Twitter, for example, spent more than a year defending itself in a lawsuit brought by Rep. Nunes over parody Twitter accounts that made fun of him before a judge ruled that the company was protected by Section 230. (The California lawmaker has urged his followers on Twitter to " SAY NO TO SOCIALISM " and join him on Parler.)

If Nunes decided to sue Parler for letting people make fun of him on its platform, Parler would probably win in court, just like Twitter did. But under its user agreement, the company could try to force the user who mocked the congressman to pay its legal fees.

"Parler gives users a false sense of safety that they can be controversial and less moderated than other platforms, but Parler in reality passes all costs of this unfettered speech onto the speakers," Carrie Goldberg, a New York-based lawyer with expertise in online harassment, told HuffPost.

If Parler gets sued by someone outside the U.S., in a country without a law similar to Section 230, there's a higher risk the company would lose the case and face a costly judgment - which it could try to pass on to the user whose post prompted litigation.

"Absolute free speech on a commercial platform is demonstrably harder than people think. Parler shows one way to plug the leak is with your users' money," wrote Twitter user Wolf Lawyer, who first flagged Parler's indemnity clause.

Some free-speech warriors may be willing to risk going bankrupt paying for Parler's lawyers in exchange for access to a social media platform that allows them to post whatever they want. But Parler doesn't even offer that. Its community guidelines warn users to avoid spam, blackmail, bribery, plagiarism, support for terrorist organizations, spreading false rumors, suggesting people should die, describing "sexual organs or activity," showing "female nipples," and using language or visuals "that are offensive and offer no literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Parler also advises users against "any other speech federally illegal in USA," which the platform incorrectly claims includes doxing and "content glorifying violence against animals."

Parler's guidelines "appear to be written to make it misleadingly look like wholly discretionary aspects of their moderation policy are legally required," Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, wrote on Twitter.

If it wanted, Parler could legally allow much of the content it restricts in its community guidelines. But like other private companies, it has made a business decision against providing a completely unregulated, unmoderated platform.

Perhaps the greatest irony of Parler positioning itself as a free-speech haven for people who are outraged by Twitter attaching a warning to a few of the president's most unhinged tweets is the fact that Parler grants itself the right to remove any post or ban any user from its platform for literally "no reason."

With terms of service at least as restrictive as mainstream tech platforms, the real allure of Parler appears to be the hope that in actively recruiting far-right individuals - including some who have been kicked off Twitter for being too racist - Parler is suggesting it won't enforce certain parts of its community guidelines. And so far, it hasn't. A quick search shows that Parler has become another space for white supremacist propaganda and conspiracy theories - including calls to "gas the kikes," start a "race war" and "red pill boomers on Jews and the anti-white agenda," as well as claims that the police killing of George Floyd was a "hoax."

But at least the president might finally find a safe space to post about deploying the military to shoot American citizens who are exercising their First Amendment right to protest.

Twitter Politics Social Media freedom of speech Parler

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

Suggest a correction

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On Parler, The Right-Wing Social Media Site, Free Speech Isn't Free

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Parler, a social media site marketing itself as an "unbiased" alternative to Twitter, promises users "the right to express your thoughts, opinions and ideals online." But there's a catch: If Parler gets sued over something you post online, the company could make you pay its legal fees.

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A Sky News video and article, looking at the debut of the world’s first AI newsreader, in Kuwait. 

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A Sky News video and article, looking at the debut of the world’s first AI newsreader, in Kuwait. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Who is ‘Fedha’, and what are students opinions of ‘her’? Is this the answer to approaching the world in an objective way? Compare Fedha to the ideas in this article - which point of view do students agree with? Overall, do events and issues going on in the world require a ‘human touch’ in order to communicate them effectively, or is emotion always an enemy to objectivity?

KEY TERMS New and innovative, Represents

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AI generated newsreader debuts in Kuwait

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The blonde-haired computer-generated woman named “Fedha” appeared on Kuwait News’ Twitter feed over the weekend.

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A Sky News report, discussing New York mayor Eric Adams’s use of audio deep fakes to make promotional calls in languages he doesn’t speak. 

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A Sky News report, discussing New York mayor Eric Adams’s use of audio deep fakes to make promotional calls in languages he doesn’t speak. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How has mayor Eric Adams been using AI tools to communicate with residents? Why have some people called this ‘unethical’ and ‘Orwellian’? What is your position on the story - is his use of AI justified? To wrap up: Where is the line between AI-usage that facilitates our ability to communicate with others, and AI-usage that misleads us when we communicate with others?

KEY TERMS  Robocalls, Unethical, Orwellian

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New York's mayor has admitted using audio deepfakes to call residents in languages he doesn't speak.

Eric Adams has been heard speaking Spanish and Mandarin thanks to the technology, which he said was a way to reach more people.

Speaking at a news briefing (in English), the Democrat said the "robocalls" were used to promote local events like recruitment fairs and concerts.

The self-described "techie" insisted he had enjoyed positive feedback from residents, saying some he'd spoken to were "excited" to hear their mayor in their own language.

"We are becoming more welcoming by using technology to speak a multitude of languages," he added.

"To all, all I can say is ni hao (Mandarin for hello)," is how he cheekily signed off the conference, having been asked whether the phone calls were potentially misleading people.

Local news outlet The City reports more than four million people have been reached by the calls so far, including thousands in Spanish and hundreds in Yiddish, Mandarin, and Cantonese.

They are generated using voice tech firm ElevenLabs, which was left embarrassed earlier this year when its software was used to generate celebrity voices reading inappropriate statements.

Spotify is experimenting with similar tools to translate podcasts into other languages.
'Deeply unethical'
Following the news conference, the mayor was criticised by campaigners who described the calls as "unethical", as they don't include any clarification that the voice is artificially generated.

Albert Fox Cahn, from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said it was a "creepy vanity project".

"The mayor is making deep fakes of himself," he said.

"This is deeply unethical, especially on the taxpayer's dime. Using AI to convince New Yorkers that he speaks languages that he doesn't is deeply Orwellian."
Read more:
Twelve AI problems that 'must be addressed'
Tom Hanks warns fans not to fall for deepfake ad
1:51
Mayor won't 'run away' from AI despite risks
The potential threat posed to democracy by the technology has recently been underlined by fake clips targeting UK Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

Mr Adams acknowledged concerns around such generative AI, including those used to create images and videos, but said he would not be "running away" from the tools.

He also used the news briefing to tout a new chatbot service to help small business owners.

It's powered by Microsoft technology with an interface similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, and allows users to ask questions about applying for local programmes and advice on how to run a company.

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New York's mayor uses audio deepfakes to call residents in languages he doesn't speak

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Eric Adams doesn't speak Spanish or Mandarin, but left some locals wondering if he was actually an expert linguist after a series of promotional calls.

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A Time article, looking at the debate over whether to rename India ‘Bharat’, and the political motivations behind this change.

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A Time article, looking at the debate over whether to rename India ‘Bharat’, and the political motivations behind this change.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE  Why is there talk of a name-change to India? What is the historical background to changing the country’s name? From the information here, do you think this is an example of a country distancing itself from its colonial past and finding a more ‘appropriate’ name, or a “nationalist push” that indicates “pettiness & intolerance”? To wrap up: What is conveyed by a country’s name, and what relationship do they have with the management of power?

KEY TERMS Controversy, Nationalist push, Colonial past, Appropriate, Intolerance, Authentic

LINKS TO Politics, Language, History

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Why Some Hindu Nationalists Want to Rename India

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An official invitation to a G-20 Summit dinner with the President of India referred to the country as “Bharat.”

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A Vox article, considering the way in which the word ‘brunch’ has become a politicized term.

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A Vox article, considering the way in which the word ‘brunch’ has become a politicized term.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do words become politicized?

Key terms Meme, Insular mindset

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The politics of “going back to brunch” after a Biden win

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The meal is a meme used to mock centrist Democrats’ complacency and political indifference.

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A Guardian article about the use of the ‘dead cat’ tactic in British politics. 

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A Guardian article about the use of the ‘dead cat’ tactic in British politics. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the relationship between language and politics?

Key terms Dead cat

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The Savile row: your questions answered about Boris Johnson's false claims that Keir Starmer failed to prosecute sex offender Jimmy Savile.

Speculation began circulating online in 2020 that Starmer had a role in the decision not to prosecute the TV and radio presenter before his death in 2011.

Shortly after Savile's death, hundreds of his victims said he had abused them in hospitals, schools and on the sets of BBC programmes.

Police on several occasions had investigated abuse claims against Savile while he was alive, and he was interviewed under caution in 2009 by Surrey police but no arrest was made.

Starmer, the current Labour party leader, was the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and head of the CPS from 2008 until 2013.

This has prompted claims online, particularly among far-right activists and so-called "paedophile hunters", that Starmer had a role in a decision not to prosecute.

Keir Starmer criticised Johnson for his remarks during PMQs Photograph: Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/EPA

Amid calls for his resignation over "partygate" claims, Johnson said on Monday that Starmer "used his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile".

After facing criticism for his comments from lawyers representing Savile's victims, the Speaker of the House Lindsay Hoyle, and several senior Conservatives, Johnson on Wednesday doubled down on his claims.

The prime minister refused to withdraw the comments and told MPs: "I am informed that in 2013 the right honourable gentleman apologised and took full responsibility for what had happened on his watch."

No.

The CPS has confirmed that there is no reference to any involvement from Starmer in the decision-making within an official report examining the case.

Surrey police consulted the CPS for advice about the allegations after interviewing Savile's victims, according to a 2013 CPS statement made by Starmer as DPP.

The official report, written by Alison Levitt QC, found that in October 2009 the CPS lawyer responsible for the cases - who was not Starmer - advised that no prosecution could be brought on the grounds that none of the complainants were "prepared to support any police action".

Levitt said in the report that Savile might have been prosecuted if the police and prosecutors had taken a different approach.

After the publication of the Levitt report in 2013 Starmer apologised for the CPS' shortcomings, not his own.

Starmer said: "I would like to take the opportunity to apologise for the shortcomings in the part played by the CPS in these cases.

"These were errors of judgment by experienced and committed police officers and a prosecuting lawyer acting in good faith and attempting to apply the correct principles. That makes the findings of Ms Levitt's report more profound and calls for a more robust response."

There is no hard evidence as yet that the Tories are "dead-catting" - introducing a shocking or sensationalist topic to divert discourse away from a more damaging topic.

But Lynton Crosby, the Australian political strategist nicknamed the Wizard of Oz, has been hired to advise Johnson during the current crisis, the prime minister told Tory MPs on Monday.

Johnson has previously praised an unnamed Australian political strategist - widely thought to be Crosby - for suggesting the tactic when losing an argument.

"The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case. Your best bet in these circumstances is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as 'throwing a dead cat on the table, mate'," Johnson wrote in a Telegraph column in 2013.

"That is because there is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table - and I don't mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant.

"The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout 'Jeez, mate, there's a dead cat on the table!'; in other words they will be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief."

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Why is Boris Johnson making false claims about Starmer and Savile?

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The Savile row: your questions answered about Boris Johnson's false claims that Keir Starmer failed to prosecute sex offender Jimmy Savile. Speculation began circulating online in 2020 that Starmer had a role in the decision not to prosecute the TV and radio presenter before his death in 2011.

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A BBC article and video, looking at the way President Zelensky adapts his language and message according to the audience he is dealing with. 

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A BBC article and video, looking at the way President Zelensky adapts his language and message according to the audience he is dealing with. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How and why does he use ‘undiplomatic language’ to communicate with other world leaders and parliaments? What other means of communication does he employ other than words? How does he tailor his message, and the way the message is delivered, to fit his audience? How does his background help him to make an intimate connection with those listening to him?

Key terms Highly tailored, Visceral, Undiplomatic language, Perspective

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‘Shame on you’: How President Zelensky uses speeches to get what he needs

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In 10 parliaments over two weeks Ukraine’s leader has used shame and national trauma to set a global agenda.

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A Guardian article, which suggests that the arts provide us with more insight into what’s going on in Ukraine than usual news bulletins. 

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A Guardian article, which suggests that the arts provide us with more insight into what’s going on in Ukraine than usual news bulletins. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What don’t the news headlines tell us about the war in Ukraine? What insights can we gain by looking at the work of Ukrainian artists, writers, playwrights and filmmakers? How does Charlotte Higgins challenge the idea that art is “less immediate and instructive” than the news? Students can also check out this poem published in Sapiens, in which poet-anthropologist Josh Yarden attempts to bridge social and geopolitical divides via the arts. To wrap up: “Human “reality” does not consist only in the external world going about its rational business, but in our imaginations.” (Deborah Levy) Do you agree that to fully understand reality, we need to consult artistic as well as news sources?

KEY TERMS Homes and hearts, Behind the lines, Immediate and instructive, Witness to experience

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Russia's war against Ukraine has never been only about territory and artillery, about politicians and putative peace deals. Of course, that is the easiest and most acceptable register in which to consider unthinkable violence: as a geopolitical problem happening at a far distance. But Russia's aggression is an event of shocking magnitude in every individual life in Ukraine, and in lives elsewhere, too. The war is not only happening on the frontline but in homes and hearts. Deaths are mourned. Lives that were once straightforward have been propelled into directions that were never sought or wanted. Ambitions have been abandoned and plans have been cast aside. The war has crept like a mist into every chink of domestic life, into the tender, tremulous matters of love and sex, into the school day where cheerful young Ukrainian kids, alongside maths and English, get lessons on never, ever touching something that might be a mine.

"What we don't see in the news headlines is conversations around the kitchen table - families discussing, for example, how much fuel they would need if they suddenly had to flee to Warsaw," said Uilleam Blacker, associate professor of Ukrainian and East European culture at University College London, at an event last week. To come close to the feeling and texture of war as it is lived behind the lines - and behind front doors - it is necessary to turn to the work of Ukrainian artists, writers, playwrights and filmmakers. Blacker was in conversation with Natalya Vorozhbit, one of Ukraine's most significant playwrights, and Molly Flynn, the editor of a new anthology of Ukrainian plays in English translation, which were all written in the wake of the Maidan protests a decade ago. Since then, Ukraine has seen an efflorescence of documentary theatre, often rapid and reactive, and centred on ordinary lives - work that has formed a kind of artistic parallel to Ukraine's vigorous civil society.

This writing has been grounded in realism, but not always in expected ways. Vorozhbit's play Take the Rubbish Out, Sasha, written in 2014, deals with a family coping with the death, in the war in the Donbas, of Sasha, a father and husband. The play starts after his death; his presence is initially a portrait on the wall. Then he begins to speak: a ghost, if you like. British author Deborah Levy once described how human "reality" does not consist only in the external world going about its rational business, but in our imaginations, thoughts and fantasies, which are also real events in our lives. Through our daydreams and reveries, we can time travel, talk to, and be addressed by, the dead. Such things are not the material of sober reports or news bulletins, but they are as meaningful, and they are the territory of art.

A scene from 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov. Photograph: Mstyslav Chernov/AP

In Kyiv last autumn, I met a group of playwrights who were debating how to write in the thick of the full-scale war. In the immediate wake of 24 February 2022, it had felt difficult, and perhaps unimportant, to write at all, they told me: the focus was on how to survive. In the months that followed, though, there was an outpouring of documentary theatre, closely based on real accounts of stories of escape and survival. And last year, they told me, they detected a fresh turn in Ukrainian theatre. Some playwrights were using comedy in their work, some fantasy, some even forms of sci-fi. Playwright Oksana Grytsenko told me she was writing a play about Ukraine's toppled statues of writer Alexander Pushkin coming alive to join the Russian military. When life is turned on its head, surreality and metaphor might provide the only accurate way to express a situation. Similarly, poetry is flourishing in Ukraine: it is the medium capable of expressing how violence explodes meaning; how it cuts into and unravels the plot coherence of individuals' lives.

You might think that reading a poem about the war, or looking at a painting or watching a film, might somehow be a secondary experience, less immediate and instructive than, say, watching the news. I suspect the opposite is true: in the hands of a good artist, you can be plunged into the life of another human, all distance eradicated, all boundaries collapsed. This can be extraordinarily painful, as in the Bafta-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, whose director, Mstyslav Chernov, thrusts the viewer right inside the besieged city. Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk wrote a poem recently, which Blacker translated last week. It begins by considering a scene of recent horror and death. "Watching from afar, you can always stop in time, / not get too close, where the eye sees too much". Literature, she writes, can edge us towards a position where we can absorb what might otherwise be unendurable details: "The child's shoe, which flew into the air from the child's foot, / when they were mixed with the shards of glass and concrete, the women's broken fingernail emerging from the rubble, / the unblurred remains of the body". A poem can offer a way of seeing an unblurred reality, in its bright and painful glare, Kruk suggests: the boundaries of artistic form contain it, and make it - just - bearable to see.

I think a lot about the tender paintings by Lucy Ivanova I saw last month in an exhibition at the Jam Factory, a newly opened arts centre in Lviv. Using the simple means at her disposal - small canvases, sketchbooks - she painted the most intimate scenes: her husband Yehor scrolling through the news, or sitting on the edge of the bed; the two of them naked, she heavily pregnant, in the kitchen of a temporary apartment; later, her son Sava at five days old. These works of art are also a witness to experience and the foundations of cultural memory. This, too, is the war.

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Art shows the surreal reality of wartime Ukraine in a way the news never could | Charlotte Higgins

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Reading a poem about the war may seem less instructive than watching the latest bulletins. I suspect the opposite is true, says Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian's chief culture writer

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 A New York Times story, exploring the stark difference in the way the Greek migrant boat sinking, and the Titan submersible implosion, were reported. 

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 A New York Times story, exploring the stark difference in the way the Greek migrant boat sinking, and the Titan submersible implosion, were reported. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why have many people commented on the role of status and race in determining the way the two stories were told in the media? What examples does the article give to indicate that it is not only status and race that leads to coverage in the news? What point is made about the fact that we find it easier to feel compassion for individual victims - and what is the relevance of this? How does ‘compassion fatigue’ affect the way we process the news? To wrap up: How do we ensure that we remain objective and compassionate about tragic events and issues going on in the world?

KEY TERMS Class and ethnicity, Unequal treatment, Degree of familiarity, Compassion fatigue

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5 Deaths at Sea Gripped the World. Hundreds of Others Got a Shrug.

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Many see harsh realities about class and ethnicity in the attention paid to the Titan submersible and the halfhearted attempts to aid a ship before it sank, killing hundreds of migrants. But there are other factors.

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A (hilarious) Guardian article, exploring a range of AI-generated news websites, and assessing their accuracy. 

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A (hilarious) Guardian article, exploring a range of AI-generated news websites, and assessing their accuracy. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What sites did Matthew Cantor investigate in order to write the article? What characteristics did the sites have that undermined their credibility? What dangers does Cantor identify about the way these sites convey information (hint: refer to the ‘AI wild west’)? Overall, how should the problems associated with AI-generated journalism inform the way we construct our knowledge about the world?

KEY TERMS False information, Cycle of fake news, Glimpses of true humanity, Trust, AI wild west

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Breaking news from celebritiesdeaths.com: the president is dead.

At least that's what the highly reliable website informed its readers last month, under the no-nonsense headline "Biden dead. Harris acting president, address 9am ET". The site explained that Joe Biden had "passed away peacefully in his sleep" and Kamala Harris was taking over, above a bizarre disclaimer: "I'm sorry, I cannot complete this prompt as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy on generating misleading content."

Celebritiesdeaths.com is among 49 supposed news sites that NewsGuard, an organization tracking misinformation, has identified as "almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software". The sites publish up to hundreds of articles daily, according to the report, much of that material containing signs of AI-generated content, including "bland language and repetitive phrases". Some of the articles contain false information and many of the sites are packed with ads, suggesting they're intended to make money via programmatic, or algorithmically generated, advertising. The sources of the stories aren't clear: many lack bylines or use fake profile photos. In other words, NewsGuard says, experts' fears that entire news organizations could be generated by AI have already become reality.

It's hard to imagine who would believe this stuff - if Biden had died, the New York Times would probably cover it - and all 49 sites contain at least one instance of AI error messaging containing phrases such as "I cannot complete this prompt" or "as an AI language model". But, as Futurism points out, a big concern here is that false information on the sites could serve as the basis for future AI content, creating a vicious cycle of fake news.

What do these sites look like - and would AI articles always be as easy to spot as the report of Biden's death? I spent an afternoon in the brave new world of digital nonsense to find out.

The first stop was Get Into Knowledge, which offers a huge amount of knowledge to get into, all of it regurgitated on to the homepage seemingly at random. (We won't link to the sites here to avoid boosting them further.)

The Get Into Knowledge homepage. Photograph: Screenshot/Getintoknowledge.com

The headlines seemed like the work of translation software. One category was "amazing reasons behind": for instance, a lengthy article on "Why do dogs eat grass? - amazing reasons behind" and "Why is yawning contagious? - 10 Amazing Science Facts behind". A piece on whether oceans freeze was based on "Massive science", and the site dares to ask questions such as "why is the Sky Blue but the Space black?" and the even more poetic "Does the gravity of Mars the same as Earth's?", something I've often wondered. I started to wonder if the language was too odd to be the work of ChatGPT, which tends to be readable, if boring.

That was the case with the articles themselves. They're ordered like presentations, with an outline at the top and paragraphs arranged by number. But there are glimpses of true humanity: for instance, the piece on grass-eating dogs refers to them as our "furry friends" six times. These pieces certainly read like the work of AI, and a person who identified himself to NewsGuard as the site's founder said the site used "automation at some points where they are extremely needed". (The site did not immediately reply to emails from the Guardian.)

Once I'd gotten into enough knowledge, I visited celebritiesdeaths.com, which earnestly describes itself as "news on famous figures who have died" - a refreshing change from outlets like Us Weekly that insist on covering figures who are still alive.

Other than the Biden snafu, the deaths that I factchecked had actually occurred, though they appear to have stopped in March: links to deaths in April and May didn't work. Fortunately, the shortage of deaths in those months was balanced by individuals' repeated deaths in March: the last surviving Czech second world war RAF pilot, for instance, apparently died on both the 25th and the 26th.

I also learned that a "dumpling empire founder" died on 26 March, which was impressive information given that the article claimed to have been posted on 26 February. Celebritiesdeaths.com did not deem it necessary to provide the name of the founder of the "colossal global dumpling franchise", even though the 96-year-old's "demise" was widely mourned. (The piece must have referred to Yang Bing-yi, who founded a celebrated Taiwanese chain.) A Guardian email to the address listed on the site was immediately returned with an error message.

A story on the death of a dumpling tycoon failed to mention his name. Photograph: Screenshot/Celebritiesdeaths.com

Once I'd had enough of dead celebrities, I headed to ScoopEarth.com, which provides juicy insider information on stars who are still breathing, as well as, for some reason, tech tips. The first article was about the musician August Alsina, who, I learned, was born on 3 September 1992 "at the age of 30". His 3 September birthday presumably explains why "every September, Alsina has a birthday party on September 3". In an email, Niraj Kumar, identified on the site as its founder, rejected claims the site used AI, calling the material "purely genuine". Many of the pieces on the site felt too oddly worded to be ChatGPT, but there was so much repeated information that it also felt like it couldn't be written by humans. I found myself wondering how we can trust anything on the internet if it's already so difficult to tell when AI is involved.

Finally, I visited Famadillo.com for product reviews. This immaculately curated site is laser-focused on stress-release tablets, RVing tips, Mother's Day T-shirts and the "top" sites in Santa Fe. The reviews themselves are sensible enough, but navigating the site is virtually impossible. Perhaps it's perfectly designed for a true dilettante - the kind of person who'd read a review of Play-Doh's Super Stretchy Green Slime immediately after a piece tackling the thorny question "Are baby potatoes regular potatoes?"

In an email to the Guardian, Famadillo rejected claims it used AI to generate content highlighted in the NewsGuard report. "Famadillo runs reported interviews and reviews and uses press releases for our contest pages. None of this content is generated by AI," the email read. "That being said, we have experimented with AI in terms of refreshing old content and editing reporter-written content with the supervision of our editors."

The controversy points to the growing difficulty of discerning the humans from the bots. By the end of the day, I was even more confused about what was real and what wasn't than I am after waking from a dream or watching 15 minutes of Fox News. Who, exactly, is running these sites is unclear: many don't contain contact information, and of those that NewsGuard managed to contact, most failed to reply while those that did were vague about their operations. Meanwhile, their impact appears to vary widely - some post to Facebook pages with tens of thousands of followers while others have none.

If this is what AI generates now, imagine what it will look like when sites like this become AI's source material. We can only hope that the bots remain compulsively honest about their identities - or that Joe Biden finds a way to prevent an AI wild west. Assuming he's still alive.

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Nearly 50 news websites are 'AI-generated', a study says. Would I be able to tell?

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A tour of the sites, featuring fake facts and odd wording, left me wondering what was real

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A Guardian story about the only foreign journalist embedded with Russian forces as they invade Ukraine. 

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A Guardian story about the only foreign journalist embedded with Russian forces as they invade Ukraine. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This article shows the difficulty of reporting conflicts, and highlights the startling fact that there is only one foreign journalist embedded with Russian forces. Get the facts of the story first - who is Lu Yuguang, and how has he managed to get the access he has with the invading army? How objective does he seem to be with his reports of what is going on? What does this reveal about the challenges of reporting on events such as these?

Key terms Exclusive access, Crooked assed, Objectivity

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n a flak jacket and helmet, the Chinese reporter Lu Yuguang stands on the side of a road as a Russian tank roars past. "I'm on the frontline in Mariupol," he says into the microphone. He then interviews a Russian soldier who says he's not nervous as he's been "fighting for eight years". In another shot, Lu talks with a group of Russian soldiers in the back of a military vehicle.

The dispatches are unusual for their extraordinary access - Lu, a veteran war reporter for a Chinese news outlet, Phoenix TV, is perhaps the only foreign correspondent embedded with Russian troops as they continue the brutal invasion of Ukraine.

He has filed reports from cities under Russian attack since the invasion began almost three weeks ago, including in Mariupol where local authorities say thousands of people have been killed.

Lu appears to have gained exclusive access to Russia's side of the conflict. In one report on 2 March, he interviewed the leader of the self-proclaimed republic in Donetsk, Denis Pushilin. Lu said the Donetsk militia cannot compare to Ukrainian forces, "but with the help of Russian forces, eastern Ukraine militia have liberated 40 residential areas within the administrative line. The victory keeps expanding."

The Guardian is not aware of any other foreign journalists reporting from such close quarters on the Russian side of the invasion. A long-running Russian government campaign against independent media has intensified since the war began, with foreign outlets among those forced to end operations after Vladimir Putin signed a law carrying 15-year prison terms for what the Kremlin considers "fake news". As such, Lu's unusual access to the Russian military stands in stark contrast to that of other reporters. It has also fuelled questions about the extent of cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.

Since the two governments signed an "unlimited partnership" shortly before Russia went to war in Ukraine, Beijing has struggled to balance its support for Moscow with the global condemnation of the invasion and swaths of international sanctions. It has outwardly sought to maintain a neutral position in the conflict but refuses to label Russia's act as an invasion or the fighting as a war, and has amplified anti-western narratives, blaming the US and Nato for the conflict.

Beijing has also pushed Russian disinformation and conspiracy theories, including un-evidenced accusations that US- funded labs in Ukraine were secretly producing chemical weapons, and early claims by Russian state media that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, had fled Kyiv.

Lu's unusual access has fuelled questions about the extent of cooperation between Moscow and Beijing. Photograph: Screengrab

Lu is a well-known journalist in China, and his career and background have been reported on by Tencent, Sohu and Sina.

His reports from Ukraine have included Russian disinformation such as claims of more than 1,000 people held hostage as human shields by Ukrainian militants. However, his interviews with Ukrainian civilian victims, and criticism of Chinese internet users objectifying Ukrainian women, have also drawn nationalistic and pro-Russia trolling, accusing him of creating pro-Ukraine "rumours" and being "crooked assed", an internet slang term for having bias or lacking objectivity.

According to profiles on Phoenix TV's website and news articles about Lu, the correspondent is a former navy officer in the People's Liberation Army, who lived in Moscow for several decades and covered events including the Chechen war, where he reportedly had Russian military protection. He has received multiple awards from the Russian government and military for his reporting. He has previously said that his outlet has good relations with intelligence figures in Russia.

ProfSteve Tsang, the director of the Soas China Institute, said Lu could have gained access through his personal connection to Russia, or because of China's general support for its government.

"They are not mutually exclusive. The only thing I think we know for sure is that Russia will not allow any foreign journalist to be embedded with Russian forces unless it is certain that the embedded foreign journalist will portray Russian forces and efforts in a positive light. The fact that Lu is embedded should show that the Russian authorities know him well enough to be certain he would not write negatively about the Russian war efforts."

Phoenix TV did not respond to questions about how Lu was able to embed with Russian troops.

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'I'm on the frontline in Mariupol': the Chinese reporter embedded with Russian troops

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n a flak jacket and helmet, the Chinese reporter Lu Yuguang stands on the side of a road as a Russian tank roars past. "I'm on the frontline in Mariupol," he says into the microphone. He then interviews a Russian soldier who says he's not nervous as he's been "fighting for eight years".

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A Guardian article, asserting that despite our conviction to the contrary, we are not living in a “post-truth” world, and the US is not on the brink of a civil war. 

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A Guardian article, asserting that despite our conviction to the contrary, we are not living in a “post-truth” world, and the US is not on the brink of a civil war. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What are the limitations of poll and survey data?

Key terms Poll and survey data, Evidence, Plausible explanation, Fake news, Different epistemic worlds

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ccording to a number of polls and surveys, significant majorities of Republican-aligned voters seem to believe the big lie that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 US presidential election and, consequently, the Biden administration is illegitimate.

Taking these data at face value, a growing chorus insists that we're living in a "post-truth" era, where members of one political party, the Republican party, can no longer tell facts from falsehood. As a result of the Republican party becoming unmoored from reality, the narratives typically continue, America is drifting headlong into a fascist takeover or a civil war.

Fortunately for all of us, these dire predictions are almost certainly overblown. We are not living in a "post-truth" world. We are not on the brink of a civil war. The perception that we are is almost purely an artifact of people taking poll and survey data at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we probably shouldn't.

For instance, in the wake of the 2016 election, Trump claimed to have had higher turnout at his inauguration than Barack Obama did. Subsequent polls and surveys presented people with pictures of Obama and Trump's inauguration crowds and asked which was bigger. Republicans consistently identified the visibly smaller (Trump) crowd as being larger than the other. A narrative quickly emerged that Trump supporters literally couldn't identify the correct answer; they were so brainwashed that they actually believed that the obviously smaller crowd was, in fact, larger.

Of course, a far more obvious and empirically plausible explanation is that respondents knew perfectly well what the correct answer was. However, they also had a sense of how that answer would be used in the media ("Even Trump's supporters don't believe his nonsense!"), so they simply declined to give pollsters the response they seemed to be looking for.

As a matter of fact, respondents regularly troll researchers in polling and surveys - especially when they are asked whether or not they subscribe to absurd or fringe beliefs, such as birtherism (a conspiracy that held that Barack Obama was born outside of the US and was legally ineligible to serve as president of the United States).

However, many academics and pundits do not seem to be in on the joke. Instead, post-2016, a consensus quickly emerged from credulous readings of polls and surveys that America is facing an epidemic of "fake news", which was leading people to believe things that were obviously false, and to vote for unsavory political candidates. Some of the initial studies on this topic were blatantly prejudicial in their design; other widely shared studies were ultimately retracted.

As more reliable data began to emerge, it turned out that, contrary to the initial hysteria, "fake news" stories were viewed by a relatively small number of voters, and infrequently at that. Most of those served pro-Trump or anti-Clinton "fake news" by social media sites already seemed firmly committed to voting for Trump, or intractably resolved against voting for Clinton (which is why the algorithms served them this niche content to begin with). That is, "fake news" is unlikely to have changed many, if any, votes. It is not a plausible explanation for the 2016 electoral outcome nor Trump's support more broadly.

Even people who share "fake news" stories typically never read (or even click on) them. That is, people are not sharing the content because they read the stories, grew convinced of their factual accuracy, and are genuinely trying to inform others. Instead, people typically share these stories based on their headlines, for a whole host of social reasons, while recognizing them to be of questionable accuracy (see here, here, here, here and here for more on this).

It should not be surprising, then, that correcting misinformation seems to have virtually no effect on political preferences or voting behavior; misperceptions are generally not driving political alignments to begin with - nor are they driving political polarization.

Contrary to narratives that have grown especially ubiquitous in recent years, Americans are actually not very far apart in terms of most empirical facts. We do not live in separate realities. Instead, people begin to polarize on their public positions on factual matters only after those issues have become politicized. And even then, polarized answers on polls and surveys often fail to reflect participants' genuine views. Indeed, when respondents are provided with incentives to answer questions accurately (instead of engaging in partisan cheerleading), the difference between Democrats and Republicans on factual matters often collapses.

In other cases, apparent disagreements about factual matters often turn out to be, at bottom, debates about how various facts are framed and interpreted, or disputes about the policies that are held to flow from the facts. That is, even in cases of genuine disagreement, there is typically less dispute about the facts themselves than about what the facts mean - morally or practically speaking.

All said, measuring misperceptions is a fraught enterprise - even when it comes to banal and politically uncontested facts. Attempting to draw inferences about "incorrect" views on matters tied political, moral and/or identity struggles is a far more complicated endeavor. These are not data that lend themselves to being taken at face value.

Similar realities hold for the data that purportedly show we're on the brink of a new civil war.

There is strong evidence that many of the surveys and polls indicating support for, or openness towards, political violence hugely overstate actual levels of support in the American public. Likewise, data that purport to show high levels of partisan vitriol may be misleading.

In general, behaviors are often a stronger indicator than attitudinal data for understanding how sincere or committed people are to a cause or idea. The number of people who are willing to rhetorically endorse some extraordinary belief tends to be much, much higher than the subset who meaningfully behave as if that claim is true. The number of people who profess commitment to some cause tends to be much, much higher than the share who are willing to make sacrifices or life adjustments in order to advance that cause.

The big lie is no exception. Both the low levels of turnout and the relatively low levels of violence are extraordinary if we take the polls and surveys at face value.

Event organizers were expecting, " hundreds of thousands, if not millions" to take part in the January 6 uprising. This would be reasonable to expect in a world where tens of millions of Americans literally believed that an apparently high-stakes election was stolen out from under them. Even if just 1% of those who purportedly believe in the big lie had bothered to show up, the demonstrations would have been hundreds of thousands strong. Instead, they only mustered 2,500 participants (according to US government estimates).

The lack of casualties was also striking, even when one considers injuries and indirect fatalities. After all, the former president also enjoyed strong support among people who are armed and formally trained in combat, such as active duty and veteran military and law enforcement. A large number of other Trump supporters participate in militias, or are private gun owners.

Yet most January 6 participants did not bring firearms, and those who armed did not discharge their weapons - not even in the heat of the violence that broke out. The only person shot in the entire uprising, Ashli Babbitt, was killed by a law enforcement officer. In fact, Babbitt was actually the only homicide to occur on that day.

Two other rioters died from heart problems, another from a drug overdose. Police officer Brian Sicknick died from strokes on 7 January; the medical examiner ultimately concluded that this was unrelated to any injuries sustained during January 6. In the months that followed, four other police officers would perish by suicide. All said, then, a total of nine deaths have been associated with the events of January 6 (directly or indirectly). Not one person, however, was actually killed by the rioters. Nor is a single bullet alleged to have been fired by the rioters, despite many participants allegedly possessing guns.

In a world where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (ie more than 50 million people, roughly one out of every five adults in the US) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and now plan to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of January 6 would likely have played out much, much differently.

Indeed, had even the 2,500 people who assembled on the Capitol arrived armed to the hilt, with a plan to seize power by force, committed to violence as "needed" to achieve their goals - things would have gone much, much differently.

Instead, most participants showed up expecting Trump would provide them with definitive evidence for his claims of electoral malfeasance, and then unveil some master plan to take the country back. This didn't happen. Those gathered seemed to have no idea what to do after that. Most of what followed was spontaneous, not planned. Even when they breached the Capitol, most had no information about the layout of the building, little knowledge about the proceedings they were ostensibly striving to disrupt, and no clear agenda of what to do once they got inside.

There was a small number, dozens perhaps, who showed up to the Capitol with a clear intent to forcibly overturn the election - who equipped themselves for violence, researched the congressional proceedings and the layout of the building, developed and executed a plan, etc. These are behaviors consistent with a sincere belief in the big lie, and a strong commitment to doing something "about" it.

Yet, critically, even these actors were operating independently of Trump, motivated in part by frustration with the former president's apparent inaction. In their telling, Trump himself wasn't acting like he believed his own rhetoric. There was no urgency. There was no "fire". There was no focus. There was no plan. The Oath Keepers hoped to engage in a radical act that would push the president to actually behave as if the election was stolen and the republic was on the line. As their leader (currently arrested on sedition charges) put it:

"All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They've had enough. We're going to defend the president, the duly elected president, and we call on him to do what needs to be done to save our country."

Of course, even tiny numbers of genuine extremists like these can be extremely destabilizing under the right circumstances. Had Oath Keepers breached the Capitol instead of being repelled (even as Q-Shaman, Confederate Flag Guy et al wandered the building aimlessly) ... January 6 could have played out much differently.

Nonetheless, there is a huge difference in talking about identifying and disrupting small numbers of highly committed individuals willing to engage in revolutionary political violence v tens of millions of Americans genuinely believing the election was fraudulent and being open to violence as a means of rectifying the situation. Those are very different problems. Orders of magnitude different.

The good news is that the second problem, the tens-of-millions-of-Americans problem, is not real. It is an artifact of politicized polling design and survey responses, followed by overly credulous interpretations of those results by academics and pundits who are committed to a narrative that half the electorate is evil, ignorant, stupid, deranged and otherwise dangerous.

In fact, rather than January 6 serving as a prelude to a civil war, the US saw lower levels of death from political violence in 2021 than in any other year since the turn of the century. Even as violent crime approached record highs across much of the country, fatalities from political violence dropped. This is not an outcome that seems consistent with large and growing shares of the population supposedly leaning towards settling the culture wars with bullets instead of ballots. This turn of events does not seem consistent with the notion that tens of millions of Americans - including large numbers of military, law enforcement and militia members - literally believe the presidency was stolen, elections can no longer be trusted, and the fate of the country is on the line.

Indeed, far from giving up on elections, Republican voters are reveling in the prospect of taking back one or both chambers of Congress at the end of this year; they are eagerly awaiting the midterms (likely for good reason).

In truth, most Republican voters likely don't believe in the big lie. But many would nonetheless profess to believe it in polls and surveys - just as they'd support politicians who make similar professions (according to one estimate, Republican candidates who embrace the big lie enjoy a 6 percentage point electoral boost as compared to Republicans who publicly affirm the 2020 electoral results).

Within contemporary rightwing circles, a rhetorical embrace of the big lie is perceived as an act of defiance against prevailing elites. It is recognized as a surefire means to "trigger" people on the other team. A demonstrated willingness to endure blowback (from Democrats, media, academics, social media companies et al) for publicly striking this "defiant" position is interpreted as evidence of solidarity with, and commitment to, "the people" instead of special interests; it's taken as a sign that one is not beholden to "the Establishment" and its rules. That is, the big lie seems to be more about social posturing than making sincere truth claims.

For many reasons, this situation is also far from ideal. But it's a very different (and much smaller) problem than partisans actually inhabiting different epistemic worlds and lurching towards a civil war. Glass half full.

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No, America is not on the brink of a civil war | Musa al-Gharbi

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ccording to a number of polls and surveys, significant majorities of Republican-aligned voters seem to believe the big lie that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 US presidential election and, consequently, the Biden administration is illegitimate.

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An FT article, looking at the importance of protecting ‘truth tellers’ in society, and facing up to facts about the world. 

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An FT article, looking at the importance of protecting ‘truth tellers’ in society, and facing up to facts about the world. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What examples does the article give of knowers finding the truth ‘unpleasant’, and reacting against those who embrace it? What drives this reaction? What techniques do modern politicians use to prevent us from accessing the truth? What can we do to overcome this? You can also check out this New Humanist article on the ‘rise of the truth industry’.

Key terms Truth, Unpleasant, Evidence

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

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This Vox article looks at the fact that Americans apparently consumed twice as much fake news in 2020 compared to 2019.  

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This Vox article looks at the fact that Americans apparently consumed twice as much fake news in 2020 compared to 2019.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Can people’s consumption of fake news be measured objectively?

Key terms Political polarization, Censorship, Unreliable content

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America's fake news problem is getting worse, not better.

According to an analysis released by NewsGuard and first reported by Axios' s Sara Fischer on Tuesday, websites that provide "unreliable news" increased their share of social media interactions this year. In 2019, 8 percent of engagement with the 100 top-performing news sources on social media was dubious. In 2020, that number more than doubled to 17 percent.

NewsGuard, which rates news websites according to reliability, found that people are engaging in a lot more news this year than they were last year. Engagement with the top 100 US news sources (meaning likes, shares, and comments on Facebook and Twitter) went from 8.6 billion reactions to 16.3 billion reactions between 2019 and 2020. That makes sense given, well, everything that has happened in 2020. There has been a lot of news, and due to pandemic-related factors such as unemployment and lockdowns, people have a lot of time on their hands to read stuff online.

But an increasing amount of the news people are seeing is problematic, inaccurate, or suspicious. And that's something to worry about. The analysis found that the Daily Wire, the outlet founded by right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, saw 2.5 times more interactions this year than last.

The blossoming of false and unreliable news on the internet is a cultural, political, and technological phenomenon that's hard to get your head around, let alone tackle. Conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation run rampant on the internet, and it's often difficult for people to tell what is true and what's not. Social media companies are not exactly doing a bang-up job of addressing the problem, either.

Right-wing content, in particular, thrives on platforms such as Facebook. But just because someone seescertain content doesn't necessarily mean they are particularly influencedby it, and figuring out just how powerful certain messages are can be complicated. Over the summer, Kevin Roose at the New York Times reported on what he described as a "parallel media universe" of super-conservative content on Facebook, noting that right-leaning pages and posts on the platform consistently get more interactions and shares than more liberal and mainstream ones. (Though just because someone likes a news post doesn't mean they actually read it.)

As Recode's Rebecca Heilweil pointed out at the time, it's hard to know what's happening on Facebook just by engagement:

There's now a running debate among academics, analytics experts, and observers like Roose around what we know about what's happening on Facebook and why. Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan recently argued that "likes," comments, and shares are just a small part of what people actually see on Facebook, and that it's difficult to draw conclusions from these interactions alone or to know what they might mean for an election.

Still, the trend is concerning. Social media is making political polarization worse in America, and it's often the case that people no longer agree on even basic facts. What people consume shapes what they see - basically, someone clicks on a certain article and algorithms start to predict what else they might like in alignment with that. And the further down the rabbit hole they go, the more they begin to seek out that media, often winding up in an information bubble.

For people who complain so much about supposed social media censorship, they are not really being censored

Republicans have spent years complaining that social media companies are biased against them and that their content is being censored and removed. President Donald Trump has often lashed out against tech companies with unfounded claims of bias. He and his administration have also attempted to undercut and scrap Section 230, a law that basically says social media companies are allowed to police their platforms however they want and aren't liable for the content third parties post on them. ( Recode's Sara Morrison has a full explainer on Section 230.)

Rather than bias toward a certain political leaning, social media algorithms are often biased toward outrage - they push content that people have an emotional reaction to and are likely to engage with. The NewsGuard data and other research shows that people are increasingly being drawn to unreliable content - and often, unreliable content that has a conservative bent. And that content can influence all sorts of attitudes and cause confusion on even basic facts.

The New York Times recently took a look at Georgia and how misinformation and unreliable news is playing a role in the US Senate runoffs there. A conservative local news network called Star News Group announced it would launch the Georgia Star in November, and NewsGuard's analysis found that the website has published misleading information about the presidential election and the Senate races. One story making false claims about Georgia's presidential election results reached up to 650,000 people on Facebook.

Combating fake and misleading news would require efforts from multiple stakeholders. YetFacebook recently rolled back changes to its algorithm that would promote news from reliable sources. Given the pace at which the problem is growing, the matter is likely to worsen without intervention.
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America's growing fake news problem, in one chart

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In a year they consumed more news than ever, Americans engaged with twice as much unreliable news in 2020 as they did in 2019.

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This Atlantic article explores how language is used by media outlets, and how this feeds into the vocabulary of those who follow them. 

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This Atlantic article explores how language is used by media outlets, and how this feeds into the vocabulary of those who follow them. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How effective are political metaphors? What do they reveal about the care with which we should watch the media in order to gain objective knowledge about politics?

Key terms Metaphors, Manufactured, Propaganda, Information Silo, Alternative realities

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How Donald Trump's favorite news source became a language

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
All happy families are alike; some unhappy families are unhappy because of Fox News.

You might have come across the articles ( "I Lost My Dad to Fox News" / "Lost Someone to Fox News?" / "'Fox News Brain': Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News"), or the Reddit threads, or the support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don't have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it's like to find yourself suddenly unable to speak with people you've known your whole life. They acknowledge how easily a national crisis can become a personal one. At this point, some Americans speak English; others speak Fox.

Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox-particularly its widely watched opinion shows-has had on American politics and culture. They've talked about the network as an "information silo" and "a filter bubble" and an "echo chamber," as an "alternate reality" constructed of "alternative facts," as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct. But they don't quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. ( You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it.
Read: Trump is building a dystopia in real-time
Language, too, is a norm. It is one more shared fact of political life that can seem self-evident until someone like Trump, or something like Fox, reveals the fragility that was there all along. You might have observed, lately, how Americans seem always to be talking past one another-how we're failing one another even at the level of our vernacular. In the America of 2020, socialism could suggest "Sweden-style social safety net" or "looming threat to liberty." Journalist could suggest "a person whose job is to report the news of the day" or "enemy of the people." Cancel culture could mean ... actually, I have no idea at all what cancel culture means at this point. Fox, on its own, did not create that confusion. But it exacerbated it, and exploited it. The network turned its translations of the world into a business model. Every day, the most watched shows of the most watched cable network in the country-a prime-time destination more popular than ESPN -take the familiar idioms of American democracy and wear away at their common meanings. The result is disorientation. The result is mass suspicion. Like a vengeful God bringing chaos to Babel, Fox has helped to create a nation of people who share everything but the ability to talk with one another.

There's an episode of The Office that ends, as so many episodes of The Office do, with Jim playing a prank on Dwight. Dwight, who sells paper with the militant zeal he brings to everything else he does, wins a company-wide prize for his sales record. His reward is to give a speech at a corporate gathering. Dwight is nervous about this opportunity; Jim-here is where he stares directly at the camera-gives him some public-speaking advice. Fast-forward to Dwight, in a cavernous hotel ballroom, breathing heavily into the lectern's microphone, pounding his fists, and shouting lines from the script Jim had provided him: the Googled speeches of famous dictators. Jim had turned Dwight into something he wasn't; that was the prank. But the joke was that Jim had also turned Dwight into something he'd been all along. Dwight Shrute has what psychologists might refer to as an "authoritarian personality." Jim had given him, in a roundabout way, the ability to become himself-dictator cosplay, no costume required. The crowd loved it.

I thought of Dwight while watching the first night of this year's Republican National Convention-specifically, while watching Kimberly Guilfoyle deliver her own version of Dwight's speech to living rooms across America. Guilfoyle, a Trump-campaign fundraiser, a sort-of daughter-in-law to the president, and a former Fox star, shouted her speech. She finger-pointed and fearmongered with a verve that might have been comical were it not also, in its Mussolinian menace, terrifying. Of Joe Biden and assorted other "cosmopolitan elites," Guilfoyle said:

They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how you live. They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal victim ideology to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.

Guilfoyle's script, like Dwight's, was both wildly inappropriate and deeply revealing. It was also, at this point, familiar. Guilfoyle was speaking the language of Fox. Her warnings were lifted from the same text the network's opinion hosts read from each evening: elites, control, enslave. Here was Fox's defining monomyth-the you and the they, locked in unending combat-brought to party politics' biggest stage.

If you weren't a regular viewer of Fox, Guilfoyle's speech, and the many others that followed it as the convention wore on, might have been nearly unintelligible. If you hadn't been informed that inclusivity is "groupthink"; if you weren't conditioned to understand that the definition of media is "the enemy"; if you hadn't been aware that Democrats want to "destroy your families, your lives, and your future"-you might have been jarred by all of the vitriol. You might have found yourself wondering why, in the midst of a global pandemic that had sickened millions of Americans and claimed the lives of more than 170,000, the RNC was warning about the threats of "cosmopolitan elites." You might also have wondered why, during the nation's long-overdue racial-justice reckoning, the RNC gave airtime to a couple who brandished guns at peaceful protesters-or why, during an economic emergency that has cost millions of Americans their livelihoods, a teenager was trotted out to talk about cancel culture ("being canceled, as in annulled, as in revoked, as in made void").

The speeches, yes, were distractions from the ground truths of our crises. But they also attempted another kind of control: They reveled in the power TV has to shape-and to limit-viewers' empathies. Instead of describing the America that is, the Republican Party described the America that is manufactured, every day, on Fox. It used its platform to refight some of Fox's fondest micro-wars. It told its viewers not to focus on the people who have died, or the many more who might, but instead to focus on themselves: Your freedom. Your future. Your America. Watching it all, I felt the familiar fog that descends when something is lost in translation, when someone talks about something you share-in this case, a country-using details that are unrecognizable. It was the same kind of haze that came when Trump, newly sworn in as president, coined American carnage to describe a nation where violent crime had been declining for decades. Do we live in the same America? the broken words whisper. Maybe not, the same words reply.
Read: How to look away
When scholars discuss the effects of propaganda, that dissonance is often what they talk about. Hannah Arendt described it in terms of cynicism: the mental exhaustion that, over time, can make people "think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." Masha Gessen, the great observer of modern autocracy, writes of a more generalized kind of dissolution: "When something cannot be described," Gessen notes, "it does not become a fact of shared reality." The fog can descend, as well, when words have had new meanings imposed on them. In George Orwell's 1984, freedom is captivity, peace is war, truth is a lie. In his 2015 book How Propaganda Works, the philosopher Jason Stanley defines political propaganda as "the employment of a political ideal against itself." He describes in particular how self-negating language can make for self-negating politics. "The most basic problem for democracy raided by propaganda," Stanley writes, "is the possibility that the vocabulary of liberal democracy is used to mask an undemocratic reality."

The Fox News Channel itself arose as a matter of negation: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, guided by the Nixonian notion that America's "unelected elite" had amassed too much power, created the network in 1996 as a counterweight to the liberal bias that many conservatives saw in journalism writ large. But Fox's initial project now reads as quaint. War is, at this point, Fox's defining metaphor. Like the other outlets that both inspired Fox and were inspired by it-conservative talk-radio shows, Breitbart News and other websites-the network often processes the facts of the world as assorted weapons of war. On Fox, there are enemy combatants ( Hillary Clinton, James Comey, "the Media," Nancy Pelosi, Robert Mueller, Christine Blasey Ford, China, immigrants, Democrats) and there are allies. The sides are always clear. So is the cause.
Read: Sean Hannity is Trump's shadow press secretary
"For the past five years, I've had a front row seat to the Trumpification of Fox and the Foxification of America," Brian Stelter writes in his new book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. Stelter, as a media correspondent and analyst, covers Fox for CNN. His book is deeply reported: For it, Stelter spoke with more than 140 staffers at Fox, along with 180 former employees and other people with direct ties to the network. ("Fox did not cooperate with the book," Stelter told The Washington Post, but he "was in frequent touch with Fox News spokespeople" for fact-checking and the like.) Many of Hoax's revelations are shocking, even-especially-if you follow the network. Fox really does function, Stelter suggests, as Trump's presidential daily briefing. (The president reportedly once told the Fox legal analyst Andrew Napolitano: "Everything I know about the Constitution, I learned from you on Fox & Friends.") And Fox really does serve as a kind of adviser to its most fervent fan. Trump, Stelter writes, "granted pardons because of Fox. He attacked Google because of Fox. He raged against migrant 'caravans' because of Fox. He accused public servants of treason because of Fox."

The leader and the news network speak, and enforce, the same language. Trump regularly lifts his tweets directly from Fox's banners and banter. Last year, Media Matters for America's Matt Gertz counted the times the president tweeted something in direct response to a Fox News or Fox Business program. Gertz found 657 such instances-in 2019 alone. Fox hosts and producers use that power to manipulate the president. "People think he's calling up Fox & Friends and telling us what to say," a former producer on the show tells Stelter. "Hell no. It's the opposite. We tell him what to say."

But the manipulation flows in both directions. At Fox, Stelter reports, executives live in fear of angering the opinion hosts, who in turn live in fear of angering viewers-who of course have been made angrier by the hosts themselves. A former producer tells Stelter: "We were deathly afraid of our audience leaving, deathly afraid of pissing them off." Stelter's sources describe "a TV network that has gone off the rails," he writes. "Some even said the place that they worked, that they cashed paychecks from, had become dangerous to democracy." A well-known commentator on the network tells Stelter: "They are lying about things we are seeing with our own eyes." An anchor laments that "we surrendered to Trump. We just surrendered." The capitulation has become so complete, and so widely recognized, that when a Fox news reporter actually questions the president, the questioning itself makes news.

Fox is fond of accusing its alleged enemies of "politicizing" the news; the irony is that politicizing the news is Fox's most basic move. Take the network's coverage of COVID-19 in the spring. The opinion shows often treated the pandemic not as a public-health emergency, but as a political threat to Trump-as a front in its ongoing war. The Fox host Pete Hegseth: "I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about." The host Jeanine Pirro: "If you listen to the mainstream media, it's time to buy the family burial plot." The language mocked, and minimized. Geraldo Rivera announced, baselessly, that if you could hold your breath for 10 seconds, that was a sign that you were COVID-free. On March 6, Fox's longest-tenured medical analyst, Marc Siegel, told Hannity that "at worst, at worst-worst-case scenario, it could be the flu."

Every news network struggled to understand the threat of the coronavirus in those early days. But Fox struggled much more. Stelter quotes several staffers who were ashamed and angry with the network's coverage at a time when it was crucial for Americans to grasp the severity of the virus. "Hazardous to our viewers," one told him. "Dangerous," said another. "Unforgivable," said another. And also hypocritical: Even as Fox was airing segments that downplayed the threat of the virus, Stelter reports, executives at Fox headquarters in Manhattan were ordering deep cleanings of their offices and making preparations for their talent to work remotely. On March 9, Stelter notes, Hannity poked fun at his favorite targets-Dems, the Media-for, he claimed, exaggerating the threat of the virus. "They're scaring the living hell out of people, and I see it again as like, Oh, let's bludgeon Trump with this new hoax," he said.

Nine days later? He was insisting that "we've never called the virus a hoax."

War, in the field, rationalizes behavior that would be deemed immoral in times of peace. War, used as language, can amount to a similar kind of exceptionalism. If your side is the right side, you might do whatever it takes to make sure that your side keeps winning. You can justify a lot in the name of liberty. (The title of Hannity's 2002 book, Manichaean and Mad Libbian at once, is Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.) One Fox & Friends staffer Stelter spoke with describes being upbraided for a particular piece of copy she'd written for the show: an update sharing the news that White Castle would begin to serve vegan burgers. The copy presented the introduction as a positive development. But that was wrong, the staffer was told: The new burgers were actually part of the "war on meat."

A 2019 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute tracked the differences between "Fox News Republicans" and other Republicans who said Fox was not their primary news source. Of the Fox loyalists, 55 percent said that there was nothing the president could do to lose their approval. That figure helps to explain how Fox can serve the state even as it operates independently. The "home team" is a powerful thing. Peter Pomerantsev, the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, points out how cannily Fox employs the metaphor of the family in its packaging of its opinion shows: Bill O'Reilly, Pomerantsev told me, was for a long time the network's cynical uncle. Tucker Carlson is the quirky cousin. Sean Hannity, meanwhile, is "the father coming home, ranting about this horrible world where the white man felt disenfranchised." Familiarity, literally-this is the "strict father" mode l of political discourse, rendered as infotainment. The upshot, Pomerantsev noted, is a constructed world that is above all "very, very coherent."

Earlier this summer, Tucker Carlson opined that Black Lives Matter is "not about Black lives" but about "left-wing mobs" who are trying to "cancel your rights." He warned viewers to "remember that when they come for you." Some advertisers left; Carlson stayed on the air. He stayed as audio surfaced of him referring to Iraqis, in 2006, as "semiliterate primitive monkeys" and saying, in 2008, that the Congressional Black Caucus existed to "blame the white man for everything." He stayed after he claimed that immigration "makes our country poorer and dirtier and more divided." Fox's PR machine, when Carlson made that comment in late 2018, backed up its star: "It is a shame that left-wing advocacy groups, under the guise of being supposed 'media watchdogs,' weaponize social media against companies in an effort to stifle free speech."

This is the paradox of a certain brand of propaganda. It is not the result of top-down efforts to capture hearts and minds; it is the result, instead, of a powerful entity responding to a powerful public. "No cable operator has ever seriously flirted with dropping Fox to save money," Stelter notes, "because, among other reasons, they believe the right-wing backlash would cripple their business." The president has his base; so does the network. That confers another kind of impunity. Fox can say whatever it wants with little consequence, save for, perhaps, higher ratings. One of the most sobering takeaways of Stelter's reporting is that Fox foments fear and loathing not really because of a Big Brotherly impulse, but because the network has recognized that fear and loathing, as goods, are extremely marketable. In 2020, Stelter notes, Fox "is on a path to $2 billion in profits."

And yet: You are under attack, Carlson tells his viewers, with his signature furrow of the brow. They are coming for you, he insists. Carlson does what he wants, and says what he wants, because he can. And he suggests that his audience, through the transitive powers of television, can enjoy a similar freedom from accountability. Critics might talk about Fox as an "information silo." They might dismiss the network's skewed stories as alternative realities. But even the insults, in their way, inoculate. They imply that Fox can do what it does in isolation. It cannot. Its outrages are atmospheric. Its definitions of the world are communal, even if they aren't commonly shared. The events of 2020 have been tragic reminders of that. When cruelty is refigured as "free speech," and when expertise becomes condescension-and when compassion is weakness and facts are "claims" and incuriosity is liberty and climate change is a con and a plague is a hoax-the new lexicon leaps off the screen. It implicates everyone, whether they speak the language or not.

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How Donald Trump's favorite news source became a language

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A Smithsonian article, which explores how whilst the technology of deep fake videos is new, the intention to mislead viewers has always driven image-makers. 

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A Smithsonian article, which explores how whilst the technology of deep fake videos is new, the intention to mislead viewers has always driven image-makers. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How can misleading photos evoke “that pathway to the future we aspire to”?

Key terms Malicious, Trust, Objective

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Two years ago, Noelle Martin discovered someone had made a "deepfake" video about her. Martin is a 26-year-old Australian law graduate who has lobbied governments and corporations to take action against the online harassment of women. Now, someone on the internet had decided to attack her via a technique that uses artificial intelligence to swap one person's face onto another's body.

Experts studying this phenomenon have found that well over 90 percent of deepfake videos involve faces swapped into pornographic scenes-the vast majority being women, most often celebrities but also politicians, activists or non-famous women. That's what someone had done with Martin. The video, she figured, was an attempt to get her to stop her advocacy work by shaming her. "It was absolutely weaponized," she told me recently. When she saw the video circulating online, she felt a stab of fury: "The audacity of these people to do that to me," she said. She also couldn't help wondering: Would people who saw it actually believe it was her?

Deepfake videos present an unsettling new phase in the evolution of media. Manipulating video used to be wildly expensive, the province of special-effects masters. But new AI technology has made it much easier. Indeed, one commonly used piece of software for doing it-which uses a "deep learning" form of artificial intelligence, hence the "deep" in deepfakes-was released anonymously online for free in 2018.

In December 2020, Sensity, a fraud-detection firm, found 85,047 deepfake videos circulating online, a number that had been roughly doubling every six months; there are now likely hundreds of thousands in existence. Some are harmless- Nicolas Cage's face swapped into scenes from movies he wasn't in, say. But "the majority of deepfakes created by experts are malicious," says Giorgio Patrini, Sensity's CEO.

Many observers worry that deepfakes could become a major threat in politics, used to humiliate political figures and advocates like Martin or even make them appear to say things they never said. "What it could do to diplomacy and democracy-we're holding our breath," says Danielle Citron, professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law. It's an unsettling moment, where our ability to discern what's real feels newly imperiled.

In fact, these anxieties echo the earliest days of photography. Then, as now, through cutting-edge fakery, major public figures were counterfeited, and questions emerged about whether a powerful new technology made it impossible to trust what you saw.

In one sense, photo manipulation began as soon as photography did. Early image-capturing technologies were crude-images had no color, and slow shutter speeds washed out details, such that skies, for example, appeared "ghastly, lifeless," one photographer complained.

So photographers from the get-go were working hard to alter images. They would paint on colors, or enhance details by drawing on an image with ink and paint. They quickly hit upon the technique of composites: To make gorgeous seascapes, the French photographer Gustave Le Gray would take photos of wave-swept oceans and splice in separate photos of clouds, even reusing the same clouds in different photos. In 1857, the photographer George Washington Wilson created faux group shots of high society by taking individual photos of subjects, cutting out their images and assembling them into a crowd, then photographing the resulting collage.

Viewers were fooled. "I had numerous inquiries as to when and where all these people had been collected and photographed," Wilson's gallerist said.

Photographers found the manipulations exciting, a new artistic technique. "I think they were just like anyone experimenting with a new art-there's a certain amount of just, isn't it cool we could do this?" says Peter Manseau, curator of American religious history at the National Museum of American History and an expert on early photo manipulation.

Commercial portrait firms employed legions of women as touch-up artists, softening wrinkles and reshaping features in the 19th century's forerunners to Instagram filters. "Anyone who went into a portrait studio would most likely be asked, 'Would you like us to touch this up for you, and, you know, make your nose smaller?'" says Mia Fineman, photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and author of Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop.

Fakery soon entered politics, as photographers tried to generate patriotic or stirring imagery. To create a "photo" of Ulysses S. Grant with his troops, photographer Levin Corbin Handy pasted Grant's head onto the body of another man, then pasted that composite onto a picture of Confederate prisoners of war. There were even meme-like parodies. When false rumors flew that Confederate President Jefferson Davis had sought to escape capture in 1865 by wearing a woman's petticoats, photographers gleefully produced composite photos that plastered his head onto an image of a woman.

Did the public know these images were fake? Historians aren't sure. Even if they did know, it's not clear they cared. Photography was not yet seen as a true document of reality. "There was no understanding that an image should be objective," Manseau says.

But photo manipulation caused particularly hot debate in one field: "spirit photography."

Amid the spiritualism movement after the Civil War, many bereaved Americans became convinced they could communicate with departed loved ones. They held séances, urging the dead to rap on tables or to speak to them through mediums. Photographers claimed they could capture images of the dead. In the United States, the most famous spiritualist deepfaker was Boston's William Mumler, who in 1862 began creating pictures that appeared to show live human subjects accompanied by translucent ghosts. Many of Mumler's subjects excitedly proclaimed he'd photographed one of their dead relatives. "What joy to the troubled heart," as Mumler wrote in a promotional pamphlet, "to know that our friends who have passed away can return."

But debate raged. Skeptical photographers suspected Mumler's pictures were mere double exposures-two negatives exposed onto a single photo sheet, with the "ghost" exposed only partially, to make it translucent. Yet when a few skeptics accompanied him into the darkroom, they couldn't deduce how he was pulling it off. Even so, in 1869, New York's city marshal charged Mumler with fraud after a reporter lodged a complaint at City Hall, and the ensuing trial made explosive headlines: "The Science of the World Against Spiritualist Theory," the New York Herald proclaimed. The city even brought in showman P.T. Barnum to testify against Mumler; Barnum showed the court a faked spirit photograph he'd staged of himself, to demonstrate how readily such fakery could be done. Still, after more than a month of trial, the judge let Mumler go free, saying the prosecution hadn't proved that "trick and deception has been practiced by the prisoner."

Manseau-who wrote The Apparitionists, a 2017 book about Mumler's trial-can't be sure how many people believed that spirit photos were real. He thinks many took them seriously, but not literally: The photos gave comfort, and that was enough. Post-trial, Mumler still took the occasional spirit photograph. His most famous was one of Mary Todd Lincoln next to a translucent image of her assassinated husband.

"It was a real consolation to her to have this image," Manseau notes, though it's unclear whether Mary Todd truly believed it was Lincoln's ghost.

Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, became an adherent of spirit photography, despite having made his fortune writing tales about ruthlessly empirical deductions. In 1920, he was outright duped by a pair of girls in Cottingley, England, who faked a set of five photos that purported to show cavorting fairies. Conan Doyle published the pictures in the Strand magazine, and in a 1921 book, The Coming of the Fairies, he rhapsodized about the images: "What joy is in the complete abandon of their little graceful figures."

Still, the public was becoming more familiar with the tricks of composite photography. "Poor Sherlock Holmes-Hopelessly Crazy?" ran one 1922 headline about Conan Doyle. "He did get pilloried, and it didn't help his career," says Andrew Lycett, author of The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes. "But he didn't really care." The author went to his grave believing those photos of fairies and spirits were real.

How many of us will be gulled in the same way today by deepfake videos?

On the one hand, experts say, we might be less easily duped because we're more savvy about image manipulation, regularly using smartphone and computer apps to tweak our own pictures and videos. But video deepfakes are still novel, and we haven't yet learned to suss out whether a face has been swapped.

To protect those targeted by hostile deepfakes-again, for now, mostly women-legal scholars like Mary Anne Franks at the University of Miami are proposing laws to criminalize "digital forgeries," or deepfakes that would appear authentic to a reasonable person. Non-malevolent uses, like satire or comedy, would remain legal, Franks says.

Granted, she adds, such laws against forgeries are only "a blunt tool." Indeed, the people who make pornographic deepfakes often aren't trying to fool anyone. Many openly revel in the fact that they're using a fake to humiliate a female celebrity.

Deepfakes are not yet common in politics, possibly because they still require more technical skill than merchants of political misinfo typically possess. But in three to five years, says Hany Farid, an expert on digital images at the University of California at Berkeley, you'll be able to create realistic deepfakes on your iPhone; rudimentary ones are already possible.

Deepfakes may also become a new canvas for artists. Stephanie Lepp, one video artist, recently created "Deep Reckonings": surprisingly realistic videos of public figures regretting their actions, including an uncannily believable Mark Zuckerberg apologizing for Facebook's alleged promotion of "hateful propagandists" and "ethnic violence." When Lepp posted them, she explicitly marked the videos as deepfakes, but viewers said it was still thought-provoking to see these figures wrestle with their public impact, however fictitiously.

For Lepp, deepfakes are a tool to help imagine a different, better world. They can evoke "that pathway to the future we aspire to," she tells me. Sometimes only a fake can express our truest desires.
A cropped history of visual hoaxes
By Ted Scheinman
*Editor's Note, 1/3/2022: An earlier version of this story stated that Betty Archer's husband served in the U.S. Air Force in World War I. In fact, he served in Britain's Royal Air Force.

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What the History of 'Spirit Photography' Portends for the Future of Deepfake Videos

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Today's video hoaxes can be downright ugly. But image-makers have been fooling viewers from the beginning

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A New Humanist article, looking at how deep fakes are at the centre of the new disinformation wars. 

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A New Humanist article, looking at how deep fakes are at the centre of the new disinformation wars. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How are deep fakes changing over time, and how does this link to current events in Ukraine? What are the limits of technological solutions to the problem - and how might the theory of knowledge course play a role? Overall, what responsibility do each of us have in helping to protect our information ecosystem?

KEY TERMS Disinformation wars, Deceptive synthetic media, Visceral reaction, Information ecosystem

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Deep fakes: the new front in the disinformation wars

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The fake video of President Zelensky asking Ukrainian troops to lay down their weapons was only the latest manifestation of a threat for which we will have to prepare.

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An FT article, which explores the phenomenon of publication bias, and how it can have serious consequences in terms of the way we perceive the world. 

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An FT article, which explores the phenomenon of publication bias, and how it can have serious consequences in terms of the way we perceive the world. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What problem does the article reveal about basing our understanding of Premier League football from the table? How does the article link this to ‘publication bias’? How can publication bias skew the way we understand the world - and what examples does the article offer of this? What solutions does the article suggest to off-set the effects of publication bias? To wrap up: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.” How can grasping what Daniel Kahneman meant by this help us to overcome the effects of publication bias?

KEY TERMS Publication bias, Evidence, Misperception, “The focusing illusion”, Clear metrics

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

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The alternate universe in which Tottenham are top

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My son's headmaster joked about his favourite team's success but publication bias can have more serious consequences

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A long Guardian article, looking at the work of Sefton Delmer, who successfully countered Nazi disinformation, and found ways of breaking into other people’s ‘echo chambers’. 

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A long Guardian article, looking at the work of Sefton Delmer, who successfully countered Nazi disinformation, and found ways of breaking into other people’s ‘echo chambers’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Who was Sefton Delmer, and why does his work resonate with those looking to counter disinformation today? How did his approach differ from anti-propaganda information produced by organizations such as the BBC? How did he change his tactics with the station, Soldatensender Calais? What does the article mean when it says, “The real antidote to [disinformation] is not plying them with facts. It’s helping to fix the underlying lack of agency”? To wrap up: “You can’t shove “the truth” down people’s throats if they don’t want to hear it, but you can inspire them to have the motivation to care about facts in the first place.” How does the work of Sefton Delmer help us to learn how to do that?

KEY TERMS Disinformation, Alternative reality, Truth, Roles, Grievance narratives, Social tribe, Values

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Thirty percent of Americans claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the last presidential elections were "rigged". Millions are sure that the "deep state" is plotting to import immigrants to vote against "real Americans" in the future. Meanwhile in Russia, the majority of people claim that the Kremlin is the innocent party in its brutal invasion of Ukraine. When Ukrainians call their relatives in Russia to tell them about the atrocities, all too often they hear their own kin parrot the Kremlin's propaganda lines: the atrocities are faked, or false flags, or necessary in order to impose Russia's greatness.

Across the world we see the growth of propaganda that promotes an alternative reality where black is white and white is black, and where truth is cast away in favour of a sense of superiority and ever more murderous paranoia. How can we defeat it? It's easy to despair when fact checking is rejected by the millions who don't want to hear the truth in the first place; when worthy journalism that preaches the virtues of "democracy" crumples in the face of suspicion, seeded purposefully for decades, that the media are actually "enemies of the people".

We are not, however, the first generation to confront the challenge of authoritarian propaganda. And as I looked for past experiences to inform our own, I discovered a British second world war media operation that managed to engage huge audiences who had been loyal to the Nazis and undermine their faith in Hitler's regime. If we think reaching people in "echo chambers" today is tough, think about how hard it was to persuade Germans to trust the people who were literally trying to kill them.

A mural of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA

This campaign was led by Sefton Delmer, who as head of special operations for the Political Warfare Executive, created dozens of radio stations, newspapers leaflets and rumours, all intended to break the spell cast by Hitler's propaganda by fair means or foul. He employed stars from the German cabaret scene, soldiers, surrealist artists, psychiatrists, forgers, spies and dissidents from across occupied Europe. Ian Fleming and Muriel Spark lent their talents to Delmer's operations. According to declassified UK government files, which have been unearthed and organised by the historian and archivist Lee Richards, around 40% of German soldiers tuned into Delmer's stations. An SS Obergruppenführer from Munich complained that Delmer's stations were among the top three in the city and were causing complete havoc. Goebbels was dismayed by how effective they were.

Delmer's interest, however, went beyond the uniquely nasty realm of nazism. He saw the same patterns at play throughout Germany in the 20th century as well as in Britain during the first world war. And his wartime work has many lessons for us today.

Propaganda is successful when it gives people a satisfying part to play: someone to be, to love and hate

The son of an Australian literature professor at Berlin University, Delmer grew up in Germany and spoke the language fluently. Australia was a dominion of the British Empire at the time, and Delmer was seen, and wanted to see himself, as British. He was 10 years old when the first world war broke out, and was bullied for being an enemy schoolchild. When he came to England in 1917, he was bullied for seeming too German, a consequence of what he described as "our British way of working up to a real crescendo of hate and fury towards the end of the war". He would learn to play the perfect English schoolboy. But reading his memoirs I felt this bicultural childhood left him with the sense that all social roles are exactly that: roles that are there to be performed. Propaganda is successful when it gives people a satisfying part to play: someone to be, to love and hate. It also left him with an awareness of how deeply we all need to belong to a group - Delmer had found it painful to be an outsider, seen as not properly British. Until the end of his life he would remain an imperial nostalgist, performing an almost caricatured version of the Britishness he longed to be part of as a child.

It was the performative aspect of propaganda, and the simultaneous need to belong, that struck him when he observed Hitler's success. In the 1920s, Delmer became a star reporter for the Daily Express in Berlin. He gained behind-the-scenes access on Hitler's election flights around Germany, where adoring crowds saluted the führer. Hitler gave people the sense of being part of a huge mass, a Volk, which appealed to many after the confusing changes of the early 20th century, when the old social order had been upended. He also gave people roles to play when the old ones had vanished: in the confusing cabaret of Weimar Germany, where identities were in flux, you knew who you were when you became a Nazi party member or an SS man. These roles were emotionally satisfying: they allowed people to submit to a strong leader, and feel strong and superior through him; they also allowed them to feel the victim, which in turn legitimised anger and cruelty to others. Some psychoanalysts who observed the rallies believed these grievance narratives gave people the chance to blame external forces for all the things they didn't like about themselves. Orators like Hitler make us feel we can crush the voice inside of us that tells us we are not good enough, by projecting it on to others.

Sefton Delmer broadcasts to Germany in 1941. Photograph: Kurt Hutton/Getty Images

Today's propagandists play on the same needs. In a time of rapid economic, social and technological change it can be comforting to be part of a large, angry crowd. Online conspiracy theory communities are particularly effective at pulling together a sense of being part of a group with a secret knowledge and mission. Such media also give people a role to play in a confusing world: as a Proud Boy or a "patriot" storming the Capitol. Social media, where you are encouraged to label who you are, only exacerbates this performance. Meanwhile the allure of " strongmen " has never gone away. Whether you buy into the psychoanalytic theories, the grievance narratives work - from Trump's crusade to Make America Great Again to Putin promising to get Russia back off its knees.

When the second world war was declared, Delmer was dismayed by Britain's efforts to counter Nazi propaganda. He felt that the BBC German Service was simply preaching to converted anti-Nazis. So was the other German language station the British ran, the Station of the European Revolution, which still held out hope for a democratic uprising in Germany. Much like media across the world today, which see themselves as supporting democracy and liberal values, these stations were trapped in what we sometimes label an echo chamber of like-minded people.

Delmer wanted to alienate people from Nazi propaganda by pushing Nazi propaganda 'one step further into the ridiculous'

Delmer wanted to break through and engage audiences that had come under the sway of the Nazis, and find the cracks that split them from the party. His first effort claimed to be a pirate radio station, hosted by a foul-mouthed German officer known simply as Der Chef. This racist patriot spewed stories about the scurrilous activities of Nazi officials, ranting about their sadomasochistic orgies. This pornography helped lure in listeners and broke taboos about insulting Nazi officials. In a more subtle way, it dramatised and mocked how nazism tapped into the psychological allure of submission and domination.

Rather than produce moral and "rational" media, Delmer wanted to undermine the Nazi's monopoly over people's strongest, most violent urges. Then he turned the propaganda back on to the Nazis: "Our stories were peopled with Burgomasters, District Leaders, Local group leaders," he explained. "We spread over them a slime of obloquy as foul as that which they themselves had spread over the Jews."

Delmer's aim was not to replace one violent movement with another. Instead, he wanted to alienate people from Nazi propaganda by, as he explained to the king when he presented his work, pushing Nazi propaganda "one step further into the ridiculous". This wasn't quite satire - people were meant to believe Der Chef was a genuine soldier hiding somewhere inside German-held territory. And satire doesn't always do much to undermine the hold a leader has on his followers: satirists who mock Trump or Brexit might make their own audiences feel good but don't necessarily reach the other side.

Delmer understood the need to engage people around their own interests rather than what you might like them to care about, and this is a lesson Ukrainian info warriors have been learning in their war with Russia. Ukraine is full of advertisers and hackers, activists and journalists all trying to reach Russian audiences.

They buy ads on Russian pornography sites and bootleg movie portals or use cold calling software more familiar from marketing campaigns. Early on they found that "moral" content didn't take off. When they made mass telephone calls to Russians, they found that some 80% would hang up during the first 20 seconds if the calls were about war crimes, but only 30% hung up when the call focused on their personal interests, such as a special tax they had to pay to support Russia's newly occupied lands.

But though Delmer's first station was a success, with some sources in Europe even claiming it was the most listened-to station in Germany, it didn't take long for the Nazis to work out that it was the British who were behind it. They began calling it out publicly, using it as an example of how dastardly the British propaganda was. Indeed, here is one (of many) negative lessons from Delmer's work. Then, as now, creating "sock puppet" media - media that pretend to be one thing but are actually another - can backfire.

People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories when they don't feel they have any agency or influence over their lives

As he expanded his war work, Delmer changed tactics. When he launched his most ambitious station, the Soldatensender Calais, it was still dressed up as if it were a native German military station, combining broadcasts of speeches by Nazi leaders with music and the latest news and gossip from the front that demonstrated all the lies and inequalities soldiers faced. But the aim was no longer to dupe the listener into believing this was a Nazi station - this time the audience was meant to be in on the act. As Peter Wykeham, a colleague of Delmer's, explained, this station would "(i) afford our German customers an excuse if caught listening, (ii) enable them to justify this dubious activity to themselves". Yet even though German listeners knew perfectly well the British were behind the station, they listened to it and trusted it. Often today we lament that people only trust the media that represent their social tribe. So how did Delmer pull it off?

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Delmer used every research tool at his disposal to understand his audience's world. Partisan groups in France provided the latest scores from military football matches and information on the cars officers drove. Secret microphones installed in PoW camps picked up on the soldiers' latest slang and complaints about their higher-ups. A special storage space had to be constructed for the volumes of notes held by Delmer's archivist, the former leader of the Social Democrats in the Saar region, Max Braun. Delmer's team had early knowledge of when the RAF would strike a German town so they could warn soldiers if the street their loved ones lived on had been hit and remind them of their right to take leave and help relatives caught under bombardment.

Trump supporters in Washington, following the 2020 US presidential election ... 'Thirty percent of Americans claim, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the last presidential elections were "rigged".' Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA

Today it is so much easier to understand what people care about, even in closed societies. You can look at open-source research into corrupt procurement by local government, do sentiment analysis of social media, or use secure messaging apps that allow you to talk directly to people even in the most dangerous areas. The key is always to understand people's conditions, and be useful to them. Delmer never talked down or lectured - instead he understood the gripes of the soldiers and made them feel part of a community that looked after their interests better than the Nazis.

But just as important as what was broadcast was the experience of tuning in. Here was a radio programme pretending to be Nazi, which understood that its listeners knew that it wasn't, and whose listeners tuned in because they needed the emotional and physical safety of play acting as if they thought it might be Nazi after all. If the principle of Goebbels' propaganda was to try to entrance you, to dissolve you into the loud, angry crowd, then here was media that required you to make a series of autonomous, conscious steps to engage. Delmer's other media, such as his leaflets to help you feign illness and defect from the front, were also designed for people to take control and be more active. He encouraged people to invent roles for themselves rather than play the ones forced on them by Nazi propaganda.

How people think and act can be just as important as what they think when undermining the most malign propaganda. People are most susceptible to conspiracy theories, for example, when they don't feel they have any agency or influence over their lives and rely on conspiracies to explain the world. Many are drawn to "strongmen" when they feel they can't take back control over their lives. The real antidote to this is not plying them with facts. It's helping to fix the underlying lack of agency.

So what can we draw from the strange, contradictory experience of Delmer's deeds and misdeeds? Dictators and propagandists inside democracies use hate-spreading troll farms and conspiracy-spewing cable news; target audiences according to their deepest grievances and encourage cruelty. To compete we need to develop a new generation of democratic media with the same focus, but with different values. This needs to be done at scale.

First, such media has to match the emotional power of authoritarians. Counter-propagandists need their own visceral dramas, YouTubers and the whole spectrum of today's channels.

They don't need to hide their provenance like Der Chef, though they may have to give people the necessary "cover" to watch safely if in a dangerous dictatorship. But they do need to delve into the operating theatre of our darkest desires. Think of the difference between the cult leader and the therapist. Both dig into people's unspoken fears and needs. The cult leader, like the authoritarian propagandist, uses that insight to make people dependent on their power. The therapist helps them to become more empowered and self-aware.

Second, we need to be much more attuned to the needs of audiences - think of media less as dispensing information and more as a social service. We are, by the looks of it, going to be in a long struggle with Russia. Now is the time to start investing in media that engage the parts of society that are critical to their war effort: workers in munitions factories or, most obviously, soldiers. It's much easier than in Delmer's time to obtain evidence of what they care about. Last month there was, for example, a large leak of documents from Russia's military that showed how the leadership lies about losses on the front. The aim is not to make these people, who are often involved in war crimes, "good" - it's to help win the war by getting them to disobey their orders.

Third, such media need to nurture a sense of community, especially in polarised democracies where there is still a chance of displacing malign propaganda before it reaches total dominance, and where there are audiences up for grabs. Instead of experiencing power through a strongman, this community needs to empower people to act for themselves. There are many small initiatives that already pioneer this. Hearken, for example, is an online platform where users can help media choose which topics they should focus on, taking power away from aloof editors and grounding it in local needs. vTaiwan is another platform whose algorithm helps people find solutions to polarising issues by identifying common ground on which to build policies. Such examples are tiny and experimental, and need to be scaled massively.

Sefton Delmer had as many bad lessons for us as good. But the most fundamental one is related to his sense that all social roles are somehow performed. We have a choice. We can either play the role prescribed by propagandists - which makes us dependent on them. Or we can invent media that welcome people into a relationship where they become active players.

You can't shove "the truth" down people's throats if they don't want to hear it, but you can inspire them to have the motivation to care about facts in the first place.

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler will be published by Faber on 7 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The man who tricked Nazi Germany: lessons from the past on how to beat disinformation

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The story of the British man who took on Hitler's information machine offers valuable insights into the fight against the rise of authoritarianism

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A Future Perfect article, exploring the decision by Google to suspend its Gemini image generator, following complaints about the ethnicity of the historical characters it creates. 

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A Future Perfect article, exploring the decision by Google to suspend its Gemini image generator, following complaints about the ethnicity of the historical characters it creates. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What problem faces programmers when they design AI image generators? How does the way you understand the meaning of bias determine the way you approach this conundrum? How could Google have avoided this problem in the first place? You can also explore this issue here (it’s everywhere in the media!) To wrap up: Why is it important that AI developers develop their philosophical abilities alongside their technical abilities in order to avoid violating ethical norms?

KEY TERMS Pushing bias, Racially diverse, Overcompensate, Philosophical problem, Conundrum, Responsible AI, Values, Historical depictions vs. dream worlds

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This story is part of a group of stories called

Finding the best ways to do good.

Just last week, Google was forced to pump the brakes on its AI image generator, called Gemini, after critics complained that it was pushing bias ... against white people.

The controversy started with - you guessed it - a viral post on X. According to that post from the user @EndWokeness, when asked for an image of a Founding Father of America, Gemini showed a Black man, a Native American man, an Asian man, and a relatively dark-skinned man. Asked for a portrait of a pope, it showed a Black man and a woman of color. Nazis, too, were reportedly portrayed as racially diverse.

After complaints from the likes of Elon Musk, who called Gemini's output "racist" and Google "woke," the company suspended the AI tool's ability to generate pictures of people.

"It's clear that this feature missed the mark. Some of the images generated are inaccurate or even offensive," Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan wrote, adding that Gemini does sometimes "overcompensate" in its quest to show diversity.

Raghavan gave a technical explanation for why the tool overcompensates: Google had taught Gemini to avoid falling into some of AI's classic traps, like stereotypically portraying all lawyers as men. But, Raghavan wrote, "our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range."

This might all sound like just the latest iteration of the dreary culture war over " wokeness " - and one that, at least this time, can be solved by quickly patching a technical problem. (Google plans to relaunch the tool in a few weeks.)

But there's something deeper going on here. The problem with Gemini is not just a technical problem.

It's a philosophical problem - one for which the AI world has no clear-cut solution.

What does bias mean?

Imagine that you work at Google. Your boss tells you to design an AI image generator. That's a piece of cake for you - you're a brilliant computer scientist! But one day, as you're testing the tool, you realize you've got a conundrum.

You ask the AI to generate an image of a CEO. Lo and behold, it's a man. On the one hand, you live in a world where the vast majority of CEOs are male, so maybe your tool should accurately reflect that, creating images of man after man after man. On the other hand, that may reinforce gender stereotypes that keep women out of the C-suite. And there's nothing in the definition of "CEO" that specifies a gender. So should you instead make a tool that shows a balanced mix, even if it's not a mix that reflects today's reality?

This comes down to how you understand bias.

Computer scientists are used to thinking about "bias" in terms of its statistical meaning: A program for making predictions is biased if it's consistently wrong in one direction or another. (For example, if a weather app always overestimates the probability of rain, its predictions are statistically biased.) That's very clear, but it's also very different from the way most people use the word "bias" - which is more like "prejudiced against a certain group."

The problem is, if you design your image generator to make statistically unbiased predictions about the gender breakdown among CEOs, then it will be biased in the second sense of the word. And if you design it not to have its predictions correlate with gender, it will be biased in the statistical sense.

So how should you resolve the trade-off?

"I don't think there can be a clear answer to these questions," Julia Stoyanovich, director of the NYU Center for Responsible AI, told me when I previously reported on this topic. "Because this is all based on values."

Embedded within any algorithm is a value judgment about what to prioritize, including when it comes to these competing notions of bias. So companies have to decide whether they want to be accurate in portraying what society currently looks like, or promote a vision of what they think society could or even should look like - a dream world.

How can tech companies do a better job navigating this tension?

The first thing we should expect companies to do is get explicit about what an algorithm is optimizing for: Which type of bias will it focus on reducing? Then companies have to figure out how to build that into the algorithm.

Part of that is predicting how people are likely to use an AI tool. They might try to create historical depictions of the world (think: white popes) but they might also try to create depictions of a dream world (female popes, bring it on!).

"In Gemini, they erred towards the 'dream world' approach, understanding that defaulting to the historic biases that the model learned would (minimally) result in massive public pushback," wrote Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face.

Google might have used certain tricks "under the hood" to push Gemini to produce dream-world images, Mitchell explained. For example, it may have been appending diversity terms to users' prompts, turning "a pope" into "a pope who is female" or "a Founding Father" into "a Founding Father who is Black."

But instead of adopting only a dream-world approach, Google could have equipped Gemini to suss out which approach the user actually wants (say, by soliciting feedback about the user's preferences) - and then generate that, assuming the user isn't asking for something off-limits.

What counts as off-limits comes down, once again, to values. Every company needs to explicitly define its values and then equip its AI tool to refuse requests that violate them. Otherwise, we end up with things like Taylor Swift porn.

AI developers have the technical ability to do this. The question is whether they've got the philosophical ability to reckon with the value choices they're making - and the integrity to be transparent about them.
This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox's flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Black Nazis? A woman pope? That's just the start of Google's AI problem.

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The Gemini image generator isn't just suffering from a technical problem, but from a philosophical one.

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A Guardian article, arguing that robots scraping news sites for content could massively impact journalism.

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A Guardian article, arguing that robots scraping news sites for content could massively impact journalism.

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It's hardly a surprise that Meta, owner of Facebook, is refusing to renew its deals with Australia's media companies. It was always grudging in its negotiations and never really accepted the principle that it should pay for the benefit of using the work of journalists.

Facebook and Google were forced to the bargaining table by the news media bargaining code. That law allowed the government to "designate" digital platforms, which would force them to negotiate with media companies.

The big stick was that if the parties could not agree, the decision would be made by an independent arbiter. In other words, Google and Facebook would lose control.

In 2021, after a few hissy fits, Google and Facebook avoided designation by cutting deals outside the legislation. These deals, mostly for three years, were worth an estimated $200m for news media companies. More journalists were hired and more journalism was done as a result.

But there was always the risk it would be a sugar hit, rather than a path to sustainability.

The news media bargaining code and the deals that followed were political more than commercial.

Google and Facebook always argued that the commercial benefit of their use of news content flowed principally to the media organisations - and that there was therefore no justification for them to have to pay. When the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission asked them for evidence to back this up, "little useful information was forthcoming", according to the then ACCC chairman, Rod Sims.

The real value of news media content to digital platforms like Google and Facebook has never really been tested.

But, with the support of all the media companies, including the mighty News Corp, the government had the political will to pass the law and force a result.

Facebook was also always more grudging than Google, cutting fewer deals and notably failing to reach agreement with smaller outlets such as SBSand The Conversation.

But it avoided designation, deals were cut and the show rolled on. Now the deals are expiring and Meta seems to think it can call a bluff.

Since the deals were cut, Facebook has, by tweaking its algorithms and the like, made itself virtually useless as a source of news.

You can go to the Facebook pages of news media organisations, to be sure. But you are very unlikely to find their content by scrolling through what Facebook chooses to serve you.

And, very fast, TikTok and WeChat have become more important sources of news than Facebook. Apple News has also grown exponentially in importance.

On Friday, the Albanese government was surprisingly strong in its comments on Meta's intransigence. It seems that the political will to force the platforms to negotiate remains in place.

But will the government also move on TikTok and Apple? That would be quite a fight, and in an election year. And could it even be done, given that TikTok is Chinese-owned?

Meanwhile, the news media is about to be hit with another tsunami of change, in the form of artificial intelligence and its integration into search engines.

This could be the most catastrophic threat to the sustainability of professional journalism so far, in an industry that has barely recovered from the flight of classified advertising to online platforms in the 90s and the exodus of most of the rest of the advertising revenue to Google and Facebook since 2014.

Let me explain. Suppose you go to Google, or to the Microsoft competitor Bing, and search for information on the Gaza Strip.

You would get a list of search results, some of which would be links to mainstream media articles. If you clicked through, your visit would be counted and that traffic would attract advertisers and therefore revenue that pays for the journalists.

The historians may conclude that the internet brought not a new enlightenment, as many of us hoped, but instead a new dark age

If you find yourself frequently visiting a particular news site, you might choose to subscribe, or in the case of the Guardian, voluntarily give support.

At the moment, both Bing and Google offer you the option of searching using AI - but it is not the default. That may soon change.

In which case, your search would yield not a list of sites to click through to, but rather an article about the Gaza Strip written by a robot, using the content of news media companies and other sources.

There might be links to the sources - but they would be much less prominent. They may not be there at all.

People who click through from search engine results make up a big proportion of the traffic for news media and it has been increasing.

Outlets that are free to the user (such as the Guardian, the ABC and commercial television news sites) are particularly dependent. If a large part of the traffic from search engines is lost, making journalism sustainable becomes even harder than it already is.

I have probably chosen the wrong example in the Gaza Strip because there are some things robots can't do. They can't bear witness. They don't go to places, talk to people, exercise judgment, consciously seek out alternative views and perspectives.

But robots can take the products of the journalists that do those things and exploit them.

In the short term, it is lifestyle journalism that is most likely to be threatened - travel sections, all those superficial articles that conclude that good diet and exercise improve your health (who knew), food journalism, recipes and the like.

Already, if you want to construct an itinerary for a three-day visit to Barcelona, AI is an efficient way of doing it. There is no need to comb through the weekend travel supplements.

High-end, literary travel journalism and truly sensual food writing will continue to delight, of course, But how much of the stuff that swells the weekend papers and the media sites meets that test?

What matters to democracy is not the disappearance of the lifestyle journalism so much but the advertising that wraps around it.

If that goes - the travel ads, the cosmetic ads, the food ads - the financial viability of much of news media will go with it.

What can be done? All the news media companies are carefully watching the way that Microsoft and Google are integrating AI into search.

Many news media are blocking outfits like OpenAI from scraping their sites. Google and Microsoft are harder to stop. It is not clear that it can be done.

Copyright law - a limp and fuzzy beast - may not be adequate to stop the cannibalism, but publishers are keeping their options open on legal action.

What about the news media bargaining code? At the moment it doesn't cover the use of media content for training the AI robots - but perhaps, with modification, it could.

As is always the case in news media, change comes more quickly than the response.

The government is consulting about ways of helping the sustainability of news media through its News Media Assistance Program. But as the discussion paper acknowledges, there have been multiple inquiries into the problems of making journalism sustainable in recent decades and the response from successive governments has been, at best, "ad hoc or reactive".

Meanwhile, journalists lose their jobs and the media are hollowed out, losing its confidence and sense of mission. Most of the recommendations of these inquiries - and they have largely said the same things - have been overlooked.

Ideas now on the table include tax incentives for investment in public interest journalism and tax deductibility for donations to not-for-profit journalism enterprises. (Declaration: through my involvement with the Public Interest Journalism Initiative , I have been involved in the development of such proposals.)

Whether or not these ideas gain favour, it is well past time for some up-to-date, nimble media policy.

Otherwise, the historians may conclude that the internet brought not a new enlightenment, as many of us hoped, but instead a new dark age.

Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. She is an honorary principal fellow of the Centre for Advancing Journalism and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group

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If Meta's intransigence isn't enough, AI poses an even greater threat to journalism | Margaret Simons

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While Facebook has refused to renew its Australian media deals, robots scraping news sites for content could upend the industry entirely