Archives for July 2021

Twitter has long banned users from sharing misinformation about the coronavirus that could lead to harm. In March, the company introduced a policy that explained the penalties for sharing lies about the virus and vaccines.

“We’ve observed the emergence of persistent conspiracy theories, alarmist rhetoric unfounded in research or credible reporting, and a wide range of unsubstantiated rumors, which left uncontextualized can prevent the public from making informed decisions regarding their health, and puts individuals, families and communities at risk,” the company said in its policy against sharing Covid misinformation.

People who violate that policy are subject to escalating punishments known as strikes and could face a permanent ban if they repeatedly share misinformation about the virus. A 12-hour ban, like the one Ms. Greene is experiencing, is Twitter’s response to users who have either two or three strikes. After four strikes, Twitter suspends users for seven days, and after five strikes, Twitter bars the user altogether.

Other Republicans who have been suspended from Twitter have complained that the social media company is censoring them.

In January, Twitter barred President Donald J. Trump after the company determined that his social media posts played a role in inciting violence during the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Mr. Trump has argued that Twitter and Facebook, which also suspended his account, were censoring him and said the companies required government oversight.

Ms. Greene was previously suspended from Twitter in April, but the company said it was a mistake caused by one of its automated systems for detecting spam and abuse.

“Everyone knows that’s a LIE, and it was no mistake,” Ms. Greene tweeted after her suspension was lifted.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/technology/marjorie-taylor-greene-twitter.html

“The suggestion we haven’t put resources toward combating Covid misinformation and supporting the vaccine rollout is just not supported by the facts,” said Dani Lever, a Facebook spokeswoman. “With no standard definition for vaccine misinformation, and with both false and even true content (often shared by mainstream media outlets) potentially discouraging vaccine acceptance, we focus on the outcomes — measuring whether people who use Facebook are accepting of Covid-19 vaccines.”

Executives at Facebook, including its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have said the company committed to removing Covid-19 misinformation since the start of the pandemic. The company said it had removed over 18 million pieces of Covid-19 misinformation, though it did not specify over what time frame.

Experts who study disinformation said the number of pieces that Facebook removed was not as informative as how many were uploaded to the site, or in which groups and pages people were seeing the spread of misinformation.

“They need to open up the black box that is their content ranking and content amplification architecture. Take that black box and open it up for audit by independent researchers and government,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that aims to combat disinformation. “We don’t know how many Americans have been infected with misinformation.”

Mr. Ahmed’s group, using publicly available data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned program, found that 12 people were responsible for 65 percent of the Covid-19 misinformation on Facebook. The White House, including Mr. Biden, has repeated that figure in the past week. Facebook says it is incorrect but has not provided details.

Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher at Stanford’s Internet Observatory, called on Facebook to release more granular data, which would allow experts to understand how false claims about the vaccine were affecting specific communities within the country. The information, which is known as “prevalence data,” essentially looks at how widespread a narrative is, such as what percentage of people in a community on the service see it.

“The reason more granular prevalence data is needed is that false claims don’t spread among all audiences equally,” Ms. DiResta said. “In order to effectively counter specific false claims that communities are seeing, civil society organization and researchers need a better sense of what is happening within those groups.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/technology/facebook-misinformation-blind-spot.html

Mr. Jaffer also flagged some issues that remain unanswered related to how broadly the department would define and interpret key terms in the new rules, like “news gathering.” He called them gaps that should be filled when the department issues its new regulation.

One ambiguity, he noted, is that the memo discusses a prohibition on compulsory legal tools that are listed in the old regulation — subpoenas, warrants and court orders — but does not mention another such tool the department sometimes uses to obtain records like logs of communications in national security inquiries, called a national security letter.

Still, the phrasing of Mr. Garland’s memo suggested an answer to one open question: whether the policy would protect reporters’ records in situations in which their source is suspected of being an outside hacker who stole information, as opposed to a government insider who leaked it.

Based on its wording, a reporter’s records would apparently still be protected. The memo said the prohibition would apply whenever “a member of the news media has, in the course of news gathering, only possessed or published government information, including classified information.”

The new limits apply only to reporters’ records. Mr. Garland noted that the government could still seize records of officials who are suspected of being the source of unauthorized disclosures.

In his memo, Mr. Garland noted that the Justice Department had previously operated under a “balancing test” that included some procedural limits on when prosecutors could seize reporters’ records, and required senior officials to weigh the interest in protecting a free flow of information to the press against the interest in gathering evidence that could solve crimes.

The attorney general wrote, however, that there were “shortcomings” to that approach and that the new policy was intended to better protect journalists’ ability to do their jobs.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/us/politics/reporter-records-justice-department.html

Cathy Guisewite, whose appealing and often befuddled cartoon avatar, Cathy, spoke to young women caught between the heady promises of second-wave feminism and the grind of everyday life, said that Mr. Andrews had been the heart and soul of the company and Mr. McMeel the fireworks.

“Cartoonists and their syndicates are typically at odds with each other,” Ms. Guisewite said. “But John created the opposite feeling for us. John opened up a new universe for different kinds of voices on the page. His insistence that there was room for our voices made room for others, too.”

John Paul McMeel was born on Jan. 26, 1936, in South Bend, Ind. His father, James, was the doctor for the University of Notre Dame’s football team; his mother, Naomi (Reilly) McMeel, was a homemaker. He earned a degree in business from Notre Dame in 1957.

Mr. McMeel spent a year in law school at Indiana University before dropping out to take a sales job at the Hall Syndicate. He had just started working there when he met Susan Sykes on a blind date. They married in 1966.

He met Mr. Andrews on a return visit home to South Bend; still a student at Notre Dame, Mr. Andrews was renting a room from Mr. McMeel’s mother.

In the early days of Universal, Mr. Andrews’s wife, Kathleen, kept the books, and Ms. McMeel, back in New York, read submissions. When Mr. Andrews died suddenly in 1980 at 44, Ms. Andrews returned to the company as chief executive of its publishing business. She later became vice chairman of the company. She died in April at 84.

Universal rebranded itself as Andrews McMeel Universal in the late 1980s. By then Mr. McMeel had signed up Dear Abby, Erma Bombeck, Mr. Larson, Roger Ebert and Pat Oliphant, the arch Australian-born political cartoonist.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/business/media/john-p-mcmeel-dead.html