Less than two weeks before pivotal elections for the European Parliament, a constellation of websites and social media accounts linked to Russia or far-right groups is spreading disinformation, encouraging discord and amplifying distrust in the centrist parties that have governed for decades. European Union investigators, academics and advocacy groups say […] Read more »
The Making of the Fox News White House
… Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at […] Read more »
Why Do People Fall for Fake News?
What makes people susceptible to fake news and other forms of strategic misinformation? And what, if anything, can be done about it? These questions have become more urgent in recent years, not least because of revelations about the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 United States presidential election by disseminating […] Read more »
Agents of doubt: How a powerful Russian propaganda machine chips away at Western notions of truth
The initial plan was a Cold War classic — brutal yet simple. Two Russian agents would slip onto the property of a turncoat spy in Britain and daub his front door with a rare military-grade poison designed to produce an agonizing and untraceable death. But when the attempted assassination of […] Read more »
Blame Fox, not Facebook, for fake news
Yochai Benkler, Rob Faris and Hal Robert, three scholars affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, have a new book, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” presenting major new research about the political consequences of American media. I asked Benkler, who is the Berkman professor of Entrepreneurial Legal […] Read more »
How disinformation, voter suppression and partisanship destroy democracy
… As Walter Lippmann first argued in “Public Opinion” (1922), people in mass societies interpret the modern world through the “pictures” and “fictions” in their heads. The “pseudo-environments” they inhabit are made comprehensible only through the “stereotypes” that enable them to make sense of an otherwise chaotic reality, and for […] Read more »