Tag: misinformation

Elon Musk: A Misinformation Machine on Steroids (and/or Ketamine)

Buck Banks

450 posts, 679 million views

PolitiFact analyzed more than 450 posts Musk made on X, the social media platform he owns, from Sept. 30 to Oct. 14. These included reposts, quote replies and some standard replies to other X users. Musk — who was born in South Africa in 1971 and became a U.S. citizen in 2002 — continued his long-standing election year pattern of sharing falsehoods about immigrants and the immigration process, including baselessly claiming that immigrants have or will vote in U.S. elections. Musk has more than 202 million X followers who regularly view and interact with his posts. The misinformation-containing posts we analyzed over these two weeks received nearly 679 million views, more than 5.3 million likes and over 1.6 million reposts.

Bannon’s Podcast Is Top Spreader of Misinformation Among Conservative Media

Buck Banks

20%

Former Trump White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s “War Room” podcast has been the top spreader of misinformation in the conservative media ecosystem, according to a new study.Bannon’s “War Room” shared the most unsubstantiated or false claims in the dataset included in a study published by the Brookings Institution this week. Close to 20 percent of all episodes of Bannon’s show that were assessed featured claims that Snopes and PolitiFact fact-checkers or the terms dictionary flagged as unsubstantiated or false, the study found.

At Least 20 Conservatives Have Said There Are ‘Furries’ in K-12 Schools

Buck Banks

20

NBC News: “At least 20 conservative candidates and elected officials have claimed this year that K-12 schools are placing litter boxes on campus or making other accommodations for students who identify as cats. … Every school district that has been named by those 20 politicians said either to NBC News or in public statements that these claims are untrue. There is no evidence that any school has deployed litter boxes for students to use because they identify as cats.”