Домой United States USA — IT ‘All of It Is Toxic’: Misinformation About Protests Surges Online

‘All of It Is Toxic’: Misinformation About Protests Surges Online

345
0
ПОДЕЛИТЬСЯ

In the universe of false online information, George Floyd remains alive and George Soros is to blame for the protests.
On Twitter and Facebook, hundreds of posts are circulating saying that George Floyd is not actually dead.
Conspiracy theorists are baselessly arguing that George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor, is funding the spreading protests against police brutality.
And conservative commentators are asserting with little evidence that antifa, the far-left antifascism activist movement, coordinated the riots and looting that sprang from the protests.
Untruths, conspiracy theories and other false information are running rampant online as the furor over Mr. Floyd, an African-American man who was killed last week in police custody in Minneapolis, has built. The misinformation has surged as the protests have dominated conversation, far outpacing the volume of online posts and media mentions about last year’s protests in Hong Kong and Yellow Vest movement in France, according to the media insights company Zignal Labs.
At its peak on Friday, Mr. Floyd and the protests around his death were mentioned 8.8 million times, said Zignal Labs, which analyzed global television broadcasts and social media. In contrast, news of the Hong Kong protests reached 1.5 million mentions a day and the Yellow Vest movement 941,000.
“The combination of evolving events, sustained attention and, most of all, deep existing divisions make this moment a perfect storm for disinformation,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “All of it is toxic, and make our very real challenges and divisions harder to address.”
The collision of racial tensions and political polarization during the coronavirus pandemic has supersized the misinformation, researchers said. Much of it is being shared by the conspiracy group QAnon and far-right commentators as well as by those on the left, Mr. Brookie said.
President Trump himself has stoked the divisive information. Over the past few days, he posted on Twitter that antifa was a “Terrorist Organization” and urged the public to show up for a “MAGA Night” counterprotest at the White House.
Along with that, people are experiencing high levels of fear, uncertainty and anger, said Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, an organization that fights online disinformation. That creates “the worst possible context for a healthy information environment,” she said.

Continue reading...