The following news features cite commentary and/or research from Network Contagion Research Institute:
Russian disinformation campaigns are trying to sow distrust of COVID vaccines, study finds
Russian propagandists and Internet trolls are increasingly targeting companies with disinformation campaigns that are intended to damage their corporate reputations and stir public animosity.
Iran Steps up Efforts to Sow Discord Inside the U.S.
Iranian state actors are intensifying their disinformation campaign on social media to spread discord and anti-Semitic tropes inside the U.S., two U.S. intelligence officials say.
Pro-Iran Twitter accounts got anti-Semitic hate trending amid Israeli-Hamas escalation: researchers
The National Contagion Research Institute picked up on the coordinated effort as ‘#Covid1948’ began trending on Twitter
Companies enlist vaccine whisperers to convince skeptical workers to get their jabs
With so many people believing disinformation about COVID-19, employers face a big problem: convincing workers to get vaccinated.
One Republican’s Lonely Fight Against a Flood of Disinformation
After losing an ugly congressional race last year, Denver Riggleman is leading a charge against the conspiracy-mongering coursing through his party. He doesn’t have many allies.
Effort to stem online extremism accidentally pushed people toward an anarchist
Google and other tech companies are under pressure to prevent the spread of extremist propaganda on their platforms
Far-Right Extremists Move From ‘Stop the Steal’ to Stop the Vaccine
Extremist organizations are now bashing the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines in an effort to try to undermine the government.
QAnon pivots to spreading conspiracies about China and Jewish people
Experts who study extremism are warning of a concerning shift in the QAnon movement, where conspiracy theories are beginning to fuse anti-Chinese and anti-Jewish tropes with worries regarding vaccines and a global plot to take over the world.
QAnon now pushes alarming conspiracy myths targeting China and Jewish people
Experts on extremism are warning about a troubling shift in the right-wing QAnon movement toward a new vein of conspiracy that blends anti-Chinese and anti-Jewish tropes with fears of vaccines and a global plot to take over the world.
How Anti-Asian Activity Online Set the Stage for Real-World Violence
On platforms such as Telegram and 4chan, racist memes and posts about Asian-Americans have created fear and dehumanization.
Anti-Asian attacks rise along with online vitriol
Data shows that terms like ‘China,’ ‘Wuhan’ and ‘flu’ have surged on far-right forums on Telegram, 8kun and TheDonald.win since the election
With Trump gone, QAnon groups focus fury on attacking coronavirus vaccines
QAnon is flourishing on Telegram chat groups even after purges on Facebook, Twitter and others
QAnon’s corrosive impact on the U.S.
Tens of millions of Americans believe QAnon’s core — and false — theory that an evil cabal of Satan-worshipping elites commits atrocities against children and controls much of the world. Where does this movement stand and who has it impacted?
We need a social media early warning center
The early warnings of social media watchdog groups of pending violence in Washington on Jan. 6 fell largely on deaf ears. Why?
People of the Pod: The Real Danger of QAnon; Telling the Jewish Story in Arabic
Discussing the dangers of the antisemitic conspiracy theory movement QAnon and they join us to discuss what we can expect next from the movement and how we can take steps to stop it.
Tackling Big Tech: We need a new weapon to combat the virus of disinformation
Opinion: A new institution that would be independent but would report to Parliament should be created to deal with disinformation on social media platforms
QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right
The conspiracy theory has become a theology of right-wing rebellion.
With Trump out of office, the Republican Party is having an identity crisis
The Republican Party is out of power on Capitol Hill and deeply divided on issues from the attack on the Capitol to the impeachment of former President Trump.
“It’s over and nothing makes sense”: QAnon believers struggle to cope with Biden inauguration
Many followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory appear to be struggling to cope with reality after President Joe Biden was sworn in on Wednesday and the mass arrests never came.
The Technology 202: Where does QAnon go from here?
QAnon conspiracy theorists faced a big reality check when their baseless theories failed to materialize as Joe Biden became president.
QAnon believers grapple with doubt, spin new theories as Trump era ends
The administrator of 8kun, the longtime Internet home of the mysterious Q, says it’s time to move on, and a moderator on Wednesday wiped Q’s ‘drops’ from the website
How to respond to the QAnon threat
The role of QAnon supporters in the riot should have come as no surprise.
Clashing impeachment agendas
As a new president is sworn in this week, his predecessor will soon be put on trial for charges that he incited the deadly insurrection at the Capitol after claiming the 2020 election was “stolen.”
GitHub Says Staff Is Free to Express Concerns About Nazis, Offers to Rehire Jewish Employee After Controversial Firing
GitHub on Sunday said it was sorry for firing a Jewish employee who sent a message warning colleagues to “stay safe homies, Nazis are about,” on Jan. 6, the day President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the election.
100 days of warning: inside the Boogaloo killings of US security personnel
Extremism experts warned that the anti-government movement was planning attacks online. Why didn’t Facebook act?
Bloomberg: Balance of Power
“Bloomberg: Balance of Power” focuses on the intersection of politics and global business. The House opens the impeachment debate against President Trump.
Splintering of social media could fuel extremism, experts warn
Researchers fear that some users could fall into a wormhole of extremist content on niche, right-wing websites after abandoning Twitter
QAnon reshaped Trump’s party and radicalized believers. The Capitol siege may just be the start.
The online conspiracy theory, which depicts Trump as a messianic warrior battling ‘deep state’ Satanists, has helped fuel a real-world militant extremism that could haunt the Biden era
Republican Congressman to Right-Wing misinformers & conspiracy theorists: I’m going after them.
Retiring Republican Congressman Denver Riggleman has had it with the conspiracy theories and misinformers. He says he is going after them.
Virginia gubernatorial candidate says ‘Trump should declare martial law’
Virginia Republican state Sen. Amanda Chase, an outspoken Trump supporter and gubernatorial hopeful, doubled down on disputed voter fraud claims and said Thursday that her state needs an election audit – through martial law, if necessary.
How QAnon’s lies are hijacking the national conversation
It started with a Tweet from a QAnon supporter at 2:09 in the morning: #SubpoenaObama.
Though devoid of context, the cryptic message made sense to anyone in tune with the groundless conspiracy theory that the Obama administration — prior to leaving office in 2017 — had taken active measures to undermine the incoming Trump presidency. Within a minute, the same Twitter account sent another tweet encouraging others to push the hashtag, adding that if they do, “good things will happen.”
Online anti-Semitism peaks during moments of national tension. And it’s being partly driven by Russian trolls.
Soon after the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a Twitter user going by the name “jojoh888” knew who was to blame for the clashes between neo-Nazis and the antifa activists who opposed them: George Soros, the Jewish billionaire and progressive philanthropist.
“George Soros is the puppet master. He’s funding both sides,” the account tweeted, echoing a false claim expressed frequently by far-right activists.
“jojoh888” was a Russian troll controlled by Vladimir Putin’s government that was suspended in 2018 in an effort to root out disinformation from Twitter.
Republican lawmaker likens Trump vote-fraud crusade to the search for Bigfoot
It was only recently that U.S. Rep. Denver Riggleman, R-Va., had his epiphany: The supporters of President Trump were starting to resemble the people who he used to hang out with more than 15 years ago when — mostly as a lark — he would go on expeditions to the Pacific Northwest looking for Bigfoot.
GOP Rep. Unloads on Team Trump’s Election Conspiracies: Cooking Up a ‘Fantasy’ Involving Venezuela and the DOJ
Outgoing congressman Denver Riggleman (R-VA) is one of the few Republicans not only acknowledging that Joe Biden won the election, but calling out people in his party pushing election conspiracies — including President Donald Trump and those around him.
In a recent interview Riggleman unloaded on fellow Republicans refusing to publicly acknowledge reality, saying, “I’m so damn sick of it.”
What hunting Bigfoot taught a Republican congressman about politics
There was a time in Denver Riggleman’s life when he sat on the banks of a creek that reeked of dead fish and peered through night-vision goggles into the thick of the Olympic National Forest. He was looking for Bigfoot.
Or at least, others in his group were. Riggleman, a nonbeliever who was then a National Security Agency defense contractor, had come along for the ride, paying thousands of dollars in 2004 to indulge a lifelong fascination: Why do people — what kind of people — believe in Bigfoot?
Now in one of his last acts as a Republican congressman from Virginia, Riggleman is asking the same questions of supporters of QAnon and deniers of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Will there be an American insurgency?
David Kilcullen, one of the world’s leading counterinsurgency theorists, recently posed the question of whether the United States is on the precipice of an insurgency. The answer remains unclear, but it is important to review the facts and the means of preventing an American insurgency from occurring.
Claiming Censorship, Conservatives Head to Alternative Social Media Sites Post-Election
It started with President Trump and his supporters posting misinformation disputing the legitimacy of the election. Among other things, Twitter applied warning labels to the president’s tweets and permanently suspended an account belonging to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. Facebook decided to remove the #StoptheSteal campaign altogether.
Now, what was a trickle of high-profile conservatives creating accounts on relatively unknown platforms like Parler, Gab and MeWe has become a flood. In recent weeks, Parler, a Twitter-like app that touts its commitment to free speech (a stance often viewed as code for welcoming far-right viewpoints), claims its membership doubled from 4 million to 8 million users.
Even if We Dump Donald Trump, These Forces Will Continue to Strangle America
Each of us has been a journalist for more than 40 years. We are old enough to remember the racism of George Wallace, the crimes of Richard Nixon, and the stupidity that squandered vast amounts of blood and treasure in Vietnam and Iraq. But nothing prepared us for the wholesale criminality of this administration, or a president for whom “cruelty is the point,” in Adam Serwer’s memorable phrase.
Not since the Civil War has the nation suffered such prolonged, vicious, and effective assaults on all the mechanisms that have given the republic a pulse for 244 years. In just a few days we will learn if there is enough strength left in our democracy’s arteries to allow its revival.
How QAnon uses satanic rhetoric to set up a narrative of “good vs. evil”
In front of a TV audience on Oct. 15, President Donald Trump declared that he knew “nothing about” QAnon, before correcting himself to say: “I do know they are very much against pedophilia.”
What he didn’t do was disavow what has been referred to as a “collective delusion.” Part of that could be down to QAnon followers holding up Trump as some sort of savior — someone playing four-dimensional chess against shadowy political insiders and power players known as the “Deep State.”
Here Are a Few of the Peer-Reviewed Reports, Published by Members of the NCRI Leadership Team:
“A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism”
by Joel Finkelstein, Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Jeremy Blackburn.
A new wave of growing antisemitism, driven by fringe Web communities, is an increasingly worrying presence in the socio-political realm. The ubiquitous and global nature of the Web has provided tools used by these groups to spread their ideology to the rest of the Internet. Although the study of antisemitism and hate is not new, the scale and rate of change of online data has impacted the efficacy of traditional approaches to measure and understand this worrying trend. In this paper, we present a large-scale, quantitative study of online antisemitism.
“On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities.” (2018)
by Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, Guillermo Suarez-Tangil. In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2018 (Distinguished Paper Award).
Internet memes are increasingly used to sway and manipulate public opinion. This prompts the need to study their propagation, evolution, and influence across the Web. In this paper, we detect and measure the propagation of memes across multiple Web communities, using a processing pipeline based on perceptual hashing and clustering techniques, and a dataset of 160M images from 2.6B posts gathered from Twitter, Reddit, 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board (/pol/), and Gab, over the course of 13 months.
“What is Gab? A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber?” (2018)
Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, Haewoon Kwak, Jeremy Blackburn. In Proceedings of the WWW Companion, 2018.
Over the past few years, a number of new “fringe” communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false information reaches mainstream communities.