Astroturfing

Image: Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images Rick Berman, an infamous right-wing lobbyist whose organizations have been accused of several astroturfing campaigns—and who is known as "Dr. Evil"—revealed that his firm is behind an organization that claimed to be a grass-roots movement against New York City's prep schools…

Comment A flawed consultation into Section 230 – America's safety blanket that shields online platforms like Google and Facebook – has already devolved into a mess dangerously reminiscent of the net neutrality debate. “The censorship of conservative voices is a well known fact to all people,” reads just one comment…

The rapid rise of social media over the past two decades has brought with it a surge in misinformation. Online debates on topics such as vaccinations, presidential elections (pdf) and the coronavirus pandemic are often as vociferous as they are laced with misleading information. Perhaps more than any other topic, climate change has been subject…

Communist Chinese government operatives got into the Trump White House and also sat at a confidential Republican election strategy meeting, Wednesday's Wall Street Journal reports. Some of the conduct the Journal described could form the basis for federal felony indictments. Fronts for the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party…

Political leaders in China’s capital Beijing are bold and getting bolder. Lately, the country has been involved in military border stoushes with India, flooding social media with misinformation, and leveraging “political assets” to advance its agendas abroad.The increasing pressure has many believing that something has to give.It hasn’t exactly been…

OpenAI, the AI company and research lab that Elon Musk helped cofound, is commercializing a sophisticated text-generation tool it previously said was too dangerous to release widely over fears of misuse. The company is launching the tool in a private beta, which will enable it to more easily monitor for…

On Wikipedia, a small group of regime-change advocates and right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporters have blacklisted independent media outlets like The Grayzone on explicitly political grounds, violating the encyclopedia’s guidelines. This is part 1 in a series of investigative reports on the systemic problems with Wikipedia. Read part 2 here: “Meet…

On Thursday Snap held its second-ever partner summit as a virtual event, announcing a new suite of products and developer tools for Snapchat. The inaugural event was one of the more memorable tech productions I’ve been to — a high-energy keynote from CEO Evan Spiegel in front of giant vertical…

The two destabilizing events recently occurring back-to-back, the response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, and the George Floyd rioting, illustrate well how America is now institutionally incapable of making decisions in her own best interests. That is, the overreaction to the disease and under-reaction to the rioting reflect a country…

GPT-3 will be adapted into the research group's first commercial product with clients like Reddit and QuizletOpenAI's GPT-3 cost $12 million to train.Illustration: Trent Joaquin; Source: Pixabay Research group OpenAI announced today that it will sell access to its cutting-edge language generation tools to clients with the organization’s first commercial…