mollyfamwat
8. January 2021, 5:11 p.m. (Eastern time)
8. January 2021, 5:11 p.m. (Eastern time)
Davey Alba.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday that there is no evidence that supporters of the Anti-Fascist Movement, a free collective of anti-fascist activists, were involved in the pro-Tromp rally that stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday.
Steven D’Antuono, the agency’s deputy director, told reporters that there was no indication that the group was involved in the unrest that stormed Capitol Hill.
Since Wednesday, right-wing extremist activists and allies of the president have claimed, often with easily rebuttable evidence, that the rioters were anti-fascist supporters and not supporters of President Trump.
Among those who lobbied for the forgery, Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, opposed Biden’s vote, arguing that the people in the crowd were in fact members of the violent terrorist group Antifa. Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General, also said that Antifa was involved.
But even President Trump acknowledged that it was his supporters, not the liberal activists, who raided Capitol Hill. At one point on Wednesday, he told the crowd that we love you.
An analysis by media research firm Zignal Labs found that unconfirmed rumors were mentioned 411,099 times on cable television, social media, and in print and online news on Wednesdays and Thursdays. According to Zignal, this is the most common false or misleading claim about the Capitol Mafia.
Adam Goldman contributed to this report.
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8. January 2021, 14:03 p.m. (Eastern time)
8. January 2021, 14:03 p.m. (Eastern time)
Davey Alba.
Protesters surrounded the U.S. Capitol during a presidential meeting on Wednesday. linked to Jason Andrew’s credit for the New York Times.
Misinformation and distortion of the truth raged on social media in the days following Wednesday’s attack on Capitol Hill by a crowd of trump cards and the disruption of the vote count to certify the victory of President-elect Joseph R.. Biden Jr.
The conservative Washington Times stated that facial recognition indicates that the crowd is made up of members of an anti-fascist group without anti-fascist activists. The article has been corrected. Other misleading and false articles and reports claim that the work of the Mafia is a set-up or insider trading. And others have said that President Trump will soon release information about how the elections were stolen.
Zignal Labs, a media analysis company, has compiled a list of the most popular false and misleading social media stories about Wednesday’s events, counting the mentions on cable television and social media, as well as in print and online newspapers on Wednesday and Thursday. Here’s the list.
1. The rioters on the Capitol were actually Antifa: 411 099 Entries.
The false story that Antifa’s supporters were behind the riots on Capitol Hill, reached a climax at 66,122 on Wednesday evening, according to Zignal. Representative Matt Getz even cited a fake Washington Times article as proof that the mafia was in fact a member of the violent terrorist group Antifa.
The Washington Times ran a new version of its story on Thursday, saying it was actually neo-Nazis and other extremists identified in photos of the crowd, according to BuzzFeed News, which disputed the document’s report.
2. Mafia actions were a set-up and an inside job: 122,287 mentions
The idea that the Mafia was a set-up has spread widely on social media, although there is no evidence to support the conspiracy theory. It was said that the construction was planned by the deep state, which is a shortcut to the conspiracy theory of democratic elites secretly exercising political control over society. According to Zignal, the story peaked at 12,593 mentioning between 6 and 7 p.m. Wednesday.
3. President Trump knew the crowd would come and people should trust the plan and hold the line: 83,990 mentions.
The twisted idea that President Trump knew in advance what the mafia was planning and that people should trust the plan and keep their finger on the pulse has spread, especially among supporters of the QAnon conspiracy movement – which is based on the false assumption that the country is governed by a gang of paedophiles led by the Democrats who founded President Trump.
4. The mafia on Capitol Hill was made up of people pretending to be MAGA: 64,258 mentions
The popular fake story that people in the crowd simply imitated MAGA reached a peak in early Wednesday before the indictments were filed specifically against Antifa Zero.
5. President Trump will release information about how the elections were stolen: 63 190 Entries
Some supporters of the President have insisted that he will soon release information on how the elections were stolen, despite overwhelming evidence – and numerous court rulings – that there was no large-scale electoral fraud.
Some versions of unconfirmed rumors have claimed that this is why Mr. Trump’s opponents have asked to accuse the president of the blocking clause of the 25th Amendment. The amendment of the constitution is not authorised.
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6. January 2021, 9:00 p.m. ET
6. January 2021, 9:00 p.m. ET
Davey Alba.
A billboard posted on Capitol Hill after the pro-Tromp crowd broke indoors on Wednesday. linked to John Cherry/Getty Images credit.
In thousands of messages on Twitter and Facebook, members of the far right have made unsubstantiated claims that the pro-Trump crowd that stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday, carried the Empire flags and prevented vote-counting in the congressional elections, consisted of liberal activists who disguised themselves as the pro-Trump community in order to give it a bad name.
Several messages shared by thousands of people contained photographs suggesting that anti-fascist supporters were behind the riots. But these pictures don’t really show Antifa. On the contrary, some photos and the information they contain suggest a connection with right-wing extremist movements.
Even President Trump has acknowledged that it was his supporters, not the liberal activists, who invaded Capitol Hill. At one point on Wednesday, he told the crowd that we love you.
Among the most popular personalities who have pushed conspiracy theory is commentator Candice Owens, Georgia L.’s attorney. Lyn Wood and Juanita Broaddrick, the administrator of the retirement home that publicly accused President Bill Clinton of rape in 1978 in 1999. Other prominent figures who have spread the rumors include Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and the representative Mo Brooks, a Republican from Alabama.
related to Twitter credit
According to a New York Times analysis, the rumour that supporters of the Anti-Fascist Movement – a loose collective of anti-fascist activists – presented themselves as members of the extreme right on Wednesday was shared more than 150,000 times on Twitter and thousands more times on Facebook. In total, the accounts that spread the rumors had tens of millions of followers.
There is compelling photographic evidence that Antifa forcibly stormed Congress today to cause harm and damage, Wood posted on Twitter. NOT @realDonaldTrump supporters.
In his message, Mr Wood pointed out that there was a link to phillyantifa.org, which published a picture of a bearded man involved in the mafia. But on this page are pictures of people known to the neo-Nazi movement.
Another popular post that was shared at least 39,000 times on Twitter claimed, without proof, that a former FBI agent present on the American Capitol had just sent me a text message confirming that at least one bus full of anti-Fa thugs had infiltrated the peaceful protesters on the trump card.
related to Twitter credit
False claims about buses or aircraft of anti-fascist activists who infiltrated demonstrations are a common refrain of the extreme right.
In response to this unfounded claim, a Twitter user said of course. As an example of Antifa’s support, the user has included photographs of a man wearing a horned helmet with an American flag pattern on his face.
This man wasn’t Antifa’s advocate. Rather, he is an old supporter of QAnon who has spoken at right-wing political meetings in Arizona in recent months, according to the Republic of Arizona.
Ben Decker and Jacob Silver contributed to the investigation.
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4. January 2021, 22:33 p.m. (Eastern time)
4. January 2021, 22:33 p.m. (Eastern time)
Maggie Astor.
Gabriel Sterling, one of Georgia’s top campaigners, responded to President Trump’s false statements at a press conference in Atlanta on Monday. Credit…Mike Segar/Reuters
At a sinister press conference on Monday, Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s largest voter, systematically denied the false accusations of election fraud made by President Trump. One more time.
The reason I have to speak here today is that there are people in authoritative and respectful positions who have said that their voices are not counted and that is not true, he said. Really, a Republican who last month denounced the president’s failure to reveal threats against election officials and who was charged on Monday with answering news of a phone call in which Trump put pressure on Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find enough votes to change the outcome of the presidential race.
Monday is anti-disclosure day, Sterling said. Groundhog Day again, Groundhog Day again, and I’m going to talk about things I’ve talked about a lot the past few months. I’m gonna do this one last time. I hope so.
Below is a summary of the misrepresentation of the vote count in Georgia by Mr Trump and his lawyers on the phone and elsewhere, as well as Mr Sterling’s explanation of what is really going on.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: Amid the disruption caused by a broken water pipe in Fulton County’s counting center, voters brought suitcases or boxes of ballots.
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : In the late evening, after the water was turned off, voters got ready to go home for the night and followed the usual procedures to keep their ballots safe: They put them in containers and put numbered seals on them. But when Mr. Raffensperger heard that they were going to close the shop, he ordered them to continue counting during the night – so the workers removed the bins and resumed counting the ballots.
It’s all in the video the secretary of state released.
That’s what’s really frustrating: The president’s legal team had the full file, Sterling said. They’ve been watching the whole band. They deliberately misled the state senate, the voters and the people of the United States.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: These employees scanned a pile of ballots several times.
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : When the scanning machine encounters a problem, it stops, but while stationary, several bulletins pass by. When this happens, the employees take the ballots with them and scan them again to make sure they are counted correctly. This is standard procedure, and ballots are not counted twice – and if they were, the recount in Georgia would show that.
This investigation showed that there were no problems with scanning the machine, Sterling said. If someone takes a pile of ballots and scans it several times, you have a lot of votes without the ballots matching.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: Tens of thousands of ineligible voters voted.
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : The actual number of votes cast by ineligible voters is negligible and cannot change the outcome of the elections.
Mr Sterling also responded to more specific allegations concerning ineligible voters:
- Mr Trump said thousands of people voted, even though they weren’t registered to vote. That’s impossible, Mr. Sterling said: You can’t do that. The right to vote cannot be granted to you, they have no means of attributing the name, unless they are on the electoral roll. So the number is zero.
- Mr Trump said thousands of voters died before the election. Mr Sterling said the Secretary of State had found only two that matched that description.
- Mr. Trump said hundreds of people voted using mailboxes instead of their home addresses. Mr Trump said that the Secretary of State’s office is still investigating, but all the people she’s investigated so far have in fact used a real home address – one for a house or apartment building.
- M. According to Trump’s campaign, a lot of criminals voted. In fact, using state corrections and trial service records, the secretary of state identified only 74 people who could fit this category, and Mr Sterling said the final number will be even lower once the service has conducted its investigation because in many cases the person may have regained their right to vote after serving their sentence or may simply have the same names as the offender.
- M. According to Mr. Trump’s campaign, tens of thousands of people under the age of 18 voted. The real number is zero, Sterling said, and the reason we know that is because the data is about voter registration. There are four cases – four where people asked for their vote by mail before turning 18, but on election day they were already 18 years old. That means it’s a legitimate vote.
- M. According to Mr. Trump’s campaign, hundreds of voters voted in two states. Officials are still under investigation, but if such cases were confirmed, they would be few in number and not enough to change the outcome.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: This machine returned the votes and counted both Trump’s and Biden’s ballots.
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : If that had happened, Sterling said, the recount would have shown a hand, and none of that.
To the accusations of hacking, he added that the voting machines and scanners were not connected to the Internet. Nobody has a modem, Mr. Sterling said. It’s very difficult to hack things without a modem.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: That election officials did not properly verify the signatures on the ballot papers.
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : The State Secretary cited signature experts who examined more than 15,000 mail-in-voting envelopes. They found potential problems with only two of them, and after an investigation both ballots were found to be legitimate.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: That Georgia rejected a suspiciously low number of absent ballots compared to previous rounds of elections.
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : The decrease in the number of refusals is due to a recent law allowing Georgians to use their ballot papers to raise issues, such as B. rejected signatures, which need to be corrected. Both parties had teams traveling across the state to contact voters whose ballots could be rejected, but the Real said the Democrats are simply better prepared for this task.
TRUMP’s statement: Those election workers were tearing up the ballots.
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : No shredding of ballots here, Mr. Sterling said with obvious annoyance. It’s not real. It’s not that.
Employees shred non-disclosure envelopes: empty envelopes that protect the privacy of postal votes and fit inside the outer envelope. This is an outer envelope that voters must sign, and voters have kept these outer envelopes, as required by law. On the other hand, envelopes containing classified information have no evidential value because, by definition, they do not contain any identifying information.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: The employees of the Dominion Voting System have moved internal parts of the voting machines and replaced them with other parts.
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : Nobody replaces parts or components of Dominion voting machines. It’s not real. I don’t even know what that means.
TRUMP’S CLAIM: That officials mistakenly counted irregular ballot papers – that is, ballot papers that had not been folded, indicating that they had not arrived in an envelope.
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : It’s not uncommon for ballots to be clean, Sterling said. For example, many soldiers and voters of foreign origin receive electronic ballot papers that they print, fill out and send. But these printed ballots are not the right size for the scanners. Election officials therefore have a standard process for transferring votes to the scanned votes. A damaged voice that cannot be scanned can be transmitted in the same way.
TRUMP’s statement: That Mr. Raffensperger has been compromised because he has a brother who works for a Chinese technology company. (Mr. Trump seized on a conspiracy theory about an unrelated man who happened to be called Ron Raffensperger).
STATEMENT IN POUNDS STERLING : Mr. Raffensperger doesn’t have a brother named Ron.
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3. January 2021, 20:34 p.m. (Eastern time)
3. January 2021, 20:34 p.m. (Eastern time)
Linda Qiu.
Fact check
President Trump made a series of misrepresentations about the election results in Georgia.Credit…Doug Mills/The York Times.
President Trump repeated a series of false and misleading allegations about the state’s election results circulated on social media during an hour-long telephone conversation with Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State. Here’s a fact check.
What Mr. Trump said
Then he was inundated with voices. They weren’t in the official ballot box, they were in suitcases, suitcases, but they weren’t in the ballot box. The minimum number could be because we looked at it, and they looked at it certified in slow motion in instant replay, if you can believe it, but it was in slow motion, and it was expanded many times, and the minimum was 18,000 bulletins, all for Biden.
Lies. M. Trump probably referred to allegations that were denied that a water leak at a census site in Fulton province forced evacuations and allowed ballot boxes to be twisted. The election authorities have stated, and the surveillance videos show, that this did not happen.
The water leak caused a delay of about two hours in counting the votes in the state arena, but none of the ballots or equipment was damaged. Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia elections, testified that an investigation of all the video footage showed that there were no mysterious ballot papers taken from an unknown location and hidden under the tables.
During the phone call, Trump also repeatedly suggested that the voter shown in the surveillance video had filled the boxes and thought she would be in prison, citing an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory promoted on social media.
[Read more about the vote in Georgia].
What Mr. Trump said
There were no election observers. There were no Democrats or Republicans. There were no guards.
It’s deceptive. Election observers and journalists were present in the arena of the state farm when the water leak occurred. They weren’t asked to leave, Watson said, but just left on their own when they saw a group of workers completing their task.
What Mr. Trump said
So the dead have voted. And I think it’s close to 5,000.
Lies. In fact, there were two of them, the Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told the president by phone.
What Mr. Trump said
They had out-of-state voters – they voted in Georgia, but they were out-of-state – of the 4925.
It’s deceptive. Ryan Germany, General Counsel in Mr Raffensperger’s office, has contradicted this description on appeal.
All the people we went through were people who lived in Georgia, who moved to another state, but then legally returned to Georgia, he said. They moved years ago. It was no different before the election. So there’s something in this data that just doesn’t add up.
What Mr. Trump said
In Fulton County and other areas – and this may or may not be true because it happened this morning – they burn their ballots, shred them and take the material with them. You turn the equipment into Dominion cars, and you know it’s not legal.
Lies. M. Trump probably referred to Fulton County mood images shared on social media and posted by a supporter, Patrick Byrne, a former Overstock executive.
The photos show stacks of ballot papers that are visibly unfilled and wrapped in plastic. Mr Byrne described the ballot papers as forgeries and stated that they were then shredded.
But according to Gabriel Sterling, a Republican official responsible for the implementation of the elections in Georgia, the images were just backup copies of the emergency ballot papers. State legislation requires constituencies to produce additional paper ballot papers when voting machines cannot be used.
Dominion Voting Systems, which has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories and false rumors, did not take equipment from Fulton County, Germany told the president.
What Mr. Trump said
In Detroit, 139% of people voted for us. It’s not very good. They had 200,000 more votes than the people of Pennsylvania.
Lies. Approximately 51% of registered voters and 38% of the total population voted in Detroit.
The Pennsylvania figure referred to an erroneous analysis by Republican state legislators. The analysis was based on the voter registration database, which was declared incomplete by the Pennsylvania State Department because several provinces – including Philadelphia and Allegheny, the two largest in the state – had not yet fully uploaded their data. The department called the analysis blatant misinformation.
What Mr. Trump said
She made you sign a totally unconstitutional agreement, which is a disastrous agreement. You can’t check the signatures. I can’t believe you’re allowed to reap in this arrangement.
Lies. It was an incorrect reference to the agreement between Georgia and the Democratic Party. According to the March agreement, officials must inform voters whose signatures have been rejected within three working days and give them the opportunity to rectify the situation. It does not prohibit officials from checking the signatures, nor does it allow the ballot papers to be collected or ordered and removed en masse.
Harvesting is still illegal in the state of Georgia. And that settlement agreement hasn’t changed one iota, Raffensperger said in an interview.
Are you wondering if the request is justified? Send an e-mail to [email protected].
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23. December 2020, 14:36 p.m. (Eastern time)
23. December 2020, 14:36 p.m. (Eastern time)
Davey Alba.
Shortly after the November elections, the Trump campaign posted the names of seven Americans killed on battlefields in Georgia and Pennsylvania on his Facebook and Twitter accounts and on his website. The deaths were used to vote in last month’s election, the campaign said, pointing out that the incidents are evidence of widespread electoral fraud that allowed elected President Joseph R. Pray Jr. to win.
Local officials have denied several accusations of deceased voters, and there is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud. But today, Pennsylvania officials say that one of the names used by the Trump campaign to vote was used in the election.
That’s where the problem lies: Authorities say the crooks are voting for Mr. Trump.
This week, Delaware County Attorney Jack Stollsteimer charged Bruce Bartman of Marple, Pennsylvania, with illegally voting in the place of his deceased mother in the general election. In addition to his mother, prosecutors say that Bartman also registered his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Weiman, who died in 2019, as a voter, but was not charged with voting for her. He also voted under his own name.
The Trump campaign has allowed accusations of electoral fraud to circulate on its social media accounts. Local officials have rejected several claims.
This is the only known case of a dead man who voted in our district, despite conspiracy theories, Stollsteimer said in a statement. The speedy prosecution of this case shows that law enforcement will continue to respect our electoral laws when actual evidence of fraud is presented and that we will continue to investigate all allegations that arise.
Samuel Stretton, Mr. Bartman’s lawyer, said he confessed to everything. He’s cooperating. Mr Stretton added that he is negotiating a guilty plea and that Mr Bartman has no criminal record.
He’s a good man, Mr. Stretton said. He did something very stupid, based on a false theory that this was his form of protest.
In an interview with the New York Times in November, after the Trump campaign took its first steps, Bartman said he didn’t remember any post for his mother. Oh, no, no, I didn’t get anything, he said. From time to time I received all kinds of junk mail for them. But not in a few years.
He added that he had not heard the accusation of the Trump campaign because he does not use social media very often and only occasionally logs on to Facebook to see photos of his grandchildren.
When asked if he knew why his mother had been voted for when she died, he replied that the governor of the state, Tom Wolf, knew nothing and did not know what was going on in the city of Philadelphia or in the neighbouring counties in the central part of the state.
Some of the things that happened in Philadelphia are just awful, Bartman said.
Mr. Stretton, his lawyer, said he had to admit he was wrong, and because the inspectors approached him, he cooperated and told the truth.
The allegation that the vote was fraudulently cast under the name Elizabeth Bartman and that she was a symbol of the systemic election fraud that Biden helped spread widely on the internet. On Facebook, articles with claims by the conservative sites ZeroHedge and The Epoch Times were shared 1,800 times and reached up to 61 million followers, according to CrowdTangle, a social media analysis tool owned by Facebook.
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18. December 2020, 6:15 p.m. (Eastern time)
18. December 2020, 6:15 p.m. (Eastern time)
Stephanie Saul.
Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, fighting for his seat in the second round, called his Democratic opponent a radical liberal. Credit…Nicole Crane for the New York Times….
Senator Kelly Loeffler launched a fierce campaign against his Democratic opponent in Georgia, Reverend Rafael Warnock, using a new deceptive tactic to summon Mr. Warnock, a Baptist preacher, a non-American, by falsely giving him a controversial comment from Reverend Jeremy A. Wright, Jr.
Their attack was facilitated by an announcement of several million dollars that the misleading Mr. Warnock video encourages the use of the same images without context.
In a press release distributed on Friday, Ms. Loeffler’s campaign became a flyer for 2014, revealing that Mr. De Warnock Church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, is home to Mr. Wright, a controversial Chicago minister known for his inflammatory rhetoric.
Warnock has a long history of praising Wright, Loeffler said, calling him a prophet and celebrating his infamous Damn America speech days after giving it. And Warnock himself said fucking America repeatedly in his sermons.
However, Mr Warnock said this sentence only in connection with Mr Wright’s speech, and not in support of that view.
Wright, once Barack Obama’s predecessor, became a lightning rod during the 2008 presidential campaign when videos of his inflammatory language surfaced, and Obama separated from him this year for the Democratic nomination. In Wright’s sermon, which included the words Damn America, the United States was criticized for its history of abuse of minority groups, including slavery of Africans.
However, in his speeches, particularly at the Chautauqua Institute in New York, Mr Warnock quoted this sentence in an academic discussion of Mr Wright’s speech, explaining how the sentence was taken out of context and taken ad nauseam to criticise Mr Wright.
Reverend Raphael Warnock is the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached. Credit related Erin Schaff / New York Times.
Loeffler’s press release attacking Warnock followed the purchase of Facebook ads paid for by American Crossroads, a super PAC that supports Republican candidates and reportedly spent up to $35 million to keep Loeffler in power. The announcement also includes excerpts from Mr Warnock Chautauqua’s speech as evidence that he did not accept Mr Wright’s testimony.
In her second campaign for one of the two seats in the Georgian Senate, Mrs. Loeffler tried to portray Mr. Warnock as a radical liberal and accused him of supporting the idea of blowing up the police force, which he denies. Mr Loeffler’s campaign advertisements in November also indicated that Mr Warnock supported Mr Wright’s views.
In fact, Mr Warnock said that he supported Mr Wright as much as he celebrated the black church tradition of truth, which he said made people uncomfortable.
Loeffler’s latest attack on Mr. Warnock follows an argument that erupted last week after she was photographed at a campaign appearance in Dawsonville, Go. with Chester Dowles, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. After the photo was distributed on the Internet, Loeffler’s campaign stated that he didn’t know who Mr. Doles was. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that there was no evidence that Ms. Loeffler knew him.)
Mrs Loeffler’s campaign did not respond immediately to a request for comments on her recent attacks on Mr Warnock.
Michael G. Brewer, a spokesman for Mr. Warnock, called the latest announcements an attack on another outsider in Kelly Loeffler and her allies who are trying to divide and mislead the Georgians for their own political gain, adding that the clips depicting Mr. Warnock have been torn from academic discussions.
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18. December 2020, 6:00 a.m. (ET)
18. December 2020, 6:00 a.m. (ET)
Shira Frankel
Even after the ban, personal profiles on Facebook – many of which are heavily monitored – continue to discuss and promote the platform law, according to a new report…Credit…Robin Beck/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images
The QAnon Superspreader remained active on Facebook even after the company banned collusion traffic on its platform two months ago, according to a report released Friday.
The report, which identified the persons who acted as the superstitious QAnon conspiracy theorists, found that videos and other content posted on the accounts were still receiving ratings, comments, and sharing.
Even after the ban, personal profiles on Facebook – many of which are heavily monitored – continue to discuss and promote the Platform Act, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Dialogue, a think tank, and NewsGuard, an impartial news and rating organisation. The super distributors had been identified as an important link in the conspiracy chain.
QAnon, a huge conspiracy theory that falsely claims that Satan’s conspiracy rules the world, began in 2017. During the pandemic she won the most spectators.
One of the super-transmitters was Larry Cook, an anti-vaccine activist who began sharing QAnon conspiracies earlier this year, according to the report. In the month after the ban, Cook continued filming and sharing videos with QAnon statements for newcomers, claiming that the government operated secret detention camps. Although Mr Cook was banned from Facebook in mid-November, he still has an Instagram account on Facebook.
Other accounts that remained active on Facebook were managed by yoga and wellness instructors who, for example, shared QAnon content. B. false allegations linking Covid-19 vaccines to a broad government conspiracy.
Since August, we’ve deleted more than 1,700 QAnon-related pages and 5,600 groups and disabled the profiles they exploited, Facebook spokesperson Sarah Pollack said. She added that the company has also led people looking for QAnon to reliable resources, such as the Global Network on Extremism and Technology.
The report, which investigated QAnon’s growth on Facebook since the start of the pandemic, found that the movement had become part of the fabric of the social network and was impossible to suppress completely.
The recent international distribution of QAnon continues, according to the report. Three of the ten most active communities that posted QAnon content on Facebook were German-speaking groups. Fifteen languages were used in messages from QAnon supporters on Facebook.
For example, an international super-sider downloaded a video of the American believer QAnon in Spanish. Since April, the video has been watched more than 786,000 times.
Another Superspreader account linked to a Brazilian citizen has uploaded a video that has been viewed tens of thousands of times. In another video, Hollywood celebrities Sandra Bullock and Ellen DeGeneres were wrongly associated with QAnon. It’s been watched over 130,000 times since July.
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Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine contains 10 ingredients. Contrary to some conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet, there is no government-implemented tracking microchip to track the movements of Americans among them.
For months, videos and viral messages widely distributed on social media made unsubstantiated claims that this technology could be used to distribute needles. None of these rumors are true.
After millions of doses of Pfizer’s new vaccine were distributed across the country, rumors surfaced that prompted the pharmaceutical company to publish what was actually in the vaccine’s prescription.
The vaccine itself has an active ingredient: a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA, which contains the genetic instructions of a coronavirus protein called spike. After injection, the mRNA causes human cells to produce a spike, exposing the immune system to the directly perceptible effects of the virus. The idea is to help the body recognize one of the most important signs of the virus, so that it can be detected and quickly eliminated if it tries to diagnose an infection.
The mRNA breaks down quickly and leaves no traces in the body. All that remains is the molecular memory of the virus – the target of each vaccine.
Pfizer’s vaccine also contains nine other ingredients. Four of them are lipids with incredibly complex chemical names: ((4-Hydroxybutyl)azandiol)bis(hexane-6,1-diyl)bis (ALC-3015); (2-hexildecanoate),2-[(polyethylene glycol)-2000]-N,N-ditradecylacetamide (ALC-0159); 1,2-distearoyl-snglycero-3-phosphocholine (DPSC); and cholesterol.
These lipids bind and form a protective fat bubble around the mRNA, which is naturally very fragile and which would be shredded in the body if injected directly. The sails of the oil ball, the genetic instructions have the best chance of ending up in the cells.
The vaccine also contains sucrose, or sugar, which prevents nanoparticles from accumulating during storage in the freezer.
The vaccine also contains four salts: Potassium chloride, monobasic potassium phosphate, basic sodium phosphate dihydrate and sodium chloride. If that last ingredient sounds familiar, it should be: It’s table salt.
These common chemicals are included in various treatments and vaccines that have been in use for a long time. The salts in the vaccine help to adapt the contents to the environment of the human body, which contains its own mixture of natural salts.
Jerica Pitts, director of Global Media Relations at Pfizer, also points out that the vaccine is diluted with water and salt prior to injection, another step to ensure that the salt balance in the mix is good.
None of these ingredients contain or resemble microchips.
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16. December 2020, 20:17 p.m. (Eastern time)
16. December 2020, 20:17 p.m. (Eastern time)
Kevin Rose.
Facebook has confirmed that it has recovered in recent days from the changes that favoured information from authoritative media over impartial sources after the November elections, indicating a return to a normal social network.
The change includes an increase in the weight given by Facebook’s News Feed algorithm to an internal editorial quality assessment called News Ecosystem Quality (NEQ). It was introduced a few days after the elections as part of Facebook’s emergency plan to combat misinformation during the critical post-election period, while the votes were still being counted.
These changes have resulted in increased traffic on Facebook for major news publishers such as CNN, NPR and the New York Times, while fan sites such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats have seen their numbers drop. After the election, several Facebook employees at a company meeting asked if the best news feedback could continue, according to several attendees.
But they were told that the glass breakage measures, including the change in the N.E.Q., were not intended to be permanent.
This is a temporary change we’ve made to limit the release of inaccurate election results, said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson. We always make sure that people see authoritative and informative news on Facebook, especially during major news cycles and on important global issues such as elections, Covid-19 and climate change.
Other measures developed by Facebook to combat political misinformation and hate speech have been removed or rejected by management in the past, either because they hurt Facebook’s user base or because management feared they would disproportionately hurt right-wing publishers, several Facebook employees told The Times last month.
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16. December 2020, 19:37 p.m. (Eastern time)
16. December 2020, 19:37 p.m. (Eastern time)
Linda Qiu.
Senator Ron Johnson has already used his committee to investigate Hunter Biden and put forward theories about the pandemic.
Two days after President-elect Joseph R.’s victory by the Electoral College. Biden Jr., a Senate panel on Wednesday provided the platform for a new round of strong legal arguments and lies about widespread electoral fraud that were repeatedly rejected by courts across the country.
The hearing is the latest attempt by the Republican chair of the Homeland Security Committee, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, to reinforce President Trump’s demands and concerns. Johnson had previously used his assignment to investigate Biden’s son Hunter and put forward theories about a coronavirus pandemic.
Although Mr Johnson acknowledged in his introductory remarks that electoral fraud did not affect the election results, he said that incompetent law enforcement, the failure of effective bipartisan oversight of the entire election process and the lack of full transparency or adequate controls had increased suspicion.
There’s been fraud. The election was largely stolen, said Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, at one point.
These statements are false. The Trump campaign has not been able to prove in a series of court cases that Republican observers were not allowed to observe the counting of votes. Accounts and audits in several disputed states are either complete, confirmed by Mr. Biden’s victory, or are underway. There’s no evidence that the election was stolen.
Johnson witnesses included three people–two Trump attorneys and a Pennsylvania state official-who tried unsuccessfully to challenge the election results. Among them was Ken Starr, who represented Mr. Trump at this year’s hearings.
Even as many witnesses insisted that there was evidence of widespread fraud – and their allegations were repeated in viral social media reports – Christopher K. Krebs, the former head of the government’s cyber security department, testified that the elections were the safest in American history.
Wisconsin’s claim of 200,000 irregular votes is rejected
James Truppis, Trump’s lawyer, Wisconsin, argued that 200,000 people in that state voted the wrong way. He argued that the acceptance of absentee ballots in the provinces of Dane and Milwaukee – two democratic strongholds – before election day was a violation of state law and should be rejected.
But on Monday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court dismissed the case, with a conservative judge declaring one of Truppis’ four claims unfounded and the other three obsolete. The judges also noted at the hearing that Mr Trupy did not try to get rid of the ballots on other journeys that used the same procedures, but Mr Trump won.
A Republican member of the state election commission noted this month that the Trump campaign did not raise accusations of fraud in the election, but sparked controversy over legal issues.
No evidence of 130,000 cases of voter fraud in Nevada
Similarly, Mr Trump’s campaign lawyer held hearings in Nevada to reiterate the false claims and arguments rejected by state courts. Attorney Jesse Binnall said campaign experts have identified 130,000 unique cases of voter fraud in Nevada and their evidence has never been refuted, just ignored.
The Nevada District Court rejected those claims and dropped the suit this month, and the Nevada Supreme Court confirmed that decision last week.
The lower court ruled that it found no credible or reliable evidence that Nevada’s 2020 general election was tainted by fraud and that the testimony of campaign experts was of little or no value. Mr. Binnall and other members of the legal team could not prove by default their allegations of double voting, dead votes and votes by non-citizens and non-residents, the Court wrote.
The State Supreme Court, which upheld the decision, wrote that it required the Trump campaign to identify the district court’s findings that it faced, but the appellants reported no unsubstantiated findings of fact, and we found nothing.
Multiple claims on Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania’s representative, Francis Ryan, also repeated a number of claims that were included in the Texas court case calling on Pennsylvania and other states to reject the election results. The Supreme Court rejected this request last week.
Ryan said the data portal initially and mistakenly listed 508,112 ballots counted in Philadelphia County when only 432,873 ballots were issued to voters. He then admitted that the figure of 500,000 had subsequently been corrected.
He also stated that the State reported that 3.1 million absenteeism votes had been sent, but that this number had risen to 2.7 million on the eve of the elections. Pennsylvania stated in its reply to the complaint that Mr Ryan’s analysis was fundamentally flawed and that 3.1 million votes for 2.7 million absentees and 400,000 votes for absentees.
Moreover, Ryan expressed his skepticism that more than 1,500 voters would be over 100 years old. But this figure includes dozens of cases where the birthday is considered as one. January 1900. This is also in line with Census and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports on the number of elderly people in Pennsylvania and the United States.
Mr Starr argued separately that Pennsylvania had blatantly violated state law by extending the voting of absentees. The lawsuit, which contained the same request, was rejected by the State Supreme Court and subsequently upheld by the US Supreme Court.
Misleading reference to the Carter-Baker commission
Johnson and Starr also mentioned Democratic officials who had previously expressed concerns about election security, suggesting that Republicans were unfairly abusing their attempts to shed light on the matter.
I don’t remember the media or anyone else accusing these eight Congressional Democrats of engaging unlisted charlatans and conspiracy theories, Johnson said, reading three letters written by Democratic senators.
The three letters focused on possible foreign efforts to hack election security software and on the involvement of private companies in companies producing voting equipment.
Mr Starr repeatedly quoted a 2005 commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III as warning against the absence of ballots.
But Carter called for more absenteeism in voting this year, and his foundation, the Carter Center, noted that the 2005 report found little evidence of voter fraud in sufficiently secure locations.
C.I.A. supercomputer and error rate 68%
Dr. Krebs cited a number of false conspiracy theories and rumors, including those of Dr. Trump and his allies.
He said the claim about a supercomputer and a CIA program that swung votes all over the country and Georgia in particular, made by Sidney Powell, a former lawyer of Mr. Trump’s, is contradicted by newspaper reports.
You can access the documents at any time. You can check your calculations, and Georgia has done it three times, and the results have been consistent each time, Krebs said.
M. Krebs also focused on Mr. Trump’s repeated misrepresentation of the 68% margin of error in the vote count in Antrim County, Michigan. However, this situation is based on a misinterpretation of the programming language.
In fact, it’s not the 68% of the votes that are wrong, but the 68% of the minutes themselves with a certain reporting frequency, Dr. Krebs said. The problem is that the report itself shows none of these errors, except for one.
added Mr. Krebs: We have to stop this. It undermines the credibility of democracy.
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16. December 2020, 3 p.m. (Eastern time)
16. December 2020, 3 p.m. (Eastern time)
Shira Frankel
Demonstrators in Edinburgh, Scotland, in October. linked to credit Jeff Mitchell/Getty Images.
On Wednesday, Twitter said it would start removing misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. As misinformation about the vaccines is just beginning to spread in the United States, withdrawals have been announced for next week.
Tweets claiming that vaccines are deliberately harmful or speculating about the dangers of vaccines will be removed as part of Twitter’s new policy. Facebook and YouTube have already declared that they will remove false vaccination claims.
In the context of a global pandemic, misinformation about vaccines is a major and growing public health problem, according to the blog post on Twitter.
While misinformation about the coronavirus has already surfaced on Twitter, such as B.’s claim that masks, social remoteness and other best medical practices are ineffective, the new directive deals specifically with vaccines.
Twitter said it will also try to distinguish between outright misinformation – which will be removed – and tweets that fall into a grey area, such as the one expressing concern about the side effects of the vaccine. Starting next year, the company will add tweets that spread unfounded rumors, controversial accusations and incomplete or out of context information about vaccines.
We will focus on removing the most harmful misleading information and will begin reporting tweets that contain potentially misleading information about vaccines in the coming weeks, the company said in a blog post.
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15. December 2020, 18:28 ET
15. December 2020, 18:28 ET
Kathleen Grey.
Demonstration of Dominion’s 2019 Voice System machine in Atlanta. Credit…John Bazemore/Presse Associée
A day after Michigan officially elected 16 electoral colleges to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the voting machine manufacturer, senators said he supported his company’s work and rejected unsubstantiated claims that the results could have been manipulated.
The Dominion Vote Systems has been the victim of a dangerous and reckless campaign of misinformation designed to sow doubt and confusion over the 2020 presidential election, company chief executive officer John Poulos told the state Senate oversight committee.
The company is under fire from Trump’s supporters and lawyers, who have made unsubstantiated claims that the company’s voting machines have shifted the votes from Trump to Biden.
Poulos assured the committee that his cabinet has no ties to House President Nancy Pelosi, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, or George Soros, the billionaire financier targeted by right-wing conspiracy theories.
The remarks that our company started its activities in Venezuela with Cuban money, with the intention of stealing the elections, are unbelievable and completely false, according to Poulos. My business started in my basement, which was in Toronto.
State senators investigating reports of irregularities in the 2020 elections continued to return to little Antrim County in northern Michigan, where a human error by a local employee, linked to a software update in some election tabulators, led to votes for Trump that were inadvertently counted for Biden. The error was discovered and corrected before the election results were certified. Mr Trump’s supporters pointed out that this mistake was evidence of massive electoral fraud.
If all tabs had been updated according to our procedure, there would have been no errors in the unofficial report, according to Mr Poulos. Human error occurs, especially in busy election years, when polling station staff work tirelessly for months on end, at weekends and on public holidays.
He rebutted a self-declared election fraud expert’s report on the situation in Antrim County cited by Trump’s allies.
Lawmakers also repeatedly questioned several other unsubstantiated accusations, including the fact that the Dominion’s tabulators were connected to the Internet and thus vulnerable to hacking, and that the machines in Michigan used ranked votes.
You can’t fake anything, asked State Senator Michael McDonald, a Republican.
I don’t think so, but if it were possible, it would certainly stand out, answered Poulos, referring to the use of paper ballots in Michigan. If the system had been tampered with, these paper ballots would not correspond to the total number of machines.
While the committee can do nothing to change the results, it plans to investigate the election further, with plans to subpoena city officials in Detroit and Livonia, two cities in Wayne County that attracted national attention last month after Republicans on the county’s investigating board initially opposed certification of the election for minor irregularities.
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Congressman Mo Brooks, a Republican from Alabama, on Capitol Hill last year. He promised to challenge the results of the presidential election when Congress meets next month to ratify the Jim Lo Scalzo/ EPA credit, via Shutterstock.
Even after the election of President-elect Joseph R. was certified by the Electoral College. Biden Jr. as the winner of Monday’s election, some of President Trump’s most loyal allies in Congress refused to acknowledge his loss, swearing he could still nullify the results of the U.S. House of Representatives election.
Trump strengthened their claims by publishing Tuesday an article on the efforts of Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, to challenge Biden’s victory when the House and Senate meet to consider it on 6. January to officially ratify.
But as long as the Constitution gives Congress the last word in the election, there is no chance of it agreeing to reverse the result and give the gentleman the trump card.
Every four years, the House and Senate meet to formally summarise the results of the vote and to express their final concerns about the outcome of the vote. This is usually a superficial confirmation of the electoral college’s choice. But this year, Mr. Brooks, by making a final mess of it by objecting. He will certainly fail, but not before there is a show in the House of Representatives that could put Vice President Mike Pence in a politically dangerous position confirming that Mr. Lost Asset.
The process is a complex design process. Brooks must first find a Republican senator who is willing to cooperate with him in the league, which, under federal law, must be signed by at least one member of each house. No Republican senators have come forward yet, and on Tuesday the Majority Senator, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, made a private appeal to Republicans in his room not to join him.
Even if this were the case, there would not be enough support to support the call. If a member of the House and Senate objects, the joint session is suspended and the legislators return to their respective chambers for a maximum of two hours of debate. They then vote on whether or not to annul the election results in that state. Both houses have to agree to reject the votes, which has not happened since the reconstruction.
As Democrats control the House of Representatives, the House is unlikely to undo the results. While Republicans lead the Senate, several members of the party have recognized that Biden won the election, and McConnell made it clear in an interview with his colleagues on Tuesday that the effort wouldn’t have his support either.
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The active members of the Electoral College of Georgia voted for Joseph R.. Biden Jr. in Atlanta on Monday in connection with the Nicole Crane credit for the New York Times.
Once the electoral college has met and the elections in each state have been certified, the Constitution does not provide for an alternative electoral list. A group of people who gather in a room and claim to be voters, as the state-sponsored Republicans did in several states on Monday, has no more authority than when the people who read this article decide that they are also members of the electoral college.
So while Republicans in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan followed the White House’s example and took or discussed steps to form their own competing pro-Tromp voter lists, this was a theatrical attempt with no legitimate path. The lists of electoral colleges are linked to the winner of the popular vote in each state, and all five states have certified their results in favour of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Most of what the Republicans could do was claim a symbolic moment by saying that the people who would run were the voters if President Trump won those states. But since he has lost them and since many state and federal courts have rejected the unsubstantiated accusations of voter fraud made by him and his allies, these groups no longer have any real meaning.
Mr Trump’s supporters also understood some of the superficial ambiguities in the constitution and federal law about whether a state legislature can determine its own electoral list.
Since the adoption of the voter count law in 1887, a situation resembling a duel of voters has only once arisen, when Hawaii carried out a complete recount in 1960. The governor of Hawaii signed the Republican ticket for Richard M. Nixon before the recount was completed; when it was completed and John F. Kennedy was introduced, the governor had to send a new Democratic ticket to Congress. The Democratic nomination was approved.
The Constitution stipulates that states elect their voters in the manner determined by their legislature. In modern times, states do this by holding popular elections that determine to whom their voters are accountable. Different constitutional rights and laws do not allow state legislators to change the rules and set aside the will of the people after seeking a different outcome.
Yet no state legislator has seriously considered reversing the results, despite Trump’s plea to the Republican leaders.
The congress will consider the results of the electoral college, which was held on 6 December 2010. January, accept. Even if the state legislature were to send ballots to Congress from its own electoral list, many lawyers have argued that Congress should prefer the list sent by the governor.
Either way, both houses should agree to block pro-Biden voters. It is unthinkable that the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives would consider such a move by the Republicans.
While some Trump loyalists in the House of Representatives, such as Congressman Mo Brooks or Alabama, said they would like to challenge the outcome, many Republican senators Monday acknowledged Biden as elected president. Majority leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday congratulated Biden on his presence in the Senate, which seems to rule out any possibility that he will give much room to this challenge.
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