In the 2020 presidential primary, leading candidates are not only subject to scrutiny from the media for any potential gaffes or slip-ups. On social media, they are also targets of misinformation attacks from trolls, bots, or even regular people who want to take down candidates they don't like.
As quickly as the problem grows, though, there are businesses looking to solve it.
VineSight, an AI-based start-up, is working to detect misinformation attacks early. The company has developed an algorithm to study how fake news campaigns spread, especially on social media platforms like Twitter.
"Consistently Joe Biden had the most attacks targeting him," following the first two Democratic debates, said CEO Gideon Blocq.
Kamala Harris was also a popular target of misinformation attacks on social media, he told Twitter. "In the July debates, she was actually targeted a lot more than in the June debates."
According to a recent report from VineSights, Biden was subject to 30 percent of the fake news attacks following his debate performance in July. Harris trailed not far behind at 27 percent.
The attacks seem to mirror what poll-watchers saw: Biden, the frontrunner, taking the brunt of the attacks, and Harris facing more after an impressive performance at the June debate.
VineSight looks beyond the 280 characters that Twitter users can type, with the AI able to scan images and videos as well, Blocq said.
As one example, VineSight identified this tweet from the verified Trump War Room Twitter account as a part of a misinformation campaign. The tweet shows a doctored video of Joe Biden stuttering during his CNN debate performance.
Misinformation doesn't always come in the form of doctored content, though. The problem can be more subtle, in the form of content that has been taken out of context.
At the Iowa State Fair over the weekend, Blocq flagged a video coming from Turning Point USA founder and Trump supporter, Charlie Kirk, that has been viewed over 1.6 million times. Kirk's tweet says that it shows Joe Biden "forcefully grab" a field staffer.
When watching a longer version of the clip play out in real time, it appears that Biden did grab the woman's arm as she walked away so that he could further answer her question, but the "grab" doesn't appear to be forceful, like Kirk contends.
When asked about videos like this, Blocq said, "It's not fabricated, but implies that something happened, which didn't happen and is taken out of context."
As for Sen. Harris, she's faced various misinformation attacks over her ethnicity, including claims that she was lying about being black.
Blocq said this is just the "tip of the iceberg" on misinformation attacks, a cautionary message with nearly 14 months to go before the general election.
Despite former special counsel Robert Mueller's lengthy investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Blocq says Americans should not be so quick to point to Russia in all of these misinformation campaigns.
Echoing Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook, Blocq said, "If you think it's Russia, it's probably not Russia."
Rather, a majority of these targeted attacks are coming from "trolls and bots, but we also see actual human beings, verified human beings, competing campaigns, sharing this misinformation," he said.
So, what now?
Though Blocq told Cheddar the targeted attacks of misinformation are just going to get "bigger and bigger" as the election ramps up, "more solutions are also coming up."
The biggest fix, he said, is increasing news literacy, and therefore drawing a line between what is real, and what is fake.
"This is the first step. It's very complex to stop this entire world of misinformation, I think we'll get there, but it'll take a long time," Blocq stated.
As the U.S. comes up on the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.,A.C. Thompson, investigative reporter at ProPublica, joined Cheddar's Baker Machado to discuss updates to American Insurrection by FRONTLINE, ProPublica and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. The documentary investigates the attack on the Capitol touched off by the lie that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump but with new information gleaned since the event including interviews with lawmakers and law enforcement and the evolution of groups like the Boogaloo Boys and the Proud Boys behind the attack. "In some ways those groups that were kind of the vanguard of January 6 are maybe no longer relevant because their message is everywhere," he said.
A new report from ProPublica and the Washington Post found that Facebook Groups played a major role in the spread of misinformation linked to the January 6 insurrection with more than 650,000 posts claiming that Joe Biden's election victory was illegitimate.
Millions of Americans with young children have relied on the child tax credit since the federal government began issuing checks in July 2021. The last round of payments was sent out just before the Christmas holiday — at the same time as the omicron variant surged. Leah Hamilton, associate professor of social work at Appalachian State University, joined Cheddar to discuss what the end to the tax credit means as the U.S. sees the end of many relief programs and its highest number of COVID cases since the start of the pandemic. "It'll become harder for families to meet their basic needs, increasing national childhood poverty rates and the proportion of families who have difficulty putting food on the table, maintaining stable housing, and paying their bills," Hamilton said. She also pointed to research that the credit as a long-term investment in children offsets claims that it contributes to macroeconomic impacts like inflation.
U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over the week-end, just days after he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The call comes as Washington prepares to meet with Moscow on January 10, as tensions mount over Russia's military build up near its border with Ukraine. Cheddar News speaks with Mustafa Tameez, a former advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, about the issue.
Several Silicon Valley insiders are being accused of contorting a 1990s-era tax break to avoid taxes on millions of dollars of investment profits. The tax break is known as the qualified small business stock exemption, and it allows early investors in certain companies to avoid half of the taxes on up to $10 million in capital gains. A piece recently published in the New York Times says venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz replicated the tax exemption by giving shares of companies to friends and family, who would otherwise face a 23.8% capital gains bill. The CEO of Roblox is also accused of replicating the tax break for his family members at least 12 times. Although the loophole known as 'stacking' is considered to be legal, the Times piece implies that the exemption has been manipulated for the ultra-wealthy to become more wealthy. Greycroft co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Alan Patricof joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Chris Sommerfeldt, City Hall reporter for the New York Daily News, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he discusses both the wins and losses of Bill de Blasio's eight years as New York City Mayor.
The push to regulate the gig worker economy is gaining steam as the share of workers who participate in freelancing through businesses like Uber and Lyft have also exponentially grown during the pandemic. Employment attorney Mark Kluger, founding partner at Kluger Healey, LLC, joined Cheddar to break down how the battle to reclassify gig workers will continue in the new year, and why the issue continues to generate conflict. "More and more workers are using gig work as their primary source of income and as a result of that they are not like employees in the sense that they don't have benefits like health insurance," Kluger noted.
