Both Facebook and TikTok have blocked some hashtags being used to spread misinformation around the election — Twitter says it's ‘proactively monitoring’ them — Facebook and TikTok have blocked hashtags that were being used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about the presidential election.
Internal Facebook metric that assesses “violence and incitement trends” based on hashtags and search terms in posts increased by 45% since October 31 — As votes are being tallied across the country to determine the next US president, internal Facebook data shows that the company …
The election process is working.
A long-building “chaos” narrative being pushed by President Donald Trump suggests that the election is fatally flawed, fraud is rampant, and no institutions other than Trump himself can be trusted. There is no evidence for any of that, and as the election math increasingly turns against him, the actual election systems around America continue functioning well.
Nothing about the 2020 elections is normal, of course, because nothing about 2020 is normal. The fact that the vote count is slower than usual is unavoidably stressful—but it’s also exactly what officials and experts have said for months would happen as every vote is counted.
“I think how the election process has played out has been remarkable,” says David Levine, the elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “I think the entire country owes a tremendous gratitude to state and local election officials and those that have worked closely with them against the backdrop of foreign interference, coronavirus pandemic, civil unrest, and frankly inadequate support from the federal government. We have an election that has gone reasonably well.”
By any measure, the 2020 election scores better than any in recent history on security, integrity, and turnout. Election infrastructure is more secure: the Department of Homeland Security installed Albert sensors in election systems, which warn officials of intrusion by hackers, and the National Security Agency has been aggressively hunting hacking groups and handing intelligence to officials around the country. Election officials have invested in paper backup systems so they can more easily recover from technical problems.
There are still weak points, especially with the electronic poll books used to sign voters in and with verifying results when a candidate demands a recount. But more states now have paper records as a backup to electronic voting, and more audits will take place this year than in any previous American election.
The pandemic itself is one reason for these improvements. The increase in mail-in and early voting meant that ballots were cast over a month-long period. That helps security because activity isn’t all focused on a single day, said a CISA official in a press briefing. It gives election officials more time to deal with both normal mistakes and malicious attacks, and any problems that do arise affect fewer voters. And more Americans will want to vote this way in the future, said Benjamin Hovland, the top federal elections official and a Trump appointee.
That means the pandemic that many feared would wreck the election has paradoxically made the system stronger. “All of that uncertainty resulted in tremendous scrutiny and transparency, and most importantly, public education about all of these administrative processes,” says Eddie Perez, an elections expert at the Open Source Election Technology Institute.
The calls from the president and his allies to stop vote counts can still undermine confidence in the outcome. But so far, few of Trump’s arguments have carried any weight in court. Judges denied or threw out lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan on Thursday. Even calls for recounts look unconvincing right now. Historically, recounts matter when races are within just a few hundred votes in a single state, as in the 2000 election. Right now, all of the half-dozen contested states have margins much bigger than that.
And while the president’s family and allies have been attacking fellow Republicans for not sufficiently supporting his efforts, several prominent party members have publicly rebuked him for his impatience, including Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. “All things considered, I think that the media and the public are doing a better than average job at remaining patient and resisting inflammatory rhetoric,” says Perez.
“This election is going remarkably well considering the obstacles election officials have faced all year long,” says Mark Lindeman, co-director of the election integrity organization Verified Voting. “Election officials in many states have had to field two entirely new election systems: massive-scale mail ballots where they have handled only a handful in the past, and also reengineering in-person voting to accommodate social distancing. There’s a chaos narrative, but what I see is not chaos. What I see is people working very hard to finish a difficult job.”
On Thursday evening, Trump gave a rambling news conference in which he repeated his many unsubstantiated claims about fraud. Most of the news networks cut away after a minute or two. Even Fox News’s anchors said afterwards that they “hadn’t seen the evidence” for Trump’s claims. The president seemed, they said, to be readying for Biden to be declared the winner—but then to start mounting legal challenges. The counting may be over soon, but the election is far from finished.
This is an excerpt from The Outcome, our daily email on election integrity and security. Click here to get regular updates straight to your inbox.
https://ift.tt/3lgrxff https://ift.tt/eA8V8JFormer Presidential advisor and right-wing pundit Steve Bannon had his show suspended from Twitter and an episode removed by YouTube after calling for violence against FBI director Christopher Wray and the government’s leading pandemic expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Bannon, speaking with co-host Jack Maxey, was discussing what Trump should do in a hypothetical second term. He suggested firing Wray and Fauci, but then went further, saying “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.”
This may strike one at first as mere hyperbole – one may say “we want his head on a platter” and not really be suggesting they actually behead anyone. But the conversation continued and seemed to be more in earnest than it first appeared:
Maxey: Just yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia. These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you wil,l with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.
Bannon: That’s how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn’t some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war.
Whether one considers this only nostalgia for the good old days of mob justice or an actual call to bring those days back, the exchange seems to have been enough for moderators at YouTube and Twitter to come down hard on the pair’s makeshift broadcast.
Twitter confirmed that it has “permanently suspended” (i.e. it can be appealed but won’t be restored automatically) the account for violating the rule against glorifying violence.
YouTube removed the episode from “Steve Bannon’s War Room” channel Wednesday afternoon after it was brought to their attention. A representative for the platform said “We’ve removed this video for violating our policy against inciting violence. We will continue to be vigilant as we enforce our policies in the post-election period.”
Online platforms have struggled with finding the line between under- and over-moderation. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram and others have all taken different measures, from preemptively turning off features to silently banning hashtags. Facebook today took down a group with more than 300,000 members that was acting as an amplifier for misinformation about the election.
While the platforms have been vigorous in at least some ways in the labeling and isolation of misinformation, it’s more difficult for video platforms. Just minutes ago Trump took to YouTube to detail a variety of unfounded conspiracy theories about mail-in voting, but the platform can’t exactly do a live fact-check of the President and shut down his channel. More than with text-based networks, video tends to spread before it is caught and flagged due to the time it takes to review it.
Teslaquila, the Tesla-branded liquor that co-starred in CEO Elon Musk’s controversial April Fool’s Day joke about the automaker filing for bankruptcy, has arrived.
The automaker now lists Tesla Tequila (a bit different from the original Teslaquila branding) on its website. The tequila — described as a “small-batch premium 100% de agave tequila añejo made from sustainably sourced highland and lowland agaves,” is housed in a handblown glass bottle shaped in the electric charge symbol. Oh, and it costs $250.
Celeb-produced tequilas are nothing new — and are often lucrative. Casamigos, the tequila brand co-founded by George Clooney, was acquired by Diageo in a deal that valued the company up to $1 billion. Tesla Tequila might be first liquor sold by an automaker. The liquor is produced by Nosotros Tequila, according to the company.
The tequila first popped up in April 2018 when Musk tweeted a photo of himself passed out against a Tesla Model 3 “surrounded by “Teslaquilla” bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks.” In the photo, Musk is holding a cardboard sign that reads “bankwupt.”
Later that year, Tesla filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to trademark “Teslaquila.”
Sources: Facebook plans to temporarily add more “friction” to users' ability to share posts and other content and will also demote election misinfo in News Feed — New measures would slow down the flow of information and make election misinformation less visible, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Hands-on with iPhone 12 mini and 12 Pro Max: mini's size requires adjustment but some gestures are easier, whereas the Max feels like a scaled up iPhone — Hands-on with Apple's big (and small) iPhone 12 models — Apple's iPhone 12 and 12 Pro are the “default” size iPhones this year.
Both Facebook and TikTok have blocked some hashtags being used to spread misinformation around the election — Facebook today began to block select hashtags that were being used to share misinformation related to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. — Now, searches for the hashtags #sharpiegate …
With games getting larger and larger, one of the growing concerns is the usable storage on the next-generation consoles. The PS5 disc and digital edition both come with 825GB of storage, the Xbox Series S has 512GB of storage and the Series X has 1TB storage. But how much of this is actually usable by the user?
It has been confirmed that the Xbox Series X will have 802GB of storage which can be used to store games and apps. The Series S on the other hand reportedly has the least amount of usable storage. It comes with a 512GB SSD of which a mere 364GB is usable. The information about the Series S usable storage comes from Reddit user spead20 who apparently got a Series S early. He was asked about the usable storage on the console, and he said “364 GB for games and apps”
The PS5, on the other hand, comes with 825GB of storage. While the usable storage isn’t officially confirmed Twitter user @okami13_ has posted screenshots highlighting that the PS5 review units sport 667GB of usable space.
In case you needed any more confirmation - the #PS5 review kits have 667 GB of storage. Looks like that's with Astro's Playroom installed.https://t.co/jccCoosOkm pic.twitter.com/XgwfmiWThy
— Okami (@Okami13_) November 3, 2020Before you freak out, know that both the Xbox Series consoles and the PS5 support expandable storage. While details of the NVMe SSD’s that are compatible with the PS5 are yet unknown, Microsoft has partnered with Seagate for a 1TB expandable drive for the Series S/X. If you would like to play backwards compatible games, you can play them off a traditional hard drive, just like you can on the PS4 and Xbox One. So, there is some silver lining here.
However, this does bring up the question of how many games one will be able to store on the console's internal drive? While the Series S will use smart delivery to download lower quality textures to the console, it will be interesting to see how much of a size difference this makes.
A game like Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which will be available on the PS5 and PS4, reportedly has a mere 2GB size difference on the 2 consoles. A game like Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War currently has a size of 85GB on the consoles with a larger file size for the PC where players will be able to take advantage of higher-quality assets.
It should also be noted that while a user could upgrade the internal storage of the PS3 and PS4, this is not possible for the PS5 as the internal storage is soldered onto the motherboard. The Xbox 360 allowed for user-replaceable storage, but the feature is not present on the Xbox One family of consoles.
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Matt Burgess / Wired : Finland, Canada, the US, and other countries are testing tech for passport-free travel, including facial recogniti...
