2020 election | The Verge

Special counsel obtained ‘some volume’ of DMs from Donald Trump’s Twitter account

2023-08-16T13:52:02-04:00

US special counsel Jack Smith acquired direct messages - potentially including deleted messages - from former President Donald Trump's Twitter account, unsealed court transcripts have revealed. The transcripts, spotted by Politico, show that engineers for Twitter (now known as X) were able to produce Trump's Twitter data after missing a January 7th deadline to comply with a search warrant that earned the company a $350,000 fine.

Among many other things, the warrant sought the former president's tweets (including drafts), likes, retweets, and any direct messages "sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with" …

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Larry Ellison was on a call with Sean Hannity and Lindsey Graham to discuss overturning election results

2022-05-22T12:29:26-04:00

Ellison contributed $1 billion in support of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Larry Ellison, one of the world's richest people and co-founder of the Oracle software company, was involved in a November 2020 call to develop plans to contest the results of the US presidential election, according to a report from The Washington Post. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Fox News host Sean Hannity, Donald Trump's attorney Jay Sekulow, and True the Vote attorney James Bopp Jr., also participated in the call.

As reported by the Post, details of the call surfaced in a court filing associated with a legal battle between True the Vote, a nonprofit organization that promotes baseless claims about election fraud, and Fair Fight, a vot …

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Newsmax apologizes to employee of Dominion Voting Systems over false election accusations

2021-05-01T17:46:12-04:00

Conservative news channel Newsmax has posted an apology to an employee of Dominion Voting Systems, after it reported without evidence that he was involved in manipulating results of the 2020 US presidential election.

"On behalf of Newsmax, we would like to apologize for any harm that our reporting of the allegations against Dr. Coomer may have caused to Dr. Coomer and his family," a statement posted to Newsmax's website states. According to the statement, there was no substance to the allegations made about Eric Coomer, Dominion's director of product strategy and security:

"Newsmax would like to clarify its coverage of Dr. Coomer and note …

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MyPillow CEO’s free speech social network will ban posts that take the Lord’s name in vain

2021-04-14T16:45:51-04:00

After a public break with Facebook and Twitter, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell is getting close to the launch of a new conservative-focused social network, giving more detail on the project in a video posted online this week. Called simply "Frank," the social network plans to open its doors to a limited set of users on April 16th.

Developed in the months since the 2020 election, Lindell has described the project as a combination of "print, radio, and TV," offering both text posts and live stream capability. Perhaps the strangest promise is that conservative personalities will have significantly more followers on the fledgling network.

"Peop …

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How YouTube failed the 2020 election test

2021-03-04T10:15:41-05:00

Today let's talk about a comprehensive new report on election integrity, and the particularly low marks it gave to one platform in particular.

I.

The 283-page report, which was published today, is called "The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election." It is the final work of a coalition of some of the most respected names in platform analysis in academia and the nonprofit world: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

The report builds on work that the partnership did leading up to and after November to identif …

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Dominion sues former Trump lawyer over voting machine conspiracy theory

2021-01-08T11:47:01-05:00

Dominion Voting Systems is suing President Donald Trump's former attorney Sidney Powell for spreading unfounded conspiracy theories about its election equipment. The long-awaited defamation suit could test the impact of legal attacks on disinformation.

As NBC News reported this morning, Dominion sued Powell for making a series of "wild" and "demonstrably false" accusations that spread across right-wing media outlets and major social networks. Powell was responsible for a series of legally dubious challenges that she dubbed the "kraken," but she failed to substantiate their allegations - which included false claims that Dominion had rigged v …

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Republican operatives sidestep Facebook policies ahead of Georgia runoff

2021-01-04T14:45:31-05:00

As the Georgia runoff election nears, Facebook's messy political ad rules have created new opportunities for operatives and political groups looking to spread disinformation. In the weeks leading up to Tuesday's election, Republican super PACs have used Facebook to spread disinformation targeting Georgia voters in the last few critical days before the state's special election on Tuesday, January 5th.

In one instance, the Republican Party wrongly accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris of conspiring to remove President-elect Joe Biden from office in a Facebook ad, according to The Washington Post. The …

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Trump’s fight to overthrow election now falls to the guy who invented the CueCat

2020-12-31T12:00:05-05:00

The CueCat barcode scanner | Tomkinsc

In a hopeless attempt to overthrow or cast suspicion on an American election, a ridiculous cast of characters has heeded outgoing President Donald Trump's call to misadventure - including, now, the inventor of one of the worst gadgets of all time. His name is Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, and yesterday he gave a poor imitation of a TED talk before the Georgia state senate, claiming that he has the ability to prove whether ballots from the 2020 election were real or fake. He introduced himself to a subcommittee of state senators as an "inventor and pattern recognition expert," just before implying that he's a titan even bigger than Apple and Google …

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Everything you need to know about Section 230

2020-12-29T16:50:03-05:00

This is a living guide to Section 230: what it is, what it isn't, why it's controversial, and how it might be changed. This guide will be updated as events warrant.

What is Section 230?

Join us on March 1st at 2PM for a virtual event about tech regulation and antitrust - featuring a keynote and Q&A from Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Sign up here!

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed in 1996, says an "interactive computer service" can't be treated as the publisher or speaker of third-party content. This protects websites from lawsuits if a user posts something illegal, although there are exceptions for copyright violati …

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Facebook rolls back ‘nicer’ News Feed that boosted mainstream publishers

2020-12-17T10:04:40-05:00

Facebook has reversed a change to its News Feed algorithm that prioritized authoritative news sources, even though some employees asked that the "nicer" News Feed become permanent, according to The New York Times.

Following a sharp increase in misinformation on the platform in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election, Facebook changed how it weighed the quality of news sources based on a "news ecosystem quality" (NEQ) score. Outlets including the Times, NPR, and CNN saw Facebook traffic rise, while more partisan sites that published incendiary or misleading news about the election saw Facebook traffic decrease.

CEO Mark …

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