Tag: terrorism

“Social media platforms have birthed viral rumors for more than a decade, but in recent years some online platforms have shifted radically away from content moderation and fact-checking while monetarily incentivizing viral posting. After Musk bought Twitter, which he renamed X, the service reinstated many previously banned users, stopped enforcing some rules about hateful content and began sharing revenue with users if they get engagement. This year, Instagram and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, stopped fact-checking in the United States. Meta is rolling out a crowdsourced “community notes” system, like a system on X in which users submit their own addenda to other users’ posts, which other users then vote on. Use of the system on X has plummeted since the beginning of this year, according to an NBC News analysis. X didn’t respond to a request for comment on the conspiracy theories on its app.

Now, the apps are fertile ground for hoaxes and unconfirmed accusations to spread, experts said.

“The design of social media platforms facilitates and even incentivizes this kind of rumoring and political point-scoring in the wake of crisis events,” Kate Starbird, a professor and co-founder at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, said in an email.

“Some of the most prominent accounts on X gained their audiences by strategically posting breaking news content with a political angle for clicks and follows,” Starbird said.

Even though federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Boelter, Republicans continued to spread the seemingly false narrative Monday.”

…

““There’s this rush to create the first narrative, and this is really crucial if you want to spread misinformation. And it’s not very difficult, because it will always take more time for the real information to come out,” he said.

“Once the narrative takes hold, it’s very, very difficult to debunk,” he said.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/minnesota-shooting-conspiracy-theories-took-090000952.html