abortion – Lone Candle

How Minnesota shooting conspiracy theories took over social media feeds

Posted on June 17, 2025June 17, 2025 by Lone Candle

“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.”

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““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

‘We are flying blind’: RFK Jr.’s cuts halt data collection on abortion, cancer, HIV and more

Posted on April 15, 2025April 15, 2025 by Lone Candle

“The federal teams that count public health problems are disappearing — putting efforts to solve those problems in jeopardy.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purge of tens of thousands of federal workers has halted efforts to collect data on everything from cancer rates in firefighters to mother-to-baby transmission of HIV and syphilis to outbreaks of drug-resistant gonorrhea to cases of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The cuts threaten to obscure the severity of pressing health threats and whether they’re getting better or worse, leaving officials clueless on how to respond.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/abortions-cancer-firefighters-super-gonorrhea-140000788.html

Why abortion didn’t lead Democrats to victory in the 2024 election

Posted on February 7, 2025February 7, 2025 by Lone Candle

“while Americans are generally supportive of abortion rights, there was little evidence to show that abortion was going to end up mattering more than other issues, like the economy and immigration, and even less evidence that it would be a more motivating issue than it was in the 2022 midterms, which took place just months after the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Generally speaking, Americans are supportive of abortion rights. When asked a standard polling question about whether abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in all cases or illegal in most cases, majorities of Americans typically say that it should be legal in all or most cases. And we saw that support show up in the 2024 election results: Six states* passed ballot measures that enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions, and these measures significantly outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris in every state they were on the ballot.”

…

“Polling before the 2024 election did seem to show an increasing share of voters saying abortion was their top issue — on average, even more than in the months preceding the 2022 midterms. According to YouGov/The Economist’s weekly tracking survey, there was a slow but steady increase in the number of registered voters choosing abortion as their top priority over the course of the campaign, from around 5 percent in the summer of 2023 to around 10 percent before the election.

But 10 percent is still relatively low compared with other major issues in the election. The percentage of respondents choosing an issue related to the economy*** in the same surveys averaged 39 percent in polls conducted in October 2024, much higher than the percentage saying abortion was their top issue, which averaged 9 percent in October.

And the increase in Americans prioritizing abortion may be an artifact of a well-known quirk of political polling: partisans forming their political opinions based on what trusted elites are saying. In other words, the Harris campaign’s focus on abortion may have made Democratic voters more likely to say abortion was an important issue to them. Indeed, if we break down the YouGov/The Economist polling numbers by party, we see that abortion’s increasing prioritization as an issue in 2024 was driven almost entirely by self-identified Democrats.”

https://abcnews.go.com/538/abortion-lead-democrats-victory-2024-election/story?id=116880480