They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.; The New York Times, December 24, 2025

Adam Satariano, The New York Times; They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.

"Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg lead a German legal aid organization that assists individuals facing online abuse and violent threats.

Clare Melford runs a British group that helps identify disinformation.

Imran Ahmed is a British activist who runs an organization that has chronicled anti-vaccination content on social media.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration accused all of them of a campaign of censorship against Americans.

The four individuals, along with a former senior European Commission official, Thierry Breton of France, were barred from entering the United States after Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeled them “radical activists” who undercut free speech...

The travel ban is a major escalation in a dispute between the Trump administration and Europe over the regulation of online content and social media."

Government Officials Once Stopped False Accusations After Violence. Now, Some Join In.; The New York Times, December 25, 2025

Steven Lee Myers, The New York Times ; Government Officials Once Stopped False Accusations After Violence. Now, Some Join In.

"A churn of disinformation after a major news event is hardly a surprise anymore, but its spread after the Brown killings was not limited to the dark fringes of the internet. It was fueled by prominent figures in business and government whose false statements or politically charged innuendo compounded public anger and anxiety.

That has raised new alarms about the nature and quality of public discourse — and whether there is any consequence for those who degrade it or for the social media platforms that reward it."

A conversation between Joe Rogan and Mel Gibson summed up 2025 for me – and not in a good way; The Guardian, December 27, 2025

George Monbiot, The Guardian ; A conversation between Joe Rogan and Mel Gibson summed up 2025 for me – and not in a good way

[Kip Currier: I'm grateful to Guardian writer George Monbiot for raising awareness of this January 2025 podcast conversation between podcast influencer Joe Rogan and "Mad Max" actor Mel Gibson, as this "bro banter" episode wasn't on my radar. The discussions between these two men have to be read to be believed. 

On the one hand, the abject ignorance, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theorizing is colossally astounding. Indeed, it could lead one to feelings of depression and apathy -- if one allows oneself to follow Rogan and Gibson down that road to nowhere good.

Instead, let's choose to see the conversation between Rogan and Gibson as a reminder of and motivation for how much work remains to be done to push back against wholesale untruths, cynicism, and divisiveness that people like this perpetrate on our world.

In 2026, resolve to support a library that provides access to life-changing information, visit a museum that is standing up for not erasing history and unheard voices, and choose news sources that engage in evidence-based reporting and fact-checking and which forthrightly correct and acknowledge when they make mistakes.

As a boy and even into my adult years, I recall my kind-hearted and worldly-wise late paternal Grandmother, Esther Currier, using the phrase "consider the source" when occasionally referring to a person of questionable character or integrity. Implicit in that phrase was the sense, too, of not wasting mental energy or time on someone or something of little value. As an evaluative tool, "consider the source" is as timely and useful now as it was then for deciding whether to trust what someone says or does.

So, no thanks, Joe Rogan and Mel Gibson...looking at your track records for character, integrity, compassion, accuracy, and responsibility, that's a "hard pass" on considering you as sources of reliable information.

And thanks again for the great advice, Grandma Currier -- which I note in the Acknowledgments section of my recently published Bloomsbury book, Ethics, Information, and Technology.]

[Excerpt]

"Looking back on this crazy year, one event, right at the start, seems to me to encapsulate the whole. In January, recording his podcast in a studio in Austin, Texas, the host, Joe Rogan, and the actor Mel Gibson merrily dissed climate science. At the same time, about 1,200 miles away in California, Gibson’s $14m home was being incinerated in the Palisades wildfire. In this and other respects, their discussion could be seen as prefiguring the entire 12 months."

White House installs plaques mocking former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden; NBC News, December 17, 2025

 Sarah Dean, Garrett Haake, Alexandra Bacallao and Rebecca Shabad , NBC News; White House installs plaques mocking former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden

[Kip Currier: This quote by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is jaw-droppingly farcical:

"The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind," she said. "As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-installs-plaques-mocking-former-presidents-barack-obama-jo-rcna249746 

 

To refer to such defamatory and erroneous statements as "eloquently written" is the epitome of George Orwell's 1984 Newspeak, in which words used by propagandists are converse from their true meanings, e.g. Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.]

[Excerpt]

"The White House has installed plaques on the exterior of the building bashing President Donald Trump's predecessors, including Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and promoting disinformation about their administrations.

The plaques were hung up below presidential portraits that have been on display on Trump’s recently added "Presidential Walk of Fame" in the White House colonnade.

The one placed under the portrait of the “Autopen," which stands in for President Joe Biden's portrait, refers to him as “Sleepy Joe Biden” and calls him “the worst President in American History.” The plaque contains a number of derisive statements about the former president, referring to Biden’s “severe mental decline,” “the Biden Crime Family” and his “Radical Left handlers."

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News in a statement that Trump wrote the text of "many" of the plaques.

“The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind," she said. "As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.”"

Fox News hosts blast Trump over 'repulsive' White House plaques; AlterNet, December 19, 2025

Thomas Kika , AlterNet; Fox News hosts blast Trump over 'repulsive' White House plaques

"Donald Trump got a sharp rebuke from his Fox News on Friday as hosts decried the recent addition of insulting plaques about Democratic presidents at the White House as "trolling" and "repulsive."

While not the largest and eye-catching change Trump has made to the White House, his addition of a "Presidential Walk of Fame" has nonetheless made headlines for insulting jabs at his political opponents. When the feature was first introduced in September, former President Joe Biden was represented with a photo of an autopen instead of a portrait, referencing the tool for signatures which Trump has falsely claimed invalidates some of the executive orders and pardons that his predecessor issued.

More recently, reporters noticed the addition of new plaques beneath thephotos of Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Under Biden's photo, the new plaque reads "Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction." It also added references to Trump's long-debunked claim that Biden's win in the 2020 election was the result of widespread voter fraud.

The new plaque for Obama refers to him as "divisive" and attacks him for the passage of the "Unaffordable Care Act" and joining the Paris Climate Accords. It also repeated Trump's unfounded claims that the Obama administration spied on his 2016 campaign and fabricated claims that it colluded with Russia. While less directly insulting, Clinton's plaque was given a new note about his wife, Hillary Clinton, losing the 2016 election to Trump."

A.I. Videos Have Flooded Social Media. No One Was Ready.; A.I. Videos Have Flooded Social Media. No One Was Ready., December 8, 2025

Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times ; A.I. Videos Have Flooded Social Media. No One Was Ready.

Apps like OpenAI’s Sora are fooling millions of users into thinking A.I. videos are real, even when they include warning labels.

"Videos like the fake interview above, created with OpenAI’s new app, Sora, show how easily public perceptions can be manipulated by tools that can produce an alternate reality with a series of simple prompts.

In the two months since Sora arrived, deceptive videos have surged on TikTok, X, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to experts who track them. The deluge has raised alarm over a new generation of disinformation and fakes.

Most of the major social media companies have policies that require disclosure of artificial intelligence use and broadly prohibit content intended to deceive. But those guardrails have proved woefully inadequate for the kind of technological leaps OpenAI’s tools represent."

CDC changes website to promote debunked vaccines-autism link; Axios, November 20, 2025

Maya Goldman , Axios; CDC changes website to promote debunked vaccines-autism link

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its website to promote the widely debunked claim that vaccines may cause autism. 

Why it matters: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly linked vaccines to autism, and now the public health agency he oversees is publicly reversing its position to reflect that belief. 

Multiple studies over decades have disproven links between childhood vaccines and developing autism. 

State of play: The agency's webpage on vaccines and autism, updated Wednesday, now says the statement that vaccines don't cause autism "is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism."

"Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities," the website continues. 

HHS in September released plans to contract with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to research connections between vaccines and autism. 

Career scientists at the agency were not consulted about the changes and were caught off guard by them, the Washington Post reported.

The CDC site previously said studies showed there was no connection between receiving vaccines and developing autism."

Trump shares false claim Obama earned $40m in ‘royalties’ from Obamacare; The Guardian, November 9, 2025

Robert Mackey, The Guardian ; Trump shares false claim Obama earned $40m in ‘royalties’ from Obamacare

"Donald Trump promoted the false claim that Barack Obama has earned $40m in “royalties linked to Obamacare” in a post to his 11 million followers on Truth Social on Sunday.

The fictional claim that the former US president receives royalty payments for the use of his name to refer to the Affordable Care Act, which he signed into law in 2010, has been repeatedly debunked since at least 2017, when it was featured on America’s Last Line of Defense, a satirical website that produces fake news reports designed to generate engagement from outraged conservatives.

The updated version of the claim shared by Trump on Sunday fooled many of his supporters in February, when it was posted on Facebook by America’s Last Line of Defense, and on the Dunning-Kruger-Times, a satirical site run by the same man, Christopher Blair, the Maine-based “godfather of fake news”.

On Sunday morning, Trump posted a screenshot of an earlier post with an image of Obama and the text: “BREAKING: DOGE halted a yearly payment of $2.5 million to Barack Obama for ‘royalties linked to Obamacare.’ He’s been collecting it since 2010, for a total of $40 million in taxpayer dollars.”"

In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia; The Guardian, November 3, 2025

Robert Booth, The Guardian ; In Grok we don’t trust: academics assess Elon Musk’s AI-powered encyclopedia

"The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy.

That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last week by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false.

It was part of a choppy start for humanity’s latest attempt to corral the sum of human knowledge or, as Musk put it, create a compendium of “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” – all revealed through the magic of his Grok artificial intelligence model."

Elon Musk launches encyclopedia ‘fact-checked’ by AI and aligning with rightwing views; The Guardian, October 28, 2025

Chris Michael, The Guardian ; Elon Musk launches encyclopedia ‘fact-checked’ by AI and aligning with rightwing views

"Elon Musk has launched an online encyclopedia named Grokipedia that he said relied on artificial intelligence and would align more with his rightwing views than Wikipedia, though many of its articles say they are based on Wikipedia itself.

Calling an AI encyclopedia “super important for civilization”, Musk had been planning the Wikipedia rival for at least a month. Grokipedia does not have human authors, unlike Wikipedia, which is written and edited by volunteers in a transparent process. Grokipedia said it is “fact-checked” by Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot.

Musk said the idea was suggested by the Trump administration’s AI and cryptocurrency czar, David Sacks.

Musk has frequently attacked Wikipedia for citing reporting by the New York Times and NPR, and regularly lambasts what he calls the “mainstream media” in an effort to encourage people to rely on X, formerly Twitter, the social media site he owns and which he has programmed to encourage the domination of conservative and far-right voices, including his own.

Grokipedia’s entries appear to hew closely to conservative talking points. For example, its entry for the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol cites “widespread claims of voting irregularities” – a lie pushed by Donald Trump and his allies to delegitimize Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 – and downplays Trump’s own role in inciting the riot."

Undocumented Immigrants Are Not Feasting on Food Stamps; NewsGuard's Reality Check, October 31, 2025

Ines Chomnalez, NewsGuard's Reality Check ; Undocumented Immigrants Are Not Feasting on Food Stamps

"False Claim of the Week: 59 Percent of U.S. Residents Without Legal Status Collect Federal SNAP Food Benefits

NewsGuard’s “False Claim of the Week” highlights a false claim from NewsGuard’s False Claim Fingerprints proprietary database of provably false claims and their debunks. The claim that 59 percent of U.S. residents without legal status collect federal SNAP food benefits is NewsGuard’s “False Claim of the Week” due to its widespread appearance across social media platforms and websites, its high engagement levels, and the high-profile nature of the sources promoting it. Those three factors, as well as both its significant subject matter and potential for harm, makes it our False Claim of the Week.

Debunk: Millions of Immigrants Without Legal Status Are Not Receiving SNAP Benefits, Contrary to Conservative Claims

What happened: Citing a report on the Newsmax network, conservative social media accounts are claiming that 59 percent of U.S. immigrants without legal status collect Supplement Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps. Some users advancing this claim said it shows that the federal nutrition program should be gutted.

Context: On Oct. 1, the federal government entered a shutdown, pausing funding to the federal Agriculture Department (USDA), which is responsible for issuing SNAP benefits. SNAP provides low-income Americans with electronic cards they can use to purchase food.

• Because of the government shutdown, the USDA said in an Oct. 27 statement that no new benefits would be issued to the 42 million Americans who receive SNAP assistance, starting on Nov. 1. On Oct. 31, a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled that the administration must continue to make the payments for now.

A closer look: On the Oct. 27 episode of the Newsmax primetime show “Finnerty,” host Rob Finnerty said, “Fifty-nine percent of all illegal aliens are collecting food stamps, meaning that most of the people getting food stamps from the U.S. government and the U.S. taxpayer are not even Americans.” Other conservatives soon began spreading the claim.

• Conservative X user @overton_news posted the Newsmax clip on Oct. 27, quoting Finnerty’s statement that “59% of ALL illegal aliens are collecting food stamps” in the caption. The post received 1 million views and 45,000 likes in less than one day.

• The same day, conservative news site TheGatewayPundit.com published an article headlined, “DEMOCRAT BACKFIRE: The Government Shutdown Has Awakened the Public About How Many People Are on Food Stamps.” The article included the above quote from Finnerty advancing the false claim, and added, “It really is shocking and now that Democrats have prolonged the shutdown, more people are going to be talking about this.”

Actually: Residents without legal status are not eligible to collect SNAP benefits, according to the USDA’s website.

• The site states, “SNAP eligibility has never been extended to undocumented non-citizens.”

Although Finnerty did not provide any evidence for his claim, it appears to be based on a misinterpretation of a statistic, previously cited accurately by conservative social media users, from the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a think tank that supports tight immigration limits.

• CIS stated in a 2023 report: “Our best estimate is that 59 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants, also called the undocumented use at least one major [welfare] program.”

• As the quote indicates, CIS was describing households receiving assistance from any “major” welfare program — not just SNAP. CIS defined “major” programs as assistance in the form of cash, Medicaid, housing, and food (including the nutrition program for women, infants, and children known as WIC, as well as school meals).

Broken down by specific welfare program, the CIS report estimated that 0.9 percent of U.S. households led by non-legal residents receive SNAP benefits. The report did not clarify whether that percentage was composed of non-legal residents obtaining SNAP benefits illegally, or of legal residents lawfully collecting the benefits but who live in a household headed by a non-legal resident.

Newsmax did not respond to an email from NewsGuard requesting comment on the matter."

Vaccine Skepticism Comes for Pet Owners, Too; The New York Times, October 27, 2025

  Emily Anthes and Teddy Rosenbluth, The New York Times; Vaccine Skepticism Comes for Pet Owners, Too

"Over the last several years, the anti-vaccine movement has gained ground in the United States, fueled, in part, by the politicization of the Covid-19 vaccines and the increasing power of vaccine critics like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Childhood vaccination rates have fallen. Once vanquished diseases, like measles, have come storming back. And vaccine mandates are under fire: Last month, Florida announced plans to end all vaccine mandates, including for schoolchildren.

But antipathy toward vaccines is also spilling over into veterinary medicine, making some people hesitant to vaccinate their pets.

“I talk to thousands of veterinarians every year across the country, and the majority are seeing this kind of issue,” said Dr. Richard Ford, an emeritus professor at the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine who helped write the national vaccine guidelines for cats and dogs.

The phenomenon has clear parallels to the anti-vaccine movement in human medicine and could, experts fear, lead the nation down a familiar path, resulting in a loosening of animal vaccination laws, a decline in pet vaccination rates and a resurgence of infectious diseases that pose a risk to both pets and people."