If you want to help end the distribution of misinformation stop using Twitter/X. I took the SR edition off of Twitter as soon as I learned this, and hope you will do so as well.
None of the five major tech companies (Meta, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter) scored well. Credit: Anadolu Agency / Getty
A report ranking climate change misinformation gave Twitter (recently rebranded as X) only a single point out of a 21-point scorecard when assessing policies aimed at reducing inaccurate information – the worst out of five major tech platforms.
The Climate of Misinformation report by Climate Action Against Disinformation looked at Meta, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter for their content moderation policies and efforts to mitigate inaccurate information such as climate denialism. The group, which is made up of dozens of international climate and anti-disinformation organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, released the report to draw attention towards climate misinformation on major platforms and makes the claim that big tech has become a “complicit actor” in accelerating the spread of climate denial.
Twitter’s low rank in the survey was because it failed to meet almost any of the organization’s criteria for climate misinformation policies, which ranged from having clear and publicly available information on climate science to […]
Here is some lovely good news. President Biden thwarted by the Congressional Republicans is using his executive authority to create a modern version of Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps that so successfully changed America for the better in ways we still benefit from. How is it possible that a convicted rapist, convicted scammer currently under 91 felonious indictments, and Joe Biden can be polling equally? I just don’t get why Americans don’t seem to recognize what Biden and the Democrats are doing to prepare for the changes being wrought by climate change and to improve their lives.
Climate activists rally in front of the White House at Lafayette Square to demand that President Joe Biden declare a climate emergency and move the country rapidly away from fossil fuels. Credit: Yuri Gripas / AP
WASHINGTON, D.C. — After being thwarted by Congress, President Joe Biden will use his executive authority to create a New Deal-style American Climate Corps that will serve as a major green jobs training program.
In an announcement Wednesday, the White House said the program will employ more than 20,000 young adults who will build trails, plant trees, help install solar panels and do other work to boost conservation and help prevent catastrophic wildfires.
The climate corps had been proposed in early versions of the sweeping climate law approved last year but was jettisoned amid strong opposition from Republicans and concerns about cost.
Democrats and environmental advocacy groups never gave up on the plan and pushed Biden in recent weeks to issue an executive order authorizing what the White House now calls the American Climate Corps.
“After years of demonstrating and fighting for a […]
A few weeks ago I ran a survey showing that a large percentage of Americans have no idea how their government works (see SR archive). Their understanding of the country’s democracy is so poor they can’t even name the branches created by the Constitution. I was appalled and saddened by that study. Well, here is another one that confirms the findings of the first one. The obvious truth to be derived from both studies is that a large percentage of the voters in this country have no idea what they are voting for, and mostly their choices are driven by their fears, resentments, hate, and grievances. Basically, they vote like cranky toddlers, and it explains why democracy is in such a parlous state.
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA — The U.S. Constitution was a collaborative effort undertaken by many of America’s Founding Fathers. James Madison played an especially crucial role in drafting the supreme law of the U.S., and as such is often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution.” One can’t help but wonder what President Madison would think about the results of a new survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. In short, the poll suggests a troubling number of Americans are incredibly uninformed when it comes to their own constitutional rights.
Even worse, the 2023 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, an annual poll released every Constitution Day (Sept. 17), also found that a significant number of Americans can’t even name the three branches of the government. More specifically, while two-thirds of Americans (66%) can name the three branches, 10 percent can only list two, another seven percent can only name one, and an astounding 17 percent can’t name a single branch.
Meanwhile, when respondents were asked to name all of the rights […]
Two billionaire Texas brothers whose fortunes derive from oil and gas fracking have pumped million of dollars into rightwing media outfits that have promoted climate-crisis denialism and sent more big checks to back an array of evangelical projects and conservative Texas politicians.
The fracking billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks have each doled out millions of dollars through separate foundations over the last decade to a number of high-profile conservative and religious groups including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.
“Thanks to their incredible wealth and largesse, the country as well as the [Republican] party are now feeling the effects of their aggressive brand of religiously-charged political activism,” said Darren Dochuk, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of Anointed with Oil.
Farris Wilks and his wife control the Thirteen Foundation, while Dan Wilks and his wife lead the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, both of which have been funded with proceeds from the 2011 sale of their majority stake in Frac Tech Services for $3.2bn.
Since they created their foundations, six- and seven-figure checks from the Wilks brothers […]
Sheldon Whitehouse, Democratic Senator for Rhode Island - Sheldon Whitehouse Senatorial Website
Stephan:
This is what honorable political discourse focused on fostering wellbeing sounds like. Such a different world from what we see on the electronic media. And what Senator Whitehouse is saying deserves your close attention. This is how the christofascist Republican minority took over the Supreme Court and much of the rest of the American judiciary.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island credit: Anne Moneymaker / Getty
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here once again to shed a little light on the dark money scheme to capture and control our Supreme Court.
As folks may recall, my first two speeches covered the early foundation of this scheme–a prominent conservative lawyer Lewis Powell’s detailed strategy memo for the corporate U.S. Chamber of Commerce and then Justice Lewis Powell’s work on the Court to assure his corporate power strategy’s success.
From there, I turned to what historian Richard Hofstetter called the paranoid style in American politics and how extreme anti-government megadonors like the Kochs harness that rightwing fringe and how, at the same time, they had at their disposal the polished mercenaries of corporate administrative agency warfare.
Then I discussed the scheme’s two big recent dark money wins at the Supreme Court–the AFPF dark money case and the Brnovich voter suppression case.
The nutshell overview of all of this is that it is a short jump for big donors from regulatory capture, which is a […]
