Latest news with #propaganda
Wall Street Journal
an hour ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
A Bad Time to Stifle Radio Free Iran
If Americans needed proof of the value of Radio Free Europe, Iran is Exhibit A. In the days since Israel began bombing nuclear sites, Iranians have needed access to news and information that can counter Iran's state propaganda. One of the first places they turned to was RFE's Persian language service, Radio Farda. In the first days of the conflict between Iran and Israel, Iranians flocked to Radio Farda and its platform. Traffic surged 344% on the group's Instagram account with 62.5 million video views while website traffic rose 77%, according to RFE. Viewership also spiked in the Middle East and North Africa.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Administration Eliminates Most Staff Of Voice Of America, Other U.S.-Funded Broadcasters
Voice of America, launched during World War II to counter the propaganda of Axis powers, has been reduced to a shell of its former self, with the Trump administration announcing that it was terminating more than 600 employees from the media outlet and other government-funded broadcasters. All told, 85% of the workforce has been eliminated since March, or 1,400 positions across the media outlets, according to an announcement from Kari Lake, the senior adviser tapped by Trump to make the cuts. More from Deadline JD Vance To Visit Los Angeles On Friday Amid ICE Raids And Protests Trump Brags About "Big Win" Over Newsom With Court Ordered Continued Control Of California National Guard, For Now - Update As Americans Celebrate Juneteenth, Donald Trump Complains About Too Many Federal Holidays Lake said that 250 employees will remain at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the entity that oversees the broadcast outlets, as well as at Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. 'The agency now operates near the statutory minimum; lean and focused,' Lake said. Trump signed an executive order in March to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media to the minimum level required by statute. The president had long targeted Voice of America, and originally tapped Lake to lead it. But by law, VOA is to remain independent of political influence, out of fears that it otherwise would become a president's propaganda arm. Instead, Trump and Lake have turned to paring down the media outlets, even though they have in the past enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress for providing U.S.-backed news and information to other countries. Lake announced in May that One America News Network, a Trump-supporting right wing news outlet, would be providing its news feed to VOA and other outlets. VOA's fate has been up in the air since March, when most of its staff was placed on leave, freezing in time its website. Employees have challenged Trump's actions in court. Among those who received reduction in force notices on Friday were three of the plaintiffs, including Patsy Widakuswara, Washington bureau choef of VOA News. Her notice, which she posted on X, was effective Sept. 1. Widakuswara said that those who received notices also included Persian journalists who were called back to work last week to cover Israel's war with Iran. Widakuswara and two other plaintiffs, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, said in a statement, 'This move follows USAGM's firing of more than 500 contractors last month,' Widakuswara wrote. 'It spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds U.S. ideals of democracy and freedom around the world. As our legal team continue to fight for our rights under the law, we call on Congress to continue its long tradition of bipartisan support for VOA. Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and extremist groups are flooding the global information space with anti-American propaganda. Do not cede this ground by silencing America's voice.' Best of Deadline 'Poker Face' Season 2 Guest Stars: From Katie Holmes To Simon Hellberg The 25 Highest-Grossing Animated Films Of All Time At The Global Box Office The Movies That Have Made More Than $1 Billion At The Global Box Office
Fox News
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Fox News
DAVID MARCUS: Your social media feed is being hijacked to divide MAGA supporters
As our society buries itself deeper and deeper into the cave of social media, we are seeing a growing divide between what happens in our real world and what we see on platforms like X and TikTok. A bombshell new report from the National Contagion Research Institute shows much of this is being directed by our foreign enemies. It also shows one of their top goals is to infiltrate and divide the MAGA movement. According to NCRI, Russia and Iran have been employing tens of thousands of bots to inject extreme rhetoric into American social media discourse, and perhaps more importantly, to artificially inflate the influence of content creators who push radical and divisive agendas. To quote one NCRI analyst, "If you talk to Republicans right now, more than 80% of them support the war against Iran. But if you go on Twitter [X] you get the sense that there is a civil war raging." This manipulation of social media by our enemies is far more insidious than most Americans realize, so let's walk through how this kind of information operation, the technical name for propaganda, works. Imagine, for example, that there was an obscure comedian, or Instagram model who began to "just ask questions," about why Jews run everything, or why black people commit crimes. Even better, they might post about how they aren't allowed to ask these very questions and insinuate that neither are you. At this point, according to the report, Russian and Iranian bot armies will begin to follow these radical accounts, massively pumping up their numbers. It will like and share the most divisive content, and work behind the scenes to make this person famous. On platforms that monetize interaction, this can mean very large payouts for creators, as spy bots mindlessly watch their videos over and over, and the beauty of it is that the content creator never even has to know they are getting paid off. When we talk about influencers being bought and paid for by foreign foes, it may not mean a duffle bag full of cash in a bus station locker, simply by using thousands of bots to juice the numbers, the social media companies themselves facilitate the payouts. Perhaps the most obvious way we can see this malign foreign influence online is in the incredible amount of casual racism and antisemitism, supposedly being posted by Americans, that we see on X. These hate posts range from straight-up Nazi apologism, to memes about fatherless black homes, or weird eugenics IQ graphs, and if their prevalence in the algorithm accurately reflects the level of racism in America, then this is a deeply racist country. Only it isn't. Because X does not accurately reflect our society, instead countries that despise America are infusing hate into the platform and propping up the handful of real people willing to push racism and division. What the Russian and Iranian bot farms hope we will believe is that America is full of secret racists who will only say their true beliefs through their anonymous personas, but this is absurd, America knows IRL, that that kind of racism is buried in our past. The question becomes, what can we do to fight back against this massive information operation aimed at our minds? Liberals have long taken the exact wrong approach, which is to try to protect the end user from malicious content. This always adds up to censorship, one way or the other. The better approach, at least as far as the government is concerned, is to target the bot farms and countries that back them. This can be done through cyberattacks, sanctions, any number of measures. There is also a role for the social media industry to play here. We are hearing growing calls for X to use a flag to identify the country of origin of its accounts. This would immediately help users see through the foreign operations. The silver lining in all of this, as the report shows, is that making the leap from influence on a social media screen to influence in the real world is not as easy as we might have once imagined. These foreign-backed influencers have few outlets they can go to off of social media. Sure, Piers Morgan may put on anyone with 250k followers no matter how awful they are, but Main Street America isn't seeing it. As a free society, America is by definition vulnerable to informational attacks, and as citizens in that free society all of us bear a responsibility to process the unfettered flow of information we have access to in responsible ways. Make no mistake, your social media feed is under direct foreign attack. So far, the attacks haven't done too much damage, but keeping it that way, first and foremost, starts with all of us.
The Standard
15 hours ago
- General
- The Standard
Rights abuses continue in North Korea a decade after probe, says UN investigator
A North Korean flag flutters on top of a 160-metre tower in North Korea's propaganda village of Gijungdong in this picture taken from the Dora observatory near the demilitarised zone separating the two Koreas, in Paju, South Korea, April 24, 2018. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji/File Photo
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls Fox News And New York Post ‘Propaganda' Supporting ‘Foreign Wars'
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) slammed right-leaning news outlets Fox News and the New York Post on Monday, accusing them of brainwashing Americans into supporting U.S. involvement in a conflict between Israel and Iran. 'We've watched propaganda news for decades. I'll call out Fox News and the New York Post. They're known to be the neocon network news,' Greene told former Florida GOP lawmaker Matt Gaetz on his show on One America News Network. 'We have propaganda news on our side, just like the left does, and the American people have been brainwashed into believing that America has to engage in these foreign wars in order for us to survive, and it's absolutely not true,' Greene continued. Greene's comments came a week after Israel launched attacks aimed at a nuclear and military site in Iran, killing some of the country's top generals. In response, Iran launched missiles at Israel. President Donald Trump said he knew Israel's attacks on Iran were coming, even calling them 'excellent.' While Trump said the U.S. is not directly involved in the conflict between the two countries, he did not rule out future involvement. Greene went on to criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who blasted U.S. reluctance to get involved in the conflict with Iran. 'Today, it's Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, it's New York,' Netanyahu said in an interview with ABC News on Monday, adding, 'Look, I understand 'America first.' I don't understand 'America dead.'' The Georgia Republican told Gaetz that Netanyahu's remark 'sounds like a threat to me,' adding that 'a Middle Eastern war will pull America back 20 years.' 'In order for America to not be dead, it's to stay America First, and this is what the American people want,' Greene said. 'It is not antisemitic to say that we do not want to go to war against Iran or any other country. That is not antisemitic at all.' Greene reiterated that she is 'completely opposed to this war' before criticizing Israel for launching the first strike against Iran. 'Of course, we don't want to see the people in Israel bombed, but they're only being bombed because Israel attacked Iran first, and that's the truth that we need to be talking about,' she said. Can Trump Prevent A Massive Middle East War? Trump To Depart The G7 Early As Conflict Between Israel And Iran Shows Signs Of Intensifying Trump Escalates His Feud With Tucker Carlson Over Israel And Iran
