Why We’re Still in the Dark About Facebook’s Fight Against Fake News
Mother Jones illustration Just hours after the mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas earlier this month, conspiracy theories connecting the perpetrator, Devin Kelley, to far-left antifa groups started spreading rapidly online. What first began as speculation on Twitter started becoming a commonly accepted theory after being shared by some of the most high-profile conspiracy theorists on the right, including Mike Cernovich…
Feinstein Presses Insiders on Trump-Russia Dealings
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., arrives in the Capitol for a vote on October 19, 2017. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Wednesday demanded an interview and documents from Felix Sater, a developer and former convict who worked for President Trump during the 2016 campaign on a secret effort to build a Trump Tower…
The FBI Reported More Than 6,000 Hate Crimes Last Year. Here’s Why It’s Probably A Whole Lot More.
Richard Ellis/Zuma An FBI report released earlier this week claims that hate crimes increased 4.6 percent in 2016 over the previous year, from 5,850 in 2015 to 6,121 last year. Mainstream media outlets widely reported on these statistics (see here and here), with several outlets calling out a specific spike in hate crimes around Election Day and reporting the…
WikiLeaks Set Off an Attack on Our Trump-Russia Project—Right After Messaging Donald Trump Jr. About It
Ron Sachs/DPA/AP; Ben Cawthra/Rex Shutterstock/ZUMA; Mother Jones illustration Additional reporting for this story was contributed by Denise Clifton and AJ Vicens. On Monday, The Atlantic published private messages from September 2016 in which WikiLeaks gave Donald Trump Jr. the password to a forthcoming site documenting his father’s ties to Russia. But there was more to the…
It’s Been an Amazing Year for Political Artists Telling Donald Trump to Shove It
kadirkaplan/Getty For many Americans, Trump’s first year in the White House has been, in a word, ugly. But the Trump administration has resulted in some of the most provocative political art in American history. “Painting is not made to decorate apartments,” Pablo Picasso famously said in 1945. “It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.” Over…
Putin’s Trolls Used the Texas Church Massacre to Sow More Chaos
Mother Jones illustration False information inundated social media after Sunday’s mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Russian trolls were in the thick of it. Conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich led the way, falsely branding shooter Devin Patrick Kelly as a member of the far-left antifa movement, and the Russian media outlet RT America had…