Paywalls

Many posts have dealt with media problems.

Emily Tomasik and Michael Lipka at Pew:

Newspaper revenue has been in decline for decades, and most Americans now prefer to get news from digital devices. In this environment, many news organizations – and not just newspapers – put paywalls on their websites or apps, blocking access to articles or other content unless news consumers pay or subscribe.

The vast majority of Americans (83%) say they have not paid for news in the past year, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. Another 17% say they have directly paid or given money to a news source by subscribing, donating or becoming a member during that time.

At the same time, 74% run into paywalls at least sometimes when they are looking for news online. This includes 38% who say they come across paywalled articles extremely often or often. 

DTLA, AI, and Disinformation

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  It is easier than ever to spread lies at scale.

Laura Doan and Emma Li at CBS:

As demonstrations against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids continue in Los Angeles, misleading videos, conspiracies and false claims have spread on social media.

Many of the posts recycle longstanding conspiracy theories, which have often been revived during past episodes of civil unrest. Some posts have made claims that wealthy individuals engineered or financed the protests, and they have racked up millions of views online.

Some posts exaggerate the unrest, using videos of past demonstrations to depict a city overwhelmed by violence. In fact, clashes since the current protests began Friday have remained largely confined to parts of Los Angeles County.

...
One widely shared video of vandalized police cars set ablaze, which was posted by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas on Sunday, was originally from news coverage of May 2020 protests in response to the death of George Floyd. 

...

Amid the recycled imagery, authentic pictures of National Guard members sleeping on the floor of a federal building in Los Angeles this week were falsely described as old or unauthentic.

The images were initially published by the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday and republished by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on X, who said they served as proof that the deployment was poorly planned, and claimed the soldiers were "without fuel, food, water or a place to sleep."

Some social media users said the images were old and depicted soldiers at previous deployments. Grok, X's AI chatbot, determined the images were likely from Afghanistan in 2021.

However, the images are authentic. Using images published by the U.S. Northern Command and other videos posted to social media, CBS News independently confirmed the images were taken from the loading dock area of the Robert Young Federal Building.

Catherine Kim at Politico:

The latest rollout of accessible AI video generators presents unique challenges to the truth — and public perception of it — because videos are “more powerful as a medium in terms of convincing people of reality,” said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor at CUNY Queens College who studies internet literacy.

“Pictures are easily manipulated,” he said. “That idea has been there. But when it comes to videos, we’ve just been trained as an individual society to believe videos. Up until recently, we haven’t really had the opportunity to assume videos could be faked at the scale that it’s being faked at this point.”

It’s not just the sheer amount of slop that is filling social media feeds that’s posing a problem. It’s the ability to visually manipulate scenes to fit the creator’s political agenda that is making it so much harder to decipher the truth during the L.A. protests. Consider these completely fake AI-generated videos posted over the past few days: one of a hypocritical protester who preaches peace and then throws a molotov cocktail. Or another of a man screaming “Viva Mexico,” but then cowering away from an officer who says he will take him to Mexico. These clips aren’t just delivering conservative talking points either: This one emanates from the left, featuring a young man delivering a heartfelt speech about standing with his community and fighting injustice.

Until recently, the concern with manipulated images has been related to their ability to misinform a crowd and sway public opinion. But a growing body of research proves that not much can change people’s minds — not even AI misinformation. What the technology can do, however, is reinforce preexisting beliefs, leaving people impervious to actual facts.

AI and News Sites

Many posts have dealt with media problems.

Isabella Simonetti and Katherine Blunt at WSJ:

The AI armageddon is here for online news publishers.

Chatbots are replacing Google searches, eliminating the need to click on blue links and tanking referrals to news sites. As a result, traffic that publishers relied on for years is plummeting.

Traffic from organic search to HuffPost’s desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washington Post, according to digital market data firm Similarweb.

Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.” Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb.

At a companywide meeting earlier this year, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of the Atlantic, said the publication should assume traffic from Google would drop toward zero and the company needed to evolve its business model.

Cyber-Orwell

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

And so it begins...

Tiffany Hsu at NYT:

Soon after the new administration arrived, things began to go missing from the White House website.

They weren’t just the partisan policy platforms that typically disappear during a presidential transition. Informational pages about the Constitution and past presidents, up in various forms since President George W. Bush was in office, all vanished.

Thousands of other government web pages had also been taken down or modified, including content about vaccines, hate crimes, low-income children, opioid addiction and veterans, before a court order temporarily blocked part of the sweeping erasure. A Justice Department database tracking criminal charges and convictions linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was removed. Segments of data sets are gone, some of the experts who produced them were dismissed, and many mentions of words like “Black,” “women” and “discrimination” have evaporated.

Jon Swaine and Jeremy B. Merrill at WP:

For years, a National Park Service webpage introduced the Underground Railroad with a large photograph of its most famous “conductor,” Harriet Tubman. “The Underground Railroad — the resistance to enslavement through escape and flight, through the end of the Civil War — refers to the efforts of enslaved African Americans to gain their freedom by escaping bondage,” the page began.

Tubman’s photograph is now gone. In its place are images of Postal Service stamps that highlight “Black/White cooperation” in the secret network and that feature Tubman among abolitionists of both races.

The introductory sentence is gone, too. It has been replaced by a line that makes no mention of slavery and that describes the Underground Railroad as “one of the most significant expressions of the American civil rights movement.” The effort “bridged the divides of race,” the page now says.

The executive order that President Donald Trump issued late last month directing the Smithsonian Institution to eliminate “divisive narratives” stirred fears that the president aimed to whitewash the stories the nation tells about itself. But a Washington Post review of websites operated by the National Park Service — among the key agencies charged with the preservation of American history — found that edits on dozens of pages since Trump’s inauguration have already softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past.

Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened, as were references to present-day echoes of racial division. The Post compared webpages as of late March to earlier versions preserved online by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

 

Trump Administration Deletes Online Data

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

And so it begins...

Cecily Mauran at Mashable:

Since President Trump was sworn into office, almost three thousand datasets have disappeared from Data.gov, the U.S. government's repository of open data.

According to 404 Media, online archivist communities discovered since Trump took office on Jan. 21, the number of datasets on Data.gov has decreased to 305,564 from 307,854 datasets. Screenshots of Data.gov's homepage archived in the Wayback Machine show the number of datasets one day before (Jan. 20) and nine days after (Jan. 30) the Trump administration began.

Will Stone and Selena Simmons-Duffin at NPR:

At the direction of the Trump administration, the federal Department of Health and Human Services and its agencies are purging its websites of information and data on a broad array of topics — from adolescent health to LGBTQ+ rights to HIV.

Several webpages from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with references to LGBTQ+ health were no longer available. A page from the HHS Office for Civil Rights outlining the rights of LGBTQ+ people in health care settings was also gone as of Friday. The website of the National Institutes of Health's Office for Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office disappeared. (Most of these pages could still be viewed through the Internet Archive.)

Naseem S. Miller at The Journalist's Resource:

A group of researchers and students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is gathered today for a data preservation marathon, scraping and downloading data related to health equity from U.S. government agency websites before they disappear. Their goal is to make the downloaded data publicly available through repositories such as the Harvard Dataverse.

...

For the first time in its 70-year history, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the official journal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was not published last week as part of a communication pause among federal health agencies. One of the studies slated to appear in the publication was about the risk of bird flu infection among veterinarians who treat cattle, reported Amy Maxman in KFF Health News on January 30. The MMWR, which historically has been published on Thursdays, was not published this week, either.

 Tips for preserving websites

Save the websites to the Wayback Machine. The easiest way to do this is by installing the Wayback Machine extension for your browser. The add-ons and extensions are listed on the left-hand panel of the website’s homepage.

To find the missing websites, go to Wayback Machine and type in the website’s URL in the search bar. 

If you’re concerned that certain websites or web pages may be removed, you can suggest federal websites and content that end in .gov, .mil and .com to the End of Term Web Archive.

You can suggest federal climate and environmental databases to Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

You can suggest databases to The Data Liberation Project, which is run by MuckRock and Big Local News.

Tell science journalist Maggie Koerth what CDC data you've downloaded and whether you've made them publicly available. 

 

 

Polling Problems in 2024

Many posts have discussed pollsters' challenges, including the plunge in response rates.

Nate Cohn at NYT:

The polls were one of the big winners of the 2012 presidential election. They showed Barack Obama ahead, even though many believed a weak economy would propel Mitt Romney to victory.

The polls conducted online were among the biggest winners of all.

The most prominent online pollsters — Google Consumer Surveys, Reuters/Ipsos and YouGov — all produced good or excellent results. With the right statistical adjustments, even a poll of Xbox users fared well.

These successes seemed to herald the dawn of a new era of public opinion research, one in which pollsters could produce accurate surveys cheaply, by marrying online polls with big data and advanced statistical techniques.

A decade later, the new era has arrived — and has fallen far short of its promise. Ever since their 2012 breakout performance, the public polls relying exclusively on data from so-called online opt-in panels have underperformed the competition.

Only YouGov, long at the cutting edge of this kind of polling, is still producing reasonably accurate results with these panels.

Many of the online pollsters who excelled in 2012 have left public polling altogether:

Google Consumer Surveys — by 538’s reckoning perhaps the best poll of 2012 — was arguably the single worst pollster in the 2016 election, and it has stepped out of the political polling game.

The Xbox poll did not return. The researchers behind it used a different online survey platform, Pollfish, to predict Hillary Clinton victories in Texas and Ohio in 2016.
And last year, Reuters/Ipsos abandoned opt-in, or nonprobability, polling. There are still Reuters/Ipsos polls, but they’re now traditional surveys with panelists recruited by mail.

Nonetheless, a majority of polls are now conducted in exactly this way: fielded online using people who joined (that is, opted into) a panel to take a survey, whether by clicking on a banner ad or via an app. Traditional polling, in contrast, attempts to take a random sample of the population, whether by calling random phone numbers or mailing random addresses.

The newer opt-in pollsters haven’t fared any better. SurveyMonkey and Morning Consult, two of the most prolific opt-in pollsters to pop up since 2012, have posted some of the well-below-average results among major pollsters since their inception, despite having established pollsters and political scientists leading their political polling.

More recently, a whole new wave of online pollsters has popped up. In just the last few months, pollsters like SoCal Strategies, Quantus Polls, ActiVote and Outward Intelligence have published dozens of polls, often with scant methodological detail. Maybe one of these firms is a diamond in the rough, but history offers no reason to expect it.

Online opt-in pollsters have fared so poorly in recent cycles that they receive less weight than other surveys in our polling averages.

Why are these polls faring poorly? The core challenge was always obvious: how to find a representative sample without the benefit of random sampling, in which everyone has an equal chance of being selected for a poll. Over the last decade, this has gotten harder and harder. Even the best firms have struggled to keep up; for the rest, it’s hard to tell how much they’re even trying.

Oppo

Many posts have discussed opposition research. 

Holly Pretsky at City and State New York:

Researchers don’t just work for political campaigns. They also investigate opponents in legislative fights and policy campaigns, working on behalf of unions and advocacy groups. Yang said a typical oppo book on a candidate and their opponent can cost between $20,000 and $30,000. Davis was paid $35,000 each by the 2022 congressional campaigns of Alessandra Biaggi and Carlina Rivera, and Scott Stringer’s mayoral campaign paid him more than $80,000 in 2021. Local campaigns prioritize research too. Yusef Salaam’s City Council campaign worked with Davis last year, as did Susan Zhuang’s. Wanecke worked with Sandy Nurse’s campaigns. “It’s just a neutral part of the business, and you would be naive to completely ignore it,” Yang said. The low-hanging fruit are the easiest things to dig up: old news reports on a person, their legislative voting record, campaign fundraising and expenditure records, what they’ve said on social media. Another starting place is what the opponent is claiming about themselves. For example, if they say they’re born and raised in the district, the researcher would start by verifying that. Another common tactic is looking for online content that the opponent has deleted – spending a lot of time on Internet Archive. Deception and hypocrisy are common themes in successful “hits.”

I love oppo,” said political consultant Evan Stavisky, whose firm Parkside Group has worked with state Senate Democrats and Rep. Tom Suozzi. “Candidates have an obligation to voters to present them with the full picture about who the candidates are and what the stakes are in the election.” His mom, Queens state Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky, had a primary challenger in 2016 who had made anti-gay comments in Korean to a church group. “It would have done a disservice to the constituents for them not to understand that,” Evan Stavisky said. And it’s true. When there is a lack of vetting, voters can get burned. Just look at disgraced former Rep. George Santos, the poster child for failed oppo. After the Times finally exposed the extent of his lies post-election, there was quite a bit of discourse and finger-pointing about vetting. Everyone was blamed: the Nassau County Republican machine, the state Democratic Party, Democratic candidate Robert Zimmerman’s campaign, the researchers, the journalists, even the voters themselves for not caring enough! The DCCC did put together an 87-page book on Santos, but it largely focused on Santos’ conservative stances and involvement with Jan. 6 and “The Big Lie.” It also stated that Santos attended Baruch College, which the Times later found was false.

It is common practice for a campaign to bring oppo to a reporter, who then writes about it, only to see the article they wrote cycled back into campaign ads. In 2022, the DCCC was shopping around oppo on how New York Republicans had been inconsistent in their stances on abortion. City & State eventually wrote about the flip-flopping in 2023. Just recently, there has been a spike in traffic on that story. That’s due to a series of social media posts in late March from a sponsored Facebook page called “The American Horizon,” which took our logo, added new photos and rewrote our headline. Who pays for “The American Horizon” posts, according to Facebook’s ad library? The DCCC. A closed loop.

Response Rates

 From Pew:

The biggest obstacle surveys face today is that it has gotten much harder to reach people and persuade them to consent to an interview. This is mostly a consequence of lifestyle changes – people seem to have busier lives – coupled with a growing wariness about answering calls from unknown numbers or cooperating with requests for information from a person or organization they are not familiar with.

The nature of the problem is evident in the chart below, which shows Pew Research Center’s telephone survey response rates over the past 25 years or so. (The response rate is an estimate of the share of households we try to reach that ultimately complete an interview.) 

In part because of this decline in telephone response rates, Pew Research Center decided a few years back to stop relying primarily on telephone surveys and instead switch to using rigorous online surveys.  

Liberal Partisan Local News Sites

Many posts have dealt with misinformation, disinformation, and ipartisan pseudo-news sites.

Max Tani at Semafor:

A secretive local media network with ties to high-profile national Democratic operatives wants to convince regulators in Arizona that despite the political tilt of its stories, it is not a political entity and should not be subject to campaign finance disclosures.

Star Spangled Media operates a series of left-leaning websites including the Morning Mirror, a difficult-to-find, barebones blog that for the last few months has periodically published a few unbylined stories about seemingly random topics. Its “About Us” page simply reads: “Welcome to the Morning Mirror—where reliability meets fresh insight. Stay informed with us as we deliver on the matters that impact your life.”

Over the last few weeks, Star Spangled Media has started spending a modest amount to boost Morning Mirror stories on Facebook that tout the pro-abortion rights records of local Democratic candidates running for Michigan House seats.

...

It’s part of a multi-pronged push by Democrats to counter conservative media across the country through increasingly creative and sometimes opaque digital strategies — ones that blur the line between even the most activist political journalism and paid campaigning for the Democratic Party.

Last year, I reported that Democratic consultants and progressive media activists were pushing wealthy Democrats to invest in for-profit media companies and social media influencers in the wake of the collapse of a generation of youth-oriented digital news outlets like Vice and BuzzFeed News. Part of the diagnosis of a widely-circulated 85-page report by longtime Democratic operative and communicator Arkadi Gerney was that center- and left-leaning philanthropists and investors should invest in local television and radio in places where local media has disintegrated.

Left-leaning groups have gotten more involved in the digital landscape, as well.

As Semafor previously reported, Courier Newsroom, a network of local news sites with close ties to the Democratic Party, ramped up its ad spending to target progressive voters ahead of the 2024 election. While the sites have a fairly transparent point of view, it’s not always easy to tell who is behind the stories.

The X Factor of Misinformation

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Marc Burrows at The Independent:

Back when I worked at Twitter, in the days before Elon Musk’s takeover and self-consciously edgy and embarrassing “X” rebrand, we took the threat of misinformation incredibly seriously. I worked on Twitter’s curation team during multiple elections, including in the UK and the US, and through the first two years of the pandemic. I saw how false information spreads quickly and is believed easily, and how difficult it is to stop it travelling once it starts.

We worked with Reuters and the Associated Press to debunk rapidly growing and unreliable stories. We coined the term “pre-bunk” for identifying likely misinformation before it spread. Misleading posts were labelled once they reached a certain influence threshold.

We all knew this was mission critical, because Twitter punches above its weight in terms of influence on the news agenda and public conversation – that’s why Musk became so invested. We all wanted to make it safer. Better. A force for good.

The curation team – my team – was among the first to be cut in Musk’s new regime. In his first weeks, and, in my view, with a lack of subtlety, grace or much sense, he undid years of work; wiping out or reducing those areas of the company that dealt with misinformation and community moderation, disbanding the Trust and Safety team, and unbanning accounts previously sanctioned for spreading harmful lies.

Since then, the EU has found that X is the social media platform with the highest disinformation rate. As Miah Hammond-Errey, the director of the Emerging Technology Program at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney said last year: “Few recent actions have done more to make a social media platform safe for disinformation, extremism, and authoritarian regime propaganda than the changes to Twitter since its purchase by Elon Musk.

American Defector and Russian Disinformation

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Brandy Zadrozny at NBC:

More than 150 fake local news websites pushing Russian propaganda to U.S. audiences are connected to John Mark Dougan, an American former law enforcement officer living in Moscow, according to a research report published Wednesday by NewsGuard, a firm that monitors misinformation.

The websites, with names like DC Weekly, New York News Daily and Boston Times, look similar to those of legitimate local news outlets and have already succeeded in spreading a number of false stories surrounding the war in Ukraine. Experts warn they could be used to launder disinformation about the 2024 election.

In an interview over WhatsApp, Dougan denied involvement with the websites. “Never heard of them,” he said.

Dougan, a former Marine and police officer, fled his home in Florida in 2016 to evade criminal charges related to a massive doxxing campaign he was accused of launching against public officials and was given asylum by the Russian government. Most recently, Dougan has posed as a journalist in Ukraine’s Donbas region, testifying at Russian public hearings and making frequent appearances on Russian state TV.

He’s now part of a small club of Western expats who have become purveyors of English-language propaganda for Russia. Researchers and cybersecurity companies had previously linked Dougan to the sites. The NewsGuard report published Wednesday is the latest to implicate him in the fake news ring.

Academic research from Clemson University linked Dougan to the network of fake news websites last year after one of them was found to share an IP address with other sites he ran, including his personal website.

In an interview, Darren Linvill, co-director of the Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, called Dougan “a tool of the broader Russian disinformation machine” whose websites “are just one of several mechanisms by which these narratives are distributed.”

McKenzie Sadeghi at NewsGuard:

This is an inside, yet almost accidental, story about how an American fugitive who sought asylum in Moscow has become a key player in Russia’s global disinformation network. It starts with a NewsGuard analyst happening upon what appeared to be a fledgling Washington D.C.-based news site promoting Russian propaganda. Unbeknownst to her, this was six months after her boss and his family had been threatened in a YouTube video that included an aerial shot of his home and calls to his unlisted phone number by a Russian disinformation operative working from a studio in Moscow. It turns out that this D.C. website, those threats to NewsGuard’s co-CEO, and what NewsGuard discovered were dozens of similar hostile information operations — including a “documentary” that the Russians used as an excuse to invade Ukraine — were all orchestrated by the same man — John Mark Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Moscow after being investigated for computer hacking and extortion.

As of this writing, NewsGuard has discovered 167 Russian disinformation websites that appear to be part of Dougan’s network of websites masquerading as independent local news publishers in the U.S. and 15 films on Dougan’s since-removed YouTube channel. Ranging from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky siphoning off money meant to aid the war against Russia so he could buy an estate in England owned by King Charles, to a non-existent U.S. bioweapons lab in Ukraine being the reason the Russians had to invade that country, these concocted stories have been amplified on social media accounts to reach a broad global audience of more than 37 million views—including 1,300,000 views of just the narrative about Zelensky buying the king’s estate.

What follows—including multiple conversations with the Russian operative and an excerpt from NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill’s upcoming book, “The Death of Truth,” recounting Brill’s harrowing experience with the same man—is the story of how NewsGuard connected the dots, shining light on a sophisticated multi-media global disinformation operation.

Digital Decay

Athena Chapekis et al. at Pew:Athena Chapekis et al. at Pew:

The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.
A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:

• A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
• For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:

• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
• 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:

• Nearly one-in-five tweets are no longer publicly visible on the site just months after being posted. In 60% of these cases, the account that originally posted the tweet was made private, suspended or deleted entirely. In the other 40%, the account holder deleted the individual tweet, but the account itself still existed.
• Certain types of tweets tend to go away more often than others. More than 40% of tweets written in Turkish or Arabic are no longer visible on the site within three months of being posted. And tweets from accounts with the default profile settings are especially likely to disappear from public view.

Opt-In Polls

 Many posts have discussed the problems of surveying public opinion in the 21st century.

Andrew Mercer at al. at Pew:

Online opt-in polls have become increasingly popular. And for some purposes, such as election polling, they can perform similarly to more traditional survey approaches.

There is evidence, however, that the online environment in which they operate is somewhat unstable.

In particular, several recent studies have documented large errors in online opt-in surveys due to the presence of so-called “bogus respondents.” These respondents do not answer questions sincerely; instead, they attempt to complete surveys with as little effort as possible to earn money or other rewards.

Studies have shown that bogus respondents can cause opt-in surveys to overestimate rare attitudes and behaviors, such as ingesting bleach to protect against COVID-19, belief in conspiracies like Pizzagate or support for political violence.

At Pew Research Center, we’ve found that this type of overreporting tends to be especially concentrated in estimates for adults under 30, as well as Hispanic adults. Bogus respondents may be identifying this way in order to bypass screening questions that might otherwise prevent them from receiving a reward, though the precise reasons are difficult to pin down. Whatever the underlying cause, the result can be unreliable estimates for those groups.

For example, in a February 2022 survey experiment, we asked opt-in respondents if they were licensed to operate a class SSGN (nuclear) submarine. In the opt-in survey, 12% of adults under 30 claimed this qualification, significantly higher than the share among older respondents. In reality, the share of Americans with this type of submarine license rounds to 0%.

Oppo and Plagiarism

Joe Rodota at Oppo File says that opposition researchers used to have a hard time detecting plagiarism.

That changed in 2000, as “plagiarism consultant” Jonathan Bailey explains:

Though plagiarism had long been against most schools' ethics codes, detecting it was a challenge. In 2000, Turnitin.com was launched. Though the technology was originally designed to detect “frat file” plagiarism, a pre-internet plagiarism technique that involves storing copies of physical essays for use in later years, it was adapted to deal with internet plagiarism, as well.

There are other “content similarity detection” programs out there, and oppo researchers use them every day.

...

In an earlier campaign cycle, oppo researchers in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee busted a Republican for plagiarism. In 2014, GOP oppo researchers decided to return the favor. They started with a universe of “targeted races” and winnowed that list down, focusing on campaigns that shared consulting teams. The NRCC oppo researchers figured the same people in those firms might be writing copy for two or more candidates, thereby increasing the possibility some of the content might be duplicated.

With that list of campaigns in hand, it became a simple matter of taking pages from candidate websites and entering them into Google. Examples of plagiarism leapt from their laptop screens and a target was identified: Staci Appel, candidate for Congress in Iowa’s 3rd District.

AI and Politics

Emily A. Vogels at Pew:

About six-in-ten U.S. adults (58%) are familiar with ChatGPT, though relatively few have tried it themselves, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. Among those who have tried ChatGPT, a majority report it has been at least somewhat useful.

ChatGPT is an open-access online chatbot that allows users to ask questions and request content. The versatility and human-like quality of its responses have captured the attention of the media, the tech industry and some members of the public. ChatGPT surpassed 100 million monthly users within two months of its public launch in late November 2022, setting a world record as the fastest-growing web application. Due to these factors, the Center chose to ask Americans about ChatGPT specifically rather than chatbots or large language models (LLMs) more broadly.

Jim Saksa at Roll Call:

AI is already being used in politics. After President Joe Biden announced his reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee released an AI-generated video that envisioned a dystopian future wrought by his four more years in office. In the Chicago mayoral primary earlier this year, a Twitter account posing as a local news outlet posted a deepfake video impersonating candidate Paul Vallas on the eve of the election. And campaigns have used machine-learning models to guide their ad buys on social media platforms like Facebook for years now.

Right now, though, it’s the potential to use large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to update voter files, perform data analysis and program automated functions that excite political operatives the most. While well-funded Senate or gubernatorial races can afford to hire data scientists to crunch numbers, smaller campaigns rarely have that luxury, said Colin Strother, a Democratic political consultant based in Texas. AI will change that.

“I’m excited about some of the brute work that would be really great to do, but — unless you’re on a big-time campaign, with a ton of money and a ton of staff — you can’t afford to do,” Strother said.

 

Digital News in Trouble

Margaret Sullivan at The Guardian:

In a seminal 2009 essay, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, the brilliant New York University professor Clay Shirky made the point that journalism as we had known it for decades was finished – and for good reason.

The reason, in a mere two words: the internet.

And he certainly proved right. With a few notable exceptions, newspapers – once the core of American journalism – have been dying right and left.

Now, big digital media-news companies, once the great hope of post-print news, seem to be going in the same direction. Down, down, down.

In recent weeks and months, digital newsrooms have taken huge hits. BuzzFeed News suddenly shuttered, leaving scores of extremely talented journalists without employment (and lest you think of BuzzFeed as strictly a place for viral videos about cats, recall that its news division did plenty of prize-winning journalism over the years). Vox Media recently laid off 7% of its staff and raised money based on a valuation about half of what it was worth in 2015.


Then, on Monday, another major blow: Vice was filing for bankruptcy. A New York Times report was unsparing, calling Vice a “decayed digital colossus”, and noting that at one point it was thought to be worth a now-unfathomable $5.7bn.

...

The problem in digital news? The audience, in many cases, was there. But the profits didn’t follow, or at least not in a sustainable way. Digital advertising revenue, once thought to be based on audience size, was going instead to social-media platforms, particularly Facebook.

Polling Has Changed

 Many posts have discussed the problems of surveying public opinion in the 21st century.

From Pew:

California Is Losing Affluent Residents

Many posts have discussed California's many problems.

Hans Johnson and Eric McGhee at PPIC:

During the height of the pandemic, the flows out of the state became so large that almost every demographic and socioeconomic group has experienced net losses. For example, California used to gain college graduates even as it lost less educated adults. But in the last couple of years, the state has started losing college graduates as well, quite markedly—albeit still not to the same extent as less educated adults. Even among young college graduates in their 20s, a group that California has disproportionately attracted in the past, the flows out of the state have been about the same as the flows into the state.

Perhaps most striking, California is now losing higher-income households as well as middle- and lower-income households. During the pandemic, the number of higher-income households moving to California declined a bit, but the number leaving the state increased dramatically (from less than 150,000 in 2019 to almost 220,000 by 2021).

The losses of college graduates and higher-income households are likely related to the ability of many highly educated and highly paid workers to work from home. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse surveys show that about two-thirds of the almost three million Californians who telework full-time (five or more days per week) have at least a bachelor’s degree. Among recent higher-income Californians leaving the state, over half (53%) report working from home.

Tech Beats Antitrust Push

 Emily Birnbaum at Bloomberg:

A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.

The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat.The years-long US legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc, Meta Platforms Inc. and Apple Inc. for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public.

The closely-watched bills advanced farther than any other antitrust overhaul in decades and emerged from an 18-month House investigation led by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would have prevented the tech giants from using their platforms to disadvantage competitors, while the Open App Markets Act would have pared back Apple and Google’s control over app stores.Despite an aggressive eleventh-hour push, the bills were not included in the end-of-year spending package released Monday, the final shot this year. The Senate included a narrower trio of antitrust bills in the end-of-year spending package. That legislation will give more money and resources to the country’s top antitrust regulators, marking the first time Congress has voted to expand antitrust enforcement measures in decades. But those provisions will not make the sweeping changes to the law that some advocates hoped for.

The Rapid Issue-Attention Cycle Online

At Axios, Sara Fischer and Neal Rothschild report:

The shooting massacre in Uvalde garnered huge attention on social media in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but it's unclear how long that focus will last.

Why it matters: The attention to the attack shows the country isn't numb to shooting tragedies — it's overwhelmed by them.

Details: Data provided exclusively to Axios by NewsWhip shows a public surge of interest in the immediate aftermath, peaking above even the 2018 shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

The interest, measured in social media interactions (likes, shares, comments) on news articles following Parkland, however, was sustained for a much longer period of time, as students who survived the shooting became vocal gun control activists.

The Uvalde tragedy, occurring just 10 days after the deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., came as Americans were already trying to process another shooting tragedy, and provided momentum for a growing debate around gun control and extremism.