#misinformation

#misinformation

On October 7, 2023 Hamas attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages to the Gaza Strip. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (updated on June 22, 2025), a total of 57 deceased hostages have been brought back to Israel so far. Israel says that the bodies of at least 27 killed hostages who were abducted on October 7 are still being held by Hamas.

AI bots are everywhere now, filling everything from online stores to social media. But that sudden ubiquity could end up being a very bad thing, according to a new paper from Stanford University scientists who unleashedAI models into different environments - including social media - and found that when they were rewarded for success at tasks like boosting likes and other online engagement metrics,the bots increasingly engaged in unethical behavior like lyingand spreading hateful messages or misinformation.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said AI will change who can be creative, as the new tools and technology will give people who couldn't be creators before the ability to produce content at a certain quality and scale. However, he also admitted that bad actors will use the technology for "nefarious purposes" and that kids growing up today will have to be taught that you can't believe something just because you saw a video of it.

The move was announced following an investigation by Republican lawmakers into whether the Biden administration pressured tech companies to remove certain types of content. YouTube said that over the past couple of years, it did away with rules that had prohibited users from repeatedly posting misinformation about Covid-19 and the 2020 US election outcome. Now, users terminated for breaking those rules have the chance to return.

For months, Donald Trump has presented himself as the very incarnation of a global peacemaker, touting an ever-changing list of international conflicts that he claims to have settled. Sometimes it has been six, sometimes as many as ten. "I ended seven wars," the President told the U.N. General Assembly last month, "and in all cases they were raging, with countless thousands of people being killed," which was not true but has not stopped Trump from repeating it.

When President Donald Trump delivered a barrage of false statements about climate change during his September 23 speech to the UN General Assembly, he made headlines around the world. Mocking climate change as a "con job" promoted by "stupid people," Trump's remarks also illustrated a dilemma facing journalism's traditional approach to covering politics, where not appearing to take sides has long been a cardinal rule. As more and more political leaders and movements mirror Trump's habit of making factually inaccurate claims, a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism offers a fresh way to think about this dilemma, along with a host of practical tools for tackling it.

According to YouTube posts, the celebrity tributes were plentiful. They came from Ed Sheeran, Eminem, Taylor Swift, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Post Malone, Dax, Lil Wayne, Jelly Roll, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber and Imagine Dragons. But none of them were real. They were all generated using artificial intelligence. And they often featured fake thumbnail images that showed the artists in tears or with mournful expressions.

If you or your loved ones have ever been sick, you may have encountered a Filipino medical professional at the clinic or hospital-a nurse, doctor, or lab technician-or perhaps an in-home caregiver or staffer in an assisted living facility. This is because Filipinos are disproportionately represented in the healthcare sector-for example, 4 percent of US nurses are Filipino, though Filipinos make up only 1 percent of the population.

On Friday night's edition of Real Time on HBO, Jones said: Iran and Qatar have come up with a disinformation campaign that they are running through TikTok and Instagram that is massive. If you are a young person, you are opening up your phone, and all you see is dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, Diddy, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby. The comments received heavy criticism as Jones was called out for turning dead children into a punchline.

President Donald Trump and the Republicans have blamed Democrats for the government shutdown by pushing the talking point that, as Trump put it in an AI-generated fake video, Democrats want to give all these illegal aliens free health care. Although that claim has been ruled false by numerous fact-checkers, Vice President JD Vance joined the White House briefing on Wednesday to press the same talking point and try to backfill an explanation with some patter about emergency care.

Space agencies say the comet, 3I/ATLAS, poses no danger, despite viral conspiracy claims. Rumours across social media platforms that a huge comet is on a collision course with Earth have been circulating, with some users describing it as a major threat to humanity. Others are debating how the comet known as 3I/ATLAS and detected by NASA's ATLAS telescope on July 1 might be diverted from the Earth.

The problem of people falling for falsehoods has become an urgent issue in recent years, as new technologies have conspired with sociopolitical currents within the culture to spread misinformation at unprecedented speed and reach. Psychologists who study this issue have focused mainly on individual vulnerabilities: the cognitive quirks and biases that predispose us to believe falsehoods, buy into lies, and give in to speculation.

As human and AI-generated " slop" floods the internet, Perplexity says it's fighting back by making Comet - its AI-native browser that normally costs $200 a month - free for anyone in the world, forever. "We want to build a better internet, and that needs to be accessible to everybody," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told Business Insider at a launch event in San Francisco on Wednesday.

"This child is a gift - a piece of Charlie I still carry," Erika Kirk revealed just 30 minutes ago, stunning the world with an announcement both heartbreaking and hopeful. Still mourning the loss of her husband, she shared that she is expecting their third child - a revelation that brings new light into her grief and carries Charlie Kirk's legacy forward into the future.

We examine how online misinformation spreads and the efforts to stop it.

The clip, styled as a Fox News report fronted by Trump's daughter-in-law Lara Trump, included a bogus announcement from the president promising every American access to the fictitious machines that supposedly cure diseases, reverse injury damage, and even regrow limbs. Kicking off The Late Show on Monday night, Colbert delved into the moment with full revelry. The fantastic but fake medbed tech, the host joked, was the least bizarre part of the entire story.

Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you're reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He's the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called "the gentle singularity"-or else buries us in slop-that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness.

In italics below the content of a post, you might see a warning label seemingly added after the fact that says: "This user is suspected to be a part of a terrorist organization called Antifa. Please report any suspicious behavior." Also: Is Meta secretly scanning your phone's camera roll? Check this setting to find out The label looks somewhat similar to Meta's community notes feature, so it's not a completely strange idea that a social media site might add context to a post.

Japan's foreign aid agency has scrapped a cultural exchange initiative with African countries after an online misinformation campaign led to a torrent of complaints and fear of increased immigration. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) announced on Thursday that it will cancel the Africa Hometown scheme, after an episode that experts say illustrates the potential impact of fake news and populist narratives to shape migration policy.

This is now the fifth or sixth time he's posted a political take contradicted by facts from his own law enforcement agencies. Favreau's post included a suggested community note, citing an NBC News report, regarding Vance's comments that read, According to an ICE spokesperson, the three individuals shot were ICE detainees, leaving two individuals dead and one injured. No law enforcement were injured in this shooting, according to law enforcement and news reports out of Dallas, Texas.

Trump said: I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it's been changed, it's been so changed. Now they want to go to sharia law. But you are in a different country, you can't do that. There is no evidence that Khan, a member of the soft left of the Labour party who defines himself as a liberal and progressive, wishes to introduce any form of sharia law in London.

At the United Nations, President Trump repeated long-debunked claims about ending wars, renewable energy, climate science, and even the UN's own renovation costs. Trump's address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday was riddled with inaccuracies and exaggerations. He recycled familiar talking points about climate change, renewable energy, immigration, and his own diplomatic record, alongside fresh distortions about the UN's New York headquarters. While a full fact-check of every statement goes beyond this article's scope, DW Fact check examined several of his key remarks.