Wildfire of Conspiracy Theories: Disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theories about the Los Angeles area wildfires have spread in far right spaces online.

President-elect Donald Trump blamed California’s devastating wildfires on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s water policy, and social media users revived Trump’s past criticism of the state’s forest management. We took a closer look at the claims. www.politifact.com/article/2025...

Shortly: no. Longer version: www.reuters.com/fact-check/t...

"Soon to be out of a job, Meta’s fact-checkers battle a blaze of wildfire conspiracy theories" www.cnn.com/2025/01/13/t...

Some AI-generated images are difficult to spot. Others ...

AI is getting better - but it's still visible.

In the space of 24 hours, Naomi Wolf has claimed that the fires in LA are an actual war or foreign invasion, a plot to kill people to destroy evidence of Covid vaccine adverse effects, weather manipulation, a deliberate bombing campaign, and mass spraying of mood stabilisers.

No source for this quote among Orwell's writings has been located, and the earliest published source of this phrase found dates to 1982.
quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/24/t...

Russia's online disinformation campaign took my advice and started deepfaking audio of the people it's quoting. This is deepfake me with the wrong British accent talking about the Kursk offensive.

While the press has focused on the ending of Meta's fact-checking program, not enough has focused on the removal of restrictions on certain types of speech previously deemed harmful on FB & IG, incl. criticism of vulnerable groups—immigrants, women and LGBTQ+ people. about.fb.com/news/2025/01...

It’s AI generated 😬

"When conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too."

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

X's Community Notes is slow, opaque, and relies on consensus rather than a focus on truth.
In other words, it has features that Zuckerberg and Musk regularly criticise in the so-called "legacy media"

bsky.app/profile/jane...

Meta is ending its fact-checking program in favor of a 'community notes' system similar to X www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcn...

This article has been updated with yet another Rumble "editor pick" video pushing the reptilian conspiracy theory, this one claiming that a "reptilian race controls Earth" and are trying to create a "one-world government."

In today’s #vatniksoup, I’ll introduce an Estonian politician and propagandist, Aivo Peterson. He’s best-known for travelling to Donbas and Mariupol to produce pro-Kremlin propaganda, and for trying to create a pro-Russia separatist movement in Estonia.

1/16

While there was so much focus on Shamsud-Din Jabbar's YouTube channel and LinkedIn profile earlier, his deleted Facebook page seems to have been the one with clear evidence of his radicalisation.

An AI image linked to a meme coin spread across platforms last week in posts misidentifying the woman set on fire on New York's subway as "Amelia Carter."

Today, police named the true victim: Debrina Kawam.

But the disinformation had already spun out of control.

factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com....

Get ready for 2025. Science is your friend. Anti-science and anti-intellectualism are your enemies.

skepticalinquirer.org/2024/12/a-tr...

We wrote about a lot of misinformation in 2024, and, as usual, some fact-checking articles piqued our readers’ interest more than others. In this post, we present the 10 most popular stories published on our website this past year.

www.factcheck.org/2024/12/our-...

❌ This pic of Laura Loomer has gathered 4k likes on Bluesky with a caption saying it shows her demanding her X blue checkmark back at the old Twitter HQ.

Except it's an old photo. @willsommer.bsky.social and others posted it back in 2018:

More Ai slop.
And as usual we have lots of real photos of mr. Wadlow.
He was tall, very tall, but somehow someone wanted to make him even taller.