Welcome to the TikTok election. Every week, people post tens of thousands of videos on the app that mention Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald J. Trump, including election updates, conspiracy theories and dance routines. Those posts attract hundreds of millions of views — on par with the interest in hit shows like…
Ryan Selkis, a cryptocurrency executive, was eating dinner at Mar-a-Lago last month when he got an unexpected invitation: Former President Donald J. Trump wanted him to come to the stage and say a few words. Mr. Selkis, who runs the crypto data firm Messari, was one of a couple hundred attendees at an event celebrating…
X, the social media service owned by Elon Musk, will host live video town halls with former President Donald J. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, a major push into politics, according to a person familiar with the plans. The town halls, which will be produced in…
TikTok said on Thursday that it was introducing new measures to limit the spread of videos from state-affiliated media accounts, including Russian and Chinese outlets, as the company deflects criticism that it could be used as a propaganda tool in a major election year. The company in 2022 started labeling state-affiliated media accounts — like…
Ahead of the U.S. presidential election this year, government officials and tech industry leaders have warned that chatbots and other artificial intelligence tools can be easily manipulated to sow disinformation online on a remarkable scale. To understand how worrisome the threat is, we customized our own chatbots, feeding them millions of publicly available social media…
Meta, the American tech giant, is being investigated by European Union regulators for the spread of disinformation on its platforms Facebook and Instagram, poor oversight of deceptive advertisements and potential failure to protect the integrity of elections. On Tuesday, European Union officials said Meta does not appear to have sufficient safeguards in place to combat…
For nearly 30 years, Oren Etzioni was among the most optimistic of artificial intelligence researchers. But in 2019 Dr. Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for A.I., became one of the first researchers to warn that a new breed of A.I. would accelerate the spread of disinformation…
Covert Chinese accounts are masquerading online as American supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, promoting conspiracy theories, stoking domestic divisions and attacking President Biden ahead of the election in November, according to researchers and government officials. The accounts signal a potential tactical shift in how Beijing aims to influence American politics, with more of…
In football, the line of scrimmage is where the “rubber meets the road.” In politics, it occurs inside the voting booth. Roger Goodell’s recent comments on politics and sports are proof that the league could be on the verge of repeating the same mistakes it did during the Colin Kaepernick era, as the presumed Presidential…
Artificial intelligence companies have been at the vanguard of developing the transformative technology. Now they are also racing to set limits on how A.I. is used in a year stacked with major elections around the world. Last month, OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, said it was working to prevent abuse of its tools…
