June 2019

Have Arrest Warrants Been Issued for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?

Despite fears of “deepfake” videos and other high-tech ways disinformation could potentially proliferate in the very near future, the stories that still get the most traction are often decidedly low effort. Take, for example, the case of a May 2019 story with the provocative headline “Panel of 16 Judges Agrees: Barr Has Enough to Indict Clinton …

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Official portrait of former United States President Barack Obama and his wife and daughters.

Did Malia Obama Cash a $1.2 Million Check?

A headline about former First Daughter Malia Obama (archived here) depositing a suspiciously large check got a lot of traction on social media in June 2019: However, this story is suspect for two reasons. First, it contains little beyond a provocative headline, a photograph, and a few lines of text: Malia Obama cashed a check for …

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‘Why I’m Voting for Donald Trump in 2020’ Twitter Meme

On June 18 2019, Twitter user @johncatsjr shared the following tweet (“why I’m voting for Donald Trump in 2020”), a missive picked up by innumerable other users — along with an original misspelling: In that first version, the user spelled “manufacturing” as “manufactuing,” an error present in reposts of the same cut-and-pasted content: In the …

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Scams and Hoax Accounts Proliferate on Instagram

April 2019 saw the culmination of a months-long popular uprising in the country of Sudan, when its former president Omar al-Bashir stepped down from his post. The Sudanese military quickly took control of the country in what it called a transitional phase. In the weeks following al-Bashir’s ouster, however, clashes became both deadlier and more …

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