How disinformation is reshaping political campaigns

Gypsy Rose Blanchard says she and her husband have separated 3 months after she was released from prison

Gypsy Rose Blanchard announced on her private Facebook that she and her husband Ryan Anderson have separated three months after she was released from prison for her role in the murder of her mother. The announcement came just weeks after Blanchard deleted her highly-followed TikTok and Instagram accounts.

Blanchard was convicted of second-degree murder for the death of her mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, who was stabbed to death by Gypsy Rose’s then-boyfriend Nick Godejohn in 2015, a crime that inspired the Hulu mini-series, “The Act.” Godejohn told police he committed the crime at Gypsy Rose’s request when she learned that after a lifetime of being told she had several debilitating illnesses that required constant care, it was all a lie and she was a victim of child abuse. After pleading guilty, Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison.

Ryan Anderson and Gypsy Rose Blanchard attend “The Prison Confessions Of Gypsy Rose Blanchard” Red Carpet Event on January 05, 2024 in New York City.

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Gypsy Rose, who was sentenced to 10 years, was released from prison after seven years on Dec. 28.

It was during her sentence that she met her husband, Ryan Anderson, a special education teacher from Louisiana. The pair wed in July 2022.

But on Thursday, she announced the two have broken up.

“People have been asking what is going on in my life. Unfortunately my husband and I are going through a separation and I moved in with my parents home down the bayo,” she wrote on her private Facebook account in a statement obtained by People magazine. “I have the support of my family and friends to help guide me through this. I am learning to listen to my heart. Right now I need time to let myself find… who I am.”

In an interview with Entertainment Tonight in January, Blanchard said she felt a connection with Anderson when he started contacting her while she was in prison. She said she was immediately attracted to the fact that he lives in Louisiana, where she is originally from.

“I wrote him a letter back and we became friends, and of course more than friends, and then now we’re married,” she said.

Immediately upon her release from prison, she told ET she and Anderson moved in together and were “learning about each other.” They had also discussed having kids, but were unsure of when they wanted to do so.

“With us getting married [while she was still in jail], she was able to come live with me straight out of prison,” Anderson told ET. “So, that was important. It’s what we both wanted.”

“We’re just trying to take it day by day,” Gypsy Rose added. “We’re just trying to start off the marriage on a good foot before we bring kids into this situation right now.”

Earlier this month, Gypsy Rose – who was determined to have suffered from a form of abuse that involves a guardian inducing illness for sympathy, leading to her decision to kill her mother – deleted her social media profiles that had amassed millions of followers.

She first deleted her Instagram account, which according to Entertainment Tonight had at one point more than 7.8 million followers. After deleting that account, she posted a series of TikToks saying she is doing her “best to live my authentic life and what’s real to me.”

“And what’s not real is social media,” she said, calling it a “doorway to hell.”

“It’s so crazy, I can’t even wrap my head around what social media is,” she said. “…And with the public scrutiny as bad as it is, I just don’t want to live my life under a microscope.”

Then she deleted her TikTok as well. People magazine learned that she deleted those accounts “at the advisement of her parole officer, so she won’t get in trouble and go back to jail.”

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How disinformation is reshaping political campaigns

How disinformation is reshaping political campaigns – CBS News

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The rampant growth of disinformation is creating an ever-evolving problem for politicians. A new book called “The Lie Detectives” seeks to understand the players fighting against the issue, and what they’re trying to teach political campaigns. Author Sasha Issenberg joins CBS News to explain.

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105-year-old eclipse chaser excited to add another to his list

105-year-old North Texas eclipse chaser excited to add another to his list

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FORT WORTH — From Texas to Brazil, the 105-year-old eclipse chaser from Fort Worth witnessed 12 solar eclipses in his life and he’s ready to watch his 13th on April 8.

It all started in 1963 when Laverne Biser packed up his bags and headed for Maine to witness his first eclipse. Six decades later, his love for this rare celestial event has taken him places he’d never visited before—And he’s been taking photos of them ever since.

“That’s my pride and joy because it’s hard to take,” he said. “You had to put your camera up to a black sky…you hope you’re going to point it in the right direction.”

105-year-old Laverne Biser has been chasing eclipses since 1963. He shares a photo he took of his favorite eclipse in 1979 in Williston, South Dakota.

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One of his favorite photos he’s taken was in 1979 during a solar eclipse in Williston, South Dakota.

“We’ve traveled all over the world to see them,” Biser said. “You see one, you want to see them all. They are so pretty.”

What makes this eclipse so special, though, is that it’s right here in his backyard. His advice to viewers: Make sure you watch the entire eclipse.

“With glasses, watch the whole thing, but take them off when it goes total. Look how pretty it is. You’ll say, ‘Oh… I want to see more of these,'” Biser said.

His love for the cosmos even involves him building handmade telescopes. One of the largest in his shop is over six feet tall and was built nearly 60 years ago.

“I made the whole thing … I ground a mirror,” Biser said. “It can take hours to weeks to ground a telescope mirror.”

Biser graduated from Ohio State University in mechanical engineering in 1942. He moved to Fort Worth to design airplanes at Carswell Airforce Base for the rest of his career. However, his obsession with the cosmos began in his high school science class.

“I love astronomy…I loved all of my science classes,” he said.

The thrill of watching eclipses will forever be one of his greatest passions.

“I’m [almost] 106. They don’t come but one or two, every couple of years,” Biser said. “I may not see anymore. I may not see any more eclipses.”

Ken Molestina

Prior to joining CBS 11 News in January 2014 as anchor and reporter, Ken was most recently a reporter for WUSA-TV in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, he was a news anchor and reporter at KVIA-TV in El Paso, where he focused on crime and public safety reporting.

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Some Instagram creators say they’re frustrated after platform starts limiting political content recs

Instagram creators who frequently post about news and politics are urging their followers to allow “political content” in their feeds after the platform began automatically limiting such posts.

The Meta-owned platform had announced in February that it would stop recommending accounts that share political content to users who don’t already follow them. The app typically suggests posts and accounts based on the type of content a user engages with most.

As changes began quietly taking effect in recent weeks, users began noticing that the new feature had been set to “Limit” by default. That setting excludes content that is “likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large” from the platform’s discovery mechanisms.

Some on the app expressed feeling blindsided that they were not directly notified of the setting change, only learning of it from other users.

Over the weekend, some creators started circulating instructions showing users how to manually toggle the option back by opening the “Settings and activity” menu at the top right corner of the app, navigating to “Content preferences” and finding the “Political content” tab. These settings also apply to the user’s Threads account.

“You can’t just essentially put a blindfold on people who may not realize it. A lot of people don’t even know that this is a thing that’s been applied to their preferences,” said Johanna Toruño, a street artist who frequently advocates for Palestinians on her Instagram account, where many of her more than 156,000 followers found through organic discovery. “It’s just so appalling to me to do something like this at such a political moment in our lives, not just internationally, but also within our country, with this being an election year.”

The move comes at a time when Instagram has emerged as a popular source of news and unfiltered updates around global and domestic political issues. A Pew Research Center study published in November found 16% of American adults regularly get their news from Instagram, which made up a bigger share of users’ news media diets than TikTok or X.

But ever since the launch of its text-based app Threads last year, Meta has made clear its intent to pivot away from promoting political content on its platforms.

Some creators circulated instructions showing users how to manually not “limit” political content by default.NBC News via Instagram

“This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted,” Dani Lever, a public affairs director at Meta, wrote in an email statement on Sunday. “And now, people are going to be able to control whether they would like to have these types of posts recommended to them.”

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has also reiterated that he doesn’t see Instagram or Threads as spaces for politics and news. Meta’s platforms have come under fire in previous years for being a source of unreliable political content, especially as generative AI makes the risk of viral misinformation more acute than ever.

“Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise,” Mosseri wrote in a Threads post in July. “But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.”

Political activists have previously accused Meta of potential bias against their content, and users grew particularly vocal about their suspicions in the months after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.

After some celebrities and influencers accused the platform in October of “shadow banning,” or essentially censoring, their content in support of Palestinians, a Meta spokesperson released a statement about a global bug affecting the reach of Instagram stories that reshared reels and posts.

Around the same time, the company apologized for “inappropriate Arabic translations” that resulted in Instagram inaccurately adding “Palestinian terrorists” to the English translation of certain descriptors in users’ bios.

Later that month, Meta locked several large pro-Palestinian Instagram accounts, saying that its security staff had detected a possible hacking attempt.

Instagram’s latest app change is reminiscent of another feature the platform added in December, in which users automatically saw less fact-checked content in their feed unless they changed the setting. Its quiet rollout had provoked similar outrage, causing pro-Palestinian accounts to air suspicions that Instagram was censoring their content by default. (It’s not clear if pro-Palestinian posts are fact-checked more often than other posts.)

Samira Mohyeddin, a Canadian-based journalist, said that a few weeks ago, she began noticing that all the historians and political commentators that usually appeared in her Instagram recommendations were suddenly replaced with videos of cats and influencer couples.

“As much as we like to pooh-pooh on social media and say it’s a cesspool and all this stuff, it’s still a vital source of news and information for a lot of people around the world,” said Mohyeddin, who shared her own post about how to change the setting.

News influencer and attorney Katie Grossbard said she worries that Instagram’s new limits on political content will keep users from staying updated on issues related to the U.S. presidential election.

“What’s kind of complicated about this news is, what’s defined as political? Because I’m like, everything is political. Our lives are political,” Grossbard said. “This decision directly harms communities whose entire existence is political. And is there a difference between posting content about nonpartisan election dates, versus posting about a court case that impacts reproductive freedom versus posting a slideshow about trans history?”

But this ease of access to bite-size information has also made social media platforms prone to spreading unchecked disinformation. Ahead of the 2020 election, Meta (then Facebook) removed 50 Instagram accounts linked to a Russian-backed influence campaign. And now, with the rapidly advancing abilities of generative AI, deepfaked images and videos pose a growing risk of infiltrating the information ecosystem.

As attention spans get shorter, Grossbard said, many voters are increasingly turning to sharable Instagram infographics rather than taking the time to watch cable news or read a lengthy article.

“While we can all try to make it better and maybe get media literacy in schools, where we are right now is where we are right now,” she said. “I think especially in an election year, we have to meet people where they are so that they can feel educated and empowered and they want to engage.”

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Jamie Foxx apologizes after ‘fake friends’ Instagram post is accused of being antisemitic

Actor Jamie Foxx apologized to the Jewish community Saturday after a cryptic Instagram post about “fake friends” was accused of promoting antisemitism.

“I want to apologize to the Jewish community and everyone who was offended by my post. I now know my choice of words have caused offense and I’m sorry,” he wrote. “That was never my intent.”

In a since-deleted post, Foxx wrote: “THEY KILLED THIS DUDE NAME JESUS…WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY’LL DO TO YOU???! #fakefriends #fakelove.”

It’s not clear what prompted the post.

A Wider Frame, a newsletter that says it aims to provide “a better overall understanding and scope of Jewish world news,” shared Foxx’s original post and called it “horrifically antisemitic.” Actor Jennifer Aniston then re-posted A Wider Frame after she came under fire for seemingly liking Foxx’s post.

“This really makes me sick,” Aniston wrote in an Instagram Story. “I did not ‘like’ this post on purpose or by accident. And more importantly, I want to be clear to my friends and anyone hurt by this showing up in their feed – I do NOT support any type of antisemitism. And I truly don’t tolerate HATE of any kind. Period.”

Foxx, who has been recovering following an undisclosed medical emergency, clarified that his post was directed at a “fake friend” that betrayed him.

“That’s what I meant by ‘they’ not anything more,” he wrote. “I only have love in my heart for everyone. I love and support the Jewish community. My deepest apologies to anyone who was offended.”

Many people came to Foxx’s defense, with some saying that it was referencing a phrase commonly used by the Black community.

“Any black person growing up in the south will tell you that Jamie Foxx wasn’t referring to Jewish people. ‘They killed/lied on/talked about Jesus’ simply means ‘If Jesus can be betrayed, so can you.’ He genuinely meant fake friends/fake people. So quick to reach, it’s ridiculous,” one user tweeted.

“Jamie Foxx is a decent person so of course he apologized for potentially offending folks. But it def got misconstrued in the most oblivious way possible, like was the ‘fake friends’ hashtag only visible for some folks??” another tweeted.

“I read Jamie Foxx’s original post and just wondered what fake friends had done him wrong. That’s all,” another tweet read.

Minyvonne Burke

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