Funny Cat Pics With Force and Motion in It
Those Cute Cats Online? They Assistance Spread Misinformation.
A mainstay of the internet is regularly used to build audiences for people and organizations pushing false and misleading information.
On Oct. 2, New Tang Dynasty Television receiver, a station linked to the Chinese spiritual motion Falun Gong, posted a Facebook video of a woman saving a babe shark stranded on a shore. Adjacent to the video was a link to subscribe to The Epoch Times, a newspaper that is tied to Falun Gong and that spreads anti-China and correct-wing conspiracies. The post collected 33,000 likes, comments and shares.
The website of Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic doc who researchers say is a chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, regularly posts about cute animals that generate tens or even hundreds of thousands of interactions on Facebook. The stories include "Kitten and Chick Nap So Sweetly Together" and "Why Orange Cats May Be Different From Other Cats," written past Dr. Karen Becker, a veterinarian.
Paradigm
And Western Journal, a right-wing publication that has published unproven claims virtually the benefits of using hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19, and spread falsehoods virtually fraud in the 2020 presidential election, owns Liftable Animals, a popular Facebook page. Liftable Animals posts stories from Western Journal's primary website alongside stories about golden retrievers and giraffes.
Videos and GIFs of cute animals — usually cats — have gone viral online for almost as long every bit the internet has been around. Many of the animals became famous: At that place's Keyboard Cat, Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub and Nyan Cat, just to name a few.
At present, it is becoming increasingly clear how widely the quondam-school internet trick is being used past people and organizations peddling imitation information online, misinformation researchers say.
The posts with the animals practice not direct spread simulated information. But they can draw a huge audience that can be redirected to a publication or site spreading simulated information about election fraud, unproven coronavirus cures and other baseless conspiracy theories entirely unrelated to the videos. Sometimes, following a feed of cute animals on Facebook unknowingly signs users up equally subscribers to misleading posts from the same publisher.
Melissa Ryan, master executive of Card Strategies, a consulting house that researches disinformation, said this kind of "engagement bait" helped misinformation actors generate clicks on their pages, which can make them more than prominent in users' feeds in the hereafter. That prominence can drive a broader audition to content with inaccurate or misleading data, she said.
"The strategy works because the platforms continue to reward engagement over everything else," Ms. Ryan said, "even when that engagement comes from" publications that also publish fake or misleading content.
Maybe no system deploys the tactic as forcefully as Epoch Media, parent visitor of The Epoch Times. Epoch Media has published videos of cute animals in 12,062 posts on its 103 Facebook pages in the past twelvemonth, co-ordinate to an analysis by The New York Times. Those posts, which include links to other Epoch Media websites, racked upwards about four billion views. Trending World, one of Epoch's Facebook pages, was the 15th most popular page on the platform in the United States betwixt July and September.
One video, posted last calendar month by The Epoch Times's Taiwan page, shows a shut-upwardly of a golden retriever while a woman tries in vain to pry an apple tree from its oral cavity. It has over 20,000 likes, shares and comments on Facebook. Another post, on Trending World's Facebook page, features a seal smiling widely with a family posing for a picture at a Sea Earth resort. The video has 12 million views.
Epoch Media did not reply to a request for comment.
"Dr. Becker is a veterinarian, her articles are nearly pets," said an electronic mail from Dr. Mercola'southward public relations team. "We reject any New York Times accusations of misleading whatever visitors, but are non surprised by information technology."
The viral fauna videos often come from places like Jukin Media and ViralHog. The companies identify extremely shareable videos and reach licensing deals with the people who made them. After securing the rights to the videos, Jukin Media and ViralHog license the clips to other media companies, giving a cut of the profits to the original creator.
Mike Skogmo, Jukin Media's senior vice president for marketing and communications, said his company had a licensing deal with New Tang Dynasty Television receiver, the station tied to Falun Gong.
"Jukin has licensing deals with hundreds of publishers worldwide, across the political spectrum and with a range of subject matters, nether guidelines that protect the creators of the works in our library," he said in a statement.
Asked whether the company evaluated whether their clips were used every bit engagement bait for misinformation in striking the license deals, Mr. Skogmo said Jukin had nada else to add.
"Once someone licenses our raw content, what they practice with it is up to them," said Ryan Bartholomew, founder of ViralHog. "ViralHog is not supporting or opposing any cause or objective — that would exist outside of our scope of business concern."
The use of animal videos presents a conundrum for the tech platforms like Facebook, because the animal posts themselves do not incorporate misinformation. Facebook has banned ads from Epoch Media when the network violated its political advertising policy, and it took down several hundred Epoch Media-affiliated accounts last yr when it determined that the accounts had violated its "coordinated inauthentic beliefs" policies.
"Nosotros've taken enforcement actions confronting Epoch Media and related groups several times already," said Drew Pusateri, a Facebook spokesman. "If we observe that they're engaging in deceptive deportment in the futurity we volition continue enforcing confronting them." The company did not annotate on the tactic of using cute animals to spread misinformation.
Rachel E. Moran, a researcher at the Academy of Washington who studies online misinformation, said it was unclear how oft the animate being videos led people to misinformation. But posting them continues to exist a popular tactic because they run such a low risk of breaking a platform's rules.
"Pictures of cute animals and videos of wholesome moments are the bread and butter of social media, and definitely won't run afoul of any algorithmic content moderation detection," Ms. Moran said.
"People are even so using it every solar day," she said.
Jacob Silver contributed research.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/technology/misinformation-cute-cats-online.html
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