“Disinformation”

Elon Musk’s X said it had suspended 800m accounts over a 12-month period as it fights the “massive” scale of attempts to manipulate the platform.

The social media company told MPs it was continually fighting state-backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network, with Russia the most prolific state actor, followed by Iran and China.

As part of the battle against such content, X suspended 800m accounts in 2024 for breaching its rules on platform manipulation and spam, although it did not reveal which of those suspensions related to foreign interference. X has approximately 300 million monthly users worldwide.

Researchers studied who’s spreading the most conspiracy theories in Canada. Here’s what they found

Canadians are becoming more exposed to conspiracy theory content in their social media feeds, but only a certain number of accounts are responsible for promoting the vast majority of it, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) analyzed more than 14 million posts between 2023 and 2025 across popular online platforms — TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram and Bluesky — and found there are only about 100 very active Canadian users who account for nearly 70 per cent of conspiratorial content.

… The claims that Canadians reported they were most aware of on social media were ones about public health threats (such as COVID-19) being exaggerated to expand government control (63 per cent), schools are indoctrinating kids with radical gender ideology (54 per cent) and the media-elite collusion (47 per cent).

A 750K fine for saying there are only 2 genders that was levied in a case brought by the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) on behalf of the Chilliwack Teachers’ Association (CTA) against former Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld says transgender indoctrination in schools is no conspiracy theory.

Why would the Media Ecosystem Observatory publish such a sketchy study?

NewsGuard has been in touch again. The ‘fact checker’ founded by a Democrat activist and funded in part by Publicis Groupe, which represents leading pharmaceutical and healthcare companies including Pfizer, has sent the Daily Sceptic its annual interrogation over where its thought police have deemed that we have deviated from the approved narrative. From migrants eating wildlife to vaccines causing blood clots (though notably no climate objections this time – did we win that argument?), NewsGuard asks us to issue corrections to ensure the purity of the Official Narrative is left untarnished, even in the humble pages of the Daily Sceptic. Since NewsGuard’s completely impartial, not-at-all biased ratings are used by advertisers to blacklist companies and Microsoft to train its search engine, we thought we’d better reply, though with little hope of an improved rating given that when Toby bent over backwards to address NewsGuard’s points the first time we were contacted we saw our rating halved, as reported in the New York Post. Here’s what NewsGuard asks us this time, and our responses.

New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers, who covers “misinformation and disinformation” and is a social media censorship supporter and First Amendment non-fan, is back with a story posted on Thursday, relaying the sad news that the Trump administration is against self-styled invariably leftist misinformation “experts” – i.e. social media censors: “Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Grants to Study Online Misinformation.”

But who determines what counts as “misinformation”?

The Canadian government paid $128,000 to a U.K. firm to monitor Canadian pro-Israel social media accounts, which framed many of them as “right-wing extremists” motivated by “anti-Muslim hatred.”

Among the activities highlighted as being evidence of rising right-wing extremism in Canada was “discontentment with pro-Palestine protests” and even the accusation that some federal politicians were “more dedicated to matters in Gaza than Canadian affairs.”

In April Global News, a bought Liberal Party of Canada propaganda outfit attempted to pass off ISD – Institute for Strategic Dialogue as a legitimate organization:

Global News cites Soros funded WEF adjacent pro-censorship extremists as authoritative source: Domestic extremists pushing ‘corrosive’ narratives in Canada’s election