The first ammendment in the age of disinformation.
By Emily Bazelon
The French press responded otherwise to a Russian hack in May 2017. Two days before a national election, the Russians posted online thousands of emails from En Marche!, the party of Emmanuel Macron, who was running for president. France, like several other democracies, has a blackout law that bars news coverage of a campaign for the 24 hours before an election and on Election Day. But the emails were available several hours before the blackout began. They were fair game. Yet the French media did not cover them. Le Monde, a major French newspaper, explained that the hack had “the obvious purpose of undermining the integrity of the ballot.”
Marine Le Pen, Macron’s far-right opponent, accused the news media of a partisan cover-up. But she had no sympathetic outlet to turn to, because there is no equivalent of Fox News or Breitbart in France. “The division in the French media isn’t between left and right,” said Dominique Cardon, director of the Media Lab at the university Sciences Po. “It’s between top and bottom, between professional outlets and some websites linked to very small organizations, or individuals on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube who share a lot of disinformation.” The faint impact of the Macron hack “is a good illustration of how it’s impossible to succeed at manipulation of the news just on social media,” said Arnaud Mercier, a professor of information and political communication at the University Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas. “The hackers needed the sustainment of the traditional media.”
Why are whites a bunch of morons?
https://archive.vn/2UfT0 nytimes magazine