The evidence contradicting Trump and PutinAfter their summit meeting in Helsinki, President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin both cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | The evidence contradicting Trump and Putin After their summit meeting in Helsinki, President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin both cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community's unanimous conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Asked whether he believed his own intelligence agencies or Putin's denials, Trump said he had "confidence in both parties" and voiced suspicions about the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. There's a mountain of evidence that shows Russia did interfere. The president's director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, issued a statement pushing back on Trump and Putin's post-summit claims. After separate investigations, the Department of Justice and the House and Senate intelligence committees have all confirmed that Russia interfered. A grand jury convened by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers three days before the summit. Trump later reversed himself and then seemed to un-reverse himself and reverse himself again over the following days. We fact-checked a series of dubious claims from both presidents, which ranged from Russia's black ops during the U.S. presidential election to debunked conspiracy theories about a Capitol Hill staffer. |  | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. | | The variety of views on abortion rights For such a hotly debated issue, the abortion rights question produces a variety of nuanced opinions among Americans. Polling shows that the key Supreme Court decision that guarantees abortion rights, Roe v. Wade, enjoys wide support among Americans (about 70 percent). But when pollsters ask about the morality of abortion, about personal views or about abortion rights more generally, the level of support drops by 10 points or more. With Justice Anthony M. Kennedy retiring from the Supreme Court, the issue has once again become a central topic of debate. Kennedy voted to uphold Roe v. Wade in 1992, but the judge Trump nominated to replace him, Brett M. Kavanaugh, may hold different views. Some of the nuance in these polls gets lost amid the shuffle, so we wanted to highlight the interesting splits on this question and remind everyone that specificity is key in describing poll results. | |  | | The old adage … "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it," Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710. Three centuries later, the rise of social media seems to have magnified the problem. A trio of professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been studying how quickly false news stories spread on Twitter compared with accurate news stories. They looked at 126,000 conversation chains on Twitter from its inception in 2006 to 2017. Their findings and conclusions — published in Science magazine and the Harvard Business Review — are a good reminder of the need for more vigilance on social media, and of the value of reputable news sources: "What we found was both surprising and disturbing. False news traveled farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in every category of information, sometimes by an order of magnitude, and false political news traveled farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than any other type. "The importance of understanding this phenomenon is difficult to overstate. And, in all likelihood, the problem will get worse before it gets better, because the technology for manipulating video and audio is improving, making distortions of reality more convincing and more difficult to detect. The good news, though, is that researchers, AI experts, and social media platforms themselves are taking the issue seriously and digging into both the nature of the problem and potential solutions." | | Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. — Salvador Rizzo | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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