Within hours of a stabbing attack in northwest England that killed three young girls and wounded several more children, a false name of a supposed suspect was circulating on social media.

Police say the name was fake, as were rumors that the 17-year-old suspect was an asylum-seeker who had recently arrived in Britain. The suspect charged with murder and attempted murder was named Thursday as Axel Rudakubana, born in the U.K. to Rwandan parents.

Governments around the world, including Britain’s, are struggling with how to curb toxic material online. U.K. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Tuesday that social media companies “need to take some responsibility” for the content on their sites.

Katwala said that social platforms such as Facebook and X worked to “de-amplify” false information in real time after mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Since Elon Musk, a self-styled free-speech champion, bought X, it has gutted teams that once fought misinformation on the platform and restored the accounts of banned conspiracy theories and extremists.

“Inciting violence online is a criminal offense. That is not a matter of free speech – it is a criminal offense,” he said Thursday.

“I was in those meetings, and Gorbachev has [also] said there was no promise not to enlarge NATO,” Zoellick recalls. Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, later president of Georgia, concurred, he says. Nor does the treaty on Germany’s unification include a limit on NATO enlargement.

good news: no evidence of echo chamber effect

bad news: "Instead, the results indicated that people simply ignore all information that does not conform to their own opinion"

as astute reddit user /u/SheriffComey put it: "You'll never reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/eixcei/our_beliefs_are_so_resilient_that_we_effectively

what it looks like when a government prioritizes educating its population. I think this is the most successful way to tackle such a structural problem. People at large aren't equipped with the skills to deal with misinformation, both targetting them, and self-inflicted. The change needs to happen from the bottom up, at a young age, through the education system.

"The initiative is just one layer of a multi-pronged, cross-sector approach the country is taking to prepare citizens of all ages for the complex digital landscape of today – and tomorrow... combining fact-checking with the critical thinking and voter literacy"

“It’s not just a government problem, the whole society has been targeted. We are doing our part, but it’s everyone’s task to protect the Finnish democracy,” Toivanen said, before adding: “The first line of defense is the kindergarten teacher.”

engaging with bad faith actors is letting them win.

"It was the first time that an EU country had convicted those responsible for disinformation campaigns, drawing a line in the sand between extreme hate speech and the pretense of free speech."

“Just like any polluting companies or factories should be and are already regulated, for polluting the air and the forests, the waters, these companies are polluting the minds of people. So, they also have to pay for it and take responsibility for it.”

“This game has the potential to inoculate a generation against misinformation. But it’s such a big problem, how do we meet the size of the challenge? Technology and gamification is a really powerful tool in being able to do that.”