TV News LIES

A federal judge on Wednesday threw out a defamation lawsuit against Fox News by a former Donald Trump supporter who said he received death threats when the network aired false conspiracy theories about his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Raymond Epps, a former Marine, was falsely accused by Fox of being a government agent causing trouble near the Capitol that day so that it would be blamed on Trump fans.

U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Hall in Delaware granted, without comment, Fox's motion to dismiss the case.

Epps was the subject of a "60 Minutes" interview in 2023, shortly before filing his lawsuit. He claimed that he and his wife sold an Arizona ranch where they lived and moved because of the harassment they faced because of the reports.

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Left-leaning apps, news websites and social networks are experiencing a spike in engagement following President-elect Trump's election win, further dividing the internet along political lines.

Why it matters: It's not unusual for resistance media to rise in response to contentious elections. But the internet itself is becoming more politically divided than ever, driving Americans further into echo chambers.

Driving the news: Bluesky, an alternative to Elon Musk's X, saw downloads rise by 430% during election week, according to Sensor Tower.

• Usage of the Bluesky app in the U.S. grew by 519% in the weeks after the election, compared to the first 10 months of the year, per SimilarWeb.
• The social network's growth is linked to users "either leaving X or investing more time in exploring a promising alternative," SimilarWeb's editor of insights news and research, David Carr, noted.

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Heading into a second term, New Yorker editor David Remnick says Donald Trump's anger "has been never so intense as it's been against the press." The president-elect has referred to the news media as the "Enemy of the American people," has threatened retribution against outlets that have covered him negatively and has suggested that that NBC, CBS and ABC should have their licenses revoked.

Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, says he expects the incoming administration "to go after the press in every conceivable way ... [using] every tool in the toolbox — and there are a lot of tools."

"I think [Trump's] salivating for the opportunity to prosecute and imprison journalists for leaks of national security information — or what they would call national security information," Baron says. "I would expect that he would deny funding to public radio ... and TV. And that he will seek to exercise control over the Voice of America and its parent company, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as he did in his previous administration, trying to turn it into a propaganda outlet."

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The day after the presidential election, the social media landscape shook.

On Elon Musk's X, more than 115,000 users deactivated their accounts, the largest-ever mass exit from the platform. At the same time, traffic on Bluesky, a smaller rival to X, began to soar, with daily usage climbing some 500% in the U.S., according to data from Similarweb.

"We've been growing by about a million users a day for several days," said Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in an interview with NPR on Monday. "It's proving out the model that we thought would be the right approach to social [media]: Give people the tools to control their experience and they'll have a better time."

Hell is other people. Or, more specifically, other people on social media. Hell is millions of people who would avoid each other like the plague if they met in real life, but who are shoved into each other’s faces and essentially egged on to punch each other online; it’s people endlessly winding each other up out of boredom or frustration or desperation to be part of some gang, which ends in viral bullying, death threats, children ripping other children to shreds on platforms they are legally not old enough to join.

Hell is a social circle so vast and remote that human brains just aren’t wired to cope with it: it’s sociability without accountability, and it was making us miserably stressed long before Elon Musk bought X and drove it at a wall. But even then, people stayed for the reasons people do stay in toxic relationships – inertia, fear of being lonely, misplaced hope it may get better – and because it seemed intrinsic to many working lives.

You had to be on X because everyone else was, a circular logic that this week finally snapped: a stampede away from X has seen rival Bluesky add 1 million users since the US election, with several prominent Labour MPs joining the charge. What’s the point, the chair of the women and equalities committee, Sarah Owen, asked, in being on a site that’s “gone from cat memes, to sharing Wordle scores, to calling people whores just for having a different political opinion”?

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The Guardian announced Wednesday that it will no longer post its content under its official accounts on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

“We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere,” the Guardian said in a statement.

The move comes just after Musk was named the co-head of President-elect Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency.” Musk has increasingly been involved in Trump’s campaign and concern is growing about what impact he will have on the administration.