Read more at the WaPo.

Fox News’s problems from the Dominion lawsuit are still in getting plenty of attention and there are some new interesting stories today.

This is from former trial lawyer Katie Phang at MSNBC: The true cost of Dominion’s devastating Fox News bombshells.

In the Dominion versus Fox News defamation case, Fox is now trapped in an ever-worsening spiral of lies of its own creation. Time and time again, Fox allegedly trafficked in lies and falsehoods. And the result just might be a financial death penalty for the network.

As we’ve seen put forth in the thousands upon thousands of pages of evidence released during the discovery process in this case, people at Fox News allegedly knew the channel was repeatedly peddling lies. But it didn’t care. Because, according to the lawsuit, profits were more important than the truth. Because, as in the words of Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch, Fox did not want to “antagonize [Donald] Trump further,” and he wanted to keep Trump’s supporters as viewers, even as he admitted under oath during his deposition that he “never believed” that Dominion rigged the 2020 presidential election.

In its most recent filing, Dominion alleges that Fox has now conceded that what it put out for its viewers to consume about Dominion was lies. “Fox has produced no evidence — none, zero -supporting those lies.” Dominion goes even further and argues that Fox could have ultimately reported the truth, but it chose not to do so. Fox also could have retracted those lies, but it chose not to do so….

Armed with thousands of pages of texts and internal chats and emails by and between Fox hosts, producers and executives, Dominion now seeks to convince a Delaware judge that a jury no longer needs to hear the case because, as a matter of law, there is no work left to be done to decide whether Fox defamed Dominion. On March 21, both sides will appear in court for oral arguments. As Dominion has argued, “It is the rare case to grant summary judgment of actual malice, but it is also the rare case where direct evidence of actual malice exists, as it does here.”

And some legal experts agree: Dominion doesn’t just have the upper hand, it has the truth on its side. If Dominion is successful, then all that would be left to determine is the amount of damages that Dominion is entitled to receive. That’s where the numbers become astronomical. Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in lost profits and reputational harm. But it’s also seeking punitive damages, which are not capped under New York state law and could also be in the billions of dollars.

This is from the Future Tense Newsletter at Slate: The Misinformation Is the Point.

The evidence is overwhelming: There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about a foreign-backed influential media platform undermining faith in America by leveraging its hypnotic hold on its audience to spread misinformation harmful to our social cohesion and democracy.

TikTok, you ask?  Nah—Fox News.

Future Tensers aren’t prone to the type of xenophobia peddled on a daily basis by Fox News. But if we were to turn the tables and go all Fox News on Fox News, we could make much of the fact that in order to launch and control the Fox broadcast network that would later beget the cable news channel without running afoul of foreign ownership limits on broadcasting licenses, Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media tycoon, became a naturalized American citizen. Isn’t it interesting, as any number of Fox News hosts might sneer, that this supposedly “American” outlet that goes to such lengths to wrap itself in the flag has made so much money by dividing Americans and sowing mistrust in our institutions?

The extent to which Fox knowingly spreads falsehoods harmful to the country has become abundantly clear (contrary to its claims that it was just reporting one campaign’s allegations) in the treasure trove of evidence coming to light thanks to the $1.6 billion defamation suit brought against the network by Dominion Voting Systems. Network officials and on-air talent, we now know, were variously annoyed and concerned that their since-ousted election data analysts called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night.

Frederick the Literate, by Charles Wysocki

This accurate call, which appeared to seal Trump’s electoral fate, triggered an existential crisis for the network because loyal Fox News viewers were woefully unprepared to accept that Trump could lose the 2020 presidential election fair and square—precisely because they were loyal Fox News viewers. Their sense of reality had been so hopelessly distorted by a news channel whose business model has long been predicated on convincing its aging, conservative audience that disdainful, know-it-all cosmopolitan elites are preying on their decency, credulity, and patriotism to conspire against American greatness. Under Fox’s proven formula (adopted from right-wing talk radio), Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, and other hosts become America’s last line of defense, decoding the vast conspiracies targeting them—conservative network and audience alike. The cultish hold Fox developed over its viewers was akin to the bond binding besieged combatants who’ve shared a trench or a bunker.

Now, the water hose of incriminating evidence emerging from the lawsuit proves that the disdainful know-it-all conspirators preying on viewers’ anxieties were actually their Fox News trenchmates.

Read the rest at the Slate link.

And here’s a tidbit from The East Bay Times: Rupert Murdoch: Fox News fired Kimberly Guilfoyle for ‘inappropriate behavior.’

After Kimberly Guilfoyle mysteriously left Fox News in the summer of 2018, she found herself vehemently denying news reports that said her departure was due to allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior.

But her former boss, Fox News Chairman Rupert Murdoch, has apparently confirmed that he wanted her gone because of the allegations, which were detailed in a 2020 report in The New Yorker. Murdoch’s concerns about Guifoyle, a former top campaign aide for Trump, were revealed in a trove of texts and emails that were recently leaked in Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News.

Murdoch said in an email, sent in the wake of the 2020 election, that he had “insisted” Fox News fire Guilfoyle “for inappropriate behavior.” The 91-year-old executive also ripped into his once-popular Fox News host in other ways, according to the email, which was shared by Semafor media reporter Max Tani.

While Murdoch’s note mistakenly called Guilfoyle “Kimberly Strassel,” an opinion writer for the Wall Street Journal, he clearly was referring to Guilfoyle when he wrote about her association with Newsmax. The rival news network was known for pushing even harder than Fox News to promote debunked conspiracy theories that Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden was due to widespread election fraud.

“Newsmax not good people!” Rupert wrote in the email. “Being advised by Don jr’s girlfriend Kimberley Strassel who I insisted we fire for inappropriate behavior. Not one of our people will join her. Newsmax desperate for money. Scoured the world, so far without luck.” [….]

The idea that Murdoch wanted Guilfoyle gone adds weight to the New Yorker report, published a month before the 2020 election. The report suggested that Guilfoyle had to leave Fox News, where she had worked since the mid-2000s, because of sexual harassment allegations made by a former assistant. Before the New Yorker report, the popular explanation for Guilfoyle’s departure from Fox was that she wanted to avoid conflicts of interest posed by her new romance with Trump Jr.

Reporter Jane Mayer detailed allegations in a 42-page draft complaint, which said that Guilfoyle showed lewd photos of male genitalia to colleagues, regularly discussed sexual matters at work, urged the assistant “to submit to a Fox employee’s demands for sexual favors,” and exposed herself to the assistant while asking for a critique of her naked body.

By Adrie Martens

A few days ago, I wrote about how Twitter had a serious outage because Elon Musk has decided to charge outside researchers who want to use Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API). Now we know the price Musk wants to charge, and it’s sky high.

Wired: Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone.

SINCE TWITTER LAUNCHED in 2006, the company has acted as a kind of heartbeat for social media conversation. That’s partly because it’s where media people go to talk about the media, but also because it’s been willing to open up its backend to researchers. Academics have used free access to Twitter’s API, or application programming interface, in order to access data on the kinds of conversations occurring on the platform, which helps them understand what the online world is talking about.

Twitter’s API is used by vast numbers of researchers. Since 2020, there have been more than 17,500 academic papers based on the platform’s data, giving strength to the argument that Twitter owner Elon Musk has long claimed, that the platform is the “de facto town square.”

But new charges, included in documentation seen by WIRED, suggest that most organizations that have relied on API access to conduct research will now be priced out of using Twitter.

It’s the end of a long, convoluted process. On February 2, Musk announced API access would go behind a paywall in a week. (Those producing “good” content would be exempted.) A week later, he delayed the decision to February 13. Unsurprisingly, that deadline also slipped by, as Twitter suffered a catastrophic outage.

The company is now offering three levels of Enterprise Packages to its developer platform, according to a document sent by a Twitter rep to would-be academic customers in early March and passed on to WIRED. The cheapest, Small Package, gives access to 50 million tweets for $42,000 a month. Higher tiers give researchers or businesses access to larger volumes of tweets—100 million and 200 million tweets respectively—and cost $125,000 and $210,000 a month. WIRED confirmed the figures with other existing free API users, who have received emails saying that the new pricing plans will take effect within months.

“I don’t know if there’s an academic on the planet who could afford $42,000 a month for Twitter,” says Jeremy Blackburn, assistant professor at Binghamton University in New York and a member of the iDRAMA Lab, which analyzes hate speech on social media—including on Twitter.

Read more details at the link.

I’m going to wrap this up, but I’ll probably post a few more links in the comment thread. I hope you’ll also share your thoughts and your recommended reads.