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Podcast: Misinformation, hate and accountability

Podcast: Misinformation, hate and accountability

The Anti-Defamation League has a long history of countering hate, bias, and harmful misinformation, which is to say the organization has some strong opinions about what happens on social media. Continuing our exploration of digital disinformation and free speech, Civic Genius chatted with Lauren Krapf, Technology Policy & Advocacy Counsel at the Anti-Defamation League, about how the ADL thinks tech companies can do better and what misinformation looks like in the real world – both online and off.

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New research shows AI beats elite debaters in persuasion — not through better arguments, but by out-pacing human reading and reply speed.

MUNTHITA LAMLUE/Getty Images

Political Chatbots Should Not Be Allowed To Set the Pace

A political chatbot can answer before a citizen has finished reading its previous message. It can add statistics, historical examples, causal claims and links at a rate no human campaign volunteer could match. That does not necessarily make its case wiser. It changes the contest by allowing one speaker to control the tempo.

A June 2026 preprint offers unusually direct evidence of this problem. Across four preregistered experiments involving 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people, frontier AI systems were more persuasive than laypeople, tournament winners, professional canvassers and elite competitive debaters. The human experts were not casual opponents: the study included world and continental champions, paid preparation, live practice and substantial performance incentives.

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President Donald Trump holds an image showing the size of Meta’s new data center during a cabinet meeting on Aug. 26, 2025.

(Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images/TCA)

Trump is on the wrong side of AI issue

I’ve covered a lot of elections — and most times, the issues that are going to really matter to voters aren’t brand new or sprung on them with just two months to go, arriving out of nowhere. They’re predictable — the economy, a war, a long-contentious policy fight.

This year is different. While most voters tell us their biggest concern is affordability, a new issue has entered the chat, taking up an outsized amount of space on the campaign trail, on the airwaves, and in party war rooms.

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America at 250 Needs a First-Rung Compact

A country asking what it wants to become over its next 250 years should pay close attention to the first opportunity it gives its young adults to become useful, trusted and independent.

The Fulcrum’s Letters to America project has deliberately elevated voices ages 14 to 30 as the generation carrying the American story forward. That civic invitation deserves an economic counterpart: a credible path into the work where young adults gain responsibility, judgment and a stake in institutions.

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America Needs a Digital Equity Policy, Not Just Tech Innovation

The United States invests billions in artificial intelligence research and development‚ semiconductor fabrication‚ and next-generation connectivity. Yet millions of Americans cannot consistently access the internet or afford the devices needed to submit an online application for social services or a job application․ This is not an oversight․ It is a policy choice that is costing the country dearly․

Connectivity is a floor, not a ceiling:

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