Aggregator

"Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939" kicks off at the Saint Louis Art Museum on April 12.

Business manager Heather Sieve reflects on the evolution of the "Original Mexican Fish Fry" and shares pro-tips for navigating the often-long lines.

The Los Angeles-based clothing retailer is currently holding liquidation sales advertising up to 40% off merchandise at its St. Louis Galleria, West County Center and South County Center locations.

The city council will weigh in Monday on whether to require a public vote on any proposed sale, transfer, long-term lease or commercial redevelopment of the city’s parks.

Sen. Adam Schnelting, R-St. Charles, said his bill would prevent legal challenges against school districts that want to require transgender students to use facilities that match their biological sex.

The project, $6.2 million in total when including design work, is being added to an $11 million redo of the community center.

This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund. After Ronald Scheer was found suffocated to death by the straps of his own wheelchair, an autopsy determined his cause of death was “hanging.” Scheer, a man with developmental disabilities and mobility issues who used a wheelchair, was living at the state-run St. Louis Developmental […]

St. Louis faces a massive challenge with vacant land and buildings. It’s more than lost tax revenue: these pieces of property can end up costing the city thousands of dollars each. STLPR's Eric Schmid dug into the issue to find out how St. Louis is slowly beginning to account for and collect these costs.

In interviews conducted by Nine PBS and SLM for the Citizens’ Agenda, we asked each candidate the same question. Here’s what they said.

The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Metro St. Louis represents a growing community, and wants to connect its members with people who want to do business with them.

The governor and the Missouri legislature have been in session for over six weeks, and many of their policy proposals and priorities are beginning to take center stage. Now is the time to become engaged and remain vigilant. Are their priorities the same as yours? Are you pleased with their actions so far? If not, […]

A horrifying 2017 death sparked calls for change. But people who work within the system say the state failed to make any significant reforms.

ST. LOUIS - We went from twenty degrees below to ten degrees above average for highs as we rolled through the weekend. The milder air will be sticking around through the week. Some clouds build on Monday ahead of a cold front. Mild, highs in the upper 50s to low 60s. Some light rain will [...]

by Craig Silverman

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, users spread a false claim on Facebook that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was paying a bounty for reports of undocumented people.

“BREAKING — ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” read a post on a page called NO Filter Seeking Truth, adding, “Cash in folks.”

Check Your Fact, Reuters and other fact-checkers debunked the claim, and Facebook added labels to posts warning that they contained false information or missing context. ICE has a tip line but said it does not offer cash bounties.

This spring, Meta plans to stop working with fact-checkers in the U.S. to label false or misleading content, the company said on Jan. 7. And if a post like the one about ICE goes viral, the pages that spread it could earn a cash bonus.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said in January that the company was removing or dialing back automated systems that reduce the spread of false information. At the same time, Meta is revamping a program that has paid bonuses to creators for content based on views and engagement, potentially pouring accelerant on the kind of false posts it once policed. The new Facebook Content Monetization program is currently invite-only, but Meta plans to make it widely available this year.

The upshot: a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, some of them funded by Meta, according to former professional Facebook hoaxsters and a former Meta data scientist who worked on trust and safety.

ProPublica identified 95 Facebook pages that regularly post made-up headlines designed to draw engagement — and, often, stoke political divisions. The pages, most of which are managed by people overseas, have a total of more than 7.7 million followers.

After a review, Meta said it had removed 81 pages for being managed by fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves as American while posting about politics and social issues. Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, declined to respond to specific questions, including whether any of the pages were eligible for or enrolled in the company’s viral content payout program.

The pages collected by ProPublica offer a sample of those that could be poised to cash in.

Meta has made debunking viral hoaxes created for money a top priority for nearly a decade, with one executive calling this content the “worst of the worst.” Meta has a policy against paying for content its fact-checkers label as false, but that rule will become irrelevant when the company stops working with them. Already, 404 Media found that overseas spammers are earning payouts using deceptive AI-generated content, including images of emaciated people meant to stoke emotion and engagement. Such content is rarely fact-checked because it doesn’t make any verifiable claims.

With the removal of fact-checks in the U.S., “what is the protection now against viral hoaxes for profit?” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the nonprofit Integrity Institute and a former Meta data scientist.

“The systems are designed to amplify the most salacious and inciting content,” he added.

In an exchange on Facebook Messenger, the manager of NO Filter Seeking Truth, which shared the false ICE post, told ProPublica that the page has been penalized so many times for sharing false information that Meta won’t allow it to earn money under the current rules. The page is run by a woman based in the southern U.S., who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said she has received threats due to her posts. She said the news about the fact-checking system ending was “great information.”

Clayton said Meta’s community standards and content moderation teams are still active and reiterated the company’s Jan. 7 statement that it is working to ensure it doesn’t “over-enforce” its rules by mistakenly banning or suppressing content.

Meta’s changes mark a significant reversal of the company’s approach to moderating false and misleading information, reframing the labeling or downranking of content as a form of censorship. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement. His stance reflects the approach of Elon Musk after acquiring Twitter, now X, in 2022. Musk has made drastic cuts to the company’s trust and safety team, reinstated thousands of suspended accounts including that of a prominent neo-Nazi and positioned Community Notes, which allows participating users to add context via notes appended to tweets, as the platform’s key system for flagging false and misleading content.

Zuckerberg has said Meta will replace fact-checkers and some automated systems in the U.S. with a version of the Community Notes system. A Jan. 7 update to a Meta policy page said that in the U.S. the company “may still reduce the distribution of certain hoax content whose spread creates a particularly bad user or product experience (e.g., certain commercial hoaxes).”

Clayton did not clarify whether posts with notes appended to them would be eligible for monetization. He provided links to academic papers that detail how crowdsourced fact-checking programs like Community Notes can be effective at identifying misinformation, building trust among users and addressing perceptions of bias.

A 2023 ProPublica investigation, as well as reporting from Bloomberg, found that X’s Community Notes failed to effectively address the misinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Reporting from the BBC and Agence France-Presse showed that X users who share false information have earned thousands of dollars thanks to X’s content monetization program, which also rewards high engagement.

Keith Coleman, X’s vice president of product, previously told ProPublica that the analysis of Community Notes about the Israel-Hamas conflict did not include all of the relevant notes, and he said that the program “is found helpful by people globally, across the political spectrum.”

Allen said it takes time, resources and oversight to scale up crowdsourced fact-checking systems. Meta’s decision to scrap fact-checking before giving the new approach time to prove itself is risky, he said.

“We could in theory have a Community Notes program that was as effective, if not more effective, than the fact-checking program,” he said. “But to turn all these things off before you have the Community Notes thing in place definitely feels like we’re explicitly going to have a moment with little guardrails.”

Before Facebook began cracking down on content in late 2016, American fake news peddlers and spammers based in North Macedonia and elsewhere cashed in on viral hoaxes that deepened political divisions and played on people’s fears.

One American, Jestin Coler, ran a network of sites that earned money from hoax news stories for nearly a decade, including the infamous and false viral headline from 2016 “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” He previously told NPR that he started the sites as a way to “infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right.” Coler said he earned five figures a month from the sites, which he operated in his spare time.

When people clicked on the links to the stories in their news feed, they landed on websites full of ads, which generated revenue for Coler. That’s become a tougher business model since Meta has made story links less visible on Facebook in recent years.

Facebook’s new program to pay publishers directly for viral content could unlock a fresh revenue stream for hoaxsters. “It’s still the same formula to get people riled up. It seems like it could just go right back to those days, like overnight,” Coler told ProPublica in a phone interview. He said he left the Facebook hoax business years ago and won’t return.

In January, ProPublica compiled a list of pages that had been previously cited for posting hoaxes and false content and discovered dozens more through domain and content searches. The pages posted false headlines designed to spark controversy, such as “Lia Thomas Admits: ‘I Faked Being Trans to Expose How Gullible the Left Is’” and “Elon Musk announced that he has acquired MSNBC for $900 million to put an end to toxic programming.” The Musk headline was paired with an AI-generated image of him holding a contract with the MSNBC logo. It generated over 11,000 reactions, shares and comments.

Most of the pages are managed by accounts outside of the U.S., including in North Macedonia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, according to data from Facebook. Many of these pages use AI-generated images to illustrate their made-up headlines.

One network of overseas-run pages is connected to the site SpaceXMania.com, an ad-funded site filled with hoax articles like “Elon Musk Confronts Beyoncé Publicly: ‘Stop Pretending to Be Country, It’s Just Not You.’” SpaceX Fanclub, the network’s largest Facebook page, has close to 220,000 followers and labels its content as satire. One of its recent posts was a typo-laden AI-generated image of a sign that said, “There Are Only 2 2 Genders And Will Ban Atheletes From Women Sports — President.”

SpaceXMania.com’s terms and conditions page says it’s owned by Funky Creations LTD, a United Kingdom company registered to Muhammad Shabayer Shaukat, a Pakistani national. ProPublica sent questions to the site and received an email response signed by Tim Lawson, who said he’s an American based in Florida who works with Shaukat. (ProPublica was unable to locate a person by that name in public records searches, based on the information he provided.)

“Our work involves analyzing the latest trends and high-profile news related to celebrities and shaping it in a way that appeals to a specific audience — particularly conservatives and far-right groups who are predisposed to believe certain narratives,” the email said.

Lawson said they earn between $500 and $1,500 per month from web ads and more than half of the traffic comes from people clicking on links on Facebook. The pages are not currently enrolled in the invitation-only Facebook Content Monetization program, according to Lawson.

The SpaceXMania pages identified by ProPublica were recently taken offline. Lawson denied that they were removed by Meta and said he deactivated the pages “due to some security reasons.” Meta declined to comment.

It remains to be seen how hoax page operators will fare as Meta’s algorithmic reversals take hold and the U.S. fact-checking program grinds to a halt. But some Facebook users are already taking advantage of the loosened guardrails.

Soon after Zuckerberg announced the changes, people spread a fake screenshot of a Bloomberg article headlined, “The spark from Zuckerberg’s electric penis pump, might be responsible for the LA fires.”

“Community note: verified true,” wrote one commenter.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

Over the course of their career, Led Zeppelin released six #1 albums — and one of those is turning 50 on Monday.Physical Graffiti, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame…

Source

McClellan writes: Ed Martin stumbles and falls, but he falls up. Without getting too metaphysical, that seems like a testament to the human spirit.

Trump’s falling approval ratings reveal an out-of-touch presidency, and have given space for allies to turn against him.

In the battle of brands, neither party is doing very well.

by Stephen Engelberg

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices.

By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week.

It’s also completely untrue.

You might ask why it’s worth grabbing onto one particular false assertion when there are so many incorrect facts and figures flooding the zone of public conversation. Last month, we witnessed the spectacle of the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, falsely announcing that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Musk shared a video of the briefing on X, saying it was the tip of the iceberg. Days later, the president doubled down, saying his administration prevented delivery of $100 million of “condoms to Hamas.”

A swarm of fact-checkers debunked these contentions, pointing out that: records from the U.S. Agency for International Development showed there was no such program for Gaza; the amount of money involved exceeded the agency’s worldwide budget for buying condoms; and it would mean more than 1 billion condoms for the roughly 1 million Palestinian males living in Gaza.

It took Musk two weeks to disavow the condom claim, saying that “we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

A look at how the administration handled the quickly debunked and obviously wrong statement about who is working from home shows that correcting “mistakes” is far from standard practice recently for either the White House or prominent Republicans.

The 6% statistic burst into the public consciousness in early December of last year when Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, released a report on federal workers with the provocative title: “Out of Office: Bureaucrats on the beach and in bubble baths but not in office buildings.” Ernst had just been named co-chair of the congressional caucus created to support DOGE, and she has long been a vocal critic of what she views as wasteful spending.

The claim was immediately picked up by The New York Post, commentator Sean Hannity and other Trump allies. Hannity tweeted “JOB FOR DOGE: Only 6% of Federal Employees work from an Office Full-time, Some not working at All: Audit.”

The Post followed up hours later with an editorial that derided federal employees for their “privilege” and asked, “How many does the nation actually need?” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters, “That is absurd, and it’s not something the American people will stand for.”

Musk retweeted the Post story to his more than 200 million followers soon after it appeared. He said things were even worse than the report had found, asserting that “if you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%! Almost no one.”

The 6% figure struck me as highly implausible. I began my career at a newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, home to the world’s largest Navy base. I thought about the number of people needed to staff an aircraft carrier battle group on deployments that last for many months. After Norfolk, I spent years covering national security. Given the restrictions on handling classified information, hardly anyone at the intelligence agencies, the State Department or the Pentagon can work from home.

I searched online for a copy of the Ernst report and quickly found the passage that said, “Six percent report in-person on a full-time basis while nearly a third of the government workforce is entirely remote.” A footnote cited a single source: a story published months earlier by Federal News Network, a news organization in the suburbs of Washington that closely covers the world of government workers. The organization had invited readers to answer an online survey about their work habits, drawing 6,338 from the federal workforce of 2.2 million. A story about the survey by reporter Drew Friedman noted that only 6% of the respondents reported working full time in the office.

The day after Ernst released her report, Federal News Network added an editor’s note to the post saying that Friedman’s story had been reworked to “clarify that the survey was a non-scientific survey of respondents who self-reported that they are current federal employees, and who were self-selected.”

The editors said they had also added data from an August 2024 study by the Office of Management and Budget, which found that 54% of the federal workforce was required to show up at an office every day. According to the study, just 10% of federal employees worked exclusively from home. Those allowed to have hybrid schedules ended up spending an average of 60% of their work time at federal offices.

In the world of journalism, this is how editors try to address egregious misreadings of their work. Jared Serbu, the deputy editor of Federal News Network, said he and his colleagues were taken aback by how his organization’s clearly unscientific survey had somehow been transformed into a defining statistic about federal employees.

“It was a survey of our niche audience for our niche audience,” Serbu said. “Nobody’s ever been confused about it before this.”

Later in December, a TV report cited the editor’s note and labeled the 6% number as “false.” At about the same time, PolitiFact looked at Johnson’s claim that only 1% of federal workers show up to work each day and labeled it “pants on fire,” the fact-checking site’s lowest rating for a statement that is “not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”

That should have ended the conversation. But it didn’t.

On Jan. 20, Trump’s first day in office, the White House issued a statement that obliquely referred to Musk’s coming assault on federal agencies. It said Trump was “planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.”

A week after that, a senior administration official cited the 6% figure in explaining plans to slash the size of the federal workforce through buyouts. “We’re five years past COVID and just 6% of federal employees work full-time in office,” the official told Axios and NBC News. The quotation also appeared in a memo sent by the White House to Republican allies, the Daily Wire reported.

I asked Ernst’s press secretary, Zach Kraft, whether the senator planned to correct the record or amend her report. He said neither was in the offing.

“To set the record straight — If federal employees were indeed showing up in large numbers, then calling them back to work wouldn’t be controversial,” Kraft said in an email. He noted that a bill introduced by Ernst would require federal managers to “take daily attendance, so everyone knows who is showing up to work and who isn’t.”

The White House did not respond to my questions about why its Jan. 20 statement cited a claim about federal workers that had been so clearly refuted. The portrayal of federal workers as lazy and indolent continues to be a central aspect of the president’s plans to slash government employment.

On Wednesday in Miami, Trump said federal workers should “show up to work in person like the rest of us,” adding that: “You can’t work at home. They’re not working. They’re playing tennis, they’re playing golf, or they have other jobs. But they’re not working, or they’re certainly not working hard.” (Multiple news outlets noted that Trump had golfed on nine of his first 30 days in office.)

It’s said that we live in a post-fact society, that everything is arguable and nothing is truly knowable. I vehemently disagree. Now, more than ever, facts matter, and ProPublica is going to continue to track how and when patently false statements are injected into momentous conversations about this country’s future.

Extreme weather is shifting the migratory patterns of birds, increasing the chances of deadly avian flu outbreaks on farms.