Author: nick

Article Metrics0CrossRef Citations This research note investigates the aftermath of YouTube’s global ban on Russian state-affiliated media channels in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Using over 12 million YouTube comments across 40 Russian-language channels, we analyzed the effectiveness of the ban and the shifts in user activity before and after the platform’s intervention. We found that YouTube, in accordance with its promise, effectively removed user activity across the banned channels. However, the ban did not prevent users from seeking out ideologically similar content on other channels and, in turn, increased user engagement on otherwise less…

Read More

From Thursday’s decision by California Court of Appeal Justice Natalie Stone, joined by Justice John Segal and L.A. Superior Court Judge Alexander Giza, in J.E. v. A.C.: In April 2016 J.E. filed a petition for a domestic violence restraining order against his then-ex-girlfriend, A.C., and a temporary restraining order was granted pending the hearing on a permanent restraining order. J.E. did not appear at the hearing, and the court dissolved the temporary restraining order and dismissed the case without prejudice for lack of prosecution. More than eight years after filing the petition, in November 2024, J.E. filed a motion to…

Read More

Britain’s former Prime Minister shows there’s no price to be paid for engineering mass slaughter in the service of Western empire. Which is why those crimes not only continue, but grow in scale.  Tony Blair in 2009. (Andrew Newton/ Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0) By Jonathan CookJonathan-Cook.net Tony Blair, the man who led Britain into a disastrous and illegal war on Iraq more than 20 years ago based on false information, is still very much a sought-after commentator in the U.K. media. His regular political pronouncements are treated as pearls of wisdom; his columns as consequential insights from a globe-striding…

Read More

 Download Audio. Scott brought Robert Pape of the University of Chicago back to discuss the attempted ceasefire that went into effect on Wednesday night. Pape explains why this is not actually a meaningful step away from the escalation to a full-on war that he’s long been warning about. He also talks about how this is war is cementing Iran’s status as a world power and why he expects the Iranians to abandon their previous stance, begin earnestly pursuing nuclear weapons and attain them quickly. Discussed on the show: “The Pause That Isn’t: Why the Iran Ceasefire Changes Everything” (The…

Read More

Editor’s note:  This article was written before the announced ceasefire Tuesday night (4/7/26). The war on Iran and the war in Ukraine have also been wars of words. Those words, like the events they are words about, have been war crimes. In the past weeks, the wars of words have been marked by dueling rants by erstwhile allies. Each wants the other in each other’s war. During a G7 ministers meeting on March 27, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas lost her patience with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Reminding him that he had said the U.S. itself would…

Read More

In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we’re doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation. The trauma of war coupled with genocidal and demeaning rhetoric from U.S. leadership could lead to lasting mental health and social concerns for Iranians, experts say Kourosh Ziabari Prism A shaky ceasefire after 39 days of U.S.-Israeli war on Iran appears to be on the verge of collapse with Tel Aviv refusing to halt its heavy bombardment of Lebanon, while there…

Read More

A month after the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, President Donald Trump addressed the nation in a prime-time speech on April 1, saying the military operation was “getting very close” to completing its mission. Trump repeated some false and questionable claims we’ve written about before. Trump said the U.S. “totally obliterated” three nuclear facility sites in Iran last June. Experts and a classified U.S. intelligence report said the sites were damaged and Iran’s uranium enrichment program was set back, but the sites and the country’s nuclear capabilities weren’t completely destroyed. The president said that Iran was “right at…

Read More

Ali, A., & Qazi, I. A. (2022). Digital literacy and vulnerability to misinformation: Evidence from Facebook users in Pakistan. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2. https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.025 Ali, A., & Qazi, I. A. (2023). Countering misinformation on social media through educational interventions: Evidence from a randomized experiment in Pakistan. Journal of Development Economics, 163, Article 103108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2023.103108 Arechar, A. A., Allen, J., Berinsky, A. J., Cole, R., Epstein, Z., Garimella, K., Gully, A., Lu, J. G., Ross, R. M., Stagnaro, M. N., Zhang, Y., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2023). Understanding and combating misinformation across 16 countries on six…

Read More