Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Nick Backovic
White Noise: How Conspiracists Exploited an Information Gap After a Derailment in Ohio
Don DeLillo's postmodern 1985 breakout novel White Noise features a toxic chemical spill from a rail car, inviting readers to explore themes including man-made disasters, conspiracies, and capitalism. Noah Baumbach's film adaptation of the novel, released in January 2023, was shot in and around Ohio using local extras.
Double Check: Is Vaping Safer Than Smoking Cigarettes?
Government health body Public Health England (PHE) endorsed an estimate that vaping is "95 percent safer than smoking" in 2015. The U.K.'s National Health Service continues to advise that "vaping poses a small fraction of the risk of smoking cigarettes" while suggesting that it can help people quit smoking.
Double Check: Florida's COVID-19 Vaccine Study
On October 7, Florida's Surgeon General unveiled the results of a study conducted to identify risks related to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Claiming that this inquiry uncovered a link between the use of these vaccines and cardiac arrest, Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced new guidance against the vaccination of men aged 18-39. Ladapo's guidance and the evidence upon which it is based have received sharp criticism from the scientific community.
Double Check: Are Electric Vehicles Even That Green?
The switch from conventional vehicles with internal combustion engines to electric vehicles (EVs) has been underway for some time, and demand for electric cars is booming. A recent report found that in 18 countries, "over half of consumers — 52 percent — who intend to buy a car in the next 24 months say they will choose an EV or hybrid vehicle." Sales of Volkswagen EVs, Ford EVs, and Teslas have also recently skyrocketed.
A QAnon crypto scheme wrecked investors - Nick Backovic & Ernie Piper (6/27/22)
Jun 27 • 29M Two QAnon personalities used their influence to hawk "sh*tcoins" to followers, who lost millions in real money Open in playerListen on ); Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. SH!TPOST is a podcast from researcher and reporter Jared Holt at the intersection of politics, technology and internet culture. New episodes release bi-weekly.
Arguing from Orwell: Everyone's Favorite Rhetorical Fallacy
In 1949, George Orwell wrote to his agent Leonard Moore about Sidney Sheldon's potential theatrical adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Russian Invasion of Ukraine Fuels Influence Operations on Indian Social Media
India's refusal to publicly disavow Moscow or show support for Ukraine has created a breeding ground for a variety of misinformation during Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Double Check: What Do We Know About Events in Leicester?
On the evening of September 17, a series of confrontations occurred in Leicester amid rising tensions between members of the Hindu and Muslim communities. The disorder, which carried through to Sunday, has sparked intense debate online, with competing narratives being pushed concerning its causes and the culpability of the groups involved.
GiveSendGo: Christ, Cash, and Conspiracy Theories
In April 2021, Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was taken to task by a number of mainstream news outlets over its decision to permit Capitol insurrectionists, the Proud Boys, and Kyle Rittenhouse to raise funds for their respective legal defenses. Attempting to set the record straight, the site’s owners, Heather and Jacob Wells, posted a blog entry explaining their decision.
Disclose.tv: Conspiracy Forum Turned Disinformation Factory
With additional reporting by Ernie Piper Disclose.tv, a disinformation outlet based in Germany, is bringing fake news to a timeline near you. Although it now presents itself on social media as a reliable news source, Disclose.tv originated as a forum fixated on conspiracy narratives and UFOs. Its continued uncritical coverage of these topics reveals its links to fringe pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.
I Was at the Capitol on January 6. This Is What I Saw.
Before there was a riot at the Capitol, there were two other D.C. Stop the Steal rallies, where baseless fear-mongering and distortion of facts helped accelerate the rally goers’ acceptance of violence.
Double Check: Is Big Bird a Communist?
This week's Twitter dust-up surrounded Big Bird, the world-famous fictional character from the long-running children's TV show Sesame Street. Following the CDC's final approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for five to 11-year olds, the official Twitter account of Big Bird (who’s apparently six years old) promoted the COVID-19 vaccine. "I got vaccinated today!" he tweeted.
How Media Drove Conspiracies About The Burari Deaths
The strange case of the Burari deaths was finally closed by Delhi police at the end of October. No signs of foul play, they concluded — the 11 members of the Chundawat family had killed themselves in a deadly ritual from which they believed their dead father would save them. Originally investigated as a murder, it became clear that the family, unbelievably, had done this to themselves.
How Disinformation Is A New Kind Of Horror Fiction
It’s hard to imagine a time when social media wasn’t the staging area for a pitched battle for truth or the engine of total epistemic and societal collapse (depending on whether you like your Internet spatialized or not). Indeed, social media platforms, message boards, forums, and comments sections, as sites of multimodal interpersonal communication, are used to create innovative terrifying fictions.
Telegram COVID-19 Conspiracy Group Rife With Antisemitism
By Ernie Piper and Jordan Wildon Content warning for extreme antisemitic images. A Logically investigation into one of the largest COVID-19 conspiracy groups on English-language Telegram has found a disturbing amount of antisemitism. In a channel of nearly 70k members, one in every 200 posts contained an overtly antisemitic narrative.
Double Check: Will More Police Help Tackle Violence Against Women?
In a party conference speech lasting just over one and a half hours, Labour leader Keir Starmer announced on Wednesday that he would tackle crime through a strengthened police force and increased surveillance, asserting that there was a clear link between women’s safety and police presence. Calls for more police have never sat comfortably with the left, but Labour’s recent commitment to increased policing came at an especially fraught time.
Internet Sleuthing Is a Safeguarding Issue
Over the summer, Gabby Petito set off with her fiancé with a plan to travel around national parks across the western United States. Around the beginning of September, her social media posts stopped. By the 11th, her family reported her missing. In the weeks that followed, online sleuths mobilized – aiming to get to the bottom of the case. TikTok videos dissecting her social media accounts topped over a billion views.
Reddit CEO Refuses To Remove COVID Misinfo
The top post for almost 12 hours yesterday on r/all – Reddit’s so-called “front page of the internet” – was an open letter from the moderators of some of the largest subreddits, demanding the website's admins take action to remove vaccine and COVID misinformation. Membership in these subreddits number in the tens of millions. “It is clear that even after promising to tackle the problem of misinformation on this site, nothing of substance has been done,” the letter read.
EXCLUSIVE: Logically Identifies GhostEzra, Florida Man Behind World’s ‘Largest Antisemitic Internet Forum’
By Nick Backovic, Jordan Wildon and Joe Ondrak Logically, as part of our mission to understand and counter harmful online misinformation, conducts continuous research into the networks, channels, and actors that play an outsized role in spreading misinformation and conspiracies. One element of that research program is working to uncover the identities of those who leverage online anonymity to avoid accountability for spreading misinformation and hate speech.
California Woman Behind Anti-Vax Site Outperforming Government Database
By Devika Khandelwal, Nick Backovic and Edie Miller A Logically investigation can reveal that Lizabeth Pearl Willner, also known as Liz Willner, of Oakland, California, is behind the website OpenVAERS. OpenVAERS is a U.S.-focused site that was created in January this year. The project used to live on thearkivist.net, which was created in September 2019, until its owner created a separate website dedicated to the misrepresentation of COVID-19 vaccine data.
New Telegram Research Shows QAnon 'Largest Extremist Group' Online
A new report from Logically and the Global Network on Extremism and Technology finds 135,000+ active QAnon members on Telegram. This research, which is the first of its kind, assesses the size of active QAnon channels on the private messaging app Telegram. Although researchers have looked at other social media platforms to measure the scope of extremism communities, Telegram has until now remained mostly unexamined.
The HART Files: Inside the Group Trying to Smuggle Anti-Vaccine Myths into Westminster
By Jordan Wildon, Nick Backovic, and Ernie Piper Chat records and other documents obtained by Logically show that a U.K. group of lockdown-skeptic political activists and health professionals have been coordinating efforts to lobby MPs and gain political and media influence, with an aim to “wrestle control back from SAGE.” Logically reviewed hundreds of documents and tens of thousands of messages sent between members of HART (Health Advisory and Recovery Team) which go as far back as January,...
EXCLUSIVE: Actors Behind UK Misinformation Site The Daily Expose Revealed
A Logically investigation can reveal that Jonathan Allen-Walker of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire is behind the conspiracy news site, The Daily Expose. The Daily Expose is a U.K.-focused conspiracy site created in November of last year, and since its establishment, it has promoted a standard portfolio of COVID-denialist, anti-vaxxer, and Great Reset myths framed as breaking news.
EXCLUSIVE: Documentary Filmmaker Who Collaborated with Jordan Sather Tied to Major QAnon Influencer Accounts
A Logically investigation can reveal that a Kentucky-based documentary filmmaker, who collaborated on a 2018 conspiracy documentary with notorious QAnon influencer Jordan Sather, created a social media account that went on to anonymously promote QAnon material to hundreds of thousands of followers.
How Women In Rural India Are Learning To Fight Misinformation
Priya Kumari* is employed as a domestic worker at one of the upscale neighborhoods in the city of Ranchi in Jharkhand. She has received both doses of the Covishield vaccine. At 30 years old, she is illiterate. It was her employer who booked vaccination slots for her on the CoWin portal and took her to the vaccination centers after they were able to convince Kumari that the vaccines were safe and could safeguard her from severe disease.
How the Hegelian Dialectic Became a Far-Right Conspiracy Theory
Legend has it that when the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was nearing his final moments in November of 1831, he purportedly uttered the following words: “Only one man ever understood me, and even he didn’t understand me.” This assessment, like many of those offered by the notoriously obtuse and complicated German philosopher, can be applied today. In 2021, Hegel’s vast body of work remains mostly inaccessible to non-specialists.
Double Check: Are These 13 Reasons Why Your Kids Shouldn’t Get Vaccinated?
Written by Devika Khandelwal and Alice Franklin A recent article from the influential conspiracy-theory-based site, the Daily Expose (sometimes known as just the Exposé), listed what it alleges are “13 reasons why your kids shouldn’t get vaccinated.” In this listicle, the anonymous author variously misrepresents scientific studies and misinterprets data from legitimate sources, cherry-picking the numbers that suit the publication’s anti-vax agenda.
Small Voices, Big Questions: The Mystery of The Cheese Badge
In the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, media corporation Clear Channel Communications sent a memo to more than a thousand radio stations managed by the company, advising them to remove 164 songs from their upcoming playlists.
The Loddening of Political Communication
What happens when political communication doesn’t involve any real people? For as long as many will be able to remember, politicians have attempted to appeal to the “man on the street”: a hypothetical individual (or class of individual) whose characteristics reflect preconceptions as much as any reality.
Assessing The Scale of German Language Disinformation Communities on Telegram
By Jordan Wildon and Kristina Gildejeva New research from Logically shows that German-language conspiracy groups on Telegram in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) have raised at least €284,678 ($337,660) for conspiracy and far-right causes across 214 crowdfunding campaigns. At least thirteen of these campaigns consistently raised a minimum of €4,627 ($5,489) per month.
Putting the Meh in Movement: Meet the 19-Year-Old Trying to Unite the Democratic Party
In the 1991 gubernatorial election, a young investment advisor named Kirby Newburger came up with a slogan that was an unlikely hit. The race was between Edwin Edwards, then a two-time Democratic Representative from Louisiana’s 7th Congressional District with a reputation for corruption that was impossible to ignore, and David Duke, a former Klansman running under the banner of the Republican Party.
Panics About Contaminated Food Aren’t New, but Why Have Cops Joined In?
In 2005, a woman named Anna Ayala was dining in a Wendy’s in San Jose, when she claimed to have found a finger in her chilli. The resulting hysteria caused the restaurant chain to lose an estimated $21 million in business.
The Problem With Fact Checking A Stranger's Disability
On September 7, Sweet Anita, a Twitch streamer with 1.8 million followers, issued a statement: “Recently I reacted to a report that this man was faking tourettes syndrome. This reality is that people officially diagnosed with Tourette’s do all these things. Claiming that any of these instances are ‘gotcha’ moments has a very real impact on people suffering with Tourette’s because they are treated with suspicion and doubt every day, whether they are content creators or not.
NESARA and the Business of False Hope: Why Times of Austerity and Pandemic Create Fertile Ground for Die-Hard Scams
Investigation by Nick Backovic and Joe Ondrak. As we already know, conspiracy theories can come in various forms and degrees of maliciousness, ranging from the innocuous to the politically motivated and outright dangerous. Some of them may even contain a kernel of truth. In other cases, conspiracy theories can be used as an effective recruitment tool in a wider grift, where the main purpose of the disinformation being pushed will be to convert people’s beliefs into financial profit.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Nick
Contact Nick, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack