Alva Review-Courier -

WASHINGTON (AP) — At first his stories seemed harmless. Tales about secret organizations plotting to take over the world, about the good guys working to save it, and about the proof that, if you knew where to look, was hiding in plain sight. To Ramon...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans on the right and the left have a lot more in common than they might think — including their strong distrust of each other. A survey published on Wednesday finds that when asked about core values including fairness, com...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Maybe they came from China. Maybe from somewhere farther away. A lot farther away. The downing of four aerial devices by U.S. warplanes has touched off rampant misinformation about the objects, their origin and their purpose, showin...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Unfounded claims about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines proliferated in the hours and days after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed during Monday's game, revealing how pervasive vaccine misinformation remains three years a...

Instances of racial slurs have soared on Twitter since Elon Musk purchased the influential platform, despite assurances from the platform that it had reduced hateful activity, a digital civil rights group reported Thursday. Researchers at the Center...

He may be good with rockets and electric cars, but don't turn to Elon Musk for public health predictions. "Probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April," the world's richest man tweeted about COVID-19 in March 2020, just as the...

TikTok may be the platform of choice for catchy videos, but anyone using it to learn about COVID-19, climate change or Russia's invasion of Ukraine is likely to encounter misleading information, according to a research report published Wednesday. Res...

The young man in the jeans and sunglasses proudly shows off his gun in the YouTube video, then instructs his 1 million subscribers how to fit extra ammo on his belt, and offers a chilling observation. "Pretty cool for active shooter stuff, if you...

As governments and social media companies have moved to suppress Russia's state media and the disinformation it spreads about the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin's diplomats are stepping up to do the dirty work. Russian embassies and consulates around...

Russia's baseless claims about secret American biological warfare labs in Ukraine are taking root in the U.S. too, uniting COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, QAnon adherents and some supporters of ex-President Donald Trump. Despite rebuttals from...

WASHINGTON (AP) — In March, as claims about the dangers and ineffectiveness of coronavirus vaccines spun across social media and undermined attempts to stop the spread of the virus, some Facebook employees thought they had found a way to help. By a...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Falsehoods about the election helped bring insurrectionists to the Capitol on Jan. 6, and now some who are facing criminal charges for their actions during the riot hope their gullibility might save them or at least e...

Los Angeles emergency room nurse Sandra Younan spent the last year juggling long hours as she watched many patients struggle with the coronavirus and some die. Then there were the patients who claimed the virus was fake or coughed in her face,...

As the coronavirus spread across the globe, so too did speculation about its origins. Perhaps the virus escaped from a lab. Maybe it was engineered as a bioweapon. Legitimate questions about the virus created perfect conditions for conspiracy...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia didn't have to lift a finger. In the weeks before the U.S. presidential election, federal authorities warned that Russia or other foreign countries might spread false information about the results to discredit the l...

Ever since Russian agents and other opportunists abused its platform in an attempt to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has insisted — repeatedly — that it's learned its lesson and is no longer a conduit for mis...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The email from a political action committee seemed harmless: if you support Joe Biden, it urged, click here to make sure you're registered to vote. But Harvard University graduate student Maya James did not click. Instead, s...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — As the world races to find a vaccine and a treatment for COVID-19, there is seemingly no antidote in sight for the burgeoning outbreak of coronavirus conspiracy theories, hoaxes, anti-mask myths and sham cures. The p...

NEW YORK (AP) — They are a symbol of celebration, loudly lighting up the night sky and best known in the U.S. as the explosive exclamation point to Fourth of July festivities. This year, fireworks aren't being saved for Independence Day. They've b...

Twitter and Pinterest are taking new steps to root out voting misinformation designed to suppress participation in the November elections. Twitter unveiled a new tool Wednesday that will make it easier for users in the U.S. to report tweets containin...

Facebook reiterated its policy of not removing misleading or bogus political ads Thursday, clarifying its own policies after CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered Congress confusing and sometimes incomplete testimony on the subject. On Wednesday, in response...

NEW YORK CITY (AP) — Vape shops in New York are scrambling to respond to Gov. Andrew Cuomo's plan to prohibit the sale of flavored vaping products — a ban poised to take effect Tuesday. Cuomo, a Democrat, proposed the ban on Sunday . The emergency re...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — The Roman Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, schools and hospitals, the late financier Jeffrey Epstein are some of the targets named in a flurry of sex abuse lawsuits filed Wednesday in New York as the state began accepting cases o...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — It was the early 1950s and Peter Vajda was a little boy attending a Catholic boarding school in the Bronx when he says a religious brother molested him. The brother is likely long dead, but the church survives. Just after m...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump linked the suspected gunman in the Dayton mass shooting to liberal candidates and organizations Wednesday, even as he pushed back against critics who tied the El Paso attack to his own comments on i...