NPR

A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the 2016 election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times. We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one. We tried to look up who owned it.

Eventually we found our man: Jestin Coler. Coler's company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won't say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry. Below are highlights of NPR's interview with Coler.

For decades Freedom House has been ranking the world on free speech, political and civil rights. In recent years, this nongovernmental organization has extended its research into the state of the Internet. And for the sixth consecutive year, it has found Internet freedom on a decline. In 2013, it was a rise in surveillance. In 2014, governments shifted more from behind-the-scenes control to overt repression and arrests. In 2015, it was more of the same, plus a push against encryption. Over the past year, the pressure fell increasingly on social media and messaging tools, often to quash protests or dissent, according to the latest Freedom on the Net report, which covers the period from June 2015 through May 2016. "In a new development, the most routinely targeted tools this year were instant messaging and calling platforms, with restrictions often imposed during times of protests or due to national security concerns," the report says, presenting two particular features that attract crackdowns:

1) Encryption on some of the apps, for instance Telegram, helps protect users' chats from surveillance;
2) The apps, which are free or cheap, challenge profits of traditional phone and other telecom companies that may be friendly with governments.

FBI Director James Comey's letter to Congress reporting a renewed look into e-mails that could be related to Hilary Clinton's private server rocked the presidential race on Oct 28. The Clinton campaign and supporters have jumped on Comey for making such a dramatic announcement so close to an election. The question being raised now is whether the timing and style of the announcement make it illegal.

Democrats allege this is more than just an 11th-hour inconvenience. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid says Comey may have violated a law known as the Hatch Act by making the investigation public this late in the election season. In a letter to Comey, Reid said the move revealed a "clear double standard" and accused Comey of using his position as FBI director to influence the election. The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from using their official authority or influence to affect the result of an election. An official complaint was filed with the Office of Special Counsel and the Office of Government Ethics by Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under the George W. Bush administration from 2005 to 2007. Painter wrote about his decision in an op-ed for The New York Times on Sunday, calling Comey's move "an abuse of power."

There will officially be no third-party candidate on the presidential debate stage. Libertarian Gary Johnson and Jill Stein of the Green Party officially did not make the cut, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced. To qualify for the stage, a candidate needs to be polling at 15 percent or higher in an average of five major national polls and qualify for the ballot in enough states to have a mathematical chance to win the presidency. Johnson had the best chance. His campaign said he made the ballot in all 50 states, the first third-party candidate to do so in 20 years since independent billionaire Ross Perot. But Johnson was only polling at an average of 8 percent in the five polls used for the criteria. (Stein is only averaging 3 percent.) Stein and Johnson struggled to gain traction, but both gained attention in an election that has seen dissatisfaction with their choices for president at similar levels to 1992. That year, Perot got the highest share of the vote for a third-party candidate since Taft in 1912.