Washington Post

President Donald Trump defended his proclivity to spread misleading statements and falsehoods, saying that he tells the truth when he can. “Well, I try. I do try...and I always want to tell the truth,” President Trump said. “When I can, I tell the truth. And sometimes it turns out to be where something happens that’s different or there’s a change, but I always like to be truthful." President Trump also took issue with the media’s estimates of the sizes of caravans of Central American migrants slowly making their way toward the United States.

Officials in Beijing are providing governments around the world with technology and training that enable them to control their own citizens. As Chinese companies compete with their international counterparts in crucial fields such as artificial intelligence and 5G mobile service, the democratic norms that long governed the global Internet are falling by the wayside. When it comes to Internet freedom, many governments are eager to buy the restrictive model that China is selling.

There’s even more phony or misleading political news circulating on social media than there was in 2016, according to a new University of Oxford report that casts doubt on tech companies’ attempts to crack down on disinformation ahead of the midterms. The report also found that social media users were more apt to share “junk news” than what researchers considered “professional content,” which includes news from established media outlets and information from the government, academics or political candidates.

Gab has become the most visible of a collection of services catering to people mainstream companies such as Twitter and Facebook have rejected as too hateful, extreme or threatening in their posts as part of a crackdown on extremism.

The special counsel investigation is pressing witnesses about longtime Trump ally Roger Stone’s private interactions with senior campaign officials and whether he had knowledge of politically explosive Democratic emails that were released in October 2016. As part of his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III appears to be focused on the question of whether WikiLeaks coordinated its activities with Stone and the campaign.