Pegasus Research Consortium

Breaking News => World News - Current Events => Topic started by: space otter on October 04, 2017, 08:34:11 am

Title: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 04, 2017, 08:34:11 am
not surprized at this  but proves we need to question everything.

the porn guys trolling for kids get caught by cops posing as kids.
the u.s. reader gets caught by this  cause social media does not tell you who you are actually talking to
and stupid humans just pass it on as truth.
sigh


http://triblive.com/usworld/world/12798047-74/russia-taking-advantage-of-american-tragedies-such-as-las-vegas-shooting

Russia taking advantage of American tragedies such as Las Vegas shooting
Aaron Aupperlee     Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017, 10:54 a.m.

Updated 13 hours ago
There is a version of nearly every major news story that Russia wants you to know.

And the Kremlin has constructed a massive network of social media profiles — humans and bots — to make sure its stories winds up at the top of Twitter or in your Facebook feed.

“Any time there is any kind of socially divisive issue out there, they tend to hop on that,” said Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “We've seen their ability to get behind a message and push it up into the more general discussion.”

Alliance for Securing Democracy, an initiative to guard against Russian and other efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions in the United States and Europe, monitors 600 Twitter accounts that are linked to, affiliated with or supportive of the Russian government. In the aftermath of major events, those accounts post tweets and stories that amplify topics more apt to tear America apart than bring it together in the face of tragedies, devastation or turmoil.

For example, stories and posts by the accounts about protests of the national anthem by NFL players sided with President Trump and were critical of the players, coaches and league. Criticism of Trump and the federal response to the devastation in Puerto Rico by San Juan's mayor was politically motivated, according to the accounts. And the shooter in Las Vegas on Sunday night that killed at least 59 and injured more than 500 had radical learnings.

The top link shared for most of the day Monday by the 600 Russian-affilitated accounts monitored by the Alliance for Securing Democracy was a story on www.truepundit.com, a conservative news site given a “Pants on Fire” score by PolitiFact and called “super-dubious” by Politico, that cites exclusive information from an unnamed FBI source that Stephen Paddock “had ‘radical leanings' when it came to politics.”
“Any time there is a tragedy, there is ripe ground for disinformation,” said Schafer, coordinator for communications, social media and digital content for the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “Right now, I would say be very, very cautious of the news coming out.”

The 2016 election shone a spotlight on efforts by the Russian government to influence the United States' domestic affairs. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is overseeing a federal investigation into Russian interference in the election. Trump's campaign is under scrutiny. On Monday, Facebook turned over more than 3,000 ads to congressional investigators that the company says were bought by Russia. Twitter will go before the Senate and House intelligence committees Thursday.

But Russia's meddling didn't start or end with the 2016 election. Nor will the use of social media for harmful and even criminal enterprises, said David Hickton, director of University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security and a former U.S. Attorney who mounted pioneering prosecutions of cyber criminals.

American officials know Russia has learned how to manipulate social media to spread false information, amplify contentious topics and garner sympathy, support and awareness for pro-Russia causes. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been compromised, as have internet service providers, and they should cooperate with investigators to stop it, Hickton said.

“This is not something that we can pretend is not just happening,” Hickton said. “If fear and anger are being stoked by initiatives that are coming from our adversaries to sow discord in our country, we need to get a grip on that and stop it.”

Schafer said it might be too soon after the Las Vegas shooting to know how Russia might try to use it to manipulate Americans.

“As soon as it comes out what his motivation was — particularly if it appears to have come from a left-leaning background — you are quickly going to see a coordinated message around this,” Schafer said of the Russians.

He said to be wary of accounts that are relatively new and have lots of posts but few followers or friends. Any account filled with politics but void of family photos or posts about birthdays or other occasions should be suspect.

“Take a look at the person's account and see if it adds up to being a normal person,” Schafer said.

Aaron Aupperlee is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at aaupperlee@tribweb.com,  via Twitter @tinynotebook.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: petrus4 on October 04, 2017, 12:01:24 pm
From what I've seen of interviews with Putin at least, it's not so much that he is trying to destroy America, as much as that he is simply trying to ignore it completely.  He's spoken about getting together with China, India, and Brazil to come up with alternate reserve currencies to pay for oil and other things.

I know there are people like Soros around who are trying to create instability, yes; but a lot of the politicians I've seen now, seem to primarily be trying to route around America, rather than destroying it.  The goal isn't so much to attack America, but simply to render it irrelevant by making different economic arrangements with other countries, which America simply won't be part of at all any more.  In a sense, that is worse than war; it's indifference.

Communism is also active all over the place, at the moment.  You only need to spend some time on Reddit to know that.  Yet, despite being aware of that, I honestly don't think that Putin is leading the charge.  I think he's a lot more interested in other things.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 04, 2017, 07:14:35 pm

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41484393

Tech giants sorry for false news about Las Vegas gunman
3 October 2017

Google and Facebook have apologised after their algorithms led to the promotion of inaccurate information about the Las Vegas shooting.

Posts from a 4chan messaging board that falsely identified the gunman as an individual who was not involved were circulated online.

Google says the posts only appeared in its Top Stories section if users searched for the erroneous name.

Facebook said it took down the posts within minutes.

Speculation gone viral

The problem occurred when users began speculating about the identity of the gunman on 4chan, a controversial anonymous messaging board.
The users named an individual on the Politically Incorrect message board, claiming that the person was a "far left loon" and a "social democrat".

The comments were picked up by several blogs and news sites, including an article by the right-wing political website, the Gateway Pundit.

Many users then searched for the erroneous name on Google. The internet giant's algorithms traced the original source of the story back to the 4chan message board and posted a link to it in the Top Stories section.

"Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing an inaccurate 4chan website in our search results for a small number of queries," a Google spokesperson told the BBC.

"Within hours, the 4chan story was algorithmically replaced by relevant results. This should not have appeared for any queries, and we'll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future."

However, Google said only a small number of search queries were made for the name, which suggests that not many people would have seen the 4chan link.

As for Facebook, the social network told the Associated Press that it began removing results relating to the Gateway Pundit and 4chan within minutes.

The Gateway Pundit's White House correspondent Lucian Wintrich told far-right conspiracy website Infowars that the article was only online for 10 minutes before it was taken down.

Despite Facebook's efforts to remove hyperlinks to the story, users had made screenshots of the incorrect story and continued to circulate these images online, which were harder to detect and take down.
"We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused," a Facebook spokesman said.

Who is responsible?

Google and Facebook have been criticised several times in the last 12 months for promoting content later found to be false, particularly relating to breaking news events.
Both tech giants have announced measures to fight inaccurate news in the last few months.

"Google and Facebook are much bigger than any media company now, but they insist that they are not publishers, that they are merely platforms, and as platforms, they don't need to take responsibility for their content," Prof Tim Luckhurst, head of Kent University's Centre for Journalism told the BBC.
"Governments create laws that allow broadcasters and newspapers to be sued, so it's up to the government to stand up to these websites and say that if anything relating to terrorism or false information is published, they can be sued."

Prof Luckhurst pointed out that in the past, Google and Facebook had been quick to tweak their algorithms when requested to do so by the Chinese government.
"Algorithms are not organic creations - they are the product of very clever software writers.

"They can tweak them when the Chinese government asks them to, they can tweak them to do target advertising, but if you ask them to tweak their algorithms in relation to terrorism or untruths, they say, 'We're not publishers.'
"But they've demonstrated that they clearly can do it, and so they should do it."

Individuals who shared the content online could face legal action.

"It's for individuals to take responsibility for what they post on social media, this person could make a lot of money from suing all these people who shared the screenshot online," said Dominic Ponsford, editor of the Press Gazette.

"Google should be only indexing bona fide news sources - it should be straightforward to check what is a bona fide news source and what isn't.
"It's kind of astonishing that Google's not doing that, given the huge concern in America about fake news."

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: petrus4 on October 04, 2017, 11:58:34 pm
Call me anachronistic, but I am inclined to view Professor Tim Luckhurst as an apologist for tyranny.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 05, 2017, 10:36:14 am

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/las-vegas-shooting-rumors_us_59d28970e4b0655781549d7b?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

10/04/2017 05:44 pm ET Updated 3 hours ago
Why Misinformation Travels In The Wake Of Tragedies Like Las Vegas
During an emergent situation, rumors can have social and psychological consequences.


As Americans tried to make sense of Sunday night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, where at least 58 people were killed and more than 500 were wounded, they faced a secondary challenge: weeding through the inevitable misinformation that cropped up in the minutes, hours and days following the initial reports of the shooting.

Putting aside hoaxes and intentionally misleading conspiracy theories, false information that spread after the Las Vegas massacre included social media users misnaming the gunman, incorrect information suggesting the gunman’s girlfriend was complicit in the shooting (law enforcement officials say she was out of the country at the time), and inaccuracies about Las Vegas’ gun control laws.

“Whenever people are in high-stress situations with a lot of uncertainty — there’s a lot of uncertainty in an emergent situation — it’s a natural response for people to engage in what we call sense-making,” Ahmer Arif, a researcher and Ph.D. student at the University of Washington who has studied online rumors, told HuffPost. “They’re going to come up with different hypotheses and explanations for what’s going on.”

As part of his research on online rumors, which has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, Arif and his colleagues interviewed 15 individuals who unintentionally tweeted rumors or false facts during unfolding crisis situations.

One interviewee, who tweeted misinformation during the 2015 Paris attacks, remembered anxiety and uncertainty as the events developed:

It’s really hard to convey how little everyone knew. There were so many rumors flying around. Where there were attacks going on. How many attacks there were. Whether or not they were coordinated. Whether or not it was all a hoax or prank. No one knew anything for sure. The only thing people knew anything of at first was the thing that happened at the football stadium. But all the other little things happening in the different parts were kind of hearsay at first... things going around on Twitter about Les Halles, about the Louvre, about so many places in Paris that weren’t at all targets as it turned out.
Some of the people who spread online rumors were journalists, while others did not work in media. “From both parties, what I sensed was first and foremost there was a lot of distress [from having spread misinformation],” Arif said. “There’s a stigma attached to rumoring.”

ome said they were unhappy about having propagated a false story, thus making things worse for victims’ families. Journalists also worried about the reputational stakes of having promoting misinformation.

Arif described rumoring as part of human nature. But in the era of mass communication, rumors can spread faster and farther than ever. Social media, in particular, has increased the consequences of spreading misinformation. “It makes its effects amplified to some extent and there’s a permanence at times,” Arif said. Or, as the old saying goes, a lie can run halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.

The effects of this can range from the social to the psychological. Here’s how misinformation might affect people trying to understand and process events like the Las Vegas massacre.

‘Nobody likes a half circle’

“Early information is always incomplete,”

rest at link
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 07, 2017, 10:53:15 am

  would you consider manipulation of the facts as fake news.. or just straight out lies or opinion offered as fact...hummmmm???


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mitchell-sunderland-fired-from-vice_us_59d7d792e4b0f6eed3503693?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
 
10/06/2017 04:22 pm ET Updated 17 hours ago
Mitchell Sunderland Fired From Vice After BuzzFeed’s Bombshell Report
Vice told BuzzFeed it was “shocked and disappointed” by the Broadly writer’s “highly inappropriate and unprofessional conduct.”
 
Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream
A cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals the truth about Steve Bannon’s alt-right “killing machine.”





https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.gv0bzdQWm#.ouJYyVWE8
Posted on October 5, 2017, at 4:28 p.m
 
These new emails and documents, however, clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream.

It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.

These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.

They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way.

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 08, 2017, 12:21:53 pm


how about just plain old incompetence.. should that be labeled fake?




ahhhhhhhhh  let the reader be aware  :'(  are we dumber or just lazier when it comes to information?



http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/paddocks-girlfriend-used-two-social-security-numbers-and-was-married-to-two-men-at-the-same-time/ar-AAsSelw?li=BBnb7Kz


RETRACTED: Paddock's Girlfriend Used Two Social Security Numbers And Was Married to Two Men at the Same Time
 Newsweek Newsweek
Newsweek Europe
4 days ago


Newsweek has retracted its story that reviewed public records of Marilou Danley, the girlfriend of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock.

The initial report was based on the marriage record of Danley, who was known under a different name when she married Geary Danley (like DUH !!! most  women have a different name when they marry..idiot.!)
in Clark County, Nevada. Newsweek mistakenly matched that record to a second public record of a different person.

The mistake was revealed when a Newsweek reporter re-interviewed a person who had initially declined to comment for our story.


Danley remains a "person of interest" in the shooting investigation of 59 people, including the gunman, Sunday night in Las Vegas.

Newsweek regrets the error.

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on October 08, 2017, 01:43:39 pm
The mistake was revealed when a Newsweek reporter re-interviewed a person who had initially declined to comment for our story.
Funny how they try to find someone to blame, as if that person not talking to them before was the reason for them not to check things.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 09, 2017, 07:44:27 am


ahhhh i see it's not fake  it's just  the

influence of  disinformation

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/google-uncovers-russian-bought-ads-on-youtube-gmail-and-other-platforms/ar-AAt9cS3?li=BBnbfcL

Google uncovers Russian-bought ads on YouTube, Gmail and other platforms
 Washington Post - Washington Post
Elizabeth Dwoskin, Adam Entous
2 hrs ago

SAN FRANCISCO — Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the company's investigation.

The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company’s DoubleClick ad network, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that have not been made public. Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world’s largest online video site.

The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook -- a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far.

Google previously downplayed the problem of Russian meddling on its platforms. Last month, Google spokeswoman Andrea Faville told The Washington Post that the company is "always monitoring for abuse or violations of our policies and we've seen no evidence this type of ad campaign was run on our platforms."

Nevertheless, Google launched an investigation into the matter, as Congress pressed technology companies to determine how Russian operatives used social media, online advertising, and other digital tools to influence the 2016 presidential contest and foment discord in U.S. society.

Google declined to provide a comment for this story. The people familiar with its investigation said that the company is looking at a set of ads that cost less than $100,000 and that it is still sorting out whether all of the ads came from trolls or whether some originated from legitimate Russian accounts.

To date, Google has mostly avoided the scrutiny that has fallen on its rival Facebook. The social network recently shared about 3,000 Russian-bought ads with Congressional investigators that were purchased by operatives associated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian-government affiliated troll farm, the company has said.

Some of the ads, which cost a total of about $100,000, touted Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and the Green party candidate Jill Stein during the campaign, people familiar with those ads said. Other ads appear to have been aimed at fostering division in United States by promoting anti-immigrant sentiment and racial animosity. Facebook has said those ads reached just 10 million of the 210 million U.S. users that log onto the service each month.

At least one outside researcher has said that the influence of Russian disinformation on Facebook is much greater than the company has so far  acknowledged and encompasses paid ads as well as posts published on Facebook pages controlled by Russian agents. The posts were shared hundreds of millions of times, said Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

In a blog post, Facebook wrote it is also looking at an additional 2,200 ads that may have not come from the Internet Research Agency.

"We also looked for ads that might have originated in Russia — even those with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort," the company wrote last month. "This was a broad search, including, for instance, ads bought from accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian — even though they didn’t necessarily violate any policy or law. In this part of our review, we found approximately $50,000 in potentially politically related ad spending on roughly 2,200 ads."

Meanwhile, Twitter said that it shut down 201 accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. It also disclosed that the account for the news site RT, which the company linked to the Kremlin, spent $274,100 on its platform in 2016. Twitter has not said how many times the Russian disinformation was shared. The company is investigating that matter and trying to map the relationship between Russian accounts and well-known media personalities as well as influencers associated with the campaigns of Donald Trump and other candidates, said a person familiar with Twitter's internal investigation. RT also has a sizeable presence on YouTube.

Twitter declined to comment for this story.

Executives for Facebook and Twitter will testify before Congressional investigators on Nov. 1. Google has not said whether it will accept a similar invitation to do so.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in January that Russian president Vladmir Putin intervened in the U.S. election to help Donald Trump win. But Silicon Valley companies have received little assistance from the inte

rest at link
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on October 09, 2017, 03:37:55 pm
So, Google finally found that misinformation works both ways.  :P

Quote
Meanwhile, Twitter said that it shut down 201 accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. It also disclosed that the account for the news site RT, which the company linked to the Kremlin, spent $274,100 on its platform in 2016.
Twitter "linked RT to the Kremlin"? How smart of them for noticing. It was created as part of the official Russian news agency, RIA Novosti.

What I find funny is that it looks like they are looking for Russian sources instead of identifying the sources of suspicious ads, so they are looking for Russian interference but only for Russian interference. Interference from any other sources is not being investigated.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 16, 2017, 02:55:28 pm


yikes   :(   wonder who fell for this  guys stuff ?


http://nypost.com/2017/09/26/fake-news-writer-who-thinks-he-got-trump-elected-found-dead-in-bed/?utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_2091396


Fake news writer who thought he ‘got Trump elected’ found dead in bed
By Joe Tacopino September 26, 2017 | 10:51pm | Updated


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSkgPr31Bgs


An infamous online troll and fake news writer was found dead in his Arizona home, authorities said Tuesday.

Paul Horner, who penned debunked articles about Bill Murray running for president and President Barack Obama opening a Muslim museum, was discovered unresponsive in his bed Sept 19.

There were no signs of foul play, according to the Maricopa County medical examiner, and there was evidence the death could be due to an “accidental overdose.”

During the 2016 presidential election, Horner created a list of websites that appeared to be legitimate news sites to spread false information.

One article that claimed protesters who disrupted Donald Trump rallies were paid $3,500 went viral on the internet and fueled endless rumors about the alleged conspiracy.

Despite the fact that no evidence existed, Trump repeated the charge about the paid protesters while on stage during one of his rallies.

Horner told the Washington Post last November that although the information was clearly fabricated, he made thousands of dollars each month from them because Trump’s supporters were “easy to fool.”

In the same interview, Horner said he thought Trump won the White House because of him.

“His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything,” Horner told the paper about Trump.

Another notable fake news items claimed Horner was a Secret Service agent who penned a book revealing Obama to be a gay Muslim.

The Associated Press fact check from last December cited a Secret Service spokesman as saying records dating back to 1990 reveal no agent named Paul Horner.

FILED UNDER 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ,  ARIZONA ,  FAKE NEWS ,  INTERNET TROLLS ,  JOURNALISM ,  PHOENIX ,  SOCIAL MEDIA
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on October 16, 2017, 04:26:24 pm
not surprized at this  but proves we need to question everything.


“Any time there is any kind of socially divisive issue out there, they tend to hop on that,” said Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “We've seen their ability to get behind a message and push it up into the more general discussion.”

So....  your saying that the Democrats are saying "The Russians did it!" ?

 ::)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on October 16, 2017, 04:35:33 pm
Despite the fact that no evidence existed, Trump repeated the charge about the paid protesters while on stage during one of his rallies.

Well finding "Paid to protest" ads on Craigslist is easy  and they are real. Anything form people needed to hold signs in front of a pet shop to Unions needing bodies to block access to construction sites. Sometime they want silent sign holders to show numbers, sometimes they want the 'beefy' type in case of trouble

Anyone who says all paid protest ads are fake just doesn't face reality :P  Just pick  any city craigslist and watch the "gigs" - "events" section

Quote
because Trump’s supporters were “easy to fool.”

Sounds prejudiced :P If you listen to the Man on the Street interviews it seems Democrats are just as easily fooled, especially the California ones :P

Quote
“His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything,” Horner told the paper about Trump.

That sounds like about 99% of people on Facebook and Twitter....  "ZOMG!!! Is that true?  I need to share it" is about the typical reply

Killing False news reporters .... now THAT might actually be useful :P
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 16, 2017, 07:43:22 pm
Quote
So....  your saying that the Democrats are saying "The Russians did it!" ?

WHOA there trigger.. i'm not saying anything
just pointing out how easy the sheeple are hearded
and i was not  quoting this as political

EXCEPT

that people believe stupid things..without any proof or checking

this was not meant as  political

only as a  "show" of things being said and that  folks should look before leaping


you want political  go start another thread


and dealing with craigs list can get you killed
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 26, 2017, 10:51:17 am


is  the old time word propaganda  the new word fake news?



https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/twitter-ban-russia-today-rt-sputnik-ads_us_59f1f036e4b077d8dfc7ccfa?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

Twitter Bans Russia Today, Sputnik From Buying Advertising
U.S. intelligence regards both as part of “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine.”

By Ryan Grenoble

vid at link

Effective immediately, Twitter will no longer permit advertising on the platform from Russia Today (which uses the moniker “RT”) or Sputnik.

Twitter announced the changes in a blog post Thursday morning, linking the companies’ accounts to “Russian efforts to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 Presidential election.” While advertising related to them will cease, the accounts themselves will remain in operation.

Both media outlets are backed by the Russian government and push political narratives favoring its officials. In January, a U.S. intelligence report concluded the two are arms of “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine.”

The social media outlet disclosed RT spent $274,100 on ads in 2016, and $1.9 million on ads since joining the platform in 2011. Twitter said Thursday it will donate those funds to an external group researching “the use of Twitter in civic engagement and elections, including use of malicious automation and misinformation.”

RT responded to the decision in an opinion piece, calling the accusations that it’s seeking to influence people via advertising on Twitter “absolutely groundless.”

The Russian outlet claimed the real culprit here is Twitter itself, blaming the company for recruiting RT to spend heavily on ads during the 2016 election.

“Twitter pushed RT for a large ad buy for the 2016 US election, but the channel declined the offer,” wrote Deputy Editor-in-Chief Kirill Karnovich-Valua.

Sputnik Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan called Twitter’s decision “regrettable,” and reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed the country would respond “swiftly and symmetrically.”

On Tuesday, Twitter announced a number of changes to how it treats advertising on the network, with an eye on political advertising in particular.

The steps, which aim to make political messaging more transparent, follow a similar push by Facebook. Both companies are making policy changes after the federal government launched investigations into their conduct during the 2016 election. The actions also come amid a fear of increased government regulation of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Twitter has been under heightened scrutiny from lawmakers, who very publicly criticized the company in late September, after closed-door briefings indicated it had not done enough to investigate its role in misinformation campaigns during 2016 election.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, called its presentation “inadequate on almost every level,” adding Twitter’s efforts “showed an enormous lack of understanding ... of how serious this issue is, [and] the threat it poses to democratic institutions.”

Troublingly, both Twitter and Facebook have been scrubbing their platforms of data ― and, in Facebook’s case, thousands of potentially incriminating posts ― that’s invaluable to researchers investigating the Russian disinformation campaign.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on October 26, 2017, 01:04:06 pm

is  the old time word propaganda  the new word fake news?

No it's still propaganda :P but it was LEGALIZED under Obama


The NDAA Legalizes The Use Of Propaganda On The US Public

(http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4fbaa47769bedd810f000004-506-253/thendaa-legalizes-the-use-of-propaganda-on-the-us-public.jpg)
1948 propaganda Santa

The newest version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes an amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on the American public, reports Michael Hastings of BuzzFeed.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5


"Never let TRUTH get in the way of a good story" ~ Mark Twain


U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans

For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs ...

http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/

So... there ya go...  fake news is NOW real news :P

VELCOME TO AMERIKA!!!


Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on October 26, 2017, 01:39:22 pm
The social media outlet disclosed RT spent $274,100 on ads in 2016, and $1.9 million on ads since joining the platform in 2011.
2016 - 2011 = 6 years

$1.9 / 6 = $316,666

That means that RT spent less on ads in 2016 than on previous years. :)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 27, 2017, 05:03:43 pm


thanks Z for that link and it really needs to be read by anyone looking at any news from anywhere

let the reader be skeptical of all  regardless of the source
it's all slanted

everyone wants to get you to believe their story




http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5

The amendment — proposed by Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and passed in the House last Friday afternoon — would effectively nullify the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion.


.........................................




https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736/text
Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 - Congress.gov
https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736/text
May 10, 2012 - To amend the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 to authorize the domestic dissemination of information and ...




http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to-americans/
U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to ...
foreignpolicy.com/.../u-s-repeals-propaganda-ban-spreads-government-made-news-to...
Jul 14, 2013 - The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous ...



http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5

NDAA Legalizes Propaganda - Business Insider
www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5
May 21, 2012 - The amendment — proposed by Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam ... the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which explicitly forbids information and ..




http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/congress-propaganda/
Is Congress Really Authorizing US Propaganda at Home? – Mother ...
www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/congress-propaganda/
May 22, 2012 - Moreover, the amendment could conceivably bring more of the government's overseas information ... modifies the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948.
How the NDAA Allows US Gov to Use Propaganda Against Americans ...



https://www.occupycorporatism.com/how-the-ndaa-allows-us-gov-to-use-propaganda-against-americans/
https://www.occupycorporatism.com/how-the-ndaa-allows-us-gov-to-use-propaganda...
Jul 22, 2013 - The newest version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has an amendment added that negates the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 ...
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on October 27, 2017, 05:26:01 pm

everything should say paid for by....


http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41785158

Facebook to disclose more on political ads
51 minutes ago
 From the section Technology


Facebook has announced measures to make political advertising on the social media platform more transparent.

Political advertisers will have to verify their identity and location and their posts will carry a disclosure saying "paid for by".

The steps come amid allegations that Russian-backed groups used social media ads to interfere in the US election.

Executives from Facebook and other internet giants will testify before a Senate hearing on Tuesday.

"When it comes to advertising on Facebook, people should be able to tell who the advertiser is and see the ads they're running, especially for political ads," Rob Goldman, Facebook's vice president of ads, said in a blog post.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on November 01, 2017, 08:52:06 pm


it's probably only going to get harder to find the truth of anything..


http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41837435
Facebook, Twitter and Google berated by senators on Russia
Dave Lee
North America technology reporter
1 November 2017
 From the section Technology

Russian operatives, likely working from St Petersburg, provoked angry Americans to take to the streets, a US Senate committee heard on Wednesday.
The May 2016 protest, arranged by a group named Heart of Texas, was one example of Kremlin-backed efforts to destabilise the American electoral process.
Lawyers for three technology companies - Facebook, Twitter and Google - were told they were grossly underestimating the scale of the problem.
"You just don't get it," said California Senator Dianne Feinstein.
"What we’re talking about is a cataclysmic change. What we’re talking about is the beginning of cyber-warfare."


She added: "We are not going to go away, gentlemen. This is a very big deal."
In the streets
Facebook said earlier this week that as many as 126 million people might have been reached by Russian propaganda efforts, a combination of paid advertisements and so-called "organic" posts that spread naturally as other users share the content.
It added on Wednesday that an additional 16 million users could have been reached via photo-sharing app Instagram, which the company also owns.

Reality Check: When 126m isn't 126m on Facebook
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41819819

Russian trolls' social-media posts put on display
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41829537

Facebook uncovers 'Russian-funded' misinformation campaign
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41182519


It was organic posts that were under the most scrutiny from the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.
Senator Mark Warner, the committee's deputy chairman, discussed how the Russian-made Heart of Texas group amassed 250,000 followers.


The group then created an event to be held at an Islamic culture centre in Houston. The event was titled "Stop Islamization of Texas".
The protest duly took place, as did a counter-protest. Local media at the time reported that the organisers "could not be found" at the event.

Twitter's Russia briefings 'inadequate'
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41436406

Can US election hack be traced to Russia?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38370630


Another example shared on Wednesday showed an account sharing "benign" posts on Christianity later shifting to anti-Hillary Clinton posts after the group had reached a critical mass of users.
Twitter, too, faced criticism for potentially under-reporting the extent of automated bots on its network.

The firm's lawyer Sean Edgett said Twitter's own research suggested that less than 5% of its 330 million users were bots. Senator Warner, however, said independent research suggested the number was perhaps as high as 12-15%.

Fake news
The companies, speaking individually but agreeing on every issue, said they were "deeply concerned" that they had become the leading platforms for "fake news" on the internet.

"We cannot defeat this evolving shared threat alone," Facebook's top lawyer Colin Stretch said.

LISTEN: Russian-backed Facebook post row in a minute
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05lkf6s

However, none of the firms would commit to backing the Honest Ads Act, which would regulate online advertising, focusing on greater transparency around political advertising.

Twitter's Mr Edgett said the companies wanted some "fine-tuning" to the proposals but supported its goals.

Several senators suggested that more hearings and consultation would be needed, expressing their frustration that the companies were not being represented by higher-ranking executives.

"I'm disappointed that you're here, and not your CEOs," said independent senator Angus King.

"If we go through this exercise again we should appreciate seeing the top people."

"I wish your CEOs were here," concurred Democrat senator Joe Manchin.

"They have to answer to this."
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on November 02, 2017, 07:30:09 am

really makes you wonder just how many advertising ploys have been used on the shepple  thru the years...sigh   ::)

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russian-facebook-ads-examples-election_us_59fa16d1e4b01b474047d7a5?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

11/01/2017 05:50 pm ET
Here Are Some Of The Ads Russia Paid To Promote On Facebook
The ads are separate from 80,000 other Facebook posts that have so far been linked back to Russia.

By Ryan Grenoble

starts with a 2 min vid

Two months after Facebook first acknowledged it was paid to promote 3,000 divisive Russian-backed ads during the 2016 election, we’re finally getting a look at some of the ads themselves.

Members of the House and Senate released redacted versions Wednesday of just over a dozen of the ads (scroll down to see them) during congressional testimony from senior staff at Facebook, Twitter and Google concerning Russian meddling in the election through social platforms.

In an earlier analysis of its content, Facebook said the ads focused on polarizing issues, such as immigration, race relations and gay rights, in a clear attempt to foment division.

In one particularly troubling example highlighted by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C), Russians masqueraded on Facebook as both a pro-Islam “United Muslims of America” group and an anti-Islam “Heart of Texas” group, then scheduled opposing rallies on the same day in the same area of Houston.

Followers of both Facebook groups dutifully attended, then clashed with the counter-rally across the street:

pic
“What neither side could have known was that Russian trolls were encouraging both sides to battle in the streets and create division between real Americans,” Burr said.

“Ironically, one person who attended stated, ‘The Heart of Texas promoted this event, but we didn’t see one of them,’” Burr added. “We now know why. It’s hard to attend an event in Houston, Texas, when you’re trolling from a site in St. Petersburg, Russia.”

The ads are separate from 80,000 other Facebook posts linked to Russian operatives that reached 126 million Americans during the election.

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) directed particularly pointed criticism at Facebook on Tuesday during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, asking Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch how Russian operatives could get away with paying for these ads in rubles yet raise no flags.

“Why did Facebook, which prides itself on processing billions of data points simultaneously, somehow not make the connection that electoral ads paid for in rubles were coming from Russia?” Franken asked.

“Those are two data points,” he added, driving the point home. “How could you not connect those two dots?”

Stretch acknowledged the company could have done better, casting it as “a signal we should’ve been alert to and we missed.”

Here are some of the ads:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russian-facebook-ads-examples-election_us_59fa16d1e4b01b474047d7a5?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

WOW some really  eye opening ads for sheeple and others there
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on November 02, 2017, 02:02:33 pm
This whole "Russian interference" is ridiculous.

Apparently, it's only a problem because it was made by Russians. Facebook rules say nothing about that type of posts, and the paid adverts are (supposedly) reviewed and only published after being accepted, so it means they considered them good enough to publish.

The fact that they have looked for Russian posts instead of a specific type of post is also interesting, as it looks like posts like that made by any other country are OK.  :P
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: micjer on November 03, 2017, 06:05:55 am
I agree ArMaP.

Another attempt to smear Trump.  If it were any other country it would be non news as no one would care.  Russians are not that evil, only the media makes them out to be.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: dreb13 on November 03, 2017, 07:53:57 am
Russians are not that evil, only the media makes them out to be.

https://extranewsfeed.com/the-trail-of-dead-russians-da27ee4a2bdc
 
::)



Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on November 03, 2017, 10:07:55 am


ok no offence to you guys but i think you are missing the point here..
i was not going political even though most are political examples..they are easy to get and have a new name....fake news

imo the point is how influencing the flock has become an out of country event
it's all slanted to influence you to see things in a way that you wouldn't if you knew the truth

sure russia is a player  but so are others ..our own country included
the thing with russia is that they don't govern the same way as we do but would like to change that so yeah it's a big deal

take the  cage free eggs commercial as a prime example...
it is slanted in a way to make you see something that isn't there

who in the hell cares if the eggs are in cages or not..
it's the chickens  you should ask about..
are they in cages? or free range ?
but what do you think about when you hear that.CAGE FRRE EGGS ?
.do you see eggs being free or chickens

 see my point..
it's the old slight of hand...smoke and mirrors used on a grand scale because of social media

social media has become more of a way to herd the sheeple than a way to keep in touch with your friends
it's a free space for liars, cheats, bullies and scams
critical thinking be damned..no one would lie on purpose now would they ? ! ?
no reason to look behind the curtain for yourself

and the label has become fake news....it's not just for politics anymore




sigh


i don't have a beef with the russians .. just shepple herders
however they become  very visible when the smoke clears

sigh

i was giving examples of how easy for the sheeple herder and  trying to warn us all to be more critical of stuff and not join the herd

i will restrain my impulse to shout "LOOK OUT"  from now on..

sigh

even a cold wet garden is looking good right now
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Shasta56 on November 03, 2017, 01:23:53 pm
I use social media to keep up with friends and family.  I also read the news that comes across.  I think about what the news articles are saying.  I don't automatically believe or disbelieve.  I do ask myself if what is being said makes sense.

Shasta
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on November 03, 2017, 01:41:24 pm
https://extranewsfeed.com/the-trail-of-dead-russians-da27ee4a2bdc
 
::)
Russians pro and against Putin, some Ukrainians, some that didn't die (and are against Putin), that list could be the result of many interconnected interests, Russian and foreign.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on November 03, 2017, 01:53:10 pm
social media has become more of a way to herd the sheeple than a way to keep in touch with your friends
it's a free space for liars, cheats, bullies and scams
critical thinking be damned..no one would lie on purpose now would they ? ! ?
no reason to look behind the curtain for yourself
Gathering places where people are anonymous have always been a target for liars, it was only a question of time. We can see that in Internet forums and, before that, on the newsgroups. The only thing that has changed is the medium used.

Quote
i was giving examples of how easy for the sheeple herder and  trying to warn us all to be more critical of stuff and not join the herd
I think the problem was the fact that you did use a political topic, so the political side took over, as usual.  :P

Quote
even a cold wet garden is looking good right now
Any place without politics looks good, and, in many circumstances, any place without other people look good also. :)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on November 04, 2017, 01:14:35 pm



Quote
Any place without politics looks good, and, in many circumstances, any place without other people look good also. :)

Dang ArMaP..we must be related !

bwhahahahahahahahahahah

 ;D   8) 
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Shasta56 on November 04, 2017, 01:58:02 pm
I agree on both counts.  Especially the no people part. 

Shasta
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on January 03, 2018, 10:16:40 pm


well this  should be interesting to see how it is established as fake or not..

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42560688

Emmanuel Macron: French president announces 'fake news' law
8 hours ago

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced plans for a new law to combat so-called fake news.

He said that during elections social media would face tougher rules over the content that they put online.

Deliberate attempts were being made to blur lines between truth and lies and undermine people's faith in liberal democracy, he added.

Correspondents say there is no question that Mr Macron had Russia in mind when he made the announcement.

He has already spoken out publicly about what he sees as Moscow's attempts to manipulate opinion in Europe and the United States.

>How fake news plagued 2017
>Facebook to expose Russian fake news pages
>Fake news: Universities offer tips


'Protect democracy'
Speaking at a new year reception for the media, Mr Macron said it was possible now at a cost of just a few thousand euros to propagate untruths over social media.

"Thousands of propaganda accounts on social networks are spreading all over the world, in all languages, lies invented to tarnish political officials, personalities, public figures, journalists," he said.

In response, he proposed imposing tougher rules on social media about revealing the sources of apparent news content.

He also said limits would be put on how much could be spent on sponsored news material.

"We will develop our legal system to protect democracy from this fake news," he said, quoted by AFP.

France's audiovisual regulator would be given extra powers to "fight any destabilisation attempt by television channels controlled or influenced by foreign states", he added.

Mr Macron denounced Russia media outlets RT and Sputnik at a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin last May, accusing them of spreading "deceitful propaganda".

Since then RT has launched a French-language TV channel.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on January 04, 2018, 07:07:32 am

well this  should be interesting to see how it is established as fake or not..
The only thing I think can be done without turning into censorship and, because of what he said, I think they are thinking about, is to make a clear distinction between personal opinions and paid space, as it appears that paid posts were the (supposed) problem.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on January 04, 2018, 08:41:17 am


i agree with you Armap
but i was wondering how strongly they planned on inforceing their law..
will they do background checks on single names to make sure that they are opinions and not planted comments. ?
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Eighthman on January 04, 2018, 10:58:12 am
The French were suckers and fools to trust Macron.  It's just another, 'vote for any one you want, get the same result'. 

Note the usual propaganda about Russian news. Meanwhile, the US violates international law, builds bases in Syria, helps terrorists, wrecks Libya and then claims to have defeated ISIS after Russia actually finished them.  Maybe Macron is some Vichy official who got reincarnated.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on February 17, 2018, 02:29:40 pm

while i don't feel this is 'fake news' per se..it is about fake news
it isn't fake news because it is

Quote
The charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller are seen as a major development in his continuing probe into the US 2016 election.
i feel the bbc is the least bias and the article is verrrrrrry interesting regardless of what polictial feelings you have
i think it tells us, that if nothing else.
beware : qualify your source : do more research


the entire article is worth the time and can be found at the link


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43095881


What does the indictment say?

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said there was no allegation that any American was "a knowing participant in this illegal activity" nor was it alleged that the meddling altered the election outcome.

Three of the people named have also been accused of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and five have been accused of aggravated identity theft. Three companies have also been charged.

The 37-page indictment says a group of Russians:

Posed as Americans, and opened financial accounts in their name; some visited the US
Spent thousands of dollars a month buying political advertising
Purchased US server space in an effort to hide their Russian affiliation

Organised and promoted political rallies within the United States

Posted political messages on social media accounts that impersonated real US citizens

Promoted information that disparaged Hillary Clinton

Received money from clients to post on US social media sites

Created themed groups on social media on hot-button issues, particularly on Facebook and Instagram

Operated with a monthly budget of as much as $1.25m (£890,000)

Financed the building of a cage large enough to hold an actress portraying Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform

The indictment says those involved systematically monitored the success of their internet posts.

and who is to say that other countries  haven't done the same
after all there are groups in this country that carry out the same 'attempt at influencing' under many names



some other links

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43091945
Russia-Trump inquiry: Full text of Mueller's indictment
16 February 2018


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40709270
Russia-Trump: Who's who in the drama to end all dramas?
23 January 2018


http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43093390
The tactics of a Russian troll farm
16 February 2018


i think the most telling quote is this one:
Quote
"The Americans are very impressionable people, they see what they want to see...," he was quoted as saying by Russian news agency Ria Novosti on Friday. "I'm not at all upset that I'm on this list. If they want to see the devil, let them see him."
opps forgot to add who was being quoted
Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as "Putin's chef"




baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on February 18, 2018, 06:55:12 am
Posed as Americans, and opened financial accounts in their name; some visited the US
I suppose that's the only possibility for an illegal action, if they used real people's identities, which I doubt.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on March 07, 2018, 12:20:36 pm


to the question of why would the russians bother
here's a thought


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putin-praises-trump-says-us-political-system-eating-itself/ar-BBJYFBa?li=BBnb7Kz

Putin praises Trump, says U.S. political system 'eating itself'
 Associated Press Associated Press
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press
1 hr ago

Speaking about the bitter tensions in Russia-West relations, Putin said they have been rooted in Western efforts to contain and weaken Russia.

"We are a great power, and no one likes competition," he said.
.
.
.
He added starkly: "Yes, it will mean a global catastrophe for mankind, for the entire world. But as a citizen of Russia and the head of Russian state I would ask: What is such a world for, if there were no Russia?"





Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on March 09, 2018, 08:26:09 am
 
is it  human nature to believe the false stuff or have we been conditioned somehow..sigh

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/study-finds-fake-info-travels-faster-than-truth-on-twitter/2018/03/08/7bea3748-2303-11e8-946c-9420060cb7bd_story.html?utm_term=.5bf8c1c6d5eb

Study finds false stories travel way faster than the truth

A new study published Thursday, March 8, 2018, in the journal Science shows that false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people. (Jeff Chiu/Associated Press)

By Seth Borenstein | AP March 8 at 4:19 PM
WASHINGTON — Twitter loves lies. A new study finds that false information on the social media network travels six times faster than the truth and reaches far more people.

And you can’t blame bots; it’s us, say the authors of the largest study of online misinformation.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at more than 126,000 stories tweeted millions of times between 2006 and the end of 2016 — before Donald Trump took office but during the combative presidential campaign. They found that “fake news” sped through Twitter “farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information,” according to the study in Thursday’s journal Science .

“No matter how you slice it, falsity wins out,” said co-author Deb Roy, who runs MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines and is a former chief media scientist at Twitter.

Twitter funded the study but had no say in the outcome, according to the researchers.

The scientists calculated that the average false story takes about 10 hours to reach 1,500 Twitter users, versus about 60 hours for the truth. On average, false information reaches 35 percent more people than true news.

While true news stories almost never got retweeted to 1,000 people, the top 1 percent of the false ones got to as many as 100,000 people.


And when the researchers looked at how stories cascade — how they link from one person to another like a family tree — false information reached as many as 24 generations, while true information maxed out at a dozen.

Concern over bogus stories online has escalated in recent months because of evidence the Russians spread disinformation on social media during the 2016 presidential campaign to sow discord in the U.S. and damage Hillary Clinton.

Social media companies have experimented with using computer algorithms and human fact-checkers to try to weed out false information and abuse online. Twitter earlier this month said it is seeking help from outside experts to better deal with the problem. And Facebook this week announced a partnership with The Associated Press to identify and debunk false and misleading stories about the midterm elections.

“We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns and increasingly divisive echo chambers,” tweeted Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough.”

The MIT study took the 126,285 stories and checked them against six independent fact-checking sites — snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com and urbanlegends.about.com— to classify them as true, false or mixed. Nearly two-thirds were false, just under one-fifth were true, and the rest were mixed.

The six fact-checking websites agreed with each other on classification at least 95 percent of the time, plus two outside researchers did some independent fact-checking to make sure everything was OK, said co-author Sinan Aral, an MIT management professor.

Lead author Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT data scientist, said the three false stories that traveled the farthest and fastest were about a Muslim guard called a hero in the Paris bombings of 2015; an Iraq war veteran finishing as runner-up to Caitlyn Jenner for an ESPN courage award ; and an episode of “The Simpsons” that had a story line in 2000 about a Trump presidency. (It was in 2015.)

University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a co-founder of factcheck.org, had problems with the way the study looked at true and false stories. The MIT team characterized a story’s truth on a 1-to-5 scale, with 1 being completely false. Factcheck.org, Jamieson said, looks more at context and does not label something either true or false.


She also suggested that calling this bogus information “false stories” does not capture how malignant it is. She said it would “better be called viral deception. VD. And treated as analogous to venereal disease.”

The researchers looked at obvious bots — automated accounts — and took them out. While the bots tweeted false information at a higher rate than humans, it wasn’t that much of a difference, and even without bots, lies still spread faster and farther, Roy said.

David Lazer, a political and computer scientist at Northeastern University who wasn’t part of the study but wrote an accompanying report, praised the MIT research but said the scientists may have missed a lot of bots and cyborgs — sort of in-between humans. His ongoing, not-yet-published research has found that about 80 percent of false stories come from just one-tenth of 1 percent of users.

The researchers dug deeper to find out what kind of false information travels faster and farther. False political stories — researchers didn’t separate conservative versus liberal — and stuff that was surprising or anger-provoking spread faster than other types of lies, Aral said.


“Falsehood was significantly more novel than the truth,” Aral said. “It’s easy to be novel when you make things up.”

That fits perfectly with previous research on the psychology of fake information, said Yale University’s Dan Kahan and Dartmouth College’s Brendan Nyhan, scientists who study the phenomenon.

“The more strange and more sensational the story sounds, the more likely they are going to retweet,” Kahan said.

Nyhan and Lazer said that while more fact-checking and education of people on how to tell fake from real can be helpful, the more effective solution will have to come from the social media platforms themselves.

Roy said the study results reminded him of the often-cited quotation that essentially says a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots — or pants — on. It’s been attributed to Mark Twain and Winston Churchill. But that would be misinformation. Politifact traced a version of it back to Jonathan Swift in 1710.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: starwarp2000 on March 09, 2018, 07:46:37 pm
Could we introduce a requirement that all Televisions have a "Bullshit Meter" incorporated?

This would alleviate the need to filter all news to ascertain whether it is correct or not.

My brain needs a rest  :)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: The Seeker on March 09, 2018, 07:50:01 pm
Could we introduce a requirement that all Televisions have a "Bullpoop Meter" incorporated?

This would alleviate the need to filter all news to ascertain whether it is correct or not.

My brain needs a rest  :)
I just said to hell with it and don't watch the news period.

 ::)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on March 10, 2018, 06:05:10 am
Could we introduce a requirement that all Televisions have a "Bullpoop Meter" incorporated?
There's a problem with that, who decides what is and what is not "bullpoop"?

Quote
My brain needs a rest  :)
It's easy, just ignore the things you don't need. :)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on March 14, 2018, 11:33:13 am

i guess anything you read online needs to be questioned  big time..sigh

POLITICS 03/14/2018 05:45 am ET

How A Twitter Fight Over Bernie Sanders Revealed A Network Of Fake Accounts
One Democratic Party consultant said an unnamed client controlled many of these accounts.

By Paul Blumenthal

Quote
Trevor, a Sanders supporter who declined to provide his last name for fear of being doxxed, but goes by @likingonline on Twitter, noticed a strange pattern of behavior when Albright responded to him. Her tweets addressing him were rapidly retweeted by the same series of accounts. This created a barrage of notifications making it look as though there was an avalanche of opposition to everything he said.

But as Trevor discovered, after an extensive amount of research that he posted online, these were not normal accounts. They appeared to be bots ― automated accounts masked as real people being used to amplify a particular political message. Who is really pulling the strings, however, remains a mystery.


entire article here:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democratic-bot-network-sally-albright_us_5aa2f548e4b07047bec68023
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on March 15, 2018, 11:06:16 am
evidence is adding up

Did Russian trolls just try to register for a Texas Democratic convention?
 NBC News NBC News
William M. Arkin and Kevin Monahan
4 hrs ago

On Saturday, March 24, hundreds of Texas Democratic Party activists will gather at the Austin Hyatt Regency to nominate candidates for political office in Travis County, a kick-off event leading up to the 2018 mid-term elections.

But some people who tried to register will not be attending, among them Candida McGruder. Gustavo Chubb. Geraldo Tinsley. Vincent Amundson. Roxie Male.

That's because these five individuals and 43 others who signed up to attend don't appear to be Travis County residents, or Texans, or even Americans. They might not even be real people. They may be pranksters — or they may be Russian trolls, and their appearance in Texas could represent the first public example of foreign probing of the 2018 elections.

Five senior intelligence officers, two current and three former, say the case of the Texas 48 looks like Russian meddling. And they tell NBC News that despite the clumsiness of the failed registrations, the Texas case fits a pattern of Russian behavior seen in its covert operations.

.
.
.

Maxey, legislative affairs director for the Texas Democratic Party and a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, said that at the time just over 2,500 Texas citizens had successfully registered online for the Travis County meeting. He went through the aborted registrations by hand, checking to see whether the registrations had been "kicked back" because of simple errors, in which case he would follow up with the individuals.

Maxey found a few unfinished registrations that were simple mistakes. But he identified 48 that were problematic, meaning they seemed unconnected to anybody living in Texas. Twenty-five of those 48 were trying to register with email addresses ending in "mail.ru." Those last two letters, .ru, are the Internet designation for domains in Russia.


entire article is here
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/did-russian-trolls-just-try-to-register-for-a-texas-democratic-convention/ar-BBKfd8I?li=BBnbcA1
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on March 19, 2018, 02:04:53 pm
ah it gets even grimmer.. the sheeple herders are using all the tools they can
escape sheeple   escape while you can


03/19/2018 03:21 pm ET Updated 42 minutes ago
By Nina Golgowski



Cambridge Analytica Execs Bragged Of Using Fake News, Sex To Sway Elections

The admissions were recorded during a probe into the firm, which was hired by President Trump’s 2016 campaign.


Disturbing undercover interviews with executives from U.K.-based political research firm Cambridge Analytica have revealed admissions of bribery, entrapment and the use of sex workers to sway political elections around the world, according to an investigative series airing Monday.

The results of a monthslong investigation by Britain’s Channel 4 News revealed Cambridge Analytica’s inner workings as told by Alexander Nix, the company’s chief executive, and Mark Turnbull, the managing director of CA Political Global, to a reporter posing as a client.

The interviews are part of Channel 4 News’ “Data, Democracy and Dirty Tricks” investigation series.
( for all the embedded links thru this article go to the posted link for this article)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=796&v=mpbeOCKZFfQ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=796&v=mpbeOCKZFfQ)

During phone calls and in-person meetings at a London hotel from November 2017 to January 2018, Nix was recorded bragging that his firm and parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) secretly influenced more than 200 elections around the world, including those in Nigeria, Kenya, the Czech Republic, India and Argentina.

Cambridge Analytica was also hired by President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. The firm recently made news for using data acquired by Facebook to build “psychographic profiles” about voters without their knowledge.

According to Channel 4′s meetings with Nix, his firm’s methods for influencing an election included putting certain politicians in compromising positions and secretly recording them, as well as conducting their work using fake IDs, websites, and under different company names so that the company’s relationship with the client is not publicly known.
“We do incognito very well indeed,” Nix said according to one December interview cited by Channel 4.

The company’s chief data officer, Dr. Alex Tayler, is also listed as having attended two of the meetings with the Channel 4 reporter.

During another interview in January, Nix reportedly said that one method of finding dirt on a candidate was to essentially create it.

“We’ll have a wealthy developer come in, somebody posing as a wealthy developer,” he said. “They will offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land, for instance. We’ll have the whole thing recorded on cameras, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the internet.”

twitter
https://twitter.com/Channel4News/status/975716455894409218?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fentry%2Fcambridge-analytica-under-cover-interviews_us_5aafebc3e4b0697dfe19352b&tfw_creator=Glowgow&tfw_site=HuffPostPol

In another example, the CEO reportedly said the firm will “send some girls,” specifically Ukranian women, to a candidate’s house to seduce the individual, an act that Nix said “works very well.”

“I’m just giving you examples of what can be done and what, what has been done,” he told the reporter.

Other methods involved making the public believe inaccurate facts about a certain candidate.

“I mean, it sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed,” he said.

... These are things that don’t necessarily need to be true, as long as they’re believed.”
“It’s no good fighting an election campaign on the facts,” Turnbull is reported as saying in November, “because actually it’s all about emotion, it’s all about emotion.”

Channel 4 noted that though Turnbull witnessed Nix’s comments on the use of sex workers, during a Dec. 19 interview, Turnbull said his company isn’t “in the business of entrapment” and “lying, making stuff up.”

“We wouldn’t send a pretty girl out to seduce a politician and then film them in their bedroom and then release the film. There are companies that do this, but to me, that crosses a line…” Turnbull is reported as saying.

A Cambridge Analytica spokesman, cited by Channel 4, denied reports that its firm and affiliates “use entrapment, bribes, or so-called ‘honey-traps’ for any purpose whatsoever ... ”

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from HuffPost on Monday.

View Part 1 of Channel 4′s “Data, Democracy and Dirty Tricks” series.

link:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cambridge-analytica-under-cover-interviews_us_5aafebc3e4b0697dfe19352b




RELATED...
Cambridge Analytica Expert Suspended By Facebook After Disclosing Data Misuse

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cambridge-analytica-expert-suspended-by-facebook-after-disclosing-data-misuse_us_5aaf0c2fe4b05b22180013d4

03/19/2018 07:27 am ET
Cambridge Analytica Expert Suspended By Facebook After Disclosing Data Misuse
“For blowing the whistle. On something they have known privately for 2 years.”
By Mary Papenfuss




and then there was an article a while back about the whistleblowers agent turning there info over to who they were blowing the whistle on
this world is f***ed up
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on March 20, 2018, 05:52:10 am
it continues ..
ok so farcebook was doing the investigating.? wonder what the 'proper' guys will find now.
are people really as stupid as this indicates...


03/19/2018 09:58 pm ET
By Antonia Blumberg

U.K. To Investigate Cambridge Analytica, Asks Facebook Auditors To Stand Down
“These investigations need to be undertaken by the proper authorities,” said one Parliament member.

British officials asked Facebook on Monday to pull auditors it hired to investigate Cambridge Analytica, the political research firm that was involved in a massive data breach during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In a statement, Facebook said forensic auditors from cybersecurity company Stroz Friedberg were on site at Cambridge Analytica’s London office on Monday evening until they were asked to leave.

“At the request of the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office, which has announced it is pursuing a warrant to conduct its own on-site investigation, the Stroz Friedberg auditors stood down,” Facebook said.

Facebook’s auditors had reportedly entered Cambridge Analytica’s office before British and European Union investigators could investigate.

British Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said Monday that she was requesting a warrant to access Cambridge Analytica’s servers after the firm didn’t cooperate with an investigation into whether it illegally acquired and used Facebook users’ data.

rest of the article is here
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/uk-cambridge-analytica-investigation_us_5ab05783e4b00549ac7e68cf


...........................

also article here

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/facebooks-data-scandal-could-get-even-worse/ar-BBKsyFX?li=BBnb4R7

Facebook says the user data in question was initially properly gathered by a psychology professor, who then passed it to Cambridge Analytica. That breached Facebook's rules.

Cambridge Analytica says it deleted all the data in 2015 when it learned that Facebook rules had been broken. It has agreed to an inspection by Facebook-hired auditors, Facebook said Monday.

Facebook shares suffered their biggest one-day fall in four years on Monday wiping $37 billion off the company's value. They are poised to fall again Tuesday, slipping 1% in premarket trading.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on March 20, 2018, 07:15:23 am


least anyone think this influencing / fake news is new   read this one
geeeeeeeeeesh


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/former-french-leader-sarkozy-held-over-libyan-funding-inquiry/ar-BBKsjY0?li=BBnb7Kz

Former French leader Sarkozy held over Libyan funding inquiry
 Reuters Reuters
By Brian Love
48 mins ago

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was held in custody on Tuesday and questioned by magistrates investigating whether late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi helped finance his 2007 election campaign, an official in the French judiciary said. It is the second major judicial investigation to fall on the 63-year-old, who served as president from 2007 to 2012.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on March 25, 2018, 09:43:22 am
  i am not on farce book but maybe someone can use some of this info to remove stuff on there..



entire article here
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/i-downloaded-14-years-of-my-facebook-data-and-heres-what-happened/ar-BBKEbnS?li=BBnb7Kz

I downloaded 14 years of my Facebook data and here's what happened
 CNN
Sara Ashley O'Brien
19 hrs ago


pieces from article

After downloading my stored data on the site — I've been a member since 2004 — I was presented with an enormous amount of personal details that have been collected about me over the years.


By visiting the Settings page, I clicked an option to download a copy of my data at the bottom of the general account section.

Facebook emailed me a link to download my data. The process took about 10 minutes. (The downloading time depends on how much data you've generated.) The data is segmented into groups: like ads, contact info, events, messages, timeline, and more.


Facebook also preserved conversations I had with people I've triedto forget.

 I needed to delete the history of our conversations in order to erase it from Facebook's digital memory .



How to control other data was more straightforward -- like manually revoking the Facebook app's permissions that I once authorized to access my Facebook information.






Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 02, 2018, 07:39:55 pm

ahhhhhhhh group speak.. right from the owners point of view


Local TV forced to denounce 'one-sided news' by America's largest media company


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T50pLTvwO80


Quote
Sinclair, which owns or operates more than 170 TV stations across the U.S., has come under fire in recent weeks for directing dozens of anchors to read from the same strongly worded script during on-air broadcasts.

“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media,” the script read. “Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias. ... This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

Deadspin created a supercut of anchors reading the script. ThinkProgress shared a similar clip that showed newscasters reciting the identical lines:

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 05, 2018, 10:47:42 am

 i'm all for  having two sides but when regular folk fall for this stuff i think it's very  sad..  but then  humans are a herd-able bunch, aren't they.?

Trump’s Most Influential White Nationalist Troll Is A Middlebury Grad Who Lives In Manhattan
Twitter troll “Ricky Vaughn” had a bigger influence on the 2016 election than NBC News and the Drudge Report. Here’s who he really is.
Who is Ricky Vaughn? That was one of the big questions for anyone following far-right politics during the 2016 presidential election. The Twitter troll who took his name and avatar from Charlie Sheen’s character in “Major League” was everywhere on social media, an indefatigable circulator of edgy memes and rah-rah Donald Trump boosterism.

And anti-Semitism and white nationalism:

(https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5ac532ce1e00008e0b7b09cd.png?ops=scalefit_720_noupscale)

He did this thing that people connected to organized white nationalism have not been able to do ― walk both sides of the extremist line in the sand,” said Keegan Hankes,

Ricky Vaughn also played an important role in amplifying disinformation injected into American politics by the Russian government

In the data set of significant accounts we looked at, Ricky Vaughn retweeted @TEN_GOP the most, by far. Although Twitter shut down his @Ricky_Vaughn99 handle in October 2016, another handle he used, @RapinBill, took over and retweeted @TEN_GOP at least 162 times between early March and late August 2017. (@RapinBill also retweeted @Pamela_Moore13, another Kremlin-controlled account, at least 37 times during this period.)
Curiously, @RapinBill, which is still active and followed by Donald Trump Jr.,
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-white-nationalist-troll-ricky-vaughn_us_5ac53167e4b09ef3b2432627


...........................................

ya know if you follow someone and know who you are following  because you agree with them that's one thing
but to just take anything you read as gospel  just proves how easily humans are being dumbed down and managed
i want out ..where my ride.!!!!!

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on April 05, 2018, 11:55:38 am
ahhhhhhhh group speak.. right from the owners point of view


Local TV forced to denounce 'one-sided news' by America's largest media company


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T50pLTvwO80

Well if it's HIS business and he doesn't fear any backlash, then he can dictate what he wants. They could have refused to say those things of course. But in all probability, they would be looking for employment elsewhere. But it's still a free country, isn't it? They can find employment else where, right?.. ;) ::)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on April 05, 2018, 11:57:26 am
i'm all for  having two sides but when regular folk fall for this stuff i think it's very  sad..  but then  humans are a herd-able bunch, aren't they.?

Trump’s Most Influential White Nationalist Troll Is A Middlebury Grad Who Lives In Manhattan
Twitter troll “Ricky Vaughn” had a bigger influence on the 2016 election than NBC News and the Drudge Report. Here’s who he really is.
Who is Ricky Vaughn? That was one of the big questions for anyone following far-right politics during the 2016 presidential election. The Twitter troll who took his name and avatar from Charlie Sheen’s character in “Major League” was everywhere on social media, an indefatigable circulator of edgy memes and rah-rah Donald Trump boosterism.

And anti-Semitism and white nationalism:

(https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5ac532ce1e00008e0b7b09cd.png?ops=scalefit_720_noupscale)

What if, just if, they thought that the cartoons and ramblings were funny...I know it's a stretch, but funny things have happended, haven't they?.. ::)

He did this thing that people connected to organized white nationalism have not been able to do ― walk both sides of the extremist line in the sand,” said Keegan Hankes,

Ricky Vaughn also played an important role in amplifying disinformation injected into American politics by the Russian government

In the data set of significant accounts we looked at, Ricky Vaughn retweeted @TEN_GOP the most, by far. Although Twitter shut down his @Ricky_Vaughn99 handle in October 2016, another handle he used, @RapinBill, took over and retweeted @TEN_GOP at least 162 times between early March and late August 2017. (@RapinBill also retweeted @Pamela_Moore13, another Kremlin-controlled account, at least 37 times during this period.)
Curiously, @RapinBill, which is still active and followed by Donald Trump Jr.,
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-white-nationalist-troll-ricky-vaughn_us_5ac53167e4b09ef3b2432627


...........................................

ya know if you follow someone and know who you are following  because you agree with them that's one thing
but to just take anything you read as gospel  just proves how easily humans are being dumbed down and managed
i want out ..where my ride.!!!!!

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on April 05, 2018, 01:00:35 pm
i am not on farce book but maybe someone can use some of this info to remove stuff on there..

The easiest way to remove facebook posts is to delete your account :P

However that may not be what you wish to do.

So there is a SOLUTION

Google Chrome has a free app  called SOCIAL BOOK POST MANAGER  Here is a link
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae?hl=en-US

Firefox has a similar one but I didn't need it so don't have a link

This App can be used with filters  You can delete all your posts,   You can delete posts others made on YOUR timeline and you can delete posts you made on other people's timeline

It is NOT 100%  I found you have to refresh several times and run it again. It works better if you do one month at a time but doing one YEAR at a time worked for me 90%

That left a few posts I had to remove manually.  And it needed several refreshes to get rid of the residual posts other people tagged you in

But now ALL my posts are gone  save a couple recent ones I left

It took a couple days because I had a lot  but its clean now  :D

I think I will add this to Members Help section
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 05, 2018, 03:23:53 pm


Quote
But it's still a free country, isn't it?


not as much as it used to be
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on April 05, 2018, 03:31:37 pm


not as much as it used to be
I'll agree on that one.

on another front, I'm slowly but surely coming to the belief of alternate timelines. I know it's an old age effect. But something isn't right. I can't put my finger on it yet but yeah, something happened.

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 05, 2018, 03:45:26 pm


Quote
on another front, I'm slowly but surely coming to the belief of alternate timelines. I know it's an old age effect. But something isn't right. I can't put my finger on it yet but yeah, something happened.

yeah for sure some of it is an age thing
but some daze i feel  like we are slipping in and out of timelines
so i am going with something IS happening...and no i can't put my finger on it either..sigh
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 05, 2018, 03:59:25 pm

hey Sarge... perfect example

i guess you can say anything as long as you don't believe it..
yeah something sure is goofy



Quote
ATLANTIC SACKS WILLIAMSON!
Atlantic Fires Kevin Williamson After Realizing He Believes The Things He Says
By Ashley Feinberg


no i didn't read the article and i don't know who that is but the headline sure proves  a time line point

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on April 05, 2018, 04:30:23 pm
no i didn't read the article and i don't know who that is but the headline sure proves  a time line point
How? ???
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 05, 2018, 08:24:11 pm


Quote
How? ???

perfect example

 you can say anything as long as you don't believe it..
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on April 05, 2018, 08:54:05 pm
Hmmm  in my old time line Judith Resnik died on the Challenger Shuttle explosion :P In THIS time line...

Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches about federalism, procedure, courts, prisons, equality, and citizenship.

https://law.yale.edu/judith-resnik

 :o

 ::)

 8)



Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on April 05, 2018, 08:57:32 pm
As for 'fake news live' you can thank Obama, Destroyer of Amerika, for that :P

The NDAA Legalizes The Use Of Propaganda On The US Public
May. 21, 2012


Quote
The amendment — proposed by Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and passed in the House last Friday afternoon — would effectively nullify the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion.

Thornberry said that the current law "ties the hands of America's diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way," according to Buzzfeed.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-legalizes-propaganda-2012-5
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 05, 2018, 09:09:01 pm
  two women with the same name..not unusual



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AJudith_Resnik


Another Judith Resnik
There is also a noted legal scholar named Judith Resnik; she is presently the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale and used to teach at the University of Southern California. She warrants a page of her own, but I don't know how to set one up given that the astronaut Judith Resnik already has one.

Perhaps you can find someone who can make a disambiguation page to help you start the article. I'd help, but, like you, I dont know how. Sorry. --66.37.59.98 18:16, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Create an article at Juduth Resnik (scholar), and then I'll add a disambig to this page.
Perhaps this page should be renamed Judith Arlene Resnik and the Yale Law professor should be put at Judith Resnik because she does not appear to have a middle name (I checked her official faculty page and publications). Libertylaw 13:41, 8 June 2007 (UTC)








.............................
Shuttle Astronaut Dr. Judith Resnik | NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/content/shuttle-astronaut-dr-judith-resnik
Jul 28, 2013 - 1979: Shuttle Astronaut Dr. Judith Resnik receives an award during a visit to the NASAGlenn Research Center. Born in Akron, Ohio, Resnik flew on Discovery in 1984. She died less than two years later, on January 28 1986, when the shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch. (C-1979-03014).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaafRyuwA8w




Judith Resnik - Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies - Yale ...
https://wgss.yale.edu/people/judith-resnik Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches about federalism, procedure, courts, equality, and citizenship. She also holds a term appointment as an Honorary Professor, Faculty of Laws, University College London. Professor Resnik's books include Representing Justice: ...

American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Published on Dec 22, 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8uNXJ5pFpA

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 05, 2018, 09:20:48 pm


Quote
Destroyer of Amerika,

good thing that we live in AMERICA then, isn't it :P
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on April 06, 2018, 01:02:32 am
good thing that we live in AMERICA then, isn't it :P

Not so sure about that these days :P

As for Judith Resnik... I brought it up because Conspiracy Nuts :P  claim to have found all the astronauts alive... 

 ::)

The resemblance is quite good though as well as the name (yes Judy would have been about the same age now :D)


Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on April 06, 2018, 03:08:17 am
perfect example

you can say anything as long as you don't believe it..
I still don't get what's the connection with timelines.  ???
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 06, 2018, 08:51:34 am

Z
the strange thing is that when i saw that last name i thought "oh maybe that is Joe's first wife' and went to look.. it went sideways with the list of links i got when i typed in her name..
 i was looking for birthdays on them but didn't find one for the lawyer but  wow they do look similar...
guess that goes back to how many doubles we have. ::) or should that be be layers..or dimensions blending in and out
or who the hell knows anymore...sigh
 that's kinda how it goes for me most daze.. i start one thing and wind up far away...hahahahahaha




Armap
I don’t know if I can explain it..and maybe it isn’t a timeline shift as much as it is a pendulum swing,or like sarge says..maybe just an age thing.
But it used to be you could read something and believe it was true with just a shading of the writers opinion.
Now it seems to be that folks want to write something to see how many they can fool and then brag how easy it is, and get enjoyment out of that.
So when I saw that headline of they were sacking that guy cause he believed what he was writing, it felt like we had slipped into some ‘other’ time (line).
Maybe it’s just me..
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on April 06, 2018, 01:06:30 pm
Maybe it’s just me..
Maybe. :)

People believing their own lies is quite common, and has always been, as they need to be convinced of what they say so they do not sound like they are lying.

The problem today is that facebook augmented things, by bringing all the liars and all the blind believers to one place where they fed on each other and then spread to other sites.

Only the media used changed, people have always been like that.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on April 06, 2018, 01:51:08 pm
Before social media, you could count the idiots that were your friends on one hand. And as ArMaP stated FB (& Instagram & the others), has brought them all together.
They have always been there, you just couldn't see them, except for a headline or two in the local newspaper.
 
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on April 06, 2018, 01:57:27 pm
They have always been there, you just couldn't see them, except for a headline or two in the local newspaper.

Yes I posted that several times LOL but since I erased the FB pages it's gone  Was that post about the VILLAGE IDIOT

Before the internet the VILLAGE IDIOT was local and easy to ignore, but now the internet and cell phones can be used by a 2 year old  so that VILLAGE IDIOT now has an INTERNATIONAL soapbox and can connect with all the other VILLAGE IDIOTs around the world.

And they are winning because they have the sheer force of numbers ob their side

 :o

 ::)

 8)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on April 06, 2018, 02:36:10 pm
Before the internet the VILLAGE IDIOT was local and easy to ignore, but now the internet and cell phones can be used by a 2 year old  so that VILLAGE IDIOT now has an INTERNATIONAL soapbox and can connect with all the other VILLAGE IDIOTs around the world.
To me that's not the biggest problem, the problem is that facebook and other social media (including this forum's software) only allow positive feedbak (facebook has "likes", we have "gold"), so people get used to see all those positive reactions and positive answers (they just have to remove the negative answers), so what was created was a huge group of people, worldwide, that thinks that all their opinions are correct and that everybody likes them, and they can't be wrong. Also, the best way of getting positive answers is to post about things other people (the "friends" of those persons), so we also get groups that all think the same and, once more, think they are right and everybody else is wrong.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: The Seeker on April 06, 2018, 03:01:47 pm
This forum has the mechanism in place, if we activate it, where those who disagree with you can smite thee instead of giving you gold
 8)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on April 06, 2018, 03:32:22 pm


well for my half penny i don't think you should be able to like or smite..
anyone looking can see how many times you have posted and take it from there
i think the like/smite thing just makes it worse..everyone looks to see if you are liked or thanks or stoned  instead of actually reading what you have to say and responding in a verbal manner

my  tiny opinion
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on April 06, 2018, 04:01:35 pm
This forum has the mechanism in place, if we activate it, where those who disagree with you can smite thee instead of giving you gold
 8)
On ATS they give "stars", and several years ago, when they added that function, it was possible to give negative stars, and what happened was that people made threads and, sometimes, although they didn't had any answer they were full of negative stars. What happened was that people started to act in groups, so when someone from a rival group made a thread everybody from the other groups would give negative stars, so the person that made the thread would look bad.

That's why negative stars were removed.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on April 06, 2018, 06:28:38 pm
I might agree with someone or the content of their thread or post. But my posting that agreement wouldn’t add anything to the conversation. The only response is to give gold.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on June 06, 2018, 06:29:50 am


i do believe that fake news is  in this picture...or maybe just the current state of human nature   sigh

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/luke-obrien-doxed-threats-amymek_us_5b16bb9de4b0734a9937f2ca

MEDIA 06/05/2018 02:56 pm ET Updated 15 hours ago

A HuffPost Reporter Was Bombarded With Threats. Twitter Suspended Him.
When Twitter outsources policing its platform to victims of harassment, it empowers brigades of trolls and extremists.


By Nick Baumann

Quote
Last week HuffPost reporter Luke O’Brien published a story identifying the woman behind @AmyMek, a massively popular pseudonymous Twitter account followed by people like Sean Hannity, Roseanne Barr, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Ryan Zinke and endorsed by people like President Donald Trump and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

O’Brien revealed the person behind the 220,000-follower account: a New York woman who also ran a website where she posted the names, photos and contact information of people and groups she believed were collaborating with terrorists. The story struck a chord. Hundreds of thousands of people read it in the days after it was published. It resonated because it’s shocking to realize that the person in the apartment next door (or your kid’s teacher or a consultant you met at a bar) might have a second life as an online hatemonger.

But the reaction to O’Brien’s piece revealed something even deeper and more disturbing about the way U.S. journalism and politics work in the age of the internet. He received dozens of threats via tweet, phone and email in the days after the story published. People published his family members’ addresses and phone numbers and those of at least five other HuffPost employees and seven of their family members. HuffPost’s editor-in-chief got calls on her cellphone from people saying racial slurs. Other people with the name Luke O’Brien had their addresses and phone numbers and pictures of their children posted online. Right-wing sites published stories falsely accusing O’Brien of violating journalistic ethics.

Some people even complained to executives at HuffPost’s parent companies, hoping to get O’Brien fired. He wasn’t. But this story could easily have ended differently. So we wanted to explain what happened before and after the story was published.

O’Brien had a good reason to investigate @AmyMek: Investigating influential people is part of his job. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook have made it easier than ever to become a public figure with enormous influence while remaining anonymous. One especially quick way to do this is to spread hate. Americans have a First Amendment right to spread hate speech anonymously without punishment from the government. But the identities of influential anonymous people are inherently newsworthy. So for months, HuffPost has been investigating the most influential anonymous Twitter and Facebook users that spread hate — and identifying the people behind them. O’Brien’s story about @AmyMek was part of that effort.

Before publishing the story, which I edited, O’Brien made multiple attempts to reach Amy Mekelburg, the woman behind @AmyMek, for comment. For days, she didn’t respond. Shortly before publication, she referred him to a lawyer — who told O’Brien he didn’t represent her. Then she tweeted out a string of accusations that O’Brien was “stalking” her and “viciously harassing me, my husband and my loved ones.”

That was not true: O’Brien was contacting Mekelburg, her husband and other people mentioned in the story to give them the chance to comment before publication. He was doing his job as a journalist.

But Mekelburg’s tweets — sent before O’Brien’s story went up — unleashed the torrent of threatening tweets, emails and phone calls directed at O’Brien and other HuffPost reporters. Prominent figures in the so-called alt-right and alt-lite, movements O’Brien has covered aggressively, piled on.

O’Brien hadn’t published Mekelburg’s address or phone number — an act known as doxing that HuffPost’s editorial standards do not permit. But people accused him of doing it anyway and then published the addresses and phone numbers of his family members, as well as those of several other HuffPost journalists and their families.

On Twitter and 4Chan, an anonymous online message board, people suggested throwing bricks at reporters. “Brick a Journalist” is a far-right intimidation campaign targeting journalists by threatening to attack them with bricks; O’Brien received at least a dozen images of bricks. Andrew Anglin, an American neo-Nazi O’Brien profiled in The Atlantic, even trollishly attempted to brand O’Brien as a Nazi ally (no, we’re not going to link to his site), encouraging his followers to support the reporter who had tracked him for months, even as neo-Nazis harassed O’Brien and targeted his family on Twitter.

For months, HuffPost has been investigating the most influential anonymous Twitter and Facebook users that spread hate – and identifying the people behind them. O’Brien’s story about @AmyMek was part of that effort.
O’Brien is a professional journalist covering political extremists. He’s not hiding: His name is on his articles, and his phone number is in his Twitter bio. He knows that receiving threats comes with the job. But what happened next shows exactly what sort of complaints platforms like Twitter take seriously — and which ones they don’t.

When one writer accused O’Brien of “going after” Mekelburg’s husband — because O’Brien called the WWE, where her husband is a vice president, to ask for comment — O’Brien, who had already received scores of threats, tweeted back to correct the record:

“Nobody went after his job, you insufferable stuffed shirt,” he wrote. “I called WWE to give them a chance to respond to info from a source who told me WWE knew about AmyMek. That’s EXACTLY how ethical journalism works. They fired him. I was shocked. Take it up with them, then go DDT yourself.”

Twitter decided to suspend O’Brien’s account — it has since been reinstated —saying his DDT suggestion amounted to encouraging self-harm. (He was referring to a pro-wrestling move, not to the pesticide.)

Many of the people who sent him threats have not been suspended. (Twitter itself uses the term “permanent suspension” to refer to a ban and “temporary locking” to refer to a suspension.)

That O’Brien was suspended but the people who threatened him are still on the site reveals a larger problem: Twitter (which provided a formulaic “taking this seriously” statement in response to questions for this story) relies heavily on its users to police the platform. The company says it has tools to identify content that violates its terms of service and remove the accounts responsible. But spending even a small amount of time on Twitter makes clear that those tools are not effective at making it the home for the “healthy conversation” the company says it wants.

Twitter matters: For all its faults, it is an essential tool for many people and the place where a lot of news breaks. That means it has a lot of users. But because Twitter is so huge, it would cost the company enormous sums to hire people to monitor all the harassment on its site. So it outsources a lot of the initial work of flagging threats, harassment and abuse to the victims of those attacks. That doesn’t work particularly well on normal days. And over the past few days, when thousands of tweets were spamming O’Brien’s account, it didn’t work well at all. No one person could have tracked and reported all the threats O’Brien received. There were too many, and they were blended in with all the rest of the crap he was getting. That means most of the users responsible for harassing and threatening O’Brien will stay on Twitter — or get new accounts if they’re suspended.

All of this gives brigades of trolls and extremists enormous power to dictate the tone and content of Twitter.

That complaint isn’t new. People have been making it for years. But Twitter is as toxic as ever. Maybe that’s because Twitter isn’t actually taking these problems seriously. Maybe the Twitter we have now — the one swamped by harassers, trolls and hatemongers — is exactly the one the company wants.

Travis Waldron contributed reporting.

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on June 06, 2018, 03:41:46 pm
On ATS they give "stars",

Yes and they smack you silly if you dare make a comment like "Great Post! I agree 100%"

In my space command thread a guy sent me a link saying "you might be interested in THIS" with a link.  I replied "Thanks a lot that is awesome"  Well the link was blocked with one of those stupid banners ATS puts up (when the link was absolute proof of what the thread was about :P because some over zealous mod deleted without reading it :P ) and for my reply despite the fact that I spent months of hard work on that thread ATS skeptic overlord singed me with a "one liner" penalty (and despite Springer saying it was an error that post is still blocked today


So one day at ATS someone said to me  WHY don't you make a serious thread instead of using those tabloid headlines....

So okay I did.  I made THREE threads  2 with tabloid headlines and one with a serious title.  What happened?  The serious title  "Fossils on Mars - A Collection of Evidence (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread386185/pg1)" 

Now that thread got several applauses from staff (that is 1000 points awards) but very little actual comments.  As people are not allowed to say "Great thread Zorgon!" they don't reply. And as other people don't really have anything new to add, they don't post... and as skeptics cannot argue with the facts presented, they do not reply... end result? Thread dies....

Now the one Sensational headline was "A Herd of Martian Creatures? (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread386109/pg1)"  Now THAT got a lot of comments in the first day....

The point is that when you do the hard work and fully research a topic and post it all, there is little anyone can really add to the information...  and skeptics cannot really argue with a presentation of facts and documents  so there is little that can be said other than 'great thread! and give a star (or gold)... but the page usually falls of the page quickly because there is no activity.

On the other hand if you post sensational topics like John Lear does there is a lot of room for argument so you will produce dialog  (and trolls :P ) This is why political posts and religious posts dominate as EVERYONE has an opinion  :P and feels the need to voice it and if you don't agree they get mad  :D   

So as for the LIKES(Gold)  sometimes that is the only way you even know if anyone has even looked at your hard worked at posts

And yes  negative marks can destroy people because it is easy to gang up on someone...

ATS has become a GANG of Trolls :P  with Spooks hiding in the shadows

 ::)

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on June 06, 2018, 04:01:12 pm
Now the one Sensational headline was "A Herd of Martian Creatures? (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread386109/pg1)"  Now THAT got a lot of comments in the first day....
And it only had one question mark, not the three I told you once would give better results. :)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on July 13, 2018, 03:58:42 pm


it used to be that you couldn't believe all that you read..
now it seems  you can't believe anything you read
perfect divide and conquer tactic



https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/russian-hackers-used-fake-accounts-disguised-as-local-news-report/ar-AAzYZcP?li=BBnb7Kz

Russian hackers used fake accounts disguised as local news: report
John Bowden  21 hrs ago

Quote
Russian operatives working out of the St. Petersberg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) used fake accounts disguised as local U.S. media outlets to exploit Americans' trust in local news.

An NPR report found that accounts linked to the IRA operated at least 48 social media accounts disguised as U.S.-based local media organizations, including @ElPasoTopNews, @MilwaukeeVoice, @CamdenCityNews and @Seattle_Post.

None of the accounts reviewed by NPR, some of which had tens of thousands of followers, had been used so far to spread disinformation, according to the report. The link to the IRA suggests that the accounts were to be used in some future operation.

"The Russians are playing a long game. They've developed a presence on social media. They've created these fictitious persons and fictitious organizations that have built up over a period of time a certain trustworthiness among people that follow them," House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told the news outlet.

The accounts, one of which was opened as early as May of 2014, were shut down by Twitter after years of posting real news stories.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NPR that the accounts represented Russia's ongoing effort to interfere in future U.S. political events and elections.

"This effort is not over," she said. "It continues to this very day, where the Russians are trying to sow the seeds of discontent in our society, take advantage of the polarization that exists."

The Trump administration moved to punish the Kremlin's domestic security bureau last month for its involvement in cyberattacks, sanctioning five Russian entities and three Russian nationals accused of aiding the Federal Security Service.

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on July 22, 2018, 10:13:25 am


not one sided at all
and repeat
it used to be called propaganda



i did the bold text highlight



https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/irans-rouhani-warns-trump-about-mother-of-all-wars/ar-BBKVpad?li=BBnb7Kz

Quote
DUBAI, July 22 (Reuters) - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Sunday cautioned U.S. President Donald Trump about pursuing hostile policies against Tehran, saying "America should know ... war with Iran is the mother of all wars," but he did not rule out peace between the two countries, either.

Iran faces increased U.S. pressure and looming sanctions after Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from a 2015 international deal over Iran's nuclear programme.

Addressing a gathering of Iranian diplomats, Rouhani said: "Mr Trump, don't play with the lion's tail, this would only lead to regret," the state new agency IRNA reported.

"America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars," Rouhani said, leaving open the possibility of peace between the two countries which have been at odds since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

"You are not in a position to incite the Iranian nation against Iran's security and interests," Rouhani said, in an apparent reference to reported efforts by Washington to destabilise Iran's Islamic government.

In Washington, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told Reuters that the Trump administration has launched an offensive of speeches and online communications meant to foment unrest and help pressure Iran to end its nuclear programme and its support of militant groups.

Current and former U.S. officials said the campaign paints Iranian leaders in a harsh light, at times using information that is exaggerated or contradicts other official pronouncements, including comments by previous administrations.


Rouhani scoffed at Trump's threat to halt Iranian oil exports and said Iran has a dominant position in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping waterway.

"Anyone who understands the rudiments of politics doesn't say 'we will stop Iran's oil exports'...we have been the guarantor of the regional waterway's security throughout history," Rouhani said, cited by the semi-official ISNA news agency.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday backed Rouhani's suggestion that Iran may block Gulf oil exports if its own exports are halted.

Rouhani's apparent threat earlier this month to disrupt oil shipments from neighbouring countries came in reaction to efforts by Washington to force all countries to stop buying Iranian oil.

Iranian officials have in the past threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for any hostile U.S. action. Separately, a top Iranian military commander warned that the Trump government might be preparing to invade Iran.

"The enemy's behaviour is unpredictable," military chief of staff General Mohammad Baqeri said, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.

"Although the current American government does not seem to speak of a military threat, according to precise information it has been trying to persuade the U.S. military to launch a military invasion (of Iran)," Baqeri said.

Iran's oil exports could fall by as much as two-thirds by the end of the year because of new U.S. sanctions, putting oil markets under huge strain amid supply outages elsewhere.

Washington initially planned to totally shut Iran out of global oil markets after Trump abandoned the deal that limited Iran's nuclear ambitions, demanding all other countries to stop buying its crude by November.

But it has somewhat eased its stance since, saying that it may grant sanction waivers to some allies that are particularly reliant on Iranian supplies. (Reporting by Dubai newsroom; editing by Jason Neely)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: fansongecho on July 22, 2018, 10:42:28 am

Hi gang,

Do any of you folks know who the Oil Price is actually set by the Oil producers??

I was lazy and used Wikipedia to see who produced the most oil - sorry -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production

I was very surprised at where the US was on the list, learning something new everyday.

Cheers,

Fans'
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on August 21, 2018, 06:20:11 am

ahh  now  the question which of these things is the fake news.?

the report or what's reported

hummmmmmmmmmmm :-\
   :-\       :-\

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/new-russian-hacking-targeted-republican-groups-microsoft-says/ar-BBMcSJp

(https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AAapfVx.img?h=40&w=138&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&f=png)

New Russian Hacking Targeted Republican Groups, Microsoft Says

By DAVID E. SANGER and SHEERA FRENKEL  3 hrs ago

Quote
BOSTON — The Russian military intelligence unit that sought to influence the 2016 election appears to have a new target: conservative American think tanks that have broken with President Trump and are seeking continued sanctions against Moscow, exposing oligarchs or pressing for human rights.

In a report scheduled for release on Tuesday, Microsoft Corporation said that it detected and seized websites that were created in recent weeks by hackers linked to the Russian unit formerly known as the G.R.U. The sites appeared meant to trick people into thinking they were clicking through links managed by the Hudson Institute and the International Republican Institute, but were secretly redirected to web pages created by the hackers to steal passwords and other credentials.

Microsoft also found websites imitating the United States Senate, but not specific Senate offices or political campaigns.

The shift to attacking conservative think tanks underscores the Russian intelligence agency’s goals: to disrupt any institutions challenging Moscow and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

The Hudson Institute has promoted programs examining the rise of kleptocracy in governments around the world, with Russia as a prime target. The International Republican Institute, which receives some funding from the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, has worked for decades in promoting democracy around the world.

“We are now seeing another uptick in attacks. What is particular in this instance is the broadening of the type of websites they are going after,” Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, said Monday in an interview.

“These are organizations that are informally tied to Republicans,” he said, “so we see them broadening beyond the sites they have targeted in the past.”

The International Republican Institute’s board of directors includes several Republican leaders who have been highly critical of Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. Putin, including a summit meeting last month between the two leaders in Helsinki, Finland.

Among them are Senator John McCain of Arizona; Mitt Romney, a former presidential candidate; and — though he was silent on Mr. Trump’s appearance in Helsinki — Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who was replaced in the spring as the White House national security adviser. General McMaster, who is now retired, had been the author of the national security strategy that called for treating Russia as a “revisionist power” and confronting it around the world.

“This is another demonstration of the fact that the Russians aren’t really pursuing partisan attacks, they are pursuing attacks that they perceive in their own national self-interest,” said Eric Rosenbach, the director of the Defending Digital Democracy project at Harvard University, on Monday. “It’s about disrupting and diminishing any group that challenges how Putin’s Russia is operating at home and around the world.”

The State Department has traditionally helped fund both Republican and Democratic groups that engage in promoting democracy.

Daniel Twining, the president of the International Republican Institute, called the apparent “spear phishing” attempt “consistent with the campaign of meddling that the Kremlin has waged against organizations that support democracy and human rights.”

“It is clearly designed to sow confusion, conflict and fear among those who criticize Mr. Putin’s authoritarian regime,” Mr. Twining said in a statement.

The goal of the Russian hacking attempt was unclear, and Microsoft was able to catch the spoofed websites as they were set up.

But Mr. Smith said that “these attempts are the newest security threats to groups connected with both American political parties” ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

“These attacks are seeking to disrupt and divide,” he said. “There is an asymmetric risk here for democratic societies. The kind of attacks we see from authoritarian regimes are seeking to fracture and splinter groups in our society.”

On Sunday, the current national security adviser, John R. Bolton, suggested that Russia was not the only threat in the fall elections. He also named China, Iran and North Korea — the other most active cyberoperators among state adversaries — as threats.

But so far Microsoft and other firms have not found extensive election-related actions by those nations.

Senior United States intelligence officials have also warned that the midterm elections will be targeted by foreign governments looking to influence American voters.

Speaking last month at the Aspen Security Forum, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said that his agency was seeing information operations “aimed at sowing discord and divisiveness in the country.”

Only days later, in a report first released to members of Congress, Facebook revealed that it had discovered and eliminated an influence operation aimed at fueling divisions among Americans by targeting progressive groups. Facebook stopped short of naming Russia as the culprit of that campaign, although the social media company pointed to similarities between the influence operation and previous work by the Russian state-linked Internet Research Agency.

The attempt revealed by Microsoft mirrored efforts by Russian state-backed hackers before the 2016 presidential election.

After the 2016 vote, a number of cybersecurity companies discovered websites that had been created by Russian hackers to spoof, or mimic, those of well-known institutions. Among the think tanks targeted were the Council on Foreign Relations and the Eurasia Group, both based in New York; the Center for a New American Security in Washington; Transparency International in Berlin; and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

A single letter, or even a punctuation mark, was often the only difference between the real and fake websites.

The fake websites were used as the conduit for a number of attacks, including persuading victims to download harmful malware or to reveal passwords and other personal information. But for the past year, Microsoft has grown increasingly aggressive in countering them.

In 2016, a federal judge in Virginia agreed that the group Microsoft calls “Strontium” and others call “APT 28,” for “advanced persistent threat,” would continue its attacks. The judge appointed a “special master” with the power to authorize Microsoft to seize fake websites as soon as they are registered. As a result, the hackers have lost control of many of the sites only days after creating them.

But it is a constant cat-and-mouse game, as the Russian hackers seek new vectors of attack while Microsoft and others seek to cut them off.

“These attacks keep happening because they work. They are successful again and again,” said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, who doubts whether anyone can stay ahead of the hackers.

“Microsoft is playing whack-a-mole here,” Mr. Rid said. “These sites are easy to register and bring back up, and so they will keep doing so.”

Last month, Microsoft announced that it had detected and helped block similar attacks against two senators who are up for re-election. Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who faces one of the toughest political challenges this year, acknowledged that her campaign was among them after months of keeping the news quiet — apparently to avoid alienating voters who doubt the Russian role in election interference.

Microsoft says it is expanding its effort to help political candidates counter foreign influence. It is starting an initiative it calls “AccountGuard” to bolster protections to candidates and campaign offices at the federal, state and local level, as well as think tanks and political organizations.

With the midterms less than three months away, Microsoft said greater cooperation was needed between tech companies and the federal government over efforts to interfere in the American elections.

“Over the last year, the larger tech companies, in particular, have put into place stronger information-sharing practices where we have seen these threats emerge,” Mr. Smith said. “Those agreements, however, are informal.”






a little bit of fun  cause i see things differently  ;D

Images for gru

(https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSV5R_VyLq2px4A-oFUH8SK-zfFeZjFDzo8Pfej5AkR-V3pQAu-bA)


the minions  always to the dirty work

bwhahahahahahahah
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on August 22, 2018, 08:45:29 pm

everybody wants to get into the act


TECH 08/21/2018 08:37 pm ET Updated 1 day ago
Facebook Says It Removed 652 Disinformation Accounts Linked To Russia And Iran
The influence campaigns were taken down ahead of the midterm elections .

Quote
MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — Facebook has identified and banned more accounts engaged in misleading political behavior ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November.

The social network said Tuesday that it had removed 652 pages, groups, and accounts linked to Russia and, unexpectedly, Iran, for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that included the sharing of political material.

Facebook has significantly stepped up policing of its platform since last year, when it acknowledged that Russian agents successfully ran political influence operations on Facebook aimed at swaying the 2016 presidential election.

The social network said it had not concluded its review of the material and declined to say how or why the state-backed actors were behaving the way they did. But it said it has informed the U.S. and U.K. governments as well as informed the U.S. Treasury and State departments because of ongoing sanctions against Iran.

“There’s a lot we don’t know yet,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a hastily called conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon.

Facebook said the actions to remove the pages, groups and accounts Tuesday morning were the result of four investigations — three involving Iran, and one involving Russia.

The first involved a group called “Liberty Front Press” that set up multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram that were followed by 155,000 other accounts. The group was linked to Iranian state media based on website registrations, IP addresses and administrator accounts, Facebook said. The first accounts were created in 2013 and posted political content about the Middle East, the U.K., and the U.S., although the focus on the West increased starting last year, Facebook said.

The second group also had multiple accounts and 15,000 followers. The group was linked to “Liberty Front Press” and attempted to hack people’s accounts to spread malware. Facebook said it disrupted those attempts.

A third group also operated out of Iran had as many as 813,000 followers, and also shared political content about the Middle East, the U.K. and U.S.

In all the Iranian-linked groups spent some $12,000 in advertising and hosted 28 different events.

A fourth group that attempted to influence politics in Syria and the Ukraine was linked to sources that Facebook said the U.S. had linked to Russian military intelligence.

“We’re working closely with U.S. law enforcement on this investigation,” Facebook said in a blog post
.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: zorgon on August 23, 2018, 02:33:25 am
Non Fake news... right from Putin himself   and he is laughing at American media :P

Here is the video from NBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9nVGgoOT6s

Notice the COMMENTS:

Quote
Julio
Wow these are probably the worst translators on the planet

Andrew anon
Bruh I need a translator for this translator

JTNugget
This is embarrassing. Not only is the left making America look hysterically crazy, but the media is making us look even more aggressively stupid.

VincentWeir
Remind me again: why does everyone hate Russia??

Matt Pops
She makes a claim Trump admits Russia helped him. I can not find one credible source confirming this.

Here is the full video from Russian News with translation in text. You will notice its a lot different than the NBC version... and the text matches the expressions and laughter....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12s_n6F2ZEQ
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on August 23, 2018, 05:50:35 am
Facebook Says It Removed 652 Disinformation Accounts Linked To Russia And Iran
My questions are:
1 - were there other disinformation accounts that were not removed?
2 - if there were, what was their source?

I don't think I will ever get answers to those. :)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on September 07, 2018, 01:40:14 pm

well i will probably be clobbered cause  this forum has lots of  his supporters but i found this very funny...
and i remember my mom telling me you are judged by the company you keep..
even if it is fake
bwhahahahahahahahahah


Several People Behind Trump Were Removed, Replaced During Rally In Montana
One particularly expressive man was replaced by a woman who some people on Twitter said looked like Zina Bash.

By Jenna Amatulli
09/07/2018 09:06 am ET Updated 7 hours ago

Quote
President Donald Trump’s rally in Billings, Montana, on Thursday had many strange moments, including a tangent where he speculated about his potential impeachment and an instance where he seemed unable to pronounce the word “anonymous.” Perhaps oddest of all, though, was that several people standing behind Trump were replaced on camera as the evening went on.

A man in a plaid shirt was replaced seemingly after he made a series of animated facial expressions as the president spoke.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_thumb/1037946027091877888/pu/img/8O8LBVTvbcJsysr7?format=jpg&name=small)

..

Quote
A woman, who some people on Twitter said looked like to be longtime Republican operative Zina Bash, eventually came and took the man’s place on camera. You can watch the moment below:

sorry i can't copy the vid

X

Quote
That man was not the only one removed from his spot behind Trump during the speech. As seen in the clip below, a man and woman in the same row were replaced by two blond women. The resulting image is Trump flanked by young women.

or this one


  X

(https://twitter.com/aztbaby/status/1037911309495361537/photo/1)

yeah i know i'll hear about where it comes from too..but too funny not to post

draw your own conclusions..i know i have

see the vids and the rest of the article at this link


https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-montana-rally-people-replaced_us_5b926b14e4b0162f472c5612
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on September 07, 2018, 07:41:18 pm
 
there is always 'more to the story'  here's more i just read

i really have to find out about these social democrats
..what?????



We Found the ‘Plaid Shirt Guy’ Who Trolled Trump’s Rally With Hilarious Faces
By andrew.kirell@thedailybeast.com (Andrew Kirell)  4 hrs ago

Quote
Despite his vein-popping rage and reality-TV theatrics, President Trump’s political rallies have become rather mundane events. He screams about The New York Times, repeatedly references Hillary Clinton, and rails against his many enemies, much to the crowd’s delight. Rinse and repeat.

But during Thursday night’s rally in Billings, Montana, something truly unusual happened.

Standing directly behind the president during his 75-minute rant was a plaid-clad young man, at times flashing incredulous, mocking faces directly to the camera as the president incoherently blustered about his critics. That man was eventually yanked—on live TV—from his spot behind Trump.

Clips of the ordeal went viral and the plaid-clad individual became known as Plaid Shirt Guy, with outlets from Reuters to BuzzFeed reporting on it.

That viral sensation is Tyler Linfesty, 17, a Billings-area high-school student who spoke with The Daily Beast on Friday via text message.

Despite what may have seemed like a concerted effort to troll the president, Linfesty said his moment in the spotlight came about entirely by chance.

“I was randomly chosen” to stand behind Trump, he said. “When people signed up to go to the rally, their names were placed into a draw and I was chosen. Because I won, I got an opportunity to meet the president.”

He shook hands with Trump during a photo opportunity, Linfesty said, and was then placed in the stands along with two friends.

At one point, during the president’s predictable soliloquy on defeating Clinton in 2016—here, awkwardly claiming the electoral college is like running a mile while the popular vote, which Clinton won, is just a 100-yard dash—-Linfesty was seen amusedly looking around, muttering to himself, “What?!”

Linfesty later flashed a Jim Halpert-like grin and chuckle to the camera when Trump randomly boasted of “knocking the hell out of the terrorists.” He let out a similar look of disbelief when Trump said “our country is thriving.”

And when the president claimed he’s “picked up a lot of support” in his fight against the so-called Deep State, a puzzled Linfesty raised his eyebrows and mouthed to himself, “You have?!”

But none of these reactions were planned attempts to gain attention, Linfesty said. “When he said something crazy, I thought ‘Wow that's crazy,’ and when he said something I thought was reasonable I thought, ‘well, that's reasonable.’”

He added: “I took each issue individually.”

But after enough time had passed with Linfesty’s facial reactions and lack of rapturous applause for the president, Trump’s advance team sent out a replacement, removing him from standing directly behind the president.

A woman in a black blouse approached Linfesty as Trump kept talking mere feet away in the foreground.

“I’m going to take your place now,” he recalled her saying.

“I knew that I was getting kicked out for not clapping so I didn't fight it,” Linfesty explained.

“Some secret service guys took me backstage and told me to wait,” he concluded. “After about 10 minutes they told me to leave and not come back and that was it.”

Although it was not visible throughout much of the speech, Linfesty was proudly sporting a sticker for the Democratic Socialists of America—the political organization that includes many of the upstart leftist candidates currently challenging Democratic lawmakers for their seats.

“I am part of the Democratic Socialists of America,” Linfesty said, “but I identify as a social democrat, like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”

And the Billings chapter of DSA was excited to see local youth representing their views on national television. “The young man is not an active member of our chapter,” the group told The Daily Beast, but we hope he will be!”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/we-found-the-%E2%80%98plaid-shirt-guy%E2%80%99-who-trolled-trump%E2%80%99s-rally-with-hilarious-faces/ar-BBN1qC3?li=BBnb7Kz
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on November 18, 2018, 05:37:08 pm


‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/%E2%80%98nothing-on-this-page-is-real%E2%80%99-how-lies-become-truth-in-online-america/ar-BBPOoIi?li=BBnb7Kz

Eli Saslow  6 hrs ago


Quote
NORTH WATERBORO, Maine —The only light in the house came from the glow of three computer monitors, and Christopher Blair, 46, sat down at a keyboard and started to type. His wife had left for work and his children were on their way to school, but waiting online was his other community, an unreality where nothing was exactly as it seemed. He logged onto his website and began to invent his first news story of the day.

“BREAKING,” he wrote, pecking out each letter with his index fingers as he considered the possibilities. Maybe he would announce that Hillary Clinton had died during a secret overseas mission to smuggle more refugees into America. Maybe he would award President Trump the Nobel Peace Prize for his courage in denying climate change.

A new message popped onto Blair’s screen from a friend who helped with his website. “What viral insanity should we spread this morning?” the friend asked.

“The more extreme we become, the more people believe it,” Blair replied.

He had launched his new website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

Blair’s own reality was out beyond the shuttered curtains of his office: a three-bedroom home in the forest of Maine where the paved road turned to gravel; not his house but a rental; not on the lake but near it. Over the past decade his family had moved around the country a half-dozen times as he looked for steady work, bouncing between construction and restaurant jobs while sometimes living on food stamps. During the economic crash of 2008, his wife had taken a job at Wendy’s to help pay down their credit-card debt, and Blair, a lifelong Democrat, had begun venting his political frustration online, arguing with strangers in an Internet forum called Brawl Hall. He sometimes masqueraded as a tea party conservative on Facebook so he could gain administrative access into their private groups and then flood their pages with liberal ideas before using his administrative status to shut their pages down.

He had created more than a dozen online profiles over the last years, sometimes disguising himself in accompanying photographs as a beautiful Southern blond woman or as a bandana-wearing conservative named Flagg Eagleton, baiting people into making racist or sexist comments and then publicly eviscerating them for it. In his writing Blair was blunt, witty and prolific, and gradually he’d built a liberal following on the Internet and earned a full-time job as a political blogger. On the screen, like nowhere else, he could say exactly how he felt and become whomever he wanted.

Now he hunched over a desk wedged between an overturned treadmill and two turtle tanks, scanning through conservative forums on Facebook for something that might inspire his next post. He was 6-foot-6 and 325 pounds, and he typed several thousand words each day in all capital letters. He noticed a photo online of Trump standing at attention for the national anthem during a White House ceremony. Behind the president were several dozen dignitaries, including a white woman standing next to a black woman, and Blair copied the picture, circled the two women in red and wrote the first thing that came into his mind.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” Blair wrote. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem. Lock them up for treason!”

Blair finished typing and looked again at the picture. The white woman was not in fact Chelsea Clinton but former White House strategist Hope Hicks. The black woman was not Michelle Obama but former Trump aide Omarosa Newman. Neither Obama nor Clinton had been invited to the ceremony. Nobody had flipped off the president. The entire premise was utterly ridiculous, which was exactly Blair’s point.

“We live in an Idiocracy,” read a small note on Blair’s desk, and he was taking full advantage. In a good month, the advertising revenue from his website earned him as much as $15,000, and it had also won him a loyal army of online fans. Hundreds of liberals now visited America’s Last Line of Defense to humiliate conservatives who shared Blair’s fake stories as fact. In Blair’s private Facebook messages with his liberal supporters, his conservative audience was made up of “sheep,” “hillbillies,” “maw-maw and paw-paw,” “TrumpTards,” “potatoes” and “taters.”

“How could any thinking person believe this nonsense?” he said. He hit the publish button and watched as his lie began to spread.

It was barely dawn in Pahrump, Nev., when Shirley Chapian, 76, logged onto Facebook for her morning computer game of Criminal Case. She believed in starting each day with a problem-solving challenge, a quick mental exercise to keep her brain sharp more than a decade into retirement. For a while it had been the daily crossword puzzle, but then the local newspaper stopped delivering and a friend introduced her to the viral Facebook game with 65 million players. She spent an hour as a 1930s detective, interrogating witnesses and trying to parse their lies from the truth until finally she solved case No. 48 and clicked over to her Facebook news feed.

“Good morning, Shirley! Thanks for being here,” read an automated note at the top of her page. She put her finger on the mouse and began scrolling down.

“Click LIKE if you believe we must stop Sharia Law from coming to America before it’s too late,” read the first item, and she clicked “like.”

“Share to help END the ongoing migrant invasion!” read another, and she clicked “share.”

The house was empty and quiet except for the clicking of her computer mouse. She lived alone, and on many days her only personal interaction occurred here, on Facebook. Mixed into her morning news feed were photos and updates from some of her 300 friends, but most items came directly from political groups Chapian had chosen to follow: “Free Speech Patriots,” “Taking Back America,” “Ban Islam,” “Trump 2020” and “Rebel Life.” Each political page published several posts each day directly into Chapian’s feed, many of which claimed to be “BREAKING NEWS.”

On her computer the attack against America was urgent and unrelenting. Liberals were restricting free speech. Immigrants were storming the border and casting illegal votes. Politicians were scheming to take away everyone’s guns. “The second you stop paying attention, there’s another travesty underway in this country,” Chapian once wrote, in her own Facebook post, so she had decided to always pay attention, sometimes scrolling and sharing for hours at a time.

“BREAKING: Democrat mega-donor accused of sexual assault!!!”

“Is Michelle Obama really dating Bruce Springsteen?”

“Iowa Farmer Claims Bill Clinton had Sex with Cow during ‘Cocaine Party.’ ”

On display above Chapian’s screen were needlepoints that had once occupied much of her free time, intricate pieces of artwork that took hundreds of hours to complete, but now she didn’t have the patience. Out her window was a dead-end road of identical beige-and-brown rock gardens surrounding double-wide trailers that looked similar to her own, many of them occupied by neighbors whom she’d never met. Beyond that was nothing but cactuses and heat waves for as far as she could see — a stretch of unincorporated land that continued from her backyard into the desert.

She’d spent almost a decade in Pahrump without really knowing why. The heat could be unbearable. She had no family in Nevada. She loved going to movies, and the town of 30,000 didn’t have a theater. It seemed to her like a place in the business of luring people — into the air-conditioned casinos downtown, into the legal brothels on the edge of the desert, into the new developments of cheap housing available for no money down — and in some ways she’d become stuck, too.

She had lived much of her life in cities throughout Europe and across the United States — places such as San Francisco, New York and Miami. She’d gone to college for a few years and become an insurance adjuster, working as one of the few women in the field in the 1980s and ’90s and joining the National Organization for Women to advocate for an equal wage before eventually moving to Rhode Island to work for a hospice and care for her aging parents. After her mother died, Chapian decided to retire and move to Las Vegas to live with a friend, and when Las Vegas become too expensive a real estate agent told her about Pahrump. She bought a three-bedroom trailer for less than $100,000 and painted it purple. She met a few friends at the local senior center and started eating at the Thai restaurant in town. A few years after arriving, she bought a new computer monitor and signed up for Facebook in 2009, choosing as her profile image a photo of her cat.

“Looking to connect with friends and other like-minded people,” she wrote then.

She had usually voted for Republicans, just like her parents, but it was only on Facebook that Chapian had become a committed conservative. She was wary of Obama in the months after his election, believing him to be both arrogant and inexperienced, and on Facebook she sought out a litany of information that seemed to confirm her worst fears, unaware that some of that information was false. It wasn’t just that Obama was liberal, she read; he was actually a socialist. It wasn’t just that his political qualifications were thin; it was that he had fabricated those qualifications, including parts of his college transcripts and maybe even his birth certificate.

For years she had watched network TV news, but increasingly Chapian wondered about the widening gap between what she read online and what she heard on the networks. “What else aren’t they telling us?” she wrote once, on Facebook, and if she believed the mainstream media was becoming insufficient or biased, it was her responsibility to seek out alternatives. She signed up for a dozen conservative newsletters and began to watch Alex Jones on Infowars. One far right Facebook group eventually led her to the next with targeted advertising, and soon Chapian was following more than 2,500 conservative pages, an ideological echo chamber that often trafficked in skepticism. Climate change was a hoax. The mainstream media was censored or scripted. Political Washington was under control of a “deep state.”

Chapian didn’t believe everything she read online, but she was also distrustful of mainstream fact-checkers and reported news. It sometimes felt to her like real facts had become indiscernible — that the truth was often somewhere in between. What she trusted most was her own ability to think critically and discern the truth, and increasingly her instincts aligned with the online community where she spent most of her time. It had been months since she’d gone to a movie. It had been almost a year since she’d made the hour-long trip to Las Vegas. Her number of likes and shares on Facebook increased each year until she was sometimes awakening to check her news feed in the middle of the night, liking and commenting on dozens of posts each day. She felt as if she was being let in on a series of dark revelations about the United States, and it was her responsibility to see and to share them.

“I’m not a conspiracy-theory-type person, but . . .” she wrote, before sharing a link to an unsourced story suggesting that Democratic donor George Soros had been a committed Nazi, or that a Parkland shooting survivor was actually a paid actor.

Now another post arrived in her news feed, from a page called America’s Last Line of Defense, which Chapian had been following for more than a year. It showed a picture of Trump standing at a White House ceremony. Circled in the background were two women, one black and one white.

“President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,” the post read. “They thanked him by giving him ‘the finger’ during the national anthem.”

Chapian looked at the photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course Trump had invited Clinton and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the Democrats — or “Demonrats,” as Chapian sometimes called them — had acted badly and disrespected America. It was the exact same narrative she saw playing out on her screen hundreds of times each day, and this time she decided to click ‘like’ and leave a comment.

“Well, they never did have any class,” she wrote.

Blair had invented thousands of stories in the past two years, always trafficking in the same stereotypes to fool the same people, but he never tired of watching a post take off: Eight shares in the first minute, 160 within 15 minutes, more than 1,000 by the end of the hour.

“Aaaaand, we’re viral,” he wrote, in a message to his liberal supporters on his private Facebook page. “It’s getting to the point where I can no longer control the absolute absurdity of the things I post. No matter how ridiculous, how obviously fake, or how many times you tell the same taters . . . they will still click that ‘like’ and hit that share button.”

By the standards of America’s Last Line of Defense, the item about Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton was only a moderate success. It included no advertisements, so it wouldn’t earn Blair any money. It wasn’t even the most popular of the 11 items he’d published that day. But, just an hour earlier, Blair had come up with an idea at his computer in Maine, and now hundreds or maybe thousands of people across the country believed Obama and Clinton had flipped off the president.

“Gross. Those women have no respect for themselves,” wrote a woman in Fort Washakie, Wyo.

“They deserve to be publicly shunned,” said a man in Gainesville, Fla.

“Not surprising behavior from such ill bred trash.”

“Jail them now!!!”

Blair had fooled them. Now came his favorite part, the gotcha, when he could let his victims in on the joke.

“OK, taters. Here’s your reality check,” he wrote on America’s Last Line of Defense, placing his comment prominently alongside the original post. “That is Omarosa and Hope Hicks, not Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton. They wouldn’t be caught dead posing for this pseudo-patriotic nationalistic garbage . . . Congratulations, stupid.”

Beyond the money he earned, this was what Blair had conceived of as the purpose for his website: to engage directly with people who spread false or extremist stories and prove those stories were wrong. Maybe, after people had been publicly embarrassed, they would think more critically about what they shared online. Maybe they would begin to question the root of some of their ideas.

Blair didn’t have time to personally confront each of the several hundred thousand conservatives who followed his Facebook page, so he’d built a community of more than 100 liberals to police the page with him. Together they patrolled the comments, venting their own political anger, shaming conservatives who had been fooled, taunting them, baiting them into making racist comments that could then be reported to Facebook. Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online. He had also forced Facebook to shut down 22 fake news sites for plagiarizing his content, many of which were Macedonian sites that reran his stories without labeling them as satire.

What Blair wasn’t sure he had ever done was change a single person’s mind. The people he fooled often came back to the page, and he continued to feed them the kind of viral content that boosted his readership and his bank account: invented stories about Colin Kaepernick, kneeling NFL players, imams, Black Lives Matter protesters, immigrants, George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, Michelle and Malia Obama. He had begun to include more obvious disclaimers at the top of every post and to intentionally misspell several words in order to highlight the idiocy of his work, but still traffic continued to climb. Sometimes he wondered: Rather than of awakening people to reality, was he pushing them further from it?

“Well, they never did have any class,” commented Shirley Chapian, from Pahrump, Nev., and Blair watched his liberal followers respond.

“That’s kind of an ironic comment coming from pure trailer trash, don’t you think?”

“You’re a gullible moron who just fell for a fake story on a Liberal satire page.”

“You my dear . . . are as smart as a potato.”

“What a waste of flesh and time.”

“Welcome to the internet. Critical thinking required.”

Chapian saw the comments after her post and wondered as she often did when she was attacked: Who were these people? And what were they talking about? Of course Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton had flipped off the president. It was true to what she knew of their character. That was what mattered.

Instead of responding directly to strangers on America’s Last Line of Defense, Chapian wrote on her own Facebook page. “Nasty liberals,” she said, and then she went back to her news feed, each day blending into the next.

A Muslim woman with her burqa on fire: like. A policeman using a baton to beat a masked antifa protester: like. Hillary Clinton looking gaunt and pale: like. A military helicopter armed with machine guns and headed toward the caravan of immigrants: like.

She had spent a few hours scrolling one afternoon when she heard a noise outside her window, and she turned away from the screen to look outside. A neighbor was sweeping his sidewalk, pushing tiny white rocks back into his rock garden. The sky was an uninterrupted blue. A mailman worked his way up the empty street. There were no signs of “Sharia Law.” The migrant caravan was still hundreds of miles away in Mexico. Antifa protesters had yet to descend on Pahrump. Chapian squinted against the sun, closed the shades and went back to her screen.

A picture of undocumented immigrants laughing inside a voting booth: like.

“Deep State Alive and Well”: like.

She scrolled upon another post from America’s Last Line of Defense, reading fast, oblivious to the satire labels and not noticing Blair’s trademark awkward phrasings and misspellings. It showed a group of children kneeling on prayer mats in a classroom. “California School children forced to Sharia in Class,” it read. “All of them have stopped eating bacon. Two began speaking in Allah. Stop making children pray to imaginary Gods!!”

Chapian recoiled from the screen. “Please!” she said. “If I had a kid in a school system like that, I’d yank them out so fast.”

She had seen hundreds of stories on Facebook about the threat of sharia, and this confirmed much of what she already believed. It was probably true, she thought. It was true enough.

“Do people understand that things like this are happening in this country?” she said. She clicked the post and the traffic registered back to a computer in Maine, where Blair watched another story go viral and wondered when his audience would get his joke.
eli.saslow@washpost.com
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on November 18, 2018, 06:10:10 pm
Now, is that true or not? :)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on November 19, 2018, 10:22:45 pm


nothing is real....yep ! circling the drain we are  :(



https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-46200018/the-face-mapping-technology-raising-fears-about-fake-news

Quote
The face-mapping technology raising fears about fake news
This facial mapping technology has been designed to improve television language dubbing, but it also has strong potential for those seeking to deceive.

BBC's Media Editor Amol Rajan looks at the benefits and risks - and tries it out himself.

This story is part of a series by the BBC on disinformation and fake news - a global problem challenging the way we share information and perceive the world around us.

To see more stories and learn more about the series visit www.bbc.co.uk/beyondfakenews



14 Nov 2018





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m0UIFlhAHo
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on November 23, 2018, 08:21:01 am

yes they really are trying to wedge our thinking into smaller and smaller ideas
divide and control
i refuse..i still like MOST folks
but thinking for yourself is becoming more rare with every published article
sigh



TECH 11/21/2018 05:33 pm ET Updated 1 day ago

Quote
Facebook Admits To Targeting Billionaire George Soros In PR Attack
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week he didn’t know about the PR campaign until The New York Times investigation.

By Carla Herreria

Facebook officials on Wednesday admitted to digging up dirt on Jewish billionaire George Soros and its competitors less than a week after The New York Times published an explosive exposé on the tech giant.

Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s head of communication and policy, published a blog post detailing the company’s decision to hire Definers Public Affairs, a Republican opposition research firm, and why it aimed its effort at the company’s critics, including Soros.

“Some of this work is being characterized as opposition research,” Schrage wrote. “But I believe it would be irresponsible and unprofessional for us not to understand the backgrounds and potential conflicts of interest of our critics.”

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied having any knowledge of the company’s PR campaign against Soros until the Times investigation, which also found negative campaigns aimed at Apple and Google, was made public.

Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, also denied having knowledge of the hiring of Definers. However, in a statement supplementing Schrage’s blog post, she said she recently learned that the PR company’s work had “crossed my desk.”

Facebook has since cut ties with Definers.

Schrage defended its attacks on Soros as a response to the liberal financier calling the company a “menace to society” during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last January.

“We had not heard such criticism from him before and wanted to determine if he had any financial motivation,” Schrage said Wednesday.

“Later, when the ‘Freedom From Facebook’ campaign emerged as a so-called grassroots coalition, the team asked Definers to help understand the groups behind them,” he added, referencing a group partly funded by Soros, who is often the target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Definers “prepared documents and distributed these to the press to show that this was not simply a spontaneous grassroots movement,“ Schrage explained.

According to the Times investigation, Facebook initially hired Definers to monitor press coverage of the company. Facebook later expanded its relationship to include promoting negative coverage of Google and Apple, whom Facebook views as rivals.

Schrage accepted blame for not properly managing Facebook’s relationship with Definers, explaining that as its work with the PR firm expanded, the relationship was “less centrally managed.”

“Mark and Sheryl relied on me to manage this without controversy,” Schrage wrote, noting that he approved the decision to hire Definers “and similar firms.”

“I’m sorry I let you all down,” he added. “I regret my own failure here.”

But Schrage also partly blamed company culture.

“Our culture has long been to move fast and take risks. Many times we have moved too quickly, and we always learn and keep trying to do our best,” he said.

In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said he had no intention of stepping down as chairman of Facebook.

This article has been updated with comment from Elliot Schrage.

ahhh who to believe..sigh

hey the sun just came out..see ya



Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on December 17, 2018, 09:56:14 pm


well here's a  truth...no one tells the truth anymore....just make up whatever you want - someone will buy it
sigh
and if you get caught.. just say someone misinformed you..sorry


https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/stone-admits-to-publishing-false-statements-on-infowars/ar-BBR6jd0?li=BBnb7Kz

Quote
Stone admits to publishing false statements on InfoWars
Justin Wise  32 mins ago

Roger Stone, a former informal adviser to President Trump, on Monday settled a defamation suit that sought $100 million in damages over material he published on InfoWars.com, according to The Wall Street Journal, admitting that he made false statements on the far-right website.

The settlement includes an agreement that mandates Stone run ads in newspapers apologizing for making defamatory statements about Chinese businessman Guo Wengui. The agreement also requires Stone to post a retraction of the false statements he made on social media.

Acting on the requirements will reportedly exempt Stone from paying any damages.

"I am solely responsible for fulfilling the terms of the settlement," Stone said in a text message to the Journal, adding that his past conduct was "irresponsible."

The settlement comes about nine months after Guo, a Chinese businessman who is a vocal critic of China, filed a lawsuit against the longtime political operative.

Guo said he was suing Stone for falsely accusing him of being a "turncoat criminal who is convicted of crimes here and in China," according to the Journal. The lawsuit also said that Stone accused Guo of violating U.S. election laws by making political donations to Hillary Clinton, the Journal reported.

Stone's settlement statement identifies Bruno Wu, a Chinese-American media tycoon as the "the apparent source of the information" about Guo. Stone says that this information was relayed to him by former Trump aide Sam Nunberg.

Stone said in a statement to The Hill that he "made the error of relying on the representations of Nunberg in my report on this matter and for that I apologized."

Nunberg declined to comment to The Journal.

The settlement from Stone comes as he faces growing scrutiny as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's election interference.

Mueller is investigating if Stone and his associate, Jerome Corsi, were aware of WikiLeaks's plans to publish hacked emails from Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, during the 2016 campaign.

Stone has repeatedly denied having advanced knowledge of the organization's plans.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is expected to become the House Intelligence Committee chairman, said Sunday "there's ample reason to be concerned about" Stone's "truthfulness."

"If Mr. Schiff has any proof that I had advance knowledge of the source or content of the allegedly hacked or stolen emails published by Wikileaks or that I received anything of the kind I challenge him to produce it," Stone said in an email to The Hill earlier this month.

-Updated 10:58 p.m.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on July 04, 2019, 11:39:18 am
happy fourth to ya all

Quote
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-facebook-ad-stock-models-080039156.html

FAKE VIEWS: The Real Americans In Trump's New Ads Are Foreign Stock Models

Ed Mazza•July 4, 2019

President Donald Trump’s latest online ads for his reelection campaign feature what’s supposed to look like testimonials from real Americans. But it turns out the people in the ads are stock footage models from overseas.

The spots are running on Facebook and Google.

According to the Popular Info website ― and a HuffPost search of stock footage archives ― videos and stills of the models from the Trump ads are available on the iStockphoto website as well as from other sources that resell such images.

“Tracey from Florida,” shown strolling along what appears to be a Florida beach, said in a voiceover that Trump was doing “a great job” and “I could not ask for a better president of the United States of America.”

But she isn’t Tracey, she’s not from Florida and the voice is unlikely to be hers. The footage is of a stock model who according to the description is “walking during sunset at the beach along the Mediterranean.”

Another featured American ― “Thomas from Washington” ― is this guy, whose image is sold via stock footage in video and stills, in this case as “bearded and tattooed hipster coffee shop owner posing.”

(https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/5xOR90QsWd9XgYtHj1IXYA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTEyNDI-/https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/c2EKzX89PSvG1moLtiunxw--~B/dz0wO3NtPTE7YXBwaWQ9eXRhY2h5b24-/https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5d1d81242400001120934865.jpeg)

He can run a coffee shop in multiple countries ― images of him are available with a sign on his door in at least six languages but was provided from a stock footage producer in Turkey. CNN discovered that the exterior of his supposed coffee shop was actually stock footage of a storefront in Japan. 

“If I did anything remotely like this for any one of my clients I’d be fired,” Democratic ad producer J.J. Balaban told CNN.

The ads do include a disclaimer: The fine-print words “actual testimonial actor portrayal” appear briefly in the spots, although they’re easy to miss.

Popular Info reported that the models in the ads seemed to target groups that Trump struggles to connect with, such as the young woman billed as Tracey from Florida or this man, who seems to be Hispanic and claims to be a “lifelong Democrat” yet supports Trump’s border plan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=CrV1OoSxwyE


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=CrV1OoSxwyE


However, there is no indication the testimonials were from people in the demographic groups portrayed in the videos.

“As a producer, you want to control — you want people to look a certain way and you want them to sound a certain way,” former cable exec Jay Newell, who teaches advertising at Iowa State University, told The Associated Press. “The fact that the footage is from outside the U.S. makes it that much more embarrassing.


ah i see this is originally from huff
..hahahahahah figures


also
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-2020-campaign-uses-stock-photo-models-in-new-political-ads/ar-AADH8pB?li=BBnb7Kz



found it
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-facebook-ad-stock-models_n_5d1d7f12e4b0f312567eb8ae

07/04/2019 04:00 am ET
The Real Americans In Trump’s New Ads Are Foreign Stock Models
The Trump campaign’s latest ads use footage from overseas models along with supposed testimonials from real supporters.

By Ed Mazza

video...if you don't want to read


President Donald Trump’s latest online ads for his reelection campaign feature what’s supposed to look like testimonials from real Americans. But it turns out the people in the ads are stock footage models from overseas.

The spots are running on Facebook and Google.

According to the Popular Info website ― and a HuffPost search of stock footage archives ― videos and stills of the models from the Trump ads are available on the iStockphoto website as well as from other sources that resell such images.

“Tracey from Florida,” shown strolling along what appears to be a Florida beach, said in a voiceover that Trump was doing “a great job” and “I could not ask for a better president of the United States of America.”

But she isn’t Tracey, she’s not from Florida and the voice is unlikely to be hers. The footage is of a stock model who according to the description is “walking during sunset at the beach along the Mediterranean.”

Another featured American ― “Thomas from Washington” ― is this guy, whose image is sold via stock footage in video and stills, in this case as “bearded and tattooed hipster coffee shop owner posing.”

same pic of husky guy above
He can run a coffee shop in multiple countries ― images of him are available with a sign on his door in at least six languages but was provided from a stock footage producer in Turkey. CNN discovered that the exterior of his supposed coffee shop was actually stock footage of a storefront in Japan. 

“If I did anything remotely like this for any one of my clients I’d be fired,” Democratic ad producer J.J. Balaban told CNN.

The ads do include a disclaimer: The fine-print words “actual testimonial actor portrayal” appear briefly in the spots, although they’re easy to miss.

Popular Info reported that the models in the ads seemed to target groups that Trump struggles to connect with, such as the young woman billed as Tracey from Florida or this man, who seems to be Hispanic and claims to be a “lifelong Democrat” yet supports Trump’s border plan:

same video as above

However, there is no indication the testimonials were from people in the demographic groups portrayed in the videos.

“As a producer, you want to control — you want people to look a certain way and you want them to sound a certain way,” former cable exec Jay Newell, who teaches advertising at Iowa State University, told The Associated Press. “The fact that the footage is from outside the U.S. makes it that much more embarrassing.”

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on July 13, 2019, 09:12:54 am

Quote

CNBC
Prime Day is coming: Tips to spot a fake review on Amazon
 Jade Scipioni  18 hrs ago

Amazon Prime Day kicks off midnight PST on Monday and lasts for two full days for the first time. While you're researching what to buy this year, there's an aspect you should keep in mind: Whether the Amazon reviews your reading are legit.

On Tuesday, members of Congress wrote a letter Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding to know what the company is doing about deceptive ratings and reviews ahead its Prime Day, which generates more than $4 billion in sales for the e-commerce giant, according to last year's numbers.

There are methods in place: Amazon uses artificial intelligence and a team of investigators to block and remove inauthentic reviews 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it works with social media sites to stop inauthentic reviews at the source, it pursues legal action to stop offenders and it's constantly improving these systems, an Amazon spokesperson tells CNBC Make It.

But still, fake reviews on the site – where sellers pay people or use bots to drum up phony positive reviews about their products in an effort to influence Amazon and Google rankings as well as consumers – are on the rise.

According to data from Fakespot, a website that uses artificial intelligence to help consumers determine the reliability of online reviews, fraudulent reviews on Amazon have climbed from 16.34% last June to more than 34% this June in all product categories. And in April, a probe carried out by U.K consumer group Which?, found tens of thousands of fake five-star reviews on products listed on Amazon.

(The problem has been intensifying since Amazon began to court Chinese sellers in 2015, according to data from Fakespot data. Amazon plans to pull its third-party services on its Chinese website starting on July 18, two days after Prime Day ends.)

There are some things you can do to try and distinguish the fake reviews from the authentic ones though, according to Fakespot COO and co-founder Robert Gross. Here are his top five tips to help spot fake reviews.

1. Know where the problem is the worst
Electronics and gadgets are some of the most popular things sold on Amazon Prime Day; they're also the categories where Gross sees the highest percentages of fake reviews, particularly for Bluetooth headsets, cell phones and accessories and electronics. Ahead of Prime Day, many sellers in these categories aggressively create fake reviews to be "prominently displayed next to deals." In other words, if someone looks at a Prime Day deal and starts searching for similar products, the ones that use fake reviews aggressively will pop up in the product search results page, he says.

2. Look at the star-rating distribution
Gross says a big red flag that a product may have fake reviews is an "unnatural" distribution of five-star ratings. If a product from a seller that you've never heard of has several hundred reviews, and those reviews are all five-star, you should question their authenticity.

Even if a product has a large majority of five-star reviews and only a couple of one-star reviews, it's worth questioning. In that case, read the one-star reviews, as they are more than likely real, according to Gross' findings.

He also says customers should look for products that have a variety of ratings, including three or two-star reviews, because no matter how good a company is, not every product or customer experience is going to be perfect.

3. Look at the language of the review
One of the most surefire ways to catch a fake review, says Gross, is to look at its language. If the reviews are very short and provide no details (like "good product," or "great company") there's a good chance it's fake, based on Fakespot's data over the last year.

Also look out for multiple reviews that have similar language to each other, says Gross, as some sellers create fake reviews using a variation of their company's marketing copy.

4. Sort the reviews by most recently posted
Gross says that Amazon and other e-commerce sites have gotten into the bad habit of showing consumer reviews that it deems to be the most relevant, not the most recent.

"These are usually the first reviews a consumer will see, and sometimes they are years old. Other times these reviews have been upvoted [by likes or comments] by fake review farms to push them to the top" he says.

Gross advises consumers to sort the reviews by "most recent" to get a better idea where the company or product stands today.

5. Don't count on 'Verified Purchase' tags
Gross says while Amazon's "Verified Purchase" tags are intended to help customers identify which reviews are legitimate, they have been taken over by fake reviewers and sellers, "to the point of being useless," he says.

"Verified purchase tags are easily gamed by fake reviewers and sellers that use them. They will typically ask the reviewer to buy the product and leave a five-star review. Once the five-star review is left, it will be labeled as from a verified purchaser. The seller then sends the 'buyer' a gift card for the amount or a little more to compensate them for the fake review," he says, adding that consumers shouldn't rely on them for authenticity.

Of course, even if reviews are fake, that doesn't mean a product is bad or good. And Gross points out that Fakespot does not analyze whether a product is good or bad either, only the quality of the reviews. However, if a consumer has never heard of the seller or company, they should do their own research before buying, he says.

"A good deal is not always the best product," he says.

Don't miss: The FTC just prosecuted a fake paid Amazon review for the first time — here's what that means for users
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on July 26, 2019, 10:48:34 am


even if you think you know who is writting what...do you?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carl-beech-westminster-pedophile-ring-sentence-jail_n_5d3b1117e4b0a6d6373ea9bf?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaHVmZnBvc3QuY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAETxEAO1dodKGa9f7ZEUCf7efd27MJh25Xm9zG4tyvMvDLYQGdl6ALFyd4s-d2BxLP6-RYV2Vz9KaRcBa2iT6cjABTQ3ufMgqwEJybY6wmdBHGcuMiPhxNgK5SPTpYnsZLUtkJhYoVD7HBNyvo4-bjdt2wowCwcjv9wzx9jl4LEN

WORLD NEWS 07/26/2019 11:39 am ET
UK Pedophile Sentenced To 18 Years For Making Up VIP Pedophile Ring Abuse Story
Ex–child advocate Carl Beech said he’d been abused by a murderous pedophile ring, but it turned out he was the pedophile.
headshot
By Chris York

A former UK child advocate who lied about being abused by a murderous VIP Westminster pedophile ring has been sentenced to 18 years in jail.

Carl Beech, 51, was convicted of perverting the course of justice and fraud on Monday, over the lies which ruined the reputations of a number of political figures.

He repeatedly told officers he had been abused in the 1970s and 1980s by a string of high-profile figures from the worlds of politics, the military and security services.

His claims about being sexually abused as a boy and witnessing three child murders at the hands of the group led the Metropolitan Police to raid the homes of 91-year-old Normandy veteran Field Marshall Lord Bramall, the late Lord Brittan and former Tory MP Harvey Proctor.

The force has come under widespread criticism for the investigation, which closed in 2016 without making a single arrest and was described by Proctor as a “truly disgraceful chapter in the history of British policing”.

Among Beech’s allegations were claims that his stepfather, an Army major, raped him and passed him on to generals to be tortured and sadistically abused at military bases by other establishment figures.

Lord Bramall said the impact of Beech’s “monstrous allegations” were worse than any of the injuries he had received in the Army.

He said: “I thought I could be hurt no more. I was never as badly wounded in all my time in the military as I was by the allegations made by ‘Nick’.”

Lord Bramall described the horror of having his house searched by 20 police officers as his seriously-ill wife lay in bed, adding she died without seeing his name cleared.

PRESS ASSOCIATION VIDEO
Harvey Proctor making a statement after the conviction of Beech earlier this week.
Beech was also convicted of voyeurism and possession of indecent images of children.

During sentencing at Newcastle Crown Court, prosecutor Tony Badenoch QC said images of a pre-pubescent boy ― referred to as Child E ― were found on a secret app, disguised as a calculator, on Beech’s iPad.

He said these pictures and videos were shot by the defendant in his bathroom without the boy knowing.

The prosecutor told the judge: “Carl Beech, whilst he was committing these offenses, was in almost daily contact with senior police officers investigating his invented claims of pedophile activity by others.”

Badenoch told the court Beech’s conduct involved “the cynical manipulation of the criminal justice system on an unprecedented scale”.

He added that this was “sophisticated and well-planned criminal behavior”.

COLIN MCPHERSON VIA GETTY IMAGES
Lord Leon Brittan, centre, died before his name was cleared.
Badenoch said the allegations made by Beech “could scarcely have been more serious”.

He said: “The defendant was motivated by entirely selfish purposes.”

“The defendant derived sexual pleasure from graphically describing the violent sexual abuse of young boys. He enjoyed the attention and celebrity.”

On Monday, the jury rejected Beech’s unfounded allegations and convicted him of 12 counts of perverting the course of justice.

He was also found guilty on one count of fraud, relating to a £22,000 ($27,000) criminal injuries payout he falsely claimed for being raped by Savile.

The jury were unconvinced by his claims that Army generals, at the height of the IRA terror threat, could sneak off unguarded to join horrific child abuse sessions.

In a victim impact statement read to the court, Diana Brittan, widow of Lord Brittan, described the trauma of having to deal with her husband’s terminal illness while facing “a series of false allegations and smears of the very worst kind”.

She said: “I feel he was caught up in a totally unjustified witchhunt which took its toll on both him and me.”

“He was denied the dignified death that he deserved.”

She added: “His name has now been cleared but he will never know this. The system has let him and my family down.”

PA ARCHIVE/PA IMAGES
Field Marshall Lord Bramall pictured in 2000.
The Met Police’s £2 million ($2.5 million) Operation Midland into the lurid allegations by the man they named only as “Nick” ended without making a single arrest.

Sir Edward Heath’s godson Lincoln Seligman said in a statement read to the court that the jury’s verdicts had confirmed that the late former prime minister “was always as he remains, wholly and categorically innocent of these depraved and wicked accusations”.

Seligman condemned the Metropolitan Police, Wiltshire Police and politicians “who should be ashamed of themselves” for giving credence to Beech’s accusations.

He said: “It is unlikely this damage will ever be undone.”

Collingwood Thompson, defending, said in mitigation that there was an “unfortunate combination” of his client making his allegations at a time that police started a policy that “complainants should be believed”.

Thompson said: “Although the flames were started by Beech, they were fanned by the policy that was adopted.”

He also told the judge that there was “no realistic prospect” that any of his client’s allegations would have resulted in prosecutions.

Over the course of the trial, which spanned more than two months, jurors heard how Beech spun officers lie after lie.

He claimed that the gang of men, who he referred to as “The Group”, had run over and killed a boy named Scott in front of him – but prosecutors said that the child described had in fact never existed.

The fraudster gave false hope to the family of Martin Allen, who went missing in 1979 at the age of 15, by saying that he had seen a youngster matching his description raped and strangled in front of him.

After Operation Midland was closed, Beech fled to Sweden at a time when the Crown Prosecution Service were considering whether to bring charges against him, buying two properties there and trying to evade justice by using false identities.

He was extradited back to the UK to face charges in October last year.

His lies were at one stage wrongly described as “credible and true” by a senior detective.

Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Sir Stephen House said that officers in the case had worked in good faith, and that an “internal debrief” would take place following Beech’s conviction to identify whether lessons could be learned.

Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson has been criticized for meeting with Beech in 2014, but the politician said he had simply told him the allegations would be taken seriously, saying in a statement: “It was not my role to judge whether victims’ stories were true."
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on July 27, 2019, 08:03:18 am


not a lot of time this morning..making elderberry jam today  so
read this is you are interested..
you really just can't trust anyone anymore..truly sad





https://www.huffpost.com/entry/patricia-russell-cfp-fake-finance-blogger_l_5d38f4f4e4b020cd994e447d



MONEY
How This Fake Financial Expert Tricked Outlets Into Publishing Her Advice
Who is "Patricia Russell"? Not a certified financial planner, for one.
ByCasey Bond
07/26/2019 07:08pm EDT | Updated 15 hours ago

Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on July 27, 2019, 08:20:53 am
you really just can't trust anyone anymore..truly sad
You should never trust anyone just because they appear honest, that's how scammers scam.

Apparently, people appear to trust other people with more ease online than on real life, when it should be the opposite.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on August 02, 2019, 07:10:42 am


well trust is a big issue anymore...this article covers a lot of ground and i have only copied a small part

entire article here:


Quote
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-saudi-arabia-fake-accounts_n_5d442f85e4b0aca3411c7bc2?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaHVmZnBvc3QuY29tLw&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADaTriWdm2d_PnQyZVHp1iOa9-k6xWzxfKyATPIUALjd0tUGn7YeXkbP2QEQL6tM-26eQqa7C0p_jEcZvrDwYZGKLzDWBE03fme0mWoXlSp6MQVyiBJZSgqgD7NoX98-8NwZz6sGiRu4Z2cSr1C4G-1cz_sBZXAOOGJ5tiNLDXVx

WORLD NEWS 08/02/2019 08:46 am ET
Facebook Says It Dismantled Covert Influence Campaign Tied To Saudi Government
Facebook said it had suspended more than 350 accounts and pages with about 1.4 million followers.

Jack Stubbs


excerpt:

ONLINE BATTLEGROUND

Social media companies are under mounting pressure to help stop illicit political influence online.

U.S. intelligence officials have said that Russia used Facebook and other platforms to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and are concerned it will do so again in 2020. Moscow denies such allegations.

The Atlantic Council’s Ben Nimmo said online information operations were becoming increasingly visible as more governments and political groups adopt the tactics and the social media companies step up efforts to take them down.

Facebook has made at least 14 public announcements about takedowns of “inauthentic behavior” stemming from 17 different countries this year. The most recent announcement before Thursday included accounts run by people in Thailand, Russia, Ukraine and Honduras.

The network based in the UAE and Egypt that was also dismantled on Thursday was separate from the Saudi campaign, Facebook said, although it targeted some of the same countries in the Middle East and Africa with messages promoting the UAE.

“This shows how much social media has become a battleground, particularly in the Gulf, where you’ve got very strong regional rivalries and you’ve got a long tradition of working through proxies,” Nimmo said.

“This is almost becoming normalized,” he added. “Where you get geopolitical tensions, you get stuff like this going on, and we’re moving into a space where the platforms are dealing with this almost as routine.” (Additional reporting by Katie Paul in SAN FRANCISCO and Ghaida Ghantous in DUBAI; Editing by Peter Graff and Richard Chang)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on August 02, 2019, 07:47:49 am
Question. Was the outcome of the election affected by any interference by any means either direct or indirect by whom ever?

I don’t believe so.

Rock  8)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on August 02, 2019, 07:31:07 pm


Quote
Question. Was the outcome of the election affected by any interference by any means either direct or indirect by whom ever?

I don’t believe so.

Rock  8)

hey Rock     we are ALL somehow affected by the words of others..written or spoken..in agreement or disagreement

you can call it interference, motivation, re enforcement of your own thought or persuasions to another view point..

you (we) can be in non-belief
BUT
it happens every minute, hour, day
their is almost always a reaction to someone else's words

some do it on purpose and some just do it to state their point of view..
some try to measure the affect we have on each other and some try to assign other things to it

doesn't matter.. it happens .. and will continue to happen
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on August 02, 2019, 09:01:12 pm

hey Rock     we are ALL somehow affected by the words of others..written or spoken..in agreement or disagreement

you can call it interference, motivation, re enforcement of your own thought or persuasions to another view point..

you (we) can be in non-belief
BUT
it happens every minute, hour, day
their is almost always a reaction to someone else's words

some do it on purpose and some just do it to state their point of view..
some try to measure the affect we have on each other and some try to assign other things to it

doesn't matter.. it happens .. and will continue to happen

Still didn’t answer my question, but let me be specific. Did the Russians alter the outcome of Trump winning the election? I don’t think so. Now that doesn’t mean they or others didn’t try, just that it didn’t affect the outcome. Trump won more states. Period.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on August 03, 2019, 03:49:19 am


have you ever heard of gerrymanderring?  and the electoral college?

that's how he won..
any republican would have won
but not by popular vote..and that's the end of my political analysis


but the attempts to encourage our thinking in a specific direct were and  are on going 
and that was the point
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on August 03, 2019, 04:06:03 am

have you ever heard of gerrymanderring?  and the electoral college?

that's how he won..
any republican would have won
but not by popular vote..and that's the end of my political analysis


but the attempts to encourage our thinking in a specific direct were and  are on going 
and that was the point

"U.S. intelligence officials have said that Russia used Facebook and other platforms to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and are concerned it will do so again in 2020. Moscow denies such allegations."

Well of course I have, and that's 'OUR' system...like it or not....(the Russians have nothing to do with it)....is the system perfect? Of course not...and both parties, when they get control, try to some extent, to gerrymander...But that is why we have courts and judges to try and see that doesn't happen...

Rock  8)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on August 03, 2019, 07:52:58 am
Did the Russians alter the outcome of Trump winning the election? I don’t think so.
I don't think that it happened to a relevant number of people, but, as you said, that's how the system works, the only way of preventing that from happening is to close all communications and allow only those media sources that the state says are "good".
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on August 03, 2019, 12:44:10 pm


Quote
But that is why we have courts and judges to try and see that doesn't happen...


right  and

List of federal judges appointed by Donald Trump - Wikipedia
Search domain en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_judges_appointed_by_Donald_Trumphttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_judges_appointed_by_Donald_Trump
As of July 26, 2019, the United States Senate has confirmed 131 Article III judges nominated by President Trump, including 2 Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, 43 judges for the United States Courts of Appeals, 86 judges for the United States District Courts, and 0 judges for the United States Court of International Trade.


Fact Check: Has Trump Appointed 1 in Every 8 Circuit Court ...
Search domain www.dailysignal.com/2018/05/21/fact-check-has-trump-appointed-1-in-every-8-circuit-court-judges/https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/05/21/fact-check-has-trump-appointed-1-in-every-8-circuit-court-judges/
In total, Trump has appointed 39 federal judges to date, including 17 district court judges and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Obama had 27 nominees approved at this point in his presidency, while President George W. Bush had 57 confirmed.



Trump Has Record Number of Judges Confirmed in 1st Year ...
Search domain www.newsmax.com/politics/donald-trump-record-number-appointed-judges-first-year/2017/12/15/id/832021/https://www.newsmax.com/politics/donald-trump-record-number-appointed-judges-first-year/2017/12/15/id/832021/
Trump Has Record Number of Judges Confirmed in 1st Year. The Senate confirmed James Ho to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, on Thursday, HuffPost noted. Ho's confirmation officially broke the record for Trump, who now surpasses Presidents Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, who had 11 circuit court judges approved in their first year,...



Trump is nominating a ton of judges and US attorneys ...
Search domain www.businessinsider.com/trump-judges-attorneys-nominations-2017-7https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-judges-attorneys-nominations-2017-7
During that same timeframe in President Barack Obama's first term, Obama had nominated just four district judges, five appeals court judges, and 13 US attorneys. In total, Trump nominated 55 ...
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on August 03, 2019, 01:27:04 pm
How can people expect an independent justice if judges are appointed by the president?
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on August 03, 2019, 02:07:29 pm
SO.... ;)

You don’t think that Obama, Clinton, appointed judges that fit their political mind set?

Come on...

Or how about the Bushes? Surely they appointed judges that were polar opposite of their political base.

In a perfect world everyone would think the same and everyone would vote the way you or I would.

But I’m a realist and I don’t hate anyone.

Now I DO dislike some people, but hey that’s just me.

 ;D
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on August 03, 2019, 02:19:02 pm
SO.... ;)

You don’t think that Obama, Clinton, appointed judges that fit their political mind set?
I wasn't talking about a specific president, I was talking about the way the system works. Having a politician nominating judges is a good way of influencing justice, and justice should be completely independent of politics.
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on August 03, 2019, 02:35:20 pm
Sorry ArMaP...I was talking to Otter....that's the 'SO'....
Looking at it now, I see where it would be confusing....lolol
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: ArMaP on August 03, 2019, 05:50:01 pm
Sorry ArMaP...I was talking to Otter....that's the 'SO'....
Looking at it now, I see where it would be confusing....lolol
It was. :)
Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: space otter on August 04, 2019, 08:25:25 am


Quote from:
Quote
Sgt.Rocknroll on August 03, 2019, 02:35:20 PM
Sorry ArMaP...I was talking to Otter....that's the 'SO'....
Looking at it now, I see where it would be confusing....lolol


Quote
It was. :)


see how easy it is ...bwhahahahahah  but you guys handled it correctly
that doesn't always happen and people go off thinking something entirely different than what the writter/ speaker said...
or misrepresents who they are..

Rock.. maybe you out to just stick to 'otter'..lol

and of course other presidents have appointed judges.. it's a flaw in the system..like Armap said....

but what i see happening  with this administration is scaring me  cause they make the appointments  and then try to change the rules so that those things can't be done in the future and eventually you do not have a democracy/republic  you have a dictatorship
and if you can't see the tendencies in this man to go that way you just aren't paying close enough attention..imo

Rock we are not going to agree that he was a good choice,  sorry..
 i don't think we have had a good choice in a long time but have been limping along  and i don't think any of those running are going to improve those choices...
i would say we are doomed but i don't want to go back on what i said to Ellirium  about not being a doom porn  person.. ;D
so
i will go with  we are being challenged to change and  right now being older we aren't as good with change as we once were..
and with the thousands of voices talking it's hard to even think straight and maintain an attitude of kindness and openness.

i want more and more to retreat to the garden but i know that isn't the right thing.....but deciding what the right thing is has become more difficult daily

so for today i am going to go pick my cabbages and start some sauerkraut in a crock  for later.....yep running away..sigh

hugs


Title: Re: fake news - live
Post by: Sgt.Rocknroll on August 04, 2019, 04:20:27 pm

Quote from:


see how easy it is ...bwhahahahahah  but you guys handled it correctly
that doesn't always happen and people go off thinking something entirely different than what the writter/ speaker said...
or misrepresents who they are..

Rock.. maybe you out to just stick to 'otter'..lol

and of course other presidents have appointed judges.. it's a flaw in the system..like Armap said....

but what i see happening  with this administration is scaring me  cause they make the appointments  and then try to change the rules so that those things can't be done in the future and eventually you do not have a democracy/republic  you have a dictatorship
and if you can't see the tendencies in this man to go that way you just aren't paying close enough attention..imo

Rock we are not going to agree that he was a good choice,  sorry..
 i don't think we have had a good choice in a long time but have been limping along  and i don't think any of those running are going to improve those choices...
i would say we are doomed but i don't want to go back on what i said to Ellirium  about not being a doom porn  person.. ;D
so
i will go with  we are being challenged to change and  right now being older we aren't as good with change as we once were..
and with the thousands of voices talking it's hard to even think straight and maintain an attitude of kindness and openness.

i want more and more to retreat to the garden but i know that isn't the right thing.....but deciding what the right thing is has become more difficult daily

so for today i am going to go pick my cabbages and start some sauerkraut in a crock  for later.....yep running away..sigh

hugs

OTTER 😂

I don’t care that much for Mr.Trump, but I care for the opposition even less.

So it’s a choice of a little and none at all.

If you get my drift.
As Zorgon called them DemonRATS, I just called them DemoRATS.

😂😂😂😂