fake news - live

[ArMaP]

Now the one Sensational headline was "A Herd of Martian Creatures?"  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.

[space otter]

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

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.

[space otter]

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

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)

[fansongecho]

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'

[space otter]

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

New Russian Hacking Targeted Republican Groups, Microsoft Says

By DAVID E. SANGER and SHEERA FRENKEL  3 hrs ago

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 

Images for gru




the minions  always to the dirty work

bwhahahahahahahah

[space otter]

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 .

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 .

[zorgon]

Non Fake news... right from Putin himself   and he is laughing at American media

Here is the video from NBC


Notice the COMMENTS:

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....

[ArMaP]

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.

[space otter]

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

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.

..

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

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



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

[space otter]

 
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

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

[space otter]

'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

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

[ArMaP]

Now, is that true or not?

[space otter]

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

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

[space otter]

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

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

[space otter]

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

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.