The "Fake News" conspiracy.

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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Dec 03, 2016 9:06 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby guruilla » Tue Dec 06, 2016 2:04 pm

From OP:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to bring up a legitimate concern about the Democratic establishment in a debate with a party loyalist and been told that I’m crazy or ridiculous because it’s a concern they’d never encountered before. Whether I’m discussing a WikiLeaks release that didn’t get much coverage or the fact that Hillary Clinton really seemed to be gearing up for an all-out war with Russia, I have never, ever been met with sincerity or had my concerns directly addressed in an earnest debate of ideas with a Hillary voter. Not once. Not one single time, ever, to this day. And I’ve spoken to a lot of them.

They consistently dismissed me and told me I was crazy for bringing up such concerns, because they’d never heard about them. Why had they never heard about them? Because they live in an echo chamber. . . . All they’d ever been told by their friends and favorite pundits is that they’re right, and everyone who disagrees with them is at best privileged and ignorant, and at worst racist and fascist.

And it’s only gotten worse ever since the “fake news” smear campaign began against alternative media. Now every single time I try to substantiate my argument with a link or a source when debating a neoliberal, they tell me my source is invalid unless it comes from one of the mainstream news sites that have consistently avoided covering anything that made Clinton look bad. The talking heads on TV are telling them that it’s okay to do this now, that they no longer have to look at a news story and address its content anymore, because unless it comes from NBC, CNN or the New York Times, it’s fake. People are even doing this with mainstream outlets like The Observer and Fox News now; it happens routinely in my interactions with them. Try talking about how their favorite neoliberal outlets hardly ever cover WikiLeaks or the Clinton Foundation scandals and they call you a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist, even while they themselves feel perfectly comfortable and sane blaming Hillary’s loss on a vast global Trump-Putin-Comey-Assange conspiracy.

Political discourse is dead in America. We can’t debate each other anymore.


Sounds . . . weirdly familiar . . ..


coffin_dodger » Fri Nov 25, 2016 8:48 pm wrote:I'm back, Jack!
Is it starting to sink in that you are directly responsible for El Trumpino yet? You, plus the other guys who consistently and relentlessly slur anyone who disagrees with you - as a Fascist or a Nazi? I really can't help but marvel at the job you and AD did here at RI. First class. I'm not, in any way, suggesting it was orchestrated or organised, at all. But very effective, nonetheless.

:|
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jan 20, 2017 11:51 am

Found my next screen name...

Image
Illustration by Angelica Alzona

Meet Guy Sims Fitch, a Fake Writer Invented by the US Government
Matt Novak
9/27/16 10:15am

Guy Sims Fitch had a lot to say about the world economy in the 1950s and 60s. He wrote articles in newspapers around the globe as an authoritative voice on economic issues during the Cold War. Fitch was a big believer in private American investment and advocated for it as a liberating force internationally. But no matter what you thought of Guy Sims Fitch’s ideas, he had one big problem. He didn’t exist.

Guy Sims Fitch was created by the United States Information Agency (USIA), America’s official news distribution service for the rest of the world. Today, people find the term “propaganda” to be incredibly loaded and even negative. But employees of the USIA used the term freely and proudly in the 1950s and 60s, believing that they were fighting a noble and just cause against the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism. And Guy Sims Fitch was just one tool in the diverse toolbox of the USIA propaganda machine.

“I don’t mind being called a propagandist, so long as that propaganda is based on the truth,” said Edward R. Murrow in 1962. Murrow took a job as head of the USIA after a long and celebrated career as a journalist, and did quite a few things during his tenure that would make modern journalists who romanticize “the good old days” blush.

But even when USIA peddled its own version of the truth, the propaganda agency wasn’t always using the most, let’s say, truthful of methods. Their use of Guy Sims Fitch—a fake person whose opinions would be printed in countries like Brazil, Germany, and Australia, among others—served the cause of America’s version of the truth against Communism during the Cold War, even if Fitch’s very existence was a lie.

I recently filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA to get more information about Guy Sims Fitch, this fictional character that journalists and editors of the USIA would use to promote American economic interests abroad. The twist? The CIA wants to make sure that the privacy rights of this fictional character aren’t violated. Or, perhaps, that the privacy rights of the people who wrote under that name aren’t violated. The short version? They’re toying with me.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, federal agencies are required to take into consideration the privacy rights of living individuals. Dead people don’t have privacy rights under US law, which is why you’ll see agencies like the FBI release their files on notable individuals after a famous person dies. (And the not so famous, if you ask for it.) But Guy Sims Fitch can never die, because he was never born.

So instead of just giving me documents about the use of that name by the USIA, the CIA has instead decided to play games with me. They’ve asked that I submit verification of identity for the editors and journalists who wrote under the name Guy Sims Fitch in the 1950s and 60s, along with documents showing that those people consent to having their information made public. And in the case of any editors who wrote under Guy Sims Fitch who might be dead, I’m supposed to submit proof of death. Unfortunately, I don’t have a list of government agents from the 1950s that wrote under the name Guy Sims Fitch. I was kind of hoping that the CIA would fill me in on that. Or, at the very least, tell me a bit more about why they were using fake people to support causes that presumably real people could have written about.

I’d be angry if I wasn’t so impressed. It’s actually a brilliant move by the CIA, if you believe that its goal is to release as little information about past operations as possible. (Personally, I find this kind of obtuse FOIA-response dickery damaging to the agency’s reputation long term. But what do I know?)

Again, it’s kind of genius. Anything a person writes under a pseudonym is still the intellectual output of that individual. So the CIA is tacitly acknowledging that while they can’t really claim any good reason to deny my request for files on Guy Sims Fitch, they can claim some vague interest in protecting the privacy of untold number of writers who occasionally wrote under that name in newspapers around the world.
An article by Guy Sims Fitch, a fake person invented by the USIA, that appeared in a German newspaper in 1959

How do we, as Americans, know about Guy Sims Fitch at all? The USIA was prohibited from disseminating news inside the United States under laws that restricted the government from producing propaganda for domestic consumption. So, as best I can tell, Fitch never showed up in any American newspapers. That, however, didn’t stop a lot of other USIA and CIA disinformation campaigns from leaking into American news.

In fact, the CIA had to acknowledge during 1977 congressional hearings that the disinformation they were helping to get published through a variety of media around the world would often find its way into American news outlets. It was during those same hearings that it was revealed the CIA had helped covertly finance the publication of about 1,000 books. And Congress made the CIA pinkie-swear that “under no circumstances” would it publish any newspapers, magazines, or books in the United States. Clandestine financing of publishing efforts outside of the US in any language that wasn’t English was just fine, according to Congress. I guess for better and worse, at least most of those efforts had real writers attached to them.

The first that I heard about Guy Sims Fitch was in a fascinating book about the history of the USIA. Wilson P. Dizard Jr., a former employee of USIA, mentions Guy Sims Fitch almost as an aside in his 2004 book Inventing Public Diplomacy. And a quick search online now gives you plenty of results for “Guy Sims Fitch” as more and more historical newspapers around the world become digitized.

For example, here’s a letter to the editor that quotes Guy Sims Fitch and appeared in the December 16, 1952 issue of The Examiner in Australia:

The Tasmanians do not seem very interested in these matters. I wonder why. We are not insulated from the rest of the world and its problems and dangers.

It is good news that increased private investment overseas is being urged by American business groups as a means of replaceing aid with trade. They believe a greater outflow of American private investment will result in higher production, larger dollar earnings and less dependence on U.S. Government loans and grants.

“The capital needs for full-scale economic development in the nations of the free world are so huge that they cannot be nor should they be, supplied largely through loan funds. The bulk of the needed capital must ultimately come from private equity investment,” writes Guy Sims Fitch.

How true! The London economic conference will be followed early next year, I predict, by a request for many millions of American dollars for the British Commonwealth. I trust that the bulk of any American money that may be forthcoming as a result will be private investments, so that the sterling economies may receive the stimulus not only of the American money but also of American productive energy and genius.

—REALIST

The letter to the editor, signed by “REALIST” is, at best guess, someone from the United States Information Agency. Especially since they’re quoting Guy Sims Fitch, a man who doesn’t exist. But the letter writer could be real! Because Fitch’s opinion was spread far and wide around the globe. We just don’t know. But the CIA probably does.

The USIA was ostensibly an independent organization, not beholden to any intelligence organization of the US government. But scholars of the Cold War have found plenty of evidence to contradict this idea in the years since USIA was folded. We now know that USIA and the CIA worked together quite explicitly on a number of different projects to influence public opinion in foreign countries.

Edward R. Murrow, that bastion of journalistic integrity, even came up with his own ideas for how to stir up insurrection in Cuba. As head of the USIA he brainstormed ways that radio could be used to incite a revolt against the Cuban government.

“The Cuban audience should be urged to act with care and cautioned against open rebellion,” Murrow wrote in a December 10, 1962 memo to the Director of Central Intelligence.

“The program would be based upon work slowdowns, purposeful inefficiency, purposeful waste, and relatively safe forms of sabotage. Specific examples of the activities urged would be putting glass and nails on the highways, leaving water running in public buildings, putting sand in machinery, wasting electricity, taking sick leave from work, damaging sugar stalks during the harvest, etc.”

“If real results were achieved, the Voice of America [radio network] could report these as evidence of opposition to the Castro regime through interviews with refugees and extracts from letters,” Murrow’s memo continued.

But we don’t know if Murrow himself ever wrote under the name of Guy Sims Fitch. I’ve found no evidence that anyone at CIA used the name Guy Sims Fitch to write articles, nor have I found anything that would lead me to believe that they had a direct hand in creating the fictional character. But it’s a safe assumption that they were at least aware of it.

And that’s part of the reason I filed my FOIA request; it’s part of the reason anyone files a FOIA request with an agency like the CIA. The goal is to learn more information once you have a nugget of something that seems important for advancing the public’s understanding of history. And in the case of Guy Sims Fitch, figuring out why the USIA was writing editorials all around the world in at least half a dozen languages to promote US investments seems like it would be valuable to our understanding of Cold War history.
An article from 1965, written by editors at the USIA for consumption by the German public under the name Guy Sims Fitch

Sometimes Fitch would appear more transparently as a voice of the United States Information Agency. For instance here’s an excerpt from an article, originally published in 1965 in Germany, that I ran through Google Translate:

The since March 1961 continued economic upswing - with previously 51 months, the longest period of economic USA in peacetime - is likely to continue in the coming months.

This is both the opinion of most economists as the new US Treasury Secretary, Henry Fowler, who is on his first press conference after taking over his duties on the present economic situation and on the development during the next few months expressed.

According to him speak at present many facts - not only rising consumer spending and increasing investment the economy - for a continuation of the cyclical period of fine weather.

At the same time, however, warned Fowler optimistic before assessment of economic developments in the coming months. After the unexpectedly strong increase in economic activity in 1st quarter 1965 (increase of GNP by 14.5 billion to an annual rate of 649 billion dollars), it would certainly not surprising when a small respite would occur in the 2nd quarter, particularly since quarterly increases on this scale the exceptions and not the rule are.

In the case of this article, at least you know that it’s the product of the United States Information Service. But Guy Sims Fitch is still fake. And I’d love to know both why they created Mr. Fitch and perhaps just how deep the bench of USIA’s fake panel of experts really was. How many more Guy Sims Fitchs were there in the world?

The USIA was closed in 1999 and the duties of creating journalism for overseas consumption was transferred to an organization called the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The BBG has taken issue in the past when I call them the propaganda arm of the US government, but that’s fundamentally what they are. The group works to promote US interests abroad through the dissemination of news. There are plenty of news organizations in the world, so you have to wonder what role the BBG plays in this mix. Especially since some of BBG’s lawyers need a Top Secret security clearance.

Needless to say, I’ll be appealing the denial of my FOIA request regarding Mr. Guy Sims Fitch. But if anyone finds a birth or death certificate for the fictional man, please let me know. The CIA would apparently be more apt to release information about this program if I can find one.

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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 20, 2017 11:58 am

:)

THE REALIST ARCHIVE PROJECT
Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 29, 2008 6:48 pm

Image
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16909
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby stefano » Wed Jan 25, 2017 4:56 am

Really interesting piece from a site I just came across for the first time. Some excerpts, my bold, but please do check out the original if you have time, it has extensive links to examples and sources.

The manipulations of the establishment have never been more visible.

Caitlin Johnstone
17 Jan 2017

In 2005, President George W. Bush admitted in a televised press conference that the US government creates its own “news” videos to give to the press, who often air those stories with no disclaimers informing viewers that they are watching government-generated media. In 2013, the US government implemented the negation of a 1948 law which had made it illegal for it to conduct psychological operations (psy-ops) on its citizens. The 2017 NDAA allots a portion of the defense budget to a new State Department-run “counter-propaganda” program to fight certain types of information Americans are getting from the internet. So when I tell you that the American government is known to actively use the media to psychologically manipulate the American people, that isn’t some wacky conspiracy theory, it’s a fact. These people have been legalizing and legislating psy-ops campaigns because they want to use them.
...
Whenever you hear all the talking heads on TV suddenly start using the same phrase at the same time, you are hearing a slogan, a marketing ploy cooked up by a political think tank in the same way corporate think tanks come up with slogans for their products like “I’m lovin’ it” or “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!” Only political slogans aren’t geared to manipulate you into buying a product, they’re geared to manipulate you into buying into an idea.
...
Pay close attention to when establishment shills interject a phrase that doesn’t seem to really “fit” with the rest of their words. Whenever you see the CIA-funded Washington Post arbitrarily start babbling about Pizzagate in the middle of an article about something or someone who opposes the political establishment, even when the hard substance of the report has nothing whatsoever to do with Pizzagate, you are seeing this psy-op at work.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo is an absolute wizard with this trick. The son of a former Democratic New York Governor and brother of a current Democratic New York Governor, Cuomo is political establishment royalty, and he appears to have been groomed for his job. Cuomo went to law school instead of studying journalism, but has been given a prominent spot on the media juggernaut Clinton News Network, where he routinely inserts ideas into his commentary that are designed to fly below the radar and bury themselves deep in America’s subconscious.

My readers might remember Cuomo as the guy who casually slipped the absurd notion that it’s illegal for Americans to read WikiLeaks into his report, which to me is less notable for how blatantly manipulative it is than for the way Americans finally caught him in the act. It was a very brief insertion, just a few seconds long, but some alert viewers were able to isolate it and go “Hey! What did you just do there? You’re tricking us!” Which is great, but this was the only time Cuomo has really been caught in a big way. Watch the clip here and get a feel for how bizarrely his sentences are structured when you really listen to his words; whenever you see a pundit word-salading like that, it’s probably because they’re slipping a toxic idea into what they’re serving you.

It’s a magic trick. I don’t know where he learned it or why he relentlessly uses it on the American public, but the technique he’s using is called neuro-linguistic programming and it’s well-known among magicians.
...
I guarantee you Chris Cuomo has made a study of neuro-linguistic programming or something similar as part of his establishment grooming. His quick, rhythmic delivery and seamless insertions are the hallmark of a genius-level NLP practitioner.
...
Half a year after the Iraq invasion, a poll by USA Today found that 70 percent of Americans still believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. This wasn’t because reporters were directly saying this; they never could have gotten away with such blatant falsehoods. What they could get away with was consistently making sure they mentioned Saddam Hussein in the same breath as the September 11th attacks over and over again, and I remember them doing this frequently. They’d mention the “intelligence” which said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and then they’d say something about the possibility of another attack similar to 9/11. They did this on purpose as part of corporate media’s well-documented participation in manufacturing consent for the invasion, and it worked.

A recent YouGov poll found that 50 percent of Hillary Clinton voters believe that the Russian government tampered with vote tallies to help Donald Trump win the presidential election. This is because media outlets, nearly all of which are owned by just five powerful companies in the US, have been deliberately using phrases like “election hacking” and “hacked the election” instead of phrases like “hacked the DNC emails” or “spearphishing John Podesta’s emails” which would have been an infinitely more accurate reflection of the actual substance of their reports. People were tricked into marrying those two ideas, and now half the Democrats you meet will likely believe that Putin was involved in hacking actual election booths or vote tallies.
...
This is just a taster but according to this amazing article from Double G, I mean, Glenn Greenwald, the key tactics boil down to the four D’s — Deny, disrupt, degrade, deceive.

So just because the campaign bunting has been taken down, don’t think that there aren’t regular assaults occurring on the hearts and minds of average Americans, but the good news is, they are getting easier and easier to spot.

It’s a fun game; I invite you to play it with me. Let me know what other tricks of theirs you spot.


Also in the news right at the moment - the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa's ruling party, ran an illegal Astroturf operation during municipal elections last year, apparently managed by Ogilvy (Ogilvy denies it obviously).

An investigation by amaBhungane published on Monday revealed that the ANC had contracted a “public relations expert”, Sihle Bolani, to roll out an elections marketing strategy prior to the 2016 local government elections. The campaign included setting up an independent news site and chat show employing the services of “influencers” on social media (read 'paid Twitter') as well as the printing of fake opposition party posters.

The ANC was to be kept discreetly out of the propaganda loop with invoices being made out to companies that channelled the funds – raised through fundraising by ANC-linked businessman Joseph Nkadimeng – to the so-called Media Advisory Team led by Shaka Sisulu.

It has emerged that the ANC’s “war room” did indeed produce posters which were aimed at discrediting the EFF and which showed EFF CIC Julius Malema brandishing an AK47 below the words “Vote EFF, Take Up Arms and Fight”. The fake EFF posters were plastered over legitimate posters. This is – the ANC might not realise – a criminal offence.

For now it seems as if someone could and should be dragged off to the Electoral Court and be held responsible for the ANC’s apartheid-style “black ops” propaganda campaign. Whoever this might be could be fined up to R200,000.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby coffin_dodger » Wed Jan 25, 2017 7:19 am

From Stefanos post above:
So just because the campaign bunting has been taken down, don’t think that there aren’t regular assaults occurring on the hearts and minds of average Americans, but the good news is, they are getting easier and easier to spot.

Indeed they are - but primarily by those with the will to see them.
Equally, those that lack the will to see have an added benefit for the System - they have become a new breed of attack-dog trained to perceive anything but their own viewpoint as inferior or pathetic.
Swings and roundabouts, as ever.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby Karmamatterz » Wed Jan 25, 2017 10:01 am

Thanks Stefano, the link was great. If there was a propaganda tactics 101 thread that would be a excellent primer.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 25, 2017 10:55 am

January 24, 2017
Beyond Orwell: Trump's Alt Universe
byAbby Zimet, staff writer

Image

Welcome to the future. By Tim O'Brien

Social media and wiseacres everywhere are having a fine old time with the DerGropenFuhrer's latest pants-on-fire atrocity after mini-me Kellyanne Conway defended their absurd inauguration numbers as #Alternative Facts. So it is we've newly learned that Yoko Ono broke up the Monkees, icebergs are disappearing from polar bears eating them, Trump is America's first black astronaut, everything is working properly, and 12 gazillion Trump supporters showed up for the coronation but we couldn't see them because they were tiny/shy/wearing Hogwarts' invisibility cloaks, and other fascinating #Spicer Facts.

Finally, they may have gone too far. Though Chuck Todd of Meet the Press needs to replace the ever-so-polite "falsehood" with the more-to-the-point "lie," mainstream media might actually, if woefully belatedly, be starting to do their job by increasingly calling out CheetoBenito's fictions. Editors are rushing to insistently correct the deliberate distortions, The New York Times is leading Trump stories with the word "lies," others are suggesting the press simply refuse to give Conway airtime, and even right-wing sources like Fox, The Blaze and the Daily Caller are sticking to the dispiriting facts. As sales of Orwell's 1984 soar in recognition of the growing dystopia, Dan Rather warns that "the press has never seen anything like this before," and needs to step up to stop it.

"We can all step up and say simply and without equivocation, 'A lie, is a lie, is a lie!' And if someone won't say it, those of us who know that there is such a thing as the truth must do whatever is in our power to diminish the liar's malignant reach into our society....Facts and the truth are not partisan. They are the bedrock of our democracy. And you are either with them, with us, with our Constitution, our history, and the future of our nation, or you are against it."

More Alternative facts:

Image

Image

From Boing Boing

Image

Massive inaugural crowds

Image

Happily married couple

Image

Alternative Pets

Image

Alternative Toys
Image


The Press Joins the Real World
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 25, 2017 10:58 am

.

Re: Astroturfing, the following excerpt from Stefano's link is worth reproducing here as well:



One of the first things I noticed before any campaigning had even started in the recent Democratic primary was when Hillary Clinton got caught buying millions of fake “zombie” accounts to bolster her numbers on Twitter and Facebook. They’re called zombie accounts because they’re not real people. You can buy followers pretty inexpensively it turns out, but they’re only shell accounts. They will never retweet you, they just make your numbers look better.

It was the beginning of the largest and most outrageous astroturfing of a campaign we’ve ever seen. Astroturf is so called because it seeks to mimic the growth of a natural grassroots campaign — you buy followers, pay people to turn up to your rallies, offer incentives to wear your stickers and badges, pay people to go online and defend you, hand out signs at rallies that look home-made, pay celebrities to endorse you, pay your marketing campaign to make memes for you, stage “spontaneous” photo-ops with “fans" — in short, you use money to pay for the appearance of what burgeoned from the Bernie Sander’s campaign organically because there was genuine and growing enthusiasm for the candidate. Astroturfing seeks to mimic that kind of virality.

These strategies are usually used by advertising companies to generate interest for a product. Check out this Ted talk by Sharyl Attkisson for a little tour. It’s well-known in the trade that word-of-mouth is by far the best salesman, so those sneaky bastards have dreamed up ways of mimicking that.

What the Clinton campaign did went way beyond hiring a few shills to inject positive messages about their candidate and into the realm of mass psychological abuse, using real-life disrupters, social media shills, and the mainstream media to demonize Trump and his supporters to the point where the nation is still showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Here’s the thing though — we can only prove that the Clinton campaign did that because of the email leaks and the fact that the FEC enforces some transparency on the activities and budgets of the campaign and its superPACS. If we didn’t have those two things, we wouldn’t have proof that it occurred.

Post-campaign, you can still hire a company to shill for you online, on whatever issue you please, and you don’t have to report it to anyone. It’s relatively inexpensive and it’s a very effective way of controlling the narrative and disrupting natural healthy collaboration between normal humans.

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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 25, 2017 11:05 am

REPORT: THREE MILLION VOTES IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAST BY ILLEGAL ALIENS
Trump may have won popular vote
Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com - NOVEMBER 14, 2016

http://www.infowars.com/report-three-mi ... al-aliens/


Trump promises 'major investigation' into alleged voter fraud

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/01 ... fraud.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 25, 2017 11:07 am

Belligerent Savant » Wed Jan 25, 2017 9:58 am wrote:.

Re: Astroturfing, the following excerpt from Stefano's link is worth reproducing here as well:



One of the first things I noticed before any campaigning had even started in the recent Democratic primary was when Hillary Clinton got caught buying millions of fake “zombie” accounts to bolster her numbers on Twitter and Facebook. They’re called zombie accounts because they’re not real people. You can buy followers pretty inexpensively it turns out, but they’re only shell accounts. They will never retweet you, they just make your numbers look better.

It was the beginning of the largest and most outrageous astroturfing of a campaign we’ve ever seen. Astroturf is so called because it seeks to mimic the growth of a natural grassroots campaign — you buy followers, pay people to turn up to your rallies, offer incentives to wear your stickers and badges, pay people to go online and defend you, hand out signs at rallies that look home-made, pay celebrities to endorse you, pay your marketing campaign to make memes for you, stage “spontaneous” photo-ops with “fans" — in short, you use money to pay for the appearance of what burgeoned from the Bernie Sander’s campaign organically because there was genuine and growing enthusiasm for the candidate. Astroturfing seeks to mimic that kind of virality.

These strategies are usually used by advertising companies to generate interest for a product. Check out this Ted talk by Sharyl Attkisson for a little tour. It’s well-known in the trade that word-of-mouth is by far the best salesman, so those sneaky bastards have dreamed up ways of mimicking that.

What the Clinton campaign did went way beyond hiring a few shills to inject positive messages about their candidate and into the realm of mass psychological abuse, using real-life disrupters, social media shills, and the mainstream media to demonize Trump and his supporters to the point where the nation is still showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Here’s the thing though — we can only prove that the Clinton campaign did that because of the email leaks and the fact that the FEC enforces some transparency on the activities and budgets of the campaign and its superPACS. If we didn’t have those two things, we wouldn’t have proof that it occurred.

Post-campaign, you can still hire a company to shill for you online, on whatever issue you please, and you don’t have to report it to anyone. It’s relatively inexpensive and it’s a very effective way of controlling the narrative and disrupting natural healthy collaboration between normal humans.

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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 25, 2017 11:10 am

Fake Think Tanks Fuel Fake News—And the President’s Tweets

FAKE NEWS ISN’T just Macedonian teenagers or internet trolls. A longstanding network of bogus “think tanks” raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies’ pull quotes and flashy stats become the “evidence” driving viral, fact-free stories. Not to mention President Trump’s tweets.

These organizations have always existed: They’re old-school propagandists with new-school, tech-savvy reach. They’ve been ginning up so-called research for everyone from shady corporations to anti-LGBTQ groups to white supremacists for decades—they’re practiced, and their faux-academic veneer is thick and glossy. Which makes them harder to brush off than your garden-variety liar. “Fake think tanks use a mix of selected truths, half-truths, and downright fabricated stuff in order to manipulate people,” says Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City College of New York and author of Nonsense on Stilts: How To Tell Science from Bunk. “We don’t live in the age of post-truth. We live in the age of internet-enabled bullshit.”

So phony think tanks are hard to spot, let alone discredit and combat. Their mix of pseudoscientific camouflage, long-held political connections, and social media gets them influence—and a whole lot of clicks.

A Who’s Who of Propagandists

Propagandists undercut scholarship in service of an agenda. Anywhere science has become politicized is fertile ground for their trade. So you get anti-vaxxers on the left and climate-change deniers on the right. And because politicized science is often tied to business interests (looking at you, ExxonMobil), explicitly corporate-colluding organizations exist, too. The Employment Policies Institute is just an anti-minimum wage increase PR firm run by actual PR firm Berman and Co, which is run by notorious former corporate lobbyist Richard “Dr. Evil” Berman.

‘We don’t live in the age of post-truth. We live in the age of internet-enabled bullshit.’
MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI, CCNY


And because business interests and power-brokering cross borders, fake news think tanks don’t end with domestic groups: “You have this additional strain of foreign influences spreading disinformation,” says Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. “Like bots from abroad retweeting factoids intermixed with fake news.” You’ve probably read some of Russia’s handiwork.

They also tend toward hate: There’s the white supremacist National Policy Institute and Jared Taylor‘s New Century Foundation; the anti-LGBTQ work of the Family Research Council and American College of Pediatricians; and a whole slew of anti-immigrant groups. Three of the biggest—Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA—are intertwined, sharing a founder and funder in white nationalist John Tanton.

The Southern Poverty Law Center designates all the organizations in the previous paragraph as bona fide hate groups. And yet most—FRC, CIS and FAIR in particular—enjoy relationships with some powerful politicians. Trump himself has met with leaders of the anti-immigration groups, hired people from FAIR and the Family Research Council, and cited the anti-immigration groups’ erroneous figures.

How They Get Away With It

Which doesn’t necessarily mean Trump is willfully amplifying disinformation. “For the lay person who reads about these topics for 10 minutes a week, I don’t think there is an easy way to see who’s full of it,” says Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

That’s because phony think tanks are professional mimics, from the innocuous-sounding names—the Employment Policies Institute practically steals its name from the Economic Policy Institute—to their online presences. “It used to be you could trust a dot-edu or a dot-org,” says Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “Now some of the main hate sites are dot-orgs.”

Then there’s their “research methods,” which have a long history: “It’s the tobacco playbook,” says Graves. “When the tobacco industry was facing the health community’s concerns about the manifest consequences of smoking, they set to work debunking the science, and endowing people with expertise they don’t actually have.”

Once you have some talking heads (or online personalities, like NPI’s Richard Spencer), you’ve got to give them something to say. Most of these organizations aren’t doing their own studies, but repurposing others’ work. For some, it’s cherry-picking the most convenient data points. “The anti-vaxxer movement bases its claims largely on a single, discredited and retracted paper,” Pigliucci says, “And simply ignores dozens upon dozens of scientific papers that don’t fit their preferred narrative.”

Others comb through many papers to construct a new narrative. The Family Research Council does quite a bit of that, as does the homophobic American College of Pediatricians (which doesn’t call itself a think tank). “We internally assemble and analyze peer-reviewed literature,” says Lisa Hawkins, the ACPeds’ executive administrator. “This is less susceptible to bias since we do not create the research design or conduct the actual research.”

Total baloney: “If everyone is on the same page, all the peer review internally won’t matter,” says Nowrasteh. In other words, since everyone in the group all starts from the same viewpoint—gay people are bad and dangerous—that’s what they see as they “assemble” (read: cobble together and mis-contextualize) peer-reviewed literature. Which is how FRC and ACPeds came to assert homosexuality is connected to pedophilia, even though none of their source material agreed.

‘Their disinformation has been weaponized through search algorithms.’
The masters of mis-contextualized stats? Those anti-immigration groups. “I’ve never had to republish my numbers because they were wrong,” says Steven Camarota, director of research at CIS, the think-tanky arm of the Tanton trifecta. “But you could interpret them in different ways, and the problems may or may not be due to immigration.” Seems legit. And that’s how they’ve seeded almost every immigration myth we debunked here.

But here’s the thing. Legally speaking, these think tanks are as legitimate as Heritage or Brookings: think tanks don’t have a regulatory agency. Many—NPI, EPI, ACPeds, CIS, the New Century Foundation, FRC—are even tax exempt, registered as 501(c)3 non-profits like most legitimate think tanks. “So they’ve been able to convince someone at the IRS that what they do is educational,” says Donald Abelson, a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario who studies think tanks. “And the only time the IRS gets involved is if they violate 501(c)3 regulations by showing overt partisanship.”

Even mainstream think tanks only just following this rule, finding loopholes in the tax code for partisan breakaway organizations like the Center for American Progress Action Fund or Heritage Action for America. “The term ‘think tank’ has become so diluted over the years,” says Abelson. “It has created additional space on the American political landscape for these types of organizations to emerge and gain notoriety.”

How They Gain Power
Most of these organizations are just hate groups with a dozen employees sitting in a tax loophole. But that doesn’t mean their reach is limited—it’s quite the opposite. “Their disinformation has been weaponized through search algorithms,” says Beirich. “Think-tanky white supremacist organizations have generated enough material that a search topic like ‘black on white crime’ is dominated by their propaganda. That’s what happened to Dylann Roof, and how Trump ended up tweeting those false statistics.”

Their content plays well on social media. “Misinformation and fake news triggers hot cognition— it bypasses your focus on accuracy and goes directly to your feelings,” says Joseph Kahne, a professor of education at UC Riverside who studies engagement with media and politics online. “If the misinformation confirms their prior policy position, they are far more likely to say its accurate.”

Which these organizations know, and exploit. “There is one basic reason why CIS is influential,” Camarota says. “It’s that there’s nobody else criticizing immigration in a thoughtful way. It’s like we’re the best hockey player in Ecuador.” When you carve out a niche supplying confirmatory information you know people are looking for, it doesn’t matter if you’re right or not. And that extends beyond arguments happening on your uncle’s Facebook feed, because appealing stats and buzzwords are politically expedient, too. “I get contacted by Congressional staffers all the time,” Camarota says. “We have a good relationship with Senator Jeff Sessions, so I’m hoping that we will play a very substantial role in informing and influencing policy.”

According to Abelson, think tanks aligning themselves with an ascendant political figure is their boat to the mainstream. That’s what Heritage did with Ronald Reagan, and what these groups are doing with Donald Trump—so far, successfully. “Look, people connected to these groups are going to be in the White House. Kris Kobach is deciding on immigration policy and he’s spent the last ten years deep in the heart of FAIR,” Beirich says. “That’s the ultimate reach.” And with no regulatory agency, and a consistent campaign to delegitimize mainstream media, few mechanisms exist to keep these groups in check.
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/fake-thin ... ts-tweets/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby stefano » Wed Jan 25, 2017 2:29 pm

Karmamatterz » Wed Jan 25, 2017 4:01 pm wrote:Thanks Stefano, the link was great. If there was a propaganda tactics 101 thread that would be a excellent primer.

Cool, glad you liked it. Yeah even if you're familiar with the material it's cool to be reminded, it certainly makes you a better reader to know a bit about this stuff. Also to be reminded that it's not that complicated, and relies on a few interfaces with the public - which, obviously, is why we're so forcefully being reminded of how vital editors and commentators are to life as we know it. It's also a good link to send friends who might not be as immersed in this kind of thing as most of us here.
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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Jan 26, 2017 10:41 pm

stefano » Wed Jan 25, 2017 1:29 pm wrote:
Karmamatterz » Wed Jan 25, 2017 4:01 pm wrote:Thanks Stefano, the link was great. If there was a propaganda tactics 101 thread that would be a excellent primer.

Cool, glad you liked it. Yeah even if you're familiar with the material it's cool to be reminded, it certainly makes you a better reader to know a bit about this stuff. Also to be reminded that it's not that complicated, and relies on a few interfaces with the public - which, obviously, is why we're so forcefully being reminded of how vital editors and commentators are to life as we know it. It's also a good link to send friends who might not be as immersed in this kind of thing as most of us here.


Yes, thanks for that. Essential reading in the midst of what someone called the Permanent Bullshit Blizzard.

From #Fake News to #post-truth, another corporate-media-driven bullshit "meme" designed to whitewash all the routine lying that preceded Trump:

Sunday, January 22, 2017

The motive behind the post-truth hoax


The first thing to be said about our post-truth moment is that it is complete bullshit that we are having a post-truth moment. The idea that somehow, uniquely in the last year, American politicians and propagandists have started lying systematically, ignores the entirety of American history. The idea of ‘post-truth’ is generated from a completely scewball, neo-liberal view of American history – and, indeed, of world history – in which America was not the country that declared its independence because the British weren’t killing enough Indians, and that incorporated slavery in the constitution. It is not the nation of Jim Crow, the Sand River massacre, the long war between labor and capital in which unions were attacked by national guards as a regular thing. It is not the America that dropped two atom bombs and proceeded to test nuclear weapons above ground for more than a decade, with the official scientific community, colluding with the executive branch, lying through its teeth about the mortal dangers of fallout – which a scientific committee in 2006, hobbled by the congressional requirement that it only consider Iodine isotopes, decided was probably the cause of at least 200,000 thyroid cancers. It is not the America of bogus drug laws, enforced with exemplary racism, that took back many of the promises of the Civil Rights era.

Instead, it is disneyland, where a perpetually cool tinkerbell, who knows the latest euphemisms, is a little burst of rainbow. In other words, post-truth analysis is based on a lie. The lie is called American exceptionalism, or various phrases of that type. Once you begin with a view of American history that can only be held by a member of the upper class (a class that is overwhelmingly white), who has distinct views about helping the “poor” (a sociological category that has its roots in charity) while despising the working class (which is a sociological category that has its roots in socio-economic struggle), you will quickly miss and misinterpret the American grain.

The post-truth meme was created in order to be scolded, and provide a soapbox for editorial lecturing. In reality, the lies of Trump are simply easier to spot. Trump has not bothered to find collaborators in the mainstream press, those willing volunteers who like to weave glamor around our monarchs – hence the awe evoked by so piddling a figue as George Bush. This is, I think, a huge mistake. But it isn’t some troubling new facet of our society. There is no post-truthiness, and its hour has not struck. I don’t want to use the occasion of clueless sex offender Trump to tell liberal seeming white lies about our country. That would be missing the moment.

Posted by Roger Gathman at 2:59 PM

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Re: The "Fake News" conspiracy.

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Jan 26, 2017 10:54 pm

.

The post-truth meme was created in order to be scolded, and provide a soapbox for editorial lecturing. In reality, the lies of Trump are simply easier to spot. Trump has not bothered to find collaborators in the mainstream press, those willing volunteers who like to weave glamor around our monarchs – hence the awe evoked by so piddling a figure as George Bush. This is, I think, a huge mistake. But it isn’t some troubling new facet of our society. There is no post-truthiness, and its hour has not struck.


Indeed. It's an f'ing straw man, a con, another form of deflection. Such tactics have been in place for decades (or rather, from the moment humans understood the the potential of persuasion).
Those that assign this horseshit solely to Trump/Trumpists are short-sighted, willfully ignorant, or participants in the con.
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