My copy of the NYT is still on the mule train, along with my blasting caps and whiskey. Expect it any day now, less'n there's trouble with the highwaymen.
Them dang road agents got aholt of a strong box with my case of mixed flavour Izzes on the Butterfield Overland last week. It gettin worse on all the trails!
My copy of the NYT is still on the mule train, along with my blasting caps and whiskey. Expect it any day now, less'n there's trouble with the highwaymen.
Them dang road agents got aholt of a strong box with my case of mixed flavour Izzes on the Butterfield Overland last week. It gettin worse on all the trails!
I read that yesterday. How on Earth did that slip by our Mr. Lazy and not receive a state-wide debunking?
My copy of the NYT is still on the mule train, along with my blasting caps and whiskey. Expect it any day now, less'n there's trouble with the highwaymen.
Civic boosters in central Montana hoped for some federal money to promote tourism. A disinformation campaign got in the way.
Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.
Ms. Grulkowski set about blowing up that effort with everything she had.
She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.
In May, several French and German social media influencers received a strange proposal.
A London-based public relations agency wanted to pay them to promote messages on behalf of a client. A polished three-page document detailed what to say and on which platforms to say it.
But it asked the influencers to push not beauty products or vacation packages, as is typical, but falsehoods tarring Pfizer-BioNTechâs Covid-19 vaccine. Stranger still, the agency, Fazze, claimed a London address where there is no evidence any such company exists.
Some recipients posted screenshots of the offer. Exposed, Fazze scrubbed its social media accounts. That same week, Brazilian and Indian influencers posted videos echoing Fazzeâs script to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
The scheme appears to be part of a secretive industry that security analysts and American officials say is exploding in scale: disinformation for hire. (...)
Trump told them to âfind fraud.â Fake. Jussie Smollett. Fake. Covington. Fake. Hands up, donât shoot. Fake. Jacob Blake was unarmed. Fake. Alfa bank. Fake. Cohen in Prague. Fake. Don Jr Wikileaks. Fake. Michael Avenatti. Holy fake. Russia dossier. Ffffffucking fake.
Oh Grandpa Simpson, you haven't met KrayKray have you?
There's something laughable and pathetic about a paid shill whining about fakery.
Don't go changin', @$$h@^.
I'm sorry you are unable to process facts vs propaganda.
Trump told them to âfind fraud.â Fake. Jussie Smollett. Fake. Covington. Fake. Hands up, donât shoot. Fake. Jacob Blake was unarmed. Fake. Alfa bank. Fake. Cohen in Prague. Fake. Don Jr Wikileaks. Fake. Michael Avenatti. Holy fake. Russia dossier. Ffffffucking fake.
Oh Grandpa Simpson, you haven't met KrayKray have you?
There's something laughable and pathetic about a paid shill whining about fakery.
Trump told them to âfind fraud.â Fake. Jussie Smollett. Fake. Covington. Fake. Hands up, donât shoot. Fake. Jacob Blake was unarmed. Fake. Alfa bank. Fake. Cohen in Prague. Fake. Don Jr Wikileaks. Fake. Michael Avenatti. Holy fake. Russia dossier. Ffffffucking fake.
For the better part of four years, those sounding the alarm about the dangers of fake news and the perils of a post-truth world struggled to make the case that this was a matter of life and death. Try as they might to argue that a secure foundation of facts was the very basis of a liberal, democratic societyâthat such a society could not function without a common, agreed-upon basis of evidenceâthe concern seemed somehow abstract, intellectual, even elitist. Their angst was easily dismissed by their populist foes as the self-interested whine of a snobbish establishment. And then came the coronavirus.
When a pandemic is raging, it becomes harder to deny that rigorous, truthful information is a mortal necessity. No one need explain the risks of false information when one can point to, say, the likely consequences of Americansâ coming to believe they can deflect the virus by injecting themselves with bleach. (The fact that that advice came from the podium of the president of the United States is one we shall return to.) In Britain, Conservative ministers who once cheerfully brushed aside Brexit naysayers by declaring that the country had âhad enough of expertsâ soon sought to reassure voters that they were âfollowing the science.â In the first phase of the crisis, they rarely dared appear in public unless flanked by those they now gratefully referred to as experts.
So perhaps the moment is ripe for a trio of new books on disinformation. All three were written before the virus struck, before we saw people refuse to take life-saving action because theyâd absorbed a baseless conspiracy theory linking Covid to, say, the towers that emit signals for 5G mobile phone coverage. But the pandemic might mean these books will now find a more receptive audience, one that has seen all too starkly that information is a resource essential for public health and well-beingâand that our information supply is being deliberately, constantly, and severely contaminated. (...)
