Silicon Valley Censorship

Authored by Samuel Westrop via The Gatestone Institute,

• If it is ever "toxic" to deem ISIS a terrorist organization, then -- regardless of whether that is the result of human bias or an under-developed algorithm -- the potential for abuse, and for widespread censorship, will always exist. The problem lies with the very concept of the idea. Why does Silicon Valley believe it should decide what is valid speech and what is not?


• Conservative news, it seems, is considered fake news. Liberals should oppose this dogma before their own news comes under attack. Again, the most serious problem with attempting to eliminate hate speech, fake news or terrorist content by censorship is not about the efficacy of the censorship; it is the very premise that is dangerous.


• Under the guidance of faulty algorithms or prejudiced Silicon Valley programmers, when the New York Times starts to delete or automatically hide comments that criticize extremist clerics, or Facebook designates articles by anti-Islamist activists as "fake news," Islamists will prosper and moderate Muslims will suffer.

Google"s latest project is an application called Perspective, which, as Wired reports, brings the tech company "a step closer to its goal of helping to foster troll-free discussion online, and filtering out the abusive comments that silence vulnerable voices." In other words, Google is teaching computers how to censor.

If Google"s plans are not quite Orwellian enough for you, the practical results are rather more frightening. Released in February, Perspective"s partners include the New York Times, the Guardian, Wikipedia and the Economist. Google, whose motto is "Do the Right Thing," is aiming its bowdlerism at public comment sections on newspaper websites, but the potential is far broader.

Perspective works by identifying the "toxicity level" of comments published online. Google states that Perspective will enable companies to "sort comments more effectively, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information." Perspective"s demonstration website currently allows anyone to measure the "toxicity" of a word or phrase, according to its algorithm. What, then, constitutes a "toxic" comment?

The organization with which I work, the Middle East Forum, studies Islamism. We work to tackle the threat posed by both violent and non-violent Islamism, assisted by our Muslim allies. We believe that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.

Perspective does not look fondly at our work:

Google"s Perspective application, which is being used by major media outlets to identify the "toxicity level" of comments published online, has much potential for abuse and widespread censorship.

No reasonable person could claim this is hate speech.

But the problem does not just extend to opinions. Even factual statements are deemed to have a high rate of "toxicity." Google considers the statement "ISIS is a terrorist group" to have an 87% chance of being "perceived as toxic."

Or 92% "toxicity" for stating the publicly-declared objective of the terrorist group, Hamas:

Google is quick to remind us that we may disagree with the result. It explains that, "It"s still early days and we will get a lot of things wrong." The Perspective website even offers a "Seem Wrong?" button to provide feedback.

These disclaimers, however, are very much beside the point. If it is ever "toxic" to deem ISIS a terrorist organization, then -- regardless of whether that figure is the result of human bias or an under-developed algorithm -- the potential for abuse, and for widespread censorship, will always exist.

The problem lies with the very concept of the idea. Why does Silicon Valley believe it should decide what is valid speech and what is not?

Google is not the only technology company enamored with censorship. In June, Facebook announced its own plans to use artificial intelligence to identify and remove "terrorist content." These measures can be easily circumvented by actual terrorists, and how long will it be before that same artificial intelligence is used to remove content that Facebook staff find to be politically objectionable?

In fact, in May 2016, the "news curators" at Facebook revealed that they were ordered to "suppress news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network"s influential "trending" news section." And in December 2016, Facebook announced it was working to "address the issue of fake news and hoaxes" published by its users. The Washington Free Beacon later revealed that Facebook was working with a group named Media Matters on this issue. In one of its own pitches to donors, Media Matters declares its dedication to fighting "serial misinformers and right-wing propagandists." The leaked Media Matters document states it is working to ensure that "Internet and social media platforms, like Google and Facebook, will no longer uncritically and without consequence host and enrich fake news sites and propagandists." Media Matters also claims to be working with Google.

Conservative news, it seems, is considered fake news. Liberals should oppose this dogma before their own news comes under attack. Again, the most serious problem with attempting to eliminate hate speech, fake news or terrorist content by censorship is not about the efficacy of the censorship; it is the very premise that is dangerous.

Under the guidance of faulty algorithms or prejudiced Silicon Valley programmers, when the New York Times starts to delete or automatically hide comments that criticize extremist clerics, or Facebook designates articles by anti-Islamist activists as "fake news," Islamists will prosper and moderate Muslims will suffer.

Silicon Valley has, in fact, already proven itself incapable of supporting moderate Islam. Since 2008, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) has granted $330,524 to two Islamist organizations, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Islamic Relief. Both these groups are designated terrorist organizations in the United Arab Emirates. SVCF is America"s largest community foundation, with assets of over $8 billion. Its corporate partners include some of the country"s biggest tech companies -- its largest donation was $1.5 billion from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The SVCF is Silicon Valley.

In countries such as China, Silicon Valley has previously collaborated with the censors. At the very least, it did so because the laws of China forced it to comply. In the European Union, where freedom of expression is superseded by "the reputation and rights of others" and the criminalization of "hate speech" (even where there is no incitement to violence), Google was ordered to delete certain data from search results when a member of the public requests it, under Europe"s "right to be forgotten" rules. Rightly, Google opposed the ruling, albeit unsuccessfully.

But in the United States, where freedom of speech enjoys protections found nowhere else in the world, Google and Facebook have not been forced to introduce censorship tools. They are not at the whim of paranoid despots or unthinking bureaucrats. Instead, Silicon Valley has volunteered to censor, and it has enlisted the help of politically partisan organizations to do so.

This kind of behavior sends a message. Earlier this year, Facebook agreed to send a team of staff to Pakistan, after the government asked both Facebook and Twitter to help put a stop to "blasphemous content" being published on the social media websites. In Pakistan, blasphemy is punishable by death.

Google, Facebook and the rest of Silicon Valley are private companies. They can do with their data mostly whatever they want. The world"s reliance on their near-monopoly over the exchange of information and the provision of services on the internet, however, means that mass-censorship is the inevitable corollary of technology companies" efforts to regulate news and opinion.

At a time when Americans have little faith in the mass media, Silicon Valley is now veering in a direction that will evoke similar ire. If Americans did not trust the mass media before, what will they think once that same media is working with technology companies not just to report information Silicon Valley prefers, but to censor information it dislikes?

Trump Slams "Fake News Story Of Secret Dinner With Putin" At G-20 - "Press Knew!"

President Trump has tweeted in on the latest "scoop" from the media about his "dealings" with Russian president Putin...

Fake News story of secret dinner with Putin is "sick." All G 20 leaders, and spouses, were invited by the Chancellor of Germany. Press knew!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

The Fake News is becoming more and more dishonest! Even a dinner arranged for top 20 leaders in Germany is made to look sinister!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2017

*  *  *

As we detailed earlier, it has been exactly one week since the latest Russia story involving Trump, or in this particular case his son, and with attentions once again starting to drift from the main news cycle narrative of the year, which was eclipsed today by the Senate republicans" humiliating failure to replace or repeal Obamacare, on Tuesday afternoon a White House official said that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held a second, "previously undisclosed" (except to all the world leaders who were in the room at the time) meeting at the G-20.

According to Reuters, the White House confirmed that the meeting took place during the G-20 heads of state dinner, hours after Trump"s formal bilateral sit-down with Putin. In that conversation, Trump spoke with the Russian leader for roughly an hour, joined only by Putin"s translator. And while the meeting took place in the open in front of all other leaders, it had previously gone without mention by the White House.

“There was a couples-only social dinner at the G-20; toward the end, the president spoke to Putin at the dinner,” NSC spokesman Michael Anton says.

The White House official did not say how long the second meeting took place or what was discussed in front of everyone.

While details of the meeting are scarce, the WaPo reports that halfway through the official dinner Trump left his seat to occupy an empty chair next to Putin. Trump was alone, and Putin was attended only by his official interpreter. In other words, it happened in front of everyone, during the so-called "mingling."  According to Eurasia Group president, Ian Bremmer, who first reported the meeting, Trump got up from his seat halfway through dinner and spent about an hour talking "privately and animatedly" with Putin, "joined only by Putin"s own translator." Bremmer said that the lack of a translator is a "breach of national security protocol", though one that the president likely would not know about.

During Trump"s initial formal meeting with Putin, one which was scheduled to last 30 minutes but exceeded two hours, Trump said he had pressed Putin about Moscow"s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election, which the Russian president denied.

And now the newscycle turns away from the failure of the republican healthcare bill to just what nefarious secrets that two heads of state were exchanging in front of and within earshot of every major world leader. Keep an eye on Trump"s twitter account for immediate details.

After Failing To Prove "Trump-Russia Collusion", Dems Set Their Sights On "Pro-Trump Websites"

Having failed miserably to produce even one single shred of tangible evidence that Trump colluded with Russia to stage a coup in 2016"s presidential election, Democrats, rather than simply admit that their entire crusade to prove a false narrative was nothing more than a charade designed to cover up their embarrassing defeat, have decided to shift the narrative to target "pro-Trump websites."  You know, because a couple of websites sharing stories over Facebook clearly overshadowed the 24/7 Hillary Clinton cheerleading sessions on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, Washington Post, New York Times...

Per The Guardian, this convenient shift in the "Russian hacking" narrative comes just as Trump"s former head of digital media has been summoned to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee to answer for his alleged "sins."

The spread of Russian-made fake news stories aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton on social media is emerging as an important line of inquiry in multiple investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Investigators are looking into whether Trump supporters and far-right websites coordinated with Moscow over the release of fake news, including stories implicating Clinton in murder or pedophilia, or paid to boost those stories on Facebook.

The head of the Trump digital camp, Brad Parscale, has reportedly been summoned to appear before the House intelligence committee looking into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 US election. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee carrying out a parallel inquiry, has said that at least 1,000 “paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” were pumping anti-Clinton fake news into social media sites during the campaign.

Ironically, the same investigators digging into the "Trump collusion" narrative admit that similar media campaigns were used during the Democratic primaries in favor of Bernie Sanders.  Oddly, however, there has been no organized effort to figure out whether or not Bernie conspired with Putin to destroy Clinton"s chances at the White House.

A huge wave of fake news stories originating from eastern Europe began washing over the presidential election months earlier, at the height of the primary campaign. John Mattes, who was helping run the outline campaign for the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders from San Diego, said it really took off in March 2016.

“In a 30-day period, dozens of full-blown sites appeared overnight, running full level productions posts. It screamed out to me that something strange was going on,” Mattes said. Much of the material was untraceable, but he tracked 40% of the new postings back to eastern Europe.

Four of the Facebook members posting virulent and false stories about Clinton (suggesting, for example, that she had profited personally by arming Islamic State extremists) had the same name, Oliver Mitov. They all had a very small number of Facebook friends, including one which all four had in common. When Mattes tried to friend them and contact them there was no reply.

Many websites producing anti-Clinton fake news were based in Albania and Macedonia. A pro-Sanders Facebook page with nearly 90,000 followers was run by an Albanian IT expert who, when interviewed by the Huffington Post, appeared to speak very little English, although his page consistently published polished English prose.

Of course, it"s also extremely unclear how these master media experts, running websites that appeared out of thin air and have since all vanished, manged to only convince voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania to turn out Clinton while failing to sway folks in Colorado, Virginia, New Mexico and Nevada. 

Google Permanently Bans 200 "Fake News" Sites

The crackdown has begun.

In a blog post by Scott Spencer, director of product management for sustainable ads, posted on Wednesday, Google said it has banned 200 publishers from accessing its Adsense advertising service for posting fake news stories. Google said it had cracked down on sites which contained 1) Ads for illegal products; 2) Misleading ads; 3) Bad ads on mobile; 4) Ads trying to game the system and, 5) Promoting and profiting from bad sites. But the emphasis was on the so-called "fake news" category which has dominated media buzz for the past two months.

This is how Spencer explained his action:

In 2016, we saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics—a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity—and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

* * *

We"ve had long-standing policies prohibiting AdSense publishers from running ads on sites that help people deceive others, like a site where you buy fake diplomas or plagiarized term papers. In November, we expanded on these policies, introducing a new AdSense misrepresentative content policy, that helps us to take action against website owners misrepresenting who they are and that deceive people with their content.

Google has faced criticism over its handling of fake news stories, including allowing a fake news website to rise to the top of its results displaying an incorrect story claiming that President Trump had won the popular vote.

In his post explaining how Google attempted to crack down on “bad ads, sites and scammers,” Spencer explained that Google had expanded its policies against misleading websites in November, leading to the crackdown.

From November to December 2016, we reviewed 550 sites that were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations.  We took action against 340 of them for violating our policies, both misrepresentation and other offenses, and nearly 200 publishers were kicked out of our network permanently.

In total, Google took down 1.7 billion ads that they found in violation of their policies in 2016, more than double the 780 million they removed in 2015.

It wasn"t just fake news: Google provided the following examples of common policy violations among bad sites in 2016:

• We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.


• We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.


• And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

Some of the more conventional bans were the result of Google adding a policy mid-year prohibiting ads for payday loans, considered predatory. Roughly five million payday loan ads were disabled over the latter six months of 2016. Also among those the removed ads were what Google calls “tabloid cloakers.” These advertisers run what look like links to news headlines, but when the user clicks, an ad for a product such as a weight loss supplement pops up. Google suspended 1,300 accounts engaged in tabloid cloaking in 2016.

Spencer concludes:

In addition to all the above, we support industry efforts like the Coalition for Better Ads to protect people from bad experiences across the web. While we took down more bad ads in 2016 than ever before, the battle doesn’t end here. As we invest in better detection, the scammers invest in more elaborate attempts to trick our systems. Continuing to find and fight them is essential to protecting people online and ensuring you get the very best from the open web.

Google has not disclosed the list of 200 sites it had permanently banned.

Facebook due for a Face-lift after Fake-News exposes Fakebook

Facebook (FB) is no doubt one of the most popular tech stocks out there. The market cap of Facebook as of this writing is 368 B - it"s nearly the size of Amazon.

But what does Facebook really do? This question has been asked of tech stocks since the .com bubble. But many tech stocks, for example Amazon (AMZN) perform a number of useful, tech services. In the case of Amazon they have hundreds of niche services many haven"t even heard of, such as Amazon Web Services (which is cloud computing, hosting, and related services), publication services for authors including a full life cycle publishing solution through Kindle, Shipping storing fulfillment and logistics services for small businesses; the list goes on and on and on.

This opinion about Facebook isn"t rare - there"s actually a huge movement of users who have deleted their profiles and refuse to ever use the service again. Here"s one power user, a Forbes contributor, who dumped Facebook, and explains reasons why:

It"s official. I"m off the Facebook FB -0.02% grid. Nobody offended me. I didn"t have a bad experience. While I"m not thrilled about the idea of Big Brother watching my every move, I"m not particularly paranoid about social media sharing. Therefore, I"m sharing why I"m dumping Facebook and committing to Twitter and Instagram. 1) Facebook sucks time from my life, and unlike money, time is a zero sum game 2) Most of my Facebook friends aren"t (actually friends).3) There are other (better) options for photo sharing.4) Facebook brings out the worst in people.5) I learn more on Twitter. 6) The presence of ads on Facebook is getting ridiculous. 7) Less is more. Goodbye, Facebook. Follow me on Twitter: @TimMaurer.

This is just one example. There"s actually a flood of people fleeing the platform, they"ve even created names for Facebook to describe their feelings, like "Fake Book" and others.

What is the straw that broke the camel"s back? It was the recent election news cycle. "Fake News" was blamed as having a part in shaping an online discussion about political issues. Sites that broadcast this alleged "Fake News" like Facebook (FB) are being investigated, and users are questioning their use of the sites:

For weeks, Facebook has been questioned about its role in spreading fake news. Now the company has mounted its most concerted effort to combat the problem.

Since the election drama, there"s all sorts of accusations both internally and from users as well:

Facebook has been in the eye of a postelection storm for the last few days, embroiled in accusations that it helped spread misinformation and fake news stories that influenced how the American electorate voted. The online conversation among Facebook"s executives on Tuesday, which was one of several private message threads that began among the company"s top ranks, showed that the social network was internally questioning what its responsibilities might be.

Even as Facebook has outwardly defended itself as a nonpartisan information source - Mark. Zuckerberg, chairman and chief executive, said at a conference on Thursday that Facebook affecting the election was "a pretty crazy idea" - many company executives and employees have been asking one another if, or how, they shaped the minds, opinions and votes of Americans.

We need to take a step back and understand the origins of Facebook as have been revealed in the last years. Facebook isn"t just a startup, it has some interesting backers and partners. It was revealed recently that Facebook was part of a broad program to collect user information they publicly volunteered on social media platforms on behalf of the intelligence community. PRISM is just one program but the most bright example of how social media was used to collect intelligence - you can read more about PRISM here. Not only was the NSA and CIA seed stage investors in Facebook under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) they were active customers. This data they extracted didn"t come free - they would pay for it, both with cash and favors. Favors that helped Facebook become the 368 B market cap behemoth that it has become.

All of this however, can potentially crumble. Not only is Facebook under investigation about manipulating public opinion with their "news algorithm" - it"s under scrutiny from potentially one of the most powerful people in the world, president-elect Trump.

Trump hasn"t put forth a plan to restructure the intelligence community explicitly; it"s been hinted at:

How Trump"s reported plans to restructure the intelligence agencies figure into this plan remains to be seen. This week, he selected former senator Dan Coats as his Director of National Intelligence, a position he reportedly considered abolishing earlier.

But case in point; Trump is in a quagmire due to his extensive international business units that can all pose a potential conflict of interest when he"s in office. As a President first and business owner second, he"s dealing with it. But from that perspective, would he perceive that it"s a conflict of interest for the intelligence community to directly invest, control, and partner with US tech companies on US soil - especially those such as the CIA that according to their mandate, only operate internationally? According to the CIA"s own website:

By law, the CIA is specifically prohibited from collecting foreign intelligence concerning the domestic activities of US citizens. Its mission is to collect information related to foreign intelligence and foreign counterintelligence. By direction of the president in Executive Order 12333 of 1981 and in accordance with procedures approved by the Attorney General, the CIA is restricted in the collection of intelligence information directed against US citizens. Collection is allowed only for an authorized intelligence purpose; for example, if there is a reason to believe that an individual is involved in espionage or international terrorist activities. The CIA"s procedures require senior approval for any such collection that is allowed, and, depending on the collection technique employed, the sanction of the Director of National Intelligence and Attorney General may be required. These restrictions on the CIA have been in effect since the 1970s.

That"s probably why InQTel makes their host clients sign NDAs! If Facebook can"t disclose them as an investor, it can never be proven they are involved in domestic intelligence even if indirectly, as the evidence could be thrown out of court due legal technicalities of how it entered the process of discovery (against the NDA). The author is not a lawyer to elaborate on how the NSA and CIA protect themselves from classified disclosures and lawsuits or worse, but they do have the best lawyers in America and even their own special court, called the FISA court, which is like a secret, classified court.

So if the NSA/CIA is "restructured" - would they look at InQTel and their affiliates? Is it a potential conflict of interest that the NSA/CIA has a vested interest in a company like Facebook that has been accused of shaping the election domestically? It"s unusual for the NSA/CIA to get involved in domestic politics. They have a history for fixing foreign elections, there are more than 100 countries where the NSA/CIA has either fixed the elections, or tried to, or tried to manipulate the local politics. But they"ve never done it domestically, at least to this extent. If they are investigated and restructured, and "de-politicized" - it can also lead to an investigation or restructuring in the least, of their public tech assets, companies like Facebook . This may sound like a big roundabout way to make a case; but consider that the NSA/CIA"s connection to Facebook is 1) not often talked about and 2) widely misinterpreted. In fact, they are a large part of the success of Facebook because well, they have really good connections!

Readers should note that, the CIA takes direction from the NSC, which is led by the President.

Facebook itself doesn"t develop technology or offer a "product" as does a company like IBM (IBM) or even Apple (AAPL). Facebook "s entire model is based on advertising, and now they have been buying companies that actually build and develop technology. But the core of Facebook is essentially, a house of cards built on the egos of its users and the illusionary world they allow people to create for themselves. This is not a stable business!

None of this is going to be reflected in the numbers, it"s hard to quantify. Even with a huge collapse Facebook is going to be around probably forever, but shareholders should take note of these major demographic trends that can cause a severe decline in the stock price as well as en-masse abandonment of the platform, at least from it"s US users. In foreign markets, it"s not clear if Facebook can be the dominating platform, as countries have their own platforms specific to their own culture, the best example being Russia"s VK which penetrates 99% of the market. Other countries have their own respective VK"s - so it"s not clear if Facebook could make up for the US issue with non-US business.

Finally, Facebook is littered with spam and fake accounts. Facebook claims to be aware of this issue, but it continues to be an ongoing problem. Local Police are even creating fake accounts for the purpose of monitoring local activity:

Police departments around the nation have taken predictive crime prevention to a new level by building fake user accounts, as well as posing as genuine people to gather information about local events, Tech.Mic reports.

Local agents put on a "digital mask" and pose as "members of the community," allowing them to gather personal information about suspects they consider a high risk of being involved in a future crime or have existing charges.

In a social media guide for law enforcement officialspublished by the Justice Department, the document details, officers create fraudulent profiles even though Facebook officially bans the practice.

That"s right - the Police have a guide on the creation of fake accounts in order to participate in the growing field of "pre-crime" published by the Department of Justice. You can download and read this manual by clicking here. From the introduction:

Police departments also have begun to explore the use of social media to obtain information, especially for tactical purposes, such as gathering information about threats of mob violence, riots, or isolated criminal activity during otherwiselawful mass demonstrations.

There"s even guides on how to create a fake account on sites like lifehacker.com - that"s not considering the companies that have made a business out of facebook-spam including but not limited to the US Military, via their Ntrepid software:

The U.S. Military is about to get into the business of lurking on forums and hanging around social media sites in a big way. Central Command (Centcom) is teaming up with a company called Ntrepid on software that will allow military users to create and manage multiple fake-but-convincing social media accounts, "replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent."

The military says these sockpuppet accounts will support "classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US."

So here we have several cases of PUBLIC NOTIFICATIONS where organizations have stated PUBLICLY that they are creating fake accounts EN MASSE. That doesn"t consider the thousands or perhaps millions of companies that do this privately, as a business. Here"s just one example of a site that simply sells Facebook (FB) accounts, buyaccs.com and why not, they have a "bulk" discount for lazy spammers that don"t want to go through the trouble of creating their own army of fake accounts like the US military says they will do. Here"s an image of the site in case it gets taken down - you can see price per account, and how many accounts available per provider. If these are all "real" accounts - who would "sell" their Facebook account? And how would they possibly have so many in such large quantities?

Facebook and supporters of Facebook is in denial about how spammy Facebook has become. They are further blinded by the fact that ad-dollars have continued to roll into Facebook"s ad platform, which has put the issue of fake accounts on the back burner.

As an aside, Google (GOOG) has always had a problem with click fraud, but they developed highly sophisticated algorithms to detect click fraud, it"s not 100% accurate but works really well, according to advertisers and publishers. Legitimate publishers and advertisers both don"t want fraudulent clicks even if it"s as simple as a publisher clicking on his own ad (this is filtered by a simple IP algorithm). Google protects advertisers by finding invalid clicks (not genuine) and refunding the fees generated and in extreme cases, banning the publisher involved. It"s unknown how much Google invested in the development of this system, but it works.

Not only has Facebook not attempted to do something like this, they don"t even go after companies who have made a business out of hacking and spamming Facebook - they encourage it! They have changed their "real name policies" but that"s superficial, robots that create fake accounts have always used real names or names that sound real, i.e. Archimbaldo Ultsright, James Terefin, Haggo de Blazio, Horatio de Pulpa, if you aren"t creative here"s a fake name generator, similar to what all the robots use.

All of this information is of course, from the technical perspective of Facebook it says nothing about the earnings, the actual revenue Facebook has received and so on. Detractors of this Fakebook theory will claim this is all being dealt with. What they are failing to realize is how fragile the Facebook model is. Take a look at another example - many think Apple is overpriced. But Apple can"t be replicated in one weekend with a few million dollars - Facebook can, and has. There are thousands of competition social network sites that many have started using instead of Facebook . As isn"t sitting on a really unique technology / patent portfolio, the only thing keeping them at the top are their really high end connections, including but not limited to Silicon Valley and associated Billionaires, the NSA/CIA apparatus, and the marketing / advertising industry which has a vested interest to see Facebook be an "alternative" to the main stream media which is declining in relevance.

So, longs should be concerned about this and at the least, hedge your positions and in the most prudent, get out and find something with real value like Overstock.com (OSTK) as we have mentioned in a previous article. There"s hundreds of better tech plays out there that are real deep value plays. Facebook is due for a major face-lift, and the current management is not willing to face the facts: Facebook is Fake.

For a quick primer on the financial system checkout SPLITTING PENNIES - YOUR POCKET GUIDE TO MAKE YOU A FOREX GENIUS

Confessions Of A Fake News Reporter

Submitted by Douglas Herman via Strike-The-Root.com,

“A lie can travel half way around the world while truth is still putting on its shoes.”  ~ Mark Twain

I write for those so-called “fake news” websites. You know the ones: the 200 odd deplorable websites, the ones Hillary, the Pope and Michael Moore have attacked as threatening to destroy World Peace, Democracy, Facebook and the Mainstream Media (MSM).

I only write for a handful of them, sad to say, although I’ve been linked to scores more. One of my recent columns went viral and it probably swayed the entire election – for better or worse: Before Trump, Sen Bulworth Spoke Truth To Power .  Seriously, the blatant corruption of the losing team, from Super Delegates to Podesta and PizzaGate to hidden Hillary health issues and secret sums of money funneling through the Clinton Foundation in “Pay to Play” accusations cost them the election, despite the best efforts and endorsements of the entire American media.

I’ve written for Rense, Counterpunch, Antiwar and Zerohedge. Most of my best stuff appears here on Strike The Root first, or STR as we call it, a website where Henry David Thoreau rather than Mark Zuckerberg is our moderator.  Tragically, STR did not appear on ProporNot and we are devastated, absolutely devastated.  Not.

Sometimes I ask my friends: If knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss, which is preferable? I always hope someone will respond, as Socrates or Obi Wan would have: Knowledge of our ignorance is power; bliss in this age is unattainable. 

So then, as an average American citizen, is it better to be misinformed or uninformed? Because Disinformation is almost a holy sacrament within the mainstream Operation Mockingbird media. Thus we fake news reporters believe we’re channeling our inner Tom Paine, Mark Twain or Henry D. Thoreau when we blog or post or link. When HDT wrote: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one who is striking at the root,” he was a spreader of fake news, by today’s tender standards. We like to think of ourselves as worldwide root strikers, following in his footsteps.

Cui Bono: Who Benefits?

Cops and crime scene investigators (CSI) always ask that question: Who benefits? Who had most to gain by the murder? We fake news reporters pride ourselves on getting the facts. Like legendary Joe Friday from that old TV show, Dragnet, we interview eyewitnesses, contact insiders and whistleblowers, sift through the circumstantial evidence (Like John Podesta’s creepy artwork) and attempt to deduce the truth. Unlike the TV talking heads and Op/Ed writers for the elite media news, we want to know exactly Who Benefits?  Even if it pisses off some elites. Or the elite media.

“There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.”

Sounds like some fake news screed, right, or some wacky conspiracy theory, right? Nope, this was written almost a hundred years ago by the Father of Public Relations and author of a book on propaganda that greatly influenced Adolf Hitler. Edward Bernays was Jewish and teaching in New York in 1923. Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, read his book Crystallizing Public Opinion and learned a lot from him a few years later, adopting Bernays’ masterful propaganda techniques.

“There is no means of human communication which may not also be a means of deliberate propaganda,” Bernays wrote and the Nazis adopted. “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.”

Maybe the mainstream media should nominate Ed Bernays as the Founding Father of Fake News, for spreading these ludicrous ideas far ahead of his time. But fakery and fudging the facts is best left to those rich and powerful Mockingbirds and their presstitutes of the so-called legacy media. Most of the best and brightest of that media have long since been blacklisted or silenced. Seymour Hersh, Steve Lendman and Paul Craig Roberts rarely appear in the NY/LA Times anymore.  Why? Because their stuff, like most of the stuff written by unknown root strikers like me, is exactly like Senator Bulworth’s. Too tough, too true.

“It must be the money; it turns everything to crap,” said Bulworth to some Hollywood elites in that movie, just before the Oscar-winning actor and director, Warren Beatty, was blacklisted from Hollywood for almost 20 years. But money is rarely a factor for fake news reporters like myself. We do it for patriotism and professional pride. In more than a dozen years of devising “fake news,” I’ve been paid about $2,000 or about TEN BUCKS A COLUMN.

“I guess I really do believe that the good is worth doing because it is good,” said peace activist and co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), Ray McGovern. “It shouldn’t matter that there is little or no guarantee of success, or even a truthful recounting of what happened.”

A couple years ago, McGovern was manhandled out of a Hillary Clinton speech she gave at George Washington University.  The topic of her speech? The need for respect of dissent. Naturally NONE of the so-called legacy media present there covered his dissent, except in a dismissive way. “America’s Fawning Corporate Media is the embodiment of a Fourth Estate that is dead in the water,” McGovern added.

By contrast to my TEN BUCKS a column, Hillary Clinton received a reported $500,000 for an appearance and speech she gave at ASU. The transcript never appeared in public, as far as I know, so it must have been absolutely priceless.

“Hillary Clinton, the woman who voted for a war that was sold on a diet of fake news, a war that killed hundreds of thousands, is now lecturing Americans about fake news putting ‘lives at risk’,” wrote Paul Joseph Watson, on the alleged fake news website Infowars. Watson is like Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick on steroids. “Being lectured by Hillary Clinton about fake news is like being lectured by Ted Bundy about not raping and killing women. It’s a joke, but a particularly sick joke given that Hillary’s role in pushing fake news had actually led to the deaths of countless innocent lives.”

We fake news reporters feed on the efforts and insights of others. We wish them well, Godspeed, Kudos, Bravos, Hurrahs, Links and Likes. Because we know that Pulitzer Prizes for reporting are now reserved for the con artists connected to the crony crime media. True Crime reporters rarely win Pulitzers anymore.

Consider Matthew Allen. He penned a column called: NYT Mocks PizzaGate as Impossible, But Its CEO Covered up Jimmy Savile Scandal. Now if this news reporter Allen is wrong, a malicious spreader of so-called fake news, then why doesn’t the NYT sue him for slander or libel?  Most of us would simply Google this fellow Jimmy Savile and then we would try to weigh the facts in PizzaGate objectively.

Allen writes, “It’s important to remember that the CEO of the fabled newspaper is none other than Mark Thompson, the former BBC director who ‘lied’ during the Jimmy Savile investigation, and is at least partly to blame for allowing a monster like Savile (So evil?) to operate within the BBC for so long ‘undetected’.”

As I said, if so many of us fake news reporters are slandering people, why aren’t they suing us? Shouldn’t The New York Times, instead of trying to sublet office space in their diminishing empire, sue writers like Matthew Allen? Why doesn’t the New York Times sue him for malicious slander or libel? “Mark Thompson’s newspaper is a crime against the written word,” Allen added, as a parting shot.  

To those of us who seek the truth, guys like Allen and Assange and Anonymous are allies in the fight against the toxic lies of the wealthy, well-connected and woefully corrupt power elites.

Props or Snopes?

Over the holidays, when a huge scandal shocked the cringing mainstream media world, WE CELEBRATED. We celebrated the deliciously karmic news that Facebook "fact checker" Snopes.com was accused of embezzling company funds. The so-called debunker of “fake news,” deified by the mainstream media without any fact-checking at all, suddenly was a steaming pile of backstabbers, porn stars and alleged con artists and embezzlers.  Not that there’s anything wrong with porn stars.  Most mainstream media personalities are highly paid porn performers. They just earn MILLIONS more than porn star Jenna Jameson ever dreamed of earning.

Many brilliant fake news reporters remain anonymous while posting as fictional characters in the alt media. Cognitive Dissonance, Miffed Microbiologist and Hedgeless Horseman are funny and always provocative at Zerohedge.  Jack Burton, at the same website, offers some astute, thought-provoking insight on an especially timely subject, terrorism.

“ISIS never touches an Israeli head,” Jack opined recently. “They are sworn allies of the Israeli Government. Seeing great benefits to be had from the Middle East Super Power, backed by the USA. The main ISIS allies are: Turkey, Israel, the USA and NATO. All this Obama crying on TV about ISIS threats is bullshit fucking lies. Obama is behind backing ISIS on to final victory in Syria. When Russia began to kill ISIS in earnest, the following governments demanded they cease bombing ISIS at once:  Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, USA, UK, Germany and others.”

Now that Aleppo has fallen, the mainstream media is in mourning. Not for all the wars they encouraged these past 15 years, or for the millions of refugees those wars caused, or the tremendous pressure now on European countries to house and feed those refugees.  No, not at all.  To them, that evil dictator Putin has almost prevailed, and only freedom of the press will keep democracy safe. And you know what? They are right. Only freedom of the press and the Constitution will keep citizens safe. That’s why I guess I’ll log onto George Washington’s Blog, Zerohedge, Infowars, Brietbart, STR, Rense and Natural News to stay informed.  Because we fake news reporters must keep informed.  Without us, America will certainly fall.

Addendum: While we fake news reporters love to be proven right, quite often we’re proven prescient. When I penned JFK and Obama--Profiles in Courage and Cowardice, I hoped to have been proven wrong. Sadly, ALL of the fake news reporters I quoted in that column EXACTLY eight years ago were proven correct.

Addendum 2.0   No fake news reporter can claim Trump will succeed overwhelmingly. More likely he will sell out his huge core of hopeful believers to the money/power elites, just as almost all presidents have done in the past. If not, Trump will die in some tragic accident or from some lone gunman. We would love to be proven wrong.

Washington Post Is Richly Rewarded For False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived

Authored by Glenn Greenwald, originally posted at The Intercept,

In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.

The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had claimed. In addition to the editor’s note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.

But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper’s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).

After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.

Baron himself, editorial leader of the Post, is a perfect case study in this irresponsible tactic. It was Baron who went to Twitter on the evening of November 24 to announce the Post’s exposé of the enormous reach of Russia’s fake news operation, based on what he heralded as the findings of “independent researchers.” Baron’s tweet went all over the place; to date, it has been re-tweeted more than 3,000 times, including by many journalists with their own large followings:

Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during election, say independent researchers https://t.co/3ETVXWw16Q

— Marty Baron (@PostBaron) November 25, 2016

But after that story faced a barrage of intense criticism — from Adrian Chen in the New Yorker (“propaganda about Russia propaganda”), Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (“shameful, disgusting”), my own article, and many others — including legal threats from the sites smeared as Russian propaganda outlets by the Post’s “independent researchers” — the Post finally added its lengthy editor’s note distancing itself from the anonymous group that provided the key claims of its story (“The Post … does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings” and “since publication of the Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list”).

What did Baron tell his followers about this editor’s note that gutted the key claims of the story he hyped? Nothing. Not a word. To date, he has been publicly silent about these revisions. Having spread the original claims to tens of thousands of people, if not more, he took no steps to ensure that any of them heard about the major walk back on the article’s most significant, inflammatory claims. He did, however, ironically find the time to promote a different Post story about how terrible and damaging Fake News is:

‘Pizzagate’ shows how fake news hurts real people https://t.co/cOh7RZ4RqK

— Marty Baron (@PostBaron) November 26, 2016

 Whether the Post’s false stories here can be distinguished from what is commonly called “Fake News” is, at this point, a semantic dispute, particularly since “Fake News” has no cogent definition.  Defenders of Fake News as a distinct category typically emphasize intent in order to differentiate it from bad journalism. That’s really just a way of defining Fake News so as to make it definitionally impossible for mainstream media outlets like the Post ever to be guilty of it (much the way terrorism is defined to ensure that the U.S. government and its allies cannot, by definition, ever commit it).

But what was the Post’s motive in publishing two false stories about Russia that, very predictably, generated massive attention, traffic, and political impact? Was it ideological and political — namely, devotion to the D.C. agenda of elevating Russia into a grave threat to U.S. security? Was it to please its audience — knowing that its readers, in the wake of Trump’s victory, want to be fed stories about Russian treachery? Was it access and source servitude — proving it will serve as a loyal and uncritical repository for any propaganda intelligence officials want disseminated? Was it profit — to generate revenue through sensationalistic click-bait headlines with a reckless disregard to whether its stories are true? In an institution as large as the Post, with numerous reporters and editors participating in these stories, it’s impossible to identify any one motive as definitive.

Whatever the motives, the effects of these false stories are exactly the same as those of whatever one regards as Fake News. The false claims travel all over the internet, deceiving huge numbers into believing them. The propagators of the falsehoods receive ample profit from their false, viral “news.” And there is no accountability of the kind that would disincentivize a repeat of the behavior. (That the Post ultimately corrects its false story does not distinguish it from classic Fake News sites, which also sometimes do the same.)

And while it’s true that all media outlets make mistakes, and that even the most careful journalism sometimes errs, those facts do not remotely mitigate the Post’s behavior here. In these cases, they did not make good faith mistakes after engaging in careful journalism. With both stories, they were reckless (at best) from the start, and the glaring deficiencies in the reporting were immediately self-evident (which is why both stories were widely attacked upon publication).

As this excellent timeline by Kalev Leetaru documents, the Post did not even bother to contact the utility companies in question — the most elementary step of journalistic responsibility — until after the story was published. Intelligence officials insisting on anonymity — so as to ensure no accountability — whispered to them that this happened, and despite how significant the consequences would be, they rushed to print it with no verification at all. This is not a case of good journalism producing inaccurate reporting; it is the case of a media outlet publishing a story that it knew would produce massive benefits and consequences without the slightest due diligence or care.

The most ironic aspect of all this is that it is mainstream journalists — the very people who have become obsessed with the crusade against Fake News — who play the key role in enabling and fueling this dissemination of false stories. They do so not only by uncritically spreading them, but also by taking little or no steps to notify the public of their falsity.

The Post’s epic debacle this weekend regarding its electric grid fiction vividly illustrates this dynamic. As I noted on Saturday, many journalists reacted to this story the same way they do every story about Russia: They instantly click and re-tweet and share the story without the slightest critical scrutiny. That these claims are constantly based on the whispers of anonymous officials and accompanied by no evidence whatsoever gives those journalists no pause at all; any official claim that Russia and Putin are behind some global evil is instantly treated as Truth. That’s a significant reason papers like the Post are incentivized to recklessly publish stories of this kind. They know they will be praised and rewarded no matter the accuracy or reliability because their Cause — the agenda — is the right one.

On Friday night, immediately after the Post’s story was published, one of the most dramatic pronouncements came from the New York Times’s editorial writer Brent Staples, who said this:

Now that this story has collapsed and been fully retracted, what has Staples done to note that this tweet was false? Just like Baron, absolutely nothing. Actually, that’s not quite accurate, as he did do something: At some point after Friday night, he quietly deleted his tweet without comment. He has not uttered a word about the fact that the story he promoted has collapsed, and that what he told his 16,000-plus followers — along with the countless number of people who re-tweeted the dramatic claim of this prominent journalist — turned out to be totally false in every respect.

Even more instructive is the case of MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin, a prolific and skilled social media user who has seen his following explode this year with a constant stream of anti-Trump content. On Friday night, when the Post story was published, Griffin hyped it with a series of tweets designed to make the story seem as menacing and consequential as possible. That included hysterical statements from Vermont officials — who believed the Post’s false claim — that in retrospect are unbelievably embarrassing.

VT Gov. Peter Shumlin on Russian hacking attempt: "One of the world"s leading thugs, Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid." pic.twitter.com/liJbVLdT5A

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 31, 2016

That tweet from Griffin — convincing people that Putin was endangering the health and safety of Vermonters — was re-tweeted more than 1,000 times. His other similar tweets — such as this one featuring Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy’s warning that Putin was trying to “shut down [the grid] in the middle of winter” — were also widely spread.

But the next day, the crux of the story collapsed — the Post’s editor’s note acknowledged that “there is no indication” that “Russian hackers had penetrated the electricity grid” — and Griffin said nothing. Indeed, he said nothing further on any of this until yesterday — four days after his series of widely shared tweets — in which he simply re-tweeted a Post reporter noting an “update” that the story was false without providing any comment himself:

In contrast to Griffin’s original inflammatory tweets about the Russian menace, which were widely and enthusiastically spread, this after-the-fact correction has a paltry 289 re-tweets. Thus, a small fraction of those who were exposed to Griffin’s sensationalistic hyping of this story ended up learning that all of it was false.

I genuinely do not mean to single out these individual journalists for scorn. They are just illustrative of a very common dynamic: Any story that bolsters the prevailing D.C. orthodoxy on the Russia Threat, no matter how dubious, is spread far and wide. And then, as has happened so often, when the story turns out to be false or misleading, little or nothing is done to correct the deceitful effects. And, most amazingly of all, these are the same people constantly decrying the threat posed by Fake News.

A very common dynamic is driving all of this: media groupthink, greatly exacerbated (as I described on Saturday) by the incentive scheme of Twitter. As the grand media failure of 2002 demonstrated, American journalists are highly susceptible to fueling and leading the parade in demonizing a new Foreign Enemy rather than exerting restraint and skepticism in evaluating the true nature of that threat.

It is no coincidence that many of the most embarrassing journalistic debacles of this year involve the Russia Threat, and they all involve this same dynamic. Perhaps the worst one was the facially ridiculous, pre-election Slate story — which multiple outlets (including The Intercept) had been offered but passed on — alleging that Trump had created a secret server to communicate with a Russian bank; that story was so widely shared that even the Clinton campaign ended up hyping it — a tweet that, by itself, was re-tweeted almost 12,000 times.

Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. pic.twitter.com/8f8n9xMzUU

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 1, 2016

But only a small percentage of those who heard of it ended up hearing of the major walk back and debunking from other outlets. The same is true of The Guardian story from last week on WikiLeaks and Putin that ended up going viral, only to have its retraction barely noticed because most of the journalists who spread the story did not bother to note it.

Beyond the journalistic tendency to echo anonymous officials on whatever Scary Foreign Threat they are hyping at the moment, there is an independent incentive scheme sustaining all of this. That Russia is a Grave Menace attacking the U.S. has — for obvious reasons — become a critical narrative for Democrats and other Trump opponents who dominate elite media circles on social media and elsewhere. They reward and herald anyone who bolsters that narrative, while viciously attacking anyone who questions it.

Indeed, in my 10-plus years of writing about politics on an endless number of polarizing issues — including the Snowden reporting — nothing remotely compares to the smear campaign that has been launched as a result of the work I’ve done questioning and challenging claims about Russian hacking and the threat posed by that country generally. This is being engineered not by random, fringe accounts, but by the most prominent Democratic pundits with the largest media followings.

I’ve been transformed, overnight, into an early adherent of alt-right ideology, an avid fan of Breitbart, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, and — needless to say  — a Kremlin operative. That’s literally the explicit script they’re now using, often with outright fabrications of what I say (see here for one particularly glaring example).

They, of course, know all of this is false. A primary focus of the last 10 years of my journalism has been a defense of the civil liberties of Muslims. I wrote an entire book on the racism and inequality inherent in the U.S. justice system. My legal career involved numerous representations of victims of racial discrimination. I was one of the first journalists to condemn the misleadingly “neutral” approach to reporting on Trump and to call for more explicit condemnations of his extremism and lies. I was one of the few to defend Jorge Ramos from widespread media attacks when he challenged Trump’s immigration extremism. Along with many others, I tried to warn Democrats that nominating a candidate as unpopular as Hillary Clinton risked a Trump victory. And as someone who is very publicly in a same-sex, inter-racial marriage — with someone just elected to public office as a socialist — I make for a very unlikely alt-right leader, to put that mildly.

The malice of this campaign is exceeded only by its blatant stupidity. Even having to dignify it with a defense is depressing, though once it becomes this widespread, one has little choice.

But this is the climate Democrats have successfully cultivated — where anyone dissenting or even expressing skepticism about their deeply self-serving Russia narrative is the target of coordinated and potent smears; where, as The Nation’s James Carden documented yesterday, skepticism is literally equated with treason. And the converse is equally true: Those who disseminate claims and stories that bolster this narrative — no matter how divorced from reason and evidence they are — receive an array of benefits and rewards.

That the story ends up being completely discredited matters little. The damage is done, and the benefits received. Fake News in the narrow sense of that term is certainly something worth worrying about. But whatever one wants to call this type of behavior from the Post, it is a much greater menace given how far the reach is of the institutions that engage in it.

Mainstream Media Is Now Whining About The "Fake News" Hysteria It Created

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

After coming under attack, the alternative media successfully appropriated and reassigned the now ubiquitous term “fake news” to a variety of disingenuous mainstream media outlets. The corporate media is not too happy about this, and it’s doing what it does best (aside from cheerleading for war); it’s whining about it to its readers.

Nothing more perfectly highlights the mainstream media’s instinctual response to complain than an article published on Christmas Day in The New York Times, which reinvents history by claiming alternative media is to blame for turning “fake news” into an overly expansive and thus meaningless term. Here are a few excerpts:

WASHINGTON — The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.”

 

Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”

 

Some supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump have also taken up the call. As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!”

 

Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online. But conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself, incredulous about suggestions that fake stories may have helped swing the election, have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.

The line highlighted above is a complete fabrication, and is either the result of extreme ignorance or intentional deceit. Either way, The New York Times should be ashamed of itself.

“Fake news was a term specifically about people who purposely fabricated stories for clicks and revenue,” said David Mikkelson, the founder of Snopes, the myth-busting website. “Now it includes bad reporting, slanted journalism and outright propaganda. And I think we’re doing a disservice to lump all those things together.”

As someone who followed the fluid and rapid progression of the “fake news” meme very closely, I can tell you that it didn’t happen the way The New York Times claims. First, let’s discuss what the term “fake news” should mean. I think the Snopes definition above is fine: “people who purposely fabricated stories for clicks and revenue.” If mainstream media had held to this standard following the election, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Nobody in alternative media would’ve cared, but that’s not what happened.

Rather, ensconced in an election-loss driven hysteria, various mainstream media outlets intentionally starting blurring the definition of fake news in order to slander the competition. This really got started with the promotion of a ridiculous list of websites to avoid compiled by a loony professor at Merrimack college. I covered the story barely a week after the election in the post, Zerohedge Included in What NY Magazine Calls ‘Extremely Helpful List of Fake and Misleading News Sites.’ Here’s some of what I observed.

Who cares that some assistant professor made a list of sites she doesn’t like and warns people about them? Why should we pay attention?

We should care because it is being promoted heavily by the mainstream media. For example, look at how a writer at New York Magazine promoted the list (seems kinda “clickbait-y” doesn’t it):

That article ended up being the most popular piece published on New York Magazine’s website that day. I never would’ve highlighted the professor’s ridiculous list if mainstream media wasn’t promoting it, and NY Mag wasn’t the only one. As I also noted:

The Los Angeles Times today published an article titled, Want to Keep Fake News Out of Your Newsfeed? College Professor Creates List of Sites to Avoid, in which it noted:

During the election, many people fell prey to fake news stories on social media — even the president-elect ended up retweeting fake statistics. A professor of communication has created a list of unreliable news sites to help people do better.

Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, put together a publicly available Google doc cataloging “False, misleading, clickbait-y and satirical ‘news’ sources.” It’s been making the rounds on social media as people seek to cleanse their newsfeeds of misinformation.

In its headline, the Los Angeles Times explicitly promotes this list as a helpful tool to avoid “fake news.” Alternative media, Trump supporters and conservatives didn’t bastardized the term, mainstream media did.

Of course, that was just the beginning. What really enraged everyone, including myself, was when The Washington Post dropped all journalistic standards to promote a “fake news” list created by the unknown, anonymous and obviously clownish organization PropOrNot. You all know what happened next, but if you want to revisit my thoughts on the topic, see:

Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of “Russian Propaganda” Websites

Additional Thoughts on “Fake News,” The Washington Post, and the Absence of Real Journalism

After all that, alternative media rightly appropriated the term, and accusations of “fake news” are now more often directed at billionaire-owned mainstream media than independent media. The response? Corporate media is crying foul and reinventing history by claiming that it was alt media barbarians who twisted the term “fake news” for propaganda purposes, when the exact opposite happened. Monumentally pathetic.

To conclude, I’d like to remind everyone of the following:

And The Washington Post likes to lecture us about fake news.#bitcoin pic.twitter.com/mKR9RtUpnd

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) December 28, 2016

Ron Paul: The War On "Fake News" Is A War On Free Speech

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

A major threat to liberty is the assault on the right to discuss political issues, seek out alternative information sources, and promote dissenting ideas and causes such as non-interventionism in foreign and domestic affairs. If this ongoing assault on free speech succeeds, then all of our liberties are endangered.

One of the most common assaults on the First Amendment is the attempt to force public policy organizations to disclose their donors. Regardless of the intent of these laws, the effect is to subject supporters of controversial causes to harassment, or worse. This harassment makes other potential donors afraid to support organizations opposing a popular war or defending the rights of an unpopular group.

Many free speech opponents support laws and regulations forbidding activist or educational organizations from distributing factual information regarding a candidate’s positions for several months before an election. The ban would apply to communications that do not endorse or oppose any candidate. These laws would result in the only sources of information on the candidate’s views being the campaigns and the media.

Recently the Federal Election Commission (FEC) rejected a proposal to add language exempting books, movies, and streaming videos from its regulations. The majority of FEC commissioners apparently believe they should have the power, for example, to ban Oliver Stone’s biography of Edward Snowden, since it was released two months before the election and features clips of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump discussing Snowden.

The latest, and potentially most dangerous, threat to the First Amendment is the war on “fake news.” Those leading the war are using a few “viral” Internet hoaxes to justify increased government regulation — and even outright censorship — of Internet news sites. Some popular websites, such as Facebook, are not waiting for the government to force them to crack down on fake news.

Those calling for bans on “fake news” are not just trying to censor easily-disproved Internet hoaxes. They are working to create a government-sanctioned "gatekeeper" (to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous phrase) with the power to censor any news or opinion displeasing to the political establishment. None of those wringing their hands over fake news have expressed any concern over the fake news stories that helped lead to the Iraq War. Those fake news stories led to the destabilizing of the Middle East, the rise of ISIS, and the deaths of millions.

The war on “fake news” has taken a chilling turn with efforts to label news and opinion sites of alternative news sources as peddlers of Russian propaganda. The main targets are critics of US interventionist foreign policy, proponents of a gold standard, critics of the US government’s skyrocketing debt, and even those working to end police militarization. All have been smeared as anti-American agents of Russia.

Just last week, Congress passed legislation creating a special committee, composed of key federal agencies, to counter foreign interference in US elections. There have also been calls for congressional investigations into Russian influence on the elections. Can anyone doubt that the goal of this is to discredit and silence those who question the mainstream media’s pro-welfare/warfare state propaganda?

The attempts to ban “fake news;” smear antiwar, anti-Federal Reserve, and other pro-liberty movements as Russian agents; and stop independent organizations from discussing a politician’s record before an election are all parts of an ongoing war on the First Amendment. All Americans, no matter their political persuasion, have a stake in defeating these efforts to limit free speech.