#Media Disinformation

[justbeingnamaste]

"I don't think that things can go too much further with the view that law enforcement, particularly the FBI or Department of Justice, runs a two-tiered system of justice. The nation can't stand under those circumstances." —Special Counsel John Durham, 6/21/23

[theculturedmarxist]

Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.

That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.

Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.

They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.

One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.

All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.

That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.

They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.

Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.

They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.

[shreygoyal]

View on Twitter

(Source)

[destielmemenews]

"The timing of the tool’s shutdown, months ahead of a major US presidential election, has drawn concern from groups that relied on CrowdTangle to track the flow of information on social media, including viral falsehoods that have led to real-world harm.

Using CrowdTangle, journalists and researchers could show how many users engaged with a piece of content, which groups supercharged the spread of a post and just how often political and medical misinformation went viral on Facebook and Instagram."

source 1

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

A media literacy handbook for Israel-Gaza

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-and-gaza-edition-on-the-media

The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:

https://media.wnyc.org/media/resources/2023/Oct/27/BNCH_ISRAEL_GAZA_EDITION_1.pdf

I. "Headlines are obscured by the fog of war"

Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.

II. Know red flags for bullshit

The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:

High-frequency posting

Emotionally charged framing

Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original

The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)

III. Don't trust screenshots

Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.

IV. "Know your platform"

It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.

V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing

People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.

VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy

TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.

VII. Think before you post

Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.

There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-gaza-edition

The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2018/03/09/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you.html

Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them – they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.

It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10/are-we-having-a-moral-panic-over-misinformation.html

It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject – to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/28/fog-o-war/#breaking-news

[odinsblog]

You can be absolutely positive that Elon Musk, Donald Trump and other rightwing billionaires and authoritarian countries are employing these bot armies right now.

[maximumphilosopheranchor]

Russian lies are meant not only to disinform, to make action more difficult, but also to demotivate, to make action seem senseless. Russian memes work not by presenting Russia as a positive alternative, but by demoralizing others. No one wants to be close to "Nazis," and the simple introduction of the lie is confusing and saddening. The same holds with the Russian meme to the effect that Ukraine is corrupt. A completely bogus Russian source introduced the entirely fake idea that the Ukrainian president had bought yachts. Although this was entirely untrue, Representative Greene then spread the fiction. Senator J.D. Vance also picked up the "yacht" example and used it as his justification for opposing aid to Ukraine. The larger sense of that lie is that everyone everywhere is corrupt, even the people who seem most admirable; and so we might as well give up on our heroes, on any struggle for democracy, or any struggle at all. Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, chose to risk his life by remaining in Kyiv and defending his country against a fearsome attack from Russia which almost all outsiders believed would succeed within days. His daring gamble saved not only his own democracy, but opened a window of faith that democracies can defend themselves. It confirmed the basis lesson of liberty that individual choices have consequences. The lie directed at Zelens'kyi was meant not only to discredit him personally and undermine support for Ukraine, but also to persuade Americans that no one is righteous and nothing is worth defending.

Timothy Snyder

[contemplatingoutlander]

Yoel Roth, PhD used to be in charge of the trust and safety team at Twitter. This is a must-read article to better understand how the far right is attacking anyone who wants to guard against disinformation being shared on social media. Consequently, the link above is a gift 🎁 link, so anyone can read the entire article, even if they do not subscribe to the NY Times.

Below are some excerpts:

When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next. Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move. This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online. Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.

I encourage you to use the gift link above and read the entire article. It is worth your time.

[alwaysbewoke]

honestly, FUCK ISRAEL!!

[undergroundusa]

How Far Out Of Touch Are Harris & The Radical Left?

"The more Harris articulates her belief system – once she gets past the word salad – the more she exposes herself as a far-Left, San Francisco Bay neo-Marxist masquerading as a Democrat..."

ORIGINAL CONTENT:

READ, SUBSCRIBE, SHARE & EDUCATE

[edenfenixblogs]

New Pinned Post: How This Blog Approaches The Conflict

I am not normally a politically-focused blog. I am normally a personal blog that enjoys fandom and occasionally processes my own past trauma. As this war goes on, I am finding that it is against my personal ethics and morals to stay silent when I have the ability to educate and remain more patient than most. (My patience is not endless. I’m still human). So, while disinformation/misinformation, and propaganda abound on all sides. I feel like the best way I can help lower the temperature is to put my skills to use.

Primary Political Goals:

1. Emphasize humanity above all and use verifiable information and good faith education and discourse to reduce tension.

2. Do my absolute best to move the conversation away from polarizing, accusatory discourse that forces Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Israelis, and Palestinians to play a desperate game of defense and toward a shared mutually beneficial peace that honors each grouped indigeneity culture, and connection to their ancestral homeland.

3. Demonstrate and emphasize both Jewish-Muslim solidarity and Israeli-Palestinian solidarity.

Primary Blogging Goals:

As a diaspora Jew, my primary goal is threefold

1. Educate about antisemitism and Islamophobia—including calling it out and explaining it to the best of my ability.

2. Elevate responsible, verifiable voices—regardless of religion or nationality—and information to the best of my ability.

3. Demonstrate effective activism and provide insight and encouragement for other to find their most effective way to contribute to fostering peace.

Elaboration:

1. I have the most experience with an understanding of antisemitism. I am more of an expert in antisemitism and have more ability to identify and educate about it. That said: I will not tolerate any Islamophobia or racism and if I don’t have the ability to educate about it, you will be blocked. If I have the ability to educate about it, I will do so and give you the chance to read about it and adjust your behavior. If you do not do so, I will block you.

2. This does not mean equal representation of all nationalities and religions. It means the best informed and most reliable voices AND the voices I personally have the best ability to vet, verify, and substantiate. This will often mean Jewish voices and Israeli voices. This is me staying in my lane, not choosing to suppress any voice. I will not elevate purposefully divisive, tokenized, or uninformed voices. This does not mean that I won’t elevate Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab voices as well. I will. But my primary goal here is responsibility. To do that, I have to stay in my lane.

3. I am most effective as an educator on this matter, a guide to finding reliable peace-oriented voices, and an example of patience. There’s a great desire among many to protest or create videos detailing their opinions and stances. Not only is this primarily performative—especially among non-Muslim/non-Palestinian goyim—it has the potential to be extraordinarily damaging to Jews both in Israel and in Diaspora as well as to Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, and South East Asians worldwide. If you truly desire to help and not just feel like you’re helping, the best thing you can do is follow the lead of much more experienced activists with a demonstrated track record of effectiveness and good faith in their areas of expertise. As I stated: mine is primarily education and greater than average (though not limitless) amounts of patience. If you want to donate money or engage in more direct action and aid, I suggest finding pro-Palestinian Israeli voices and peace oriented Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian voices as well as organizations with experience in this conflict that do not rely on eliminating any population or erasing anyone’s connection to the Levant. Follow their lead on that matter. If you are only just engaging in this conflict for the first time due to current events, you likely do not know nearly as much as you think you do about any of this. Being uninformed and spouting disinformation has actual dire consequences that can get Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Israelis, and Arabs killed. It is vital that you’re responsible in your engagement on this matter. Learning dogwhistles and how to spot bad faith arguments is a must. And to be effective, you should spend more of your time learning than you’re doing protesting or arguing. This is a 2000+ year old conflict. There is a lot to know and understand. And there are a lot of people willing to prey on your newcomer status and manipulate your existing beliefs to use you as a pawn to further their bad faith aims. The only consistent, trustworthy principal is to trust those who repeatedly affirm their goal as peace and shared prosperity and who reject any form of demonization based on ethnicity or religion. This is not a game. This is not the west’s fight. This is a conflict between two horribly oppressed, traumatized, and nearly exterminated ethnoreligous groups.

I am begging you to think, listen, and learn before joining the fray.

Note: I also don’t claim to be perfect. If I mess up or reblog something that causes unintended harm (which is very easy to do when engaging in discussions and activism about this conflict), I will say so and issue a correction. There’s no need to be hostile in informing me about this. Just message with your concern and I’ll evaluate from there.

Additionally, I will not interact with Hamas apologists. Hamas is a terrorist organization.

Anyone trying to make me feel like this is an Us vs. Them situation will be blocked.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

The most powerful moment of the coronation of King Charles III was not the gold glittering off carriages or epaulettes — not the pomp and show and signifiers of power.

It was precisely their opposite: when Charles shed his gold robes and stood in a thin white shirt, his frail humanity implied.

Then a screen was erected around him and, shielded, he had a private consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who dabbed anointing oil with his hands on Charles’s bare breast.

"This was the most solemn and personal of moments,” Buckingham Palace said.

Charles was bare before God, in privacy, God being one of the last beings with no need to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

The Princess of Wales looked on as the screen shielded her father-in-law.

By contrast, she was at that point the most magnificent she had ever been, swathed in layer upon layer of regality, the dress, the robes, the hanging chains, headpiece and ribbons all serving to move the viewing gaze — subjects in every sense — from our awareness of Catherine Middleton with her everyday human DNA and towards the shared fiction of her transcendent queenliness.

Less than a year later, this moment is remembered with new and terrible power.

It is spring again, but it’s a time of hard Lenten moral reflection for us as a nation, in relationship to our royals, as well as an ever more voraciously unprivate modern celebrity culture.

Both the King and the princess have cancer, the latter’s disclosed by Catherine in an unprecedented video address on Friday, March 22.

Catherine’s speech was something of a plea bargain in which she traded not only her customary silence but her most personal of health ordeals in order to put an end to toxic rumours swirling online that had become in tone like an unruly mob rattling at the palace gates.

Or rattling at the figurative locks on her medical notes, with three workers at the London Clinic, where she and the King were treated, suspended and under investigation for allegedly trying to access her records (hers, it is important to note, the King’s were unmolested).

📷: Getty Images

What was so powerful about the anointing of the King was the sacredness of that space in which he could be fully human away from observation and judgment.

There should be another one-on-one consultation that is sacred, where anyone, from King to princess to pauper, can expect to be shriven in total privacy, and that is the sanctity of the medical room.

It used to be that priests were our only bound confidants, we could trust them to be privy to all our spiritual ills.

Now doctors are our secular priests: bound by law and ethics to enshrine confidentiality at the heart of the patient relationship.

As a result, our medical privacy in an age of oversharing and online surveillance feels both stranger and more necessary.

If we knew our every GP-inspected rash was to be posted on TikTok for the nation, many of us would quite literally die of embarrassment.

The King’s appointment behind the three-sided screen can now be viewed through the lens of royal illness.

The lavishly embroidered panels and expensive white shirt now replaced by the flimsy three-sided ward screen on wheels and thin hospital gown that can humble us all.

But it also enacts a principle at the very heart of becoming the monarch.

The medical-like screen is erected in the coronation to tell us there are some places the public cannot go; to tell us that there are sacredly personal moments in which a person, any person, however swathed in our projections of power, needs to be nakedly human.

Otherwise, they will go mad. We need to make sure the screens are erected around Catherine now.

Much is said, quite a lot of it by Prince Harry himself, of the dangers of the wives of the princes repeating the tragic history of their mother, Princess Diana, hunted by photographers.

He remains phobic to any hint of tabloid persecution or paparazzi chase. But this is a sideshow, even an anachronism in 2024.

He and others have not recognised how the “chase” has changed. Who needs paparazzi when there are a billion citizen hacks ready to take pictures with their phones, in case a convalescing woman nips to a Windsor farm shop with her husband?

Instead, the appetite now is not to see but to know.

The royals used to have a contract with the public: we pay for them, and in return, they give us their presence.

Nearly all of their official job is to do with surface: to show up, to put in appearances at a set number of functions, whether at the opening of parliament or the opening of a leisure centre.

But now parts of the online mob seem to be staging a coup. We want more than the surface, we want to puncture the skin barrier of the royal family and occupy from the inside.

The “fans” have become an invasive virus. The royal analogy is often that they are trapped in a gilded zoo. This new model, instead, casts the royals more as lab rats.

When Catherine disappeared from view in January after announcing a “planned abdominal operation,” the response from internet truthers was one of irate entitlement.

They are now the 1980s tabloids: ravening for intimacies and making stuff up when thwarted.

This wasn’t the boomer generation, who are both more respectful of the royals and more private about their own health.

It was the fortysomething mothers frustrated when they can’t track the phone location of everyone in their life; or the twentysomethings on Snap Map.

Both desperate for their personalised new Netflix season of “The Royals” to drop.

Catherine presents with such stoicism and dignity, it is easy to forget where this new invasiveness started: when she was pregnant with Prince George in December 2012 and hospitalised for extreme morning sickness.

While she was sleeping on the ward, a radio station in Australia rang the hospital switchboard pretending to be the Queen.

They broadcast the nurse’s comments about Catherine’s “retching.”

One could only find this prank funny if Catherine had already — a young, wretchedly ill, pregnant woman — been dehumanised.

George is now ten and his mother hospitalised again, and in that decade, the physical security of ill royals may have tightened but their claim to bodily autonomy seems to have weakened.

Some say Kensington Palace “brought it on themselves” by their wish for discretion; this claim is duplicitous.

The late Queen Elizabeth II became increasingly debilitated in her final years with not much detail ever given; just as her father, King George VI, died without disclosing his lung cancer.

I’m glad that the British do not subject their heads of state to the same publicised medical reports as the president of the United States; one shouldn’t have to present a stool swab to sit on the throne.

No, instead the apparent justification of all those clicking and posting conspiracy theories “worried for Catherine’s welfare” was this sinful truth.

As a beautiful, 42-year-old mother of three, her drama was more box office than the ailments of those older, a pound of her flesh was worth more.

Pity, Susan Sontag said in her 1978 book Illness as Metaphor, is close to contempt.

Back then cancer was still taboo. Those around the patient, Sontag says, “express pity but also convey contempt.”

Ask any cancer patient and they will say they don’t want pity: it is too isolating, it sets them apart, an unwanted privilege.

This is why the video plea of Catherine was one of affinity, rather than pity or privilege.

Last year, she sat in robes in Westminster Abbey at the coronation of her father-in-law, next to her future king son and future king husband.

In her video address last week, she sat on a classically English garden bench, pale, alone and in jeans, as bare of pomp as any royal can be.

No mention of kings or titles, just Diana’s ring on her hand.

Rather she gave an appeal, parent to parent, human to human, about her “huge shock” and her care for her “young family.”

And, finally, her kinship with anyone who lives in a vulnerable human body susceptible to a democratic illness like cancer, “you are not alone.”

Or, to paraphrase Richard Curtis:

“I’m just a girl, standing in front of a public, asking for some time to endure gruelling chemotherapy."

NOTE: Additional photos have been included in this article.

[shreygoyal]

View on Twitter

Many business journalists identify with the [scammer] titans they cover—some even aspire to join them. Then there’s the general reluctance to be the skunk at the picnic—when markets are frothing, it’s more fun to play along than play the critic.

(Source)

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Seth Mandel

Christiane Amanpour had a problem, and in mid-February CNN talker decided to confront her network’s leadership about it. Her frustration boiled down to the fact that CNN was carefully running its Gaza coverage through its Jerusalem bureau’s fact checkers, which has always included Arab staff based outside of Israel as well. The stakes were too high, and the famous Hamas censorship and propaganda networks too powerful, for CNN to do what many newspapers were doing: run with copy straight from Hamas to print.

The results had thus far been undeniable: CNN anchors like Jake Tapper, Bianna Golodryga, and Abby Phillip were turning in thoughtful, deeply considered segments while holding politicians’ feet to the fire. Because of the plain facts of the war, Hamas’s depraved modus operandi was exposed for all to see. That’s when Amanpour went to management to demand a change.

Well, it’s pretty clear Amanpour’s strongarming worked. Here she is this week leading a sloppy segment playing up an already-debunked piece of Hamas propaganda. Anyone can get fooled by a video, of course—but that was the point of the fact checkers so reviled by Amanpour. This particular hoax was easy to spot: The “mass grave” in Khan Younis—to which Amanpour devotes a “difficult to watch” segment—was dug by Palestinians. After watching the story get notice from other journalists and even members of Congress, it became clear what this was: a real, live, actual disinformation campaign.

Perfect timing, then, for the return of Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz, you’ll remember, was briefly put at the helm of a Biden administration censorship project dressed up as a “disinformation” board. It immediately became clear that this was the worst idea on the planet: Jankowicz had actually been fooled by disinformation campaigns and even arguably joined one—the attempt by national-security officials to declare Hunter Biden’s very real laptop a Russian trick. As Robby Soave points out, this particular story has had debilitating consequences for free speech and for the institutional legitimacy of national-security and intelligence officials: “Not only were so many so-called experts dead wrong about the Russian connection, they pursued all the wrong policies as a result. Vast efforts to pressure social media platforms to censor questionable content were what followed. Crackdowns by the FBI, DHS, and other law enforcement agencies on election-related information paved the way for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to crack down on coronavirus-related misinformation. This isn’t an insignificant or trivial issue that Jankowicz just happened to get wrong. It was emblematic of an entire approach to dealing with disputed facts—an approach pioneered by academics working in tandem with government agencies and directed at speech on social media.”

[therapeutic007]

🌟✨ MAGA Vibes Only! ✨🌟

Okay, fam, let’s talk about what happens if President Trump makes his glorious return in 2024. 🇺🇸🔥

America First, Always: If he comes back, expect a major revival of the America First agenda! We’re talking about prioritizing American jobs, energy independence, and securing our borders. Imagine a new wave of policies designed to bring manufacturing back home! 🏭💪

Draining the Swamp 2.0: Trump knows the deep state is still lurking. You can bet he’ll double down on rooting out corruption in D.C. and dismantling the bureaucratic nonsense that holds our country back. This time, he’s got allies in Congress ready to help him clean house! 🧹🚫

Economic Boom: Remember that pre-pandemic economy? If he returns, expect tax cuts, deregulation, and a stock market that soars! Trump will likely push for a massive infrastructure plan to create jobs and revitalize cities across America. 💰📈

Foreign Policy Reboot: Get ready for a firmer stance on China and a renewed focus on our allies. Trump might even revive his peace initiatives in the Middle East, showing the world that America can lead without endless wars. 🌍✈️

Constitutional Rights: You can count on him to defend our freedoms! Whether it’s gun rights, free speech, or religious liberty, he’ll be a staunch advocate for our Constitutional rights. It’ll be all about empowering the American people! 📜🔒

Grassroots Movement: Trump knows the power of the people! Expect to see him rallying his base like never before, utilizing social media and public appearances to energize his supporters and bring them into the fold for local elections too! 📣🤝

Innovative Tech and Trade: Watch out for a focus on American tech innovation and fair trade deals that prioritize American workers. Say goodbye to unfair competition and hello to a thriving tech sector that benefits us all! 💻🇺🇸

So, what do you think, MAGA fam? Ready for a comeback that will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN?! Let’s keep the energy high and stay united! 🔥💥

[gwydionmisha]

Be careful what you watch and read and believe.