#stop disinformation campaign

[protect-namine]

twitter trying to put a fee on new users from the philippines and new zealand... SO many things are not good about this, but one thing that sticks out to me is that, while I know that it's to curb spambots and melon moose does not have the intelligence or finesse to cambridge analytica this, I'm also just like. tired of being the targeted demographic for social media experiments for someone else's profits with no consideration of how this will greatly affect local politics here

[femme-objet]

it’s also the same logic that fox news watchers or daily mail readers use when they believe major european cities have been rendered off-limits because of ‘sharia law’. get fed a constant stream of anecdotes, the vast majority of which are bullshit, of supposed islamic violence, until they think it’s a common occurrence

[littleguymart]

hello friends! I'm going to talk a bit about the current events in Gaza, Israel, and Palestine.

I'm doing this not because I'm the most informed (my us-american perspective is going to be distorted) or can speak for anyone else. I'm doing it because I have a lot of followers on here.

I hope that a blog people associate with kindness & comfort saying something can prompt people to reflect & take action.

I want to address this post to folks in the US who struggle with scrupulosity & who get stuck in dread. It's understandable if you're overwhelmed by the amount of information coming out about Israel, Palestine, and Gaza.

The US was established & is perpetuated through genocide, land theft, and continued oppression of indigenous people. This reality is not spoken about by the majority of settlers in the US and contradicts US national identity/myth.

As a result, a lot of Americans (myself included), have been taught not recognize this kind of violence for what it is. This means we are not necessarily skilled at recognizing good-faith reporting from dogwhistles & propaganda & disinformation campaigns.

Our country's myth-- that its genocidal creation was justified-- relies on that kind of ignorance. Even when we can tell the difference, it can feel hopeless to do anything about, or like we as individuals are responsible for its entirety.

I don't have a blanket solution to this. Unlearning this type of thinking is a long process, but it begins with recognizing that violent colonial governments are at work, and doing what we can to stop those processes.

Please call or write an email to your representatives to demand a ceasefire and an end to military aid to the Israeli government, if you're able. Turn out to protests if you're able. Refuse racism, orientalism, and anti-Semitism.

[opencommunion]

since zionists want to act obtuse about why we're criticizing a superbowl ad, here's an explanation from before the ad even aired. it was openly designed to act as pro-genocide propaganda. fighting antisemitism is a worthy goal but that's not what's happening here:

"The New England Patriots’ 81-year-old owner, Robert Kraft, writes seven-digit checks to the right-wing Israeli lobbying machine AIPAC, but his personal, political, and financial ties to Israel run deeper than the occasional donation. The multibillionaire married his late wife, Myra, in Israel in 1963 when Kraft, then 22, was older than the nation itself. Together they set up numerous business, athletic, and charitable ties to Israel, a record of which is proudly proclaimed on the Kraft company website. In particular, the Kraft Group boasts of its 'Touchdown in Israel' program, where NFL players are given free, highly organized vacations to see 'the holy land' and come back to spread the word about 'the only democracy in the Middle East.' (Not every NFL player has chosen to take part.) Kraft also attends fundraisers for the Israel Defense Forces, currently—and in open view of the world—committing war crimes in Gaza."

Now, as Israel wages war against the civilians of Gaza—more than 25,000 Palestinian have been killed with at least 10,000 of them children—Kraft is again flexing his financial and political muscles in order to defend the indefensible. His Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (FCAS) will be spending an estimated $7 million to buy a Super Bowl ad titled 'Stop Jewish Hate' that will be seen by well over 100 million people. Under Kraft’s direction, the ad’s goal is to create a propaganda campaign to counter the reports and images from Gaza that young people are consuming on social media. 

... The content of the Super Bowl ad is not yet known, but FCAS has afforded Kraft the opportunity to make the rounds on cable news saying things like, 'It’s horrible to me that a group like Hamas can be respected and people in the United States of America can be carrying flags or supporting them.'

This is Kraft enacting the mission of FCAS: fostering disinformation. He is far from subtle: A Palestinian flag becomes a 'Hamas flag,' and people like the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets of Washington, D.C., last month to call for a cease-fire and end the violence are expressions of the 'rise in antisemitism.' Without a sense of irony or the horrors happening on the ground in Gaza, Kraft says he is giving $100 million of his own money to FCAS, because 'hate leads to violence.'

Let’s be clear: What Kraft is doing politically and what he will be using the Super Bowl as a platform to do is dangerous. He appears to think any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. For Kraft, it is Jews like myself, rabbis, and Holocaust survivors calling for a cease-fire and a Free Palestine that are part of the problem. Kraft seems to think that opposition to Israel, the IDF, and the AIPAC agenda is antisemitism.

... Right-wing Christian nationalists, with their belief in a Jewish state existing alongside their conviction that Jews are going to Hell, are welcome in Netanyahu’s Israel and Kraft’s coalition. Left-wing anti-Zionist Jews are not. The greatest foghorn of this evangelical right-wing 'love Israel, hate Jews' perspective is, of course, Donald Trump. Kraft, while speaking of being troubled by events like the Charlottesville Nazi march and the right-wing massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue, counts Donald Trump as a close friend and even donated $1 million to his presidential inauguration.

No one who provides cover for the most powerful, public antisemite in the history of US politics should ever be taken seriously on how to best fight antisemitism. No one who funds AIPAC and the IDF and opposes a cease-fire amid the carnage should be allowed a commercial platform at the Super Bowl. But given that the big game is always an orgy of militarism, blind patriotism, and big budget commercials that lie through their teeth, perhaps that ad could not be more appropriate. We can do better than Kraft’s perspective on how to fight antisemitism. Morally, we don’t have a choice."

[soon-palestine]

So it turns out that Elons trip to Israel wasn't just for kosher theater and an IDF propaganda tour.

A secret meeting took place while he was there that went virtually unreported by any news media outlets.

In attendance was Netanyahu, Musk's tour organizer, investor Omri Casspi, Brigadier General Danny Gold, Head of the Israeli Directorate of Defense Research & Development and one of the developers of Iron Dome, Aleph venture capital funds partner Michael Eisenberg, and Israeli cybersecurity company CHEQ CEO Guy Tytunovich who is ex-israeli intelligence unit 8200.

The six men talked about technology in the service of Israel's defense, dealing with fake content and anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli comments, and the use by non-democratic countries of bots as part of campaigns to change perceptions, including on the X platform.

The solution Musk was presented was the Israeli unicorn CHEQ, a company founded by ex-Israeli intelligence unit 8200 CEO Guy Tytunovich that combats bots and fake users.

Following the meeting, Elon signed an agreement with cheQ, and apparently, the reason for the quick closing of the deal was Elons "direct involvement" with the company.

Now. What they won't tell you.

Israel is primarily responsible for the creation of bots. There currently exists dozens of ex-Israeli intelligence firms whose sole purpose is perception management, social media influencing/manipulation, disinformation campaigns, psychological operations, opposition research, and honey traps.

They create state of art, multi layer, AI avatars that are virtually indistinguishable from a real human online. They infiltrate target audiences with these elaborately crafted social-media personas and spread misleading information through websites meant to mimic news portals. They secretly manipulate public opinion across app social media platforms.

The applications of this technology are endless, and it has been used for character assassination, disruption of activism/protest, creating social upheaval/civil unrest, swaying elections, and toppling governments.

These companies are all founded by ex-Israeli intelligence and members of unit 8200. When they leave their service with the Israeli government, they are backed by hundreds of billions of dollars through Israeli venture capital groups tied to the Israeli government.

These companies utilize the technology and skills learned during their time served with Israeli intelligence and are an extension of the Israeli government that operates in the private sector.

In doing so, they operate with impunity across all geographical borders and outside the bounds of the law. The Israeli government is forbidden by law to spy on US citizens, but "ex" Israeli intelligence has no such limitations, and no laws currently exist to stop them.

Now back to X and Elon Musk.

Elon met with these people in secret to discuss how to use X in service of Israel's defense.

Elon hired an ex-Israeli intelligence firm to combat the bots…. that were created by another ex-israeli intelligence firm.

Elon hired an ex-israeli intelligence firm to verify your identity and collect your facial biometric data.

Do you see the problem yet?

Israel now has end to end control over X. Israel can conduct psychological operations and create social disinfo/influence campaigns on X with impunity. They now have facial biometric data from millions of people that can be used to create and populate these AI generated avatars.

They can manipulate public opinion, influence congressmen and senators, disrupt online movements, manipulate the algorithm to silence dissenting voices against Israel, and they can sway the US elections.

When the company that was hired to combat the bots is also Israeli intelligence…

Who is going to stop them?

Cyberspace is the wild.west. There are currently no laws on the books to regulate foreign influence on social media. There is nothing to stop them from conducting psychological operations and disinformation campaigns on unsuspecting US citizens. These companies operate with impunity across all geographical boundaries and there is nobody to stop them. But don't take my word for it.

For anyone wondering what the end game is for this, it was recently verbalized by Vivek Ramaswamy here on X. To narrow and completely eliminate the gap between what we say (think) in private and in public. In practice, the thought police of the future. And X is actively working on it.

[givemearmstopraywith]

quick palestine fact sheet:

there are nearly 7 million palestinian refugees globally

1.5 million individuals live in the 58 recognized palestine refugee camps around palestine (i.e. in gaza, syria, east jerusalem, etc) recognized by the unrwa

67% of gaza's population are refugees

there are 905,000 registered palestine refugee children: 635,000 in gaza and 269,000 in the west bank

palestinian refugees frequently cannot access public health insurance and are barred from many professions; some areas bar them from education and formal work

in gaza poverty rates are nearly 82% and the unemployment rate is some of the highest in the world at nearl 47% as of august 2022

one recent study showed that 88% of palestinian children show signs of war-related post traumatic stress disorder

37% of adults in the gaza strip qualify for diagnosis for ptsd; however, this number should be approached cautiously, accounting for preconceptions about mental health, access to diagnosis, and hermeneutic injustice: the number is likely far higher

48,000 people in gaza have some form of a disability: more than one fifth of this number are children

palestinians are not allowed, by israeli law, to have citizenship; they have no freedom of movement, and can be subject to forced evictions, detention, and torture.

the per capita gdp of palestine is US$3,678 as of december 2021; this is in comparison to a gdp per capita of USD$52,000 in israel

palestine does not have a formal military. the us stopped aid to palestine, around $60 million, in 2019. palestinian security services receives around $27 million from the national budget.

hamas, a separate entity from the pss, receives around $300 million per year. in comparison, israel spends in excess of USD$23.6 billion annually on their military.

in the midst of disinformation campaigns by global powers, fight facts with facts- and with protests, rallying, donating, elevating the voices of palestinians. keep showing up. keep educating yourself and others. never give up hope. palestine will be free.

[porterdavis]

Whenever I start feeling there's no way Trump could possibly win I have to remind myself there is a large segment of the US electorate (like my sister) that only watches Fox News and has never heard this quote. Or has never heard about Trump's dissing of Medal of Honor recipients. Or heard that Fox itself had to pay $500MM+ to Dominion Voting for deliberately lying about it and the whole 'stop the steal' disinformation campaign.

But not hearing the burgeoning list of Trump's illegal and immoral behaviour is not as bad as repeatedly hearing the lies and distortions that Fox actively spews. My sister vehemently believes Joe Biden is an evil, corrupt man! Come on....Joe may have his shortcomings but if there is a more honest, empathetic man in Washington I'd like to meet him.

[qqueenofhades]

https://www.tumblr.com/qqueenofhades/742700762243727361/you-can-tell-you-work-in-academia-with-how-much

Hi, sorry, Asshole Anon here (I’m not giving myself that nickname to lash out, I’m saying it because I was an ass)

To clarify: I mean “I don’t know what to trust anymore” in that “people whom I normally respect and would otherwise agree with are now sharing material that I find either morally indefensible or overtly simplistic, and at the same time people on the ground in Gaza are saying that Hamas IS a liberation organization, so I trust their word, but there is also the existence of the “We Want To Live” protests, and the fact that there’s now apparently a protest against a child that got killed that isn’t widely reported, with an attached video of said protest from somebody on the ground in Gaza, but it’s in Arabic, there are no subtitles, I cannot speak Arabic, and I don’t trust Google Translate”

I just want an objective sense of what is happening on the ground. I want to know what is and is not propaganda, because I (white, raised in a liberal(?) household, surrounded by white people) am especially susceptible to it. Once I have that objective sense of what the people in Gaza want, then I will be able to effectively and efficiently advocate for shit. But that also necessitates listening to orgs like Standing Together, B’Tselem, people IN Israel who want this shit to stop, and hoo BOY that ain’t gonna fly with those people I mentioned because of:

1. BDS saying that the org “normalizes the occupation”, but they’re made up of Palestinian activists and anti-apartheid veterans, I can’t discount their statement, not fully.

2. Netenyahu’s… Netenyahu

3. Twitter’s doing a great job of asserting that everyone in Israel is a — quoting directly here from a half-remembered Tweet — “genocidal maniac”, or wants the bombardment to happen. (Which I know for a fact is not the case, if the protests calling for a new election are anything to go by)

That’s not even getting into the domestic stuff. I’m in an org rn and I’m getting the sinking feeling that they’re gonna drop this thing like a hot potato when a ceasefire gets called. Just sucks.

Anyways, back to improvement. Just closing this out

I agree that we're currently in a paradoxical state where there is simultaneously ALL THE INFORMATION EVER and ACTUALLY NO INFORMATION AT ALL, and that's what makes it difficult to sort out true from false. It's also what contributes to compassion fatigue, where we are able to get extensive real-time information and/or eyewitness accounts about pretty much any tragedy or catastrophe anywhere in the world, and social media has created a space where we are expected to both immediately react to all that information and to do so in the "right" and "correct" way. Which is basically impossible, and is also what burns out young well-meaning people so hard, where they insist that there's nothing to be done except The Revolution, because they have been so inundated with this torrent of human suffering and it seems like small steps are in fact useless. I am a historian and I can tell you upfront that humans are simply not made to process that volume of information about ALL THE BAD THINGS EVERYWHERE. It's also impossible to have an informed opinion on all or sometimes any of it, but there is still the pressure to visibly do so and to do it in a way that fits in with what everyone in your peer group is saying, even if you don't understand it. So yes -- that is absolutely very difficult, and it's hard to filter or parse it.

That said, I don't think we actually need to have painstaking piece-by-piece analysis of every single piece of information out there, because there are in fact so many competing narratives, perspectives, fake news, disinformation campaigns, opinions, etc., and it will lead you to the same information paralysis: there's just too much of it to even start processing, and so your brain just gives up and reverts to those same simplistic cliches and things that "feel" right, regardless of whether or not they are. When you're trying to decide on the fine details of something, it helps to have an overall sense of the context and narrative that they're operating in. So for reference, these are some broad and basic analytic paradigms that I personally use when reading or thinking about any material in regard to the Israel/Hamas situation in particular:

No person of basic good faith and human decency wants the current situation in Gaza to be happening. However, the person/group that has the power to call it off -- i.e. Netanyahu and the current Israeli government -- has not done so despite increasing pressure from Western allies, because the situation is beneficial to Bibi personally and he sees more use in continuing it than making the decision for it to stop.

The governments of Western allies, therefore, can voice disapproval of Israel's actions (which they have been doing more and more frequently) but unless Netanyahu himself makes the choice to end the war, it will not stop. The West has recently given more and more signals that they are not prepared to countenance the ongoing destruction and genocide of Gaza, but yet again, Israel is its own sovereign country with its own powerful government, military, intelligence services, etc. The "anti-imperialists" who think the collective West can just reach in and turn off the violence whenever they please, and have just refused to do so because they're "bad people," are not being realistic. Western allies can exert pressure and leverage, but as long as Netanyahu himself wants to keep going, he will.

"People in Gaza" and "people in Israel" are not homogeneous blocs who think exactly alike. Some people in Gaza support Hamas. Some people do not. Hamas support has recently grown as a result of Israel's post-October 7 response, but it is not unanimous or unquestioned.

Hamas is the entity that started the current war by attacking Israel on October 7 and murdering/raping/kidnapping 1,000+ Israeli civilians. Hamas is also associated with Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and other terrorist regimes/states, which are often defended by Online Leftists simply for being "anti-Western," regardless of how heinous their actions also are.

Netanyahu was wildly unpopular in Israel for MONTHS before this current war, due to his autocratic attempts to neutralize the Israeli Supreme Court and make the country even more of his personal fiefdom. There were huge, massive, ongoing protests against his naked power-grab for almost all of 2023, and he was so preoccupied with pushing it through that he ignored warnings from the Israeli and Egyptian intelligence services that Hamas was planning a major attack. These anti-Netanyahu demonstrations have continued and ramped up in intensity even in the middle of the war/attacks on Gaza.

As such, painting every single Israeli as mindlessly supporting the current actions of Netanyahu and the Israeli government is antisemitic nonsense and reflect the current Western Leftist tendency to assume that "all Israelis" and "all Zionists (read Jews)" are evil and personally responsible for this.

Israeli Jews have a right to exist and to reside on the land currently called Israel. Modern Israel was founded in 1948, three years after the end of WWII and the Holocaust, the greatest incidence of antisemitic mass murder in history, which is a fact that cannot be ignored and which western leftists eagerly calling for its total eradication and treating it as an illegitimate "white western settler colony" nonetheless do in fact repeatedly ignore.

This is why many Jews do not feel safe in other countries, because there has literally been thousands of years of history proving that they often aren't, and which the rabidly antisemitic response to the current conflict is doing nothing to dissuade.

Jews have had a presence in the land alternately called Palestine, Israel, the Holy Land, Judah, etc., for over 2,000 years, and their entire religion and history is founded around the exile from Jerusalem. That is the history that the current state of Israel is drawing on. It does not vanish just because it is inconvenient for western leftists to acknowledge.

Israel currently has a militant far-right government (after tending toward rightist/right wing domestic politics more generally, partially due to post-Holocaust trauma) that has deliberately erased, ignored, and violated the equally valid claims of Palestine and Palestinian people to that same land, and which is currently committing full-scale genocide against them.

Palestine and Palestinian/Muslim people have the same right to exist on that land as Israel and Israeli/Jewish people (and Christian people, and none-of-the-three people). They both have equally long and historically relevant claims to this land and one of them (in an ideal world, which we do not live in) should not be artificially prized over the other.

However, this land is some of the most bitterly and violently contested in the entire world, for the last two thousand years and counting, and there is no one good guy, simplistic answer, or quick way to stop it. The three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have fought bitterly over Jerusalem and its associated territories for a cool few millennia, and human nature being what it is, there is no way for one person, group, organization, government, etc to just step in and make it stop.

The Western/American leftist response to the current conflict has often made absolutely no attempt to take into account any of this troubled and complex history, and has reduced the whole thing down to whichever antisemitic and/or anti-Democratic Party soundbites will get them the most traction on social media. This often rests on whitewashing any moral responsibility belonging to Hamas and defending them no matter what, labeling all Israeli Jews as "evil genocide supporters," and assuming that if Biden wanted to magically shapeshift into Netanyahu and give the order to make it stop, he would, but he's "just not doing it," ergo something something Trump Would Totally Be Better!

These people also often call themselves "anti-imperialist" while thinking/demanding that America swoop in and play Big Global Policeman Daddy (as it indeed has often done in the past) and spank all its naughty children (but if it actually did do this, etc etc it would be evil). Biden could very much do more and has not necessarily done enough, but he has also done more than any other American president in history to shift away from unconditional unquestioning support of Israel only, and to advocate for a Palestinian state, a lasting ceasefire, and other basic precepts of Palestinian self-determination and dignity of personhood. These two things can be true at the same time.

I don't necessarily expect everyone to agree with every single fine detail of these statements, but I do expect them to at least make a basic effort to let all of these facts to inform their response, and not just the ones that they most agree with and which most fit their ideology or preferred conclusion. So that's one way to approach the situation, even if we obviously can't wring every single drop of meaning out of every single competing piece of information or evidence, because there is just too much of it. When we have a broader understanding of the space that we are operating in and the precepts that are factually true, we are able to make better judgments about who is trustworthy, who is worth listening to, what message they are pushing, and whether it corresponds with reality.

Good luck. I'm sure you'll continue to think about this and take the steps that you feel are best. It is all any of us can do.

[mariacallous]

“Now, how long will this take? The Ukrainians behave like charlatans and we continue to pay,” reads a quote in French next to a picture of Taylor Swift on what looks like a promotional poster for an upcoming tour. “That is not right.”

“Every time the Ukrainians get money, everything goes wrong,” reads another quote in German next to a picture of Selena Gomez on what appears to be a page taken from a fashion magazine.

"It's just disappointing how the Ukrainians use our help,” a quote, also in German, reads next to a picture of Kim Kardashian speaking on stage. “Someone needs to stop this, seriously."

Though the images make it look like these quotes were said by Swift, Gomez, and Kardashian, they weren’t. They were the product of a pro-Russian network of fake Facebook and X accounts that created and disseminated an ad campaign suggesting that some of the most famous people in the world back Russia and detest Ukraine. Among the celebrities included are Beyoncé, Oprah, Gigi Hadid, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber, Shakira, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cristiano Ronaldo. “Supporting Ukrainians is unacceptable,” reads a quote next to a photo of Oprah. “Their actions destroy lives and societies.”

The disinformation campaign, which was launched in November, reached at least 7.6 million people on Facebook alone, according to a database of the ads reviewed by WIRED and collected by Reset, a nonprofit that provides grants to those tackling disinformation. It’s still in progress, and two separate groups of disinformation researchers believe the campaign is run by a notorious Russian influence operation dubbed Doppelganger that has in the past been linked to the Kremlin. New information shared exclusively with WIRED suggests the campaign has links to Russia’s GRU military spy agency.

At the beginning of November, researchers at Reset discovered what they described as a “blitz campaign” by two networks of fake Facebook pages. Over the course of a week, the researchers saw at least 560 Facebook ads that feature images of celebrities alongside pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian quotes. While some of the ads reached only thousands of users, others spread far more widely. One featuring Cristiano Ronaldo reached over 115,000 people before it was deactivated. Alongside the image of Ronaldo was the quote “It's frustrating to see how the Ukrainians use our aid. Someone needs to stop this, seriously.”

Researchers at Reset believe that the campaign “exploits loopholes in Facebook’s ad verification and content moderation systems to foster hostility against Ukrainians and undermine EU support for Kyiv.” Including fake quotes from celebrities within images makes it harder for Facebook to spot a coordinated campaign, they added. The campaign, which specifically targeted people in France and Germany, also removed any links or additional text in the ads, making it harder for Meta to track it.

Doppelganger has been actively spreading disinformation on both Facebook and X for some time. The organization was unmasked in September 2022 by EU DisinfoLab, a nonprofit working to combat disinformation against the EU, but it had been operating since at least May 2022. The group used clones of media websites, including The Guardian and Bild, to spread disinformation, filling the fake sites with articles, videos, and polls designed to push pro-Kremlin talking points about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Facebook first announced action against Doppelganger in September 2022, and said it was removing pages and accounts associated with the campaign.

In June 2023, another campaign targeting major French websites including Le Parisien, 20 Minutes, Le Monde, and Le Figaro was exposed by the French government. “French Minister supports the murder of Russian soldiers in Ukraine,” read one fake headline on a page that looked like Le Monde during that campaign.

Despite being repeatedly found out, the operators of Doppelganger have managed to continue their work: They also created fake versions of Fox News and other news websites to seed chaos and confusion during the Israel-Hamas war.

While Doppelganger campaigns in the past have been linked to the Kremlin in some media reports, new information from researchers tracking the disinformation campaign shows a link to Russia’s GRU.

A network of bot accounts on X, which in the past have been used to push Doppelganger’s fake websites, has also been used to push people to websites with direct links to Russia’s military spy agency. “Doppelganger bots promoted two sites recently, which both have strong connections to GRU,” researchers at Antibot4Navalny, a Russian anti-disinformation research group that has been closely tracking Doppelganger activity on X, tell WIRED. The researchers did not want to be identified due to security concerns.

The first site promoted by the Doppelganger bots was ObservateurContinental.fr. The Whois data, a public record of information related to the registration of a website, for this site shows that it is connected to InfoRos, a news agency previously linked to the GRU that operates hundreds of websites to push Kremlin propaganda. InfoRos was first reported to be a front organization for GRU Unit 54777 by The Washington Post in 2018. At the time, the group was said to have been active as far back as 2014 to spread disinformation about Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The second site pushed by Doppelganger bots targeted Germans. In October 2022, an investigation by the German newspaper Die Welt found that the author of content on the EuroBRICS site was being paid directly by InfoRos, which is registered as the operator of the EuroBRICs website by the German domain registrar.

Many of the same images from Doppelganger’s campaign, along with others targeting an English-speaking audience, were also shared on X by the same network of bots that have previously shared links to the Doppelganger campaigns.

“We collected a whopping 75-plus fake quotes by celebrities from the US and EU, all massively posted recently by bots of Doppelganger, the pro-Kremlin influence campaign,” one of the researchers at Antibot4Navalny tells WIRED.

The campaign on X, which coincided with the Facebook campaign, used over 10,000 bot accounts, according to the researchers. In the space of one eight-hour period, the bots posted over 27,000 messages. At one point, the bot accounts were posting 120 messages every minute.

The posts on X are identical to those posted as ads on Facebook identified by Reset, except that some of these posts were in English. The X campaign also featured mocked-up versions of celebrities’ verified Instagram accounts, making it seem as if screenshots of celebrity Instagram accounts, using similar anti-Ukraine quotes, were being shared.

X did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED about the Doppelganger campaign. Since Elon Musk took control of the platform in October 2022, he has eliminated most of the company’s trust and safety team, and disinformation has flourished on the site, especially around breaking news events like the recent Israel-Hamas war.

One of Reset’s researchers, who did not want to be identified to protect their privacy, tells WIRED that, in recent days, researchers have seen Doppelganger’s celebrity-based campaign evolve. Some ads on Facebook now, like the ones on X, feature screenshots that appear to show verified Instagram accounts of the same celebrities, adding a further layer of authenticity to the campaign. In one case, a screenshot of a fake Instagram post from the entrepreneur Richard Branson suggests that he believes America was behind the Nord Stream explosion.

The researcher also found video ads that feature real footage of celebrities with fake audio dubbed over the top, which they say have been created with text-to-speech apps. The researchers at Reset were unable to identify which app was being used to automate the creation of the videos. One example reviewed by WIRED showed footage of German filmmaker Wim Wenders speaking in English about his own films, dubbed to make it appear as if he was speaking in French about how “the Ukrainians are ruined.” The ad was posted to Facebook on November 25 and was seen by up to 3,000 people before it was removed for failing to have the “required disclaimer,” according to Facebook’s ad library.

While Facebook has taken down the majority of the pages, some of them remain active, and the campaign shows glaring gaps in Meta’s ability to deal with disinformation on this scale.

Meta declined to respond on the record to WIRED’s request for comment about the campaign and the network of fake accounts created to disseminate the false ads. In a report from August, however, Meta acknowledged that Doppelganger was the “largest and most aggressively persistent covert influence operation from Russia that we’ve seen since 2017.”

The automated creation of accounts on Facebook is a well-known problem, and Meta has deployed a variety of artificial intelligence systems to combat efforts to mass-create fake pages and accounts. By its own admission, Facebook deletes millions, and sometimes billions, of fake pages every quarter, sometimes within minutes of their creation. Meta claims that around 5 percent of its monthly average users are fake, but outside experts say that figure is substantially higher.

While the Doppelganger group ran the campaign, the fake Facebook pages it used were purchased from an agency that specializes in creating massive networks of inauthentic pages on Facebook, according to Reset. They are still investigating who created these initial networks, but the researchers say this campaign was pushed out by two separate networks they identified containing 52,000 and 25,000 pages respectively. In October, Reset published a report identifying even larger networks of inauthentic Facebook pages, including one that had over 340,000 inauthentic pages. Despite having been identified publicly, these networks are still operating today.

With a number of major elections taking place in 2024, experts are again concerned about Meta’s ability to reign in disinformation.

“Meta’s sloppy product safety is a security liability for both Europe and the US as we approach next year’s elections,” Felix Kartte, EU director at Reset claims to WIRED. “Threat actors will continue exploiting loopholes in Facebook’s advertising systems to target deceptive and inflammatory content at millions of voters in the world’s biggest democracies.”

[jkottke]

YES YES YES: “Campaigns from Harris for President on down should clarify that they will post to Twitter only after updating other platforms. Steering the media away from Twitter helps democracy.” Time to stop helping Musk’s disinformation campaign.

[mightyflamethrower]

Riots have broken out in multiple cities and towns across Great Britain, particularly over the past week. There were already protests taking place, but some of them have now turned violent. The topic driving all of this unrest is the immigration situation, particularly the illegal migrants that have been crossing the English Channel on rubber rafts and boats. Much as we've seen a backlash in the United States to violent crimes committed by illegal migrants, many Brits are clearly fed up as well. Everything seemed to come to a head last week when a series of stabbing attacks took the lives of three young children and left eight other children and two adults seriously injured. This took place in Southport, a seaside town north of Liverpool. Rumors quickly spread that the attacker was an illegal migrant, and that's when the protests turned violent. Hundreds have been arrested as a result. (AP)

Britain has been convulsed by violence for the past week as crowds spouting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic slogans clashed with police. The disturbances have been fueled by right-wing activists using social media to spread misinformation about a knife attack that killed three girls during a Taylor Swift-themed dance event. The violence, some of Britain’s worst in years, has led to hundreds of arrests as the government pledges that the rioters will feel “the full force of the law” after hurling bricks and other projectiles at police, looting shops and attacking hotels used to house asylum-seekers. As Britain’s new government struggles to quell the unrest and announces a “standing army” of specialist police to deal with rioting, here’s a look at what’s happening and why.

The liberal media has a marked tendency to try to blame nearly everything on online misinformation or disinformation, but in this case, they do seem to have a point. The attacker was described in several outlets as someone "believed to be an asylum-seeker or a Muslim immigrant." That report spread across the media quickly, inflaming tensions. But it turns out that the killer's name is Axel Muganwa Rudakubana and he was actually born in Wales in 2006, moving to Southport in 2013. His parents are reportedly legal immigrants from Rwanda. He also reportedly suffers from autism, so the stabbing attack may have been more of a mental health issue than any sort of hate crime.

Even if the deadly attack in Southport turns out to have been mischaracterized, that doesn't mean that the UK doesn't still have a serious problem with its illegal immigration situation and resultant unrest. This situation has been simmering for more than a decade and it now appears to be reaching the boiling point. There is a group over there named the English Defence League that has been operating for more than a decade, running a campaign against massive Muslim migration into the country, and they've been attracting more followers recently.

As far as the response to this situation goes, what we're seeing is a jarring juxtaposition between two different British leaders. The UK recently elected its new Labor Party Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, to replace the outgoing Conservative Party PM, Rishi Sunak. Sunak had previously vowed to stop the flow of illegals into the country by turning back the boats in the channel and deporting illegals already in the country to Rwanda. Immediately upon taking office, Starmer canceled the plan and instead vowed to take care of the problem by "working with other European nations and speeding up the removal of failed asylum-seekers."

Starmer has also vastly increased the rate of arrests... not of the migrants, of course, but of the protesters. Some of the protesters have engaged in vandalism and caused damage, with some even attacking the police, so they will need to be held accountable, but many of them are simply carrying signs and decrying both the current administration and the flood of migrants. They don't have the type of First Amendment protections we enjoy in the United States, so many of them have been sent to jail. Starmer has promised that the protesters will "feel the full force of the law" and established a "standing army" of specialist police to deal with the rioting. The entire situation is a mess, to be sure, but it's yet one more sign that massive migration and lax immigration enforcement are causing unrest far beyond America's borders. And the problem is spreading.

[nando161mando]

January 26 is 'Australia Day', AKA 'Invasion Day' or 'Survival Day'.

There will be protest rallies around the country.

The following text is via 'WAR: Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance':

2024 INVASION DAY RALLY - MELBOURNE — Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung Lands

Invasion Day Rally Melbourne

10AM Friday 26 January 2024

Parliament House Victoria.

We continue to call for treaty, truth and justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The 26th January, Australia Day is not a day to celebrate. It is an annual reminder of invasion, occupation, genocide and the ongoing impacts of colonisation that continues to destroy our lives, our lands and our waters. As the oldest living culture in the world, it is our right and our responsibility as First Nations people to protect our country, culture and our people. That is why we meet this day with protest and mourning, as one of the longest standing protests in the world.

A Dawn Service will be held at 5am at Kings Domain Resting Place, Linlithgow Avenue. This will be followed by the Invasion Day Rally where we will be meeting at 10am at the Victorian Parliament on Spring St and marching to Flinders St Station.

In recent months, distinct lines have been drawn both nationally and globally, marking those who endorse settler colonialism and those uniting to resist the enduring colonial forces that we strive to counteract. The repercussions of settler colonialism have been starkly illustrated in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by Israel, supported by all other settler colonial states, including Australia.

In the wake of the unsuccessful 'Voice' campaign, the imperative to ensure the resonance of Indigenous Rights campaigns across the nation has become increasingly apparent. The concluded 'Voice' campaign exposed our community to reprehensible levels of vitriol from racists, sparking discussions about our humanity. This unsettling experience highlighted the perils of misinformation and disinformation during the referendum, aimed at demonising the Indigenous struggle. In response to these challenges, we are taking to the streets to demand treaty, truth, and justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

On this Invasion Day, as on every such occasion, we stand united for our families, communities, and all, asserting that all Black Lives Matter.

The Australia colony is a racist nation: there is no other conclusion from the referendum. We know and live this every day. Reconciliation is dead.

We want our land back now!

Join us in our fight to Abolish Australia Day.

We demand:

Treaty/Treaties

Land back and land rights - stop selling land promised to us

End Aboriginal deaths in custody

Climate justice

End the theft of Black children and return all Black children to their families and kin

Abolish police and prisons

Reparations

The Australian government stop arming Israel

We call on everyone to respect our demands and take action with us. We also remind attendees that COVID19 is still impacting our communities and we encourage all attendees to wear a mask, bring hand sanitiser and take all necessary precautions to keep each other safe.

Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance will be available for media interviews in the lead up to the rally. Please email warcollectivevic@protonmail.com for interviews.

@antifainternational @anarchistmemecollective @kropotkindersurprise @left-reminders @radicalgraff

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Donald Trump on Sunday called for President Joe Biden to take down an attack ad featuring a series of quotes attributed to the Republican in which he mocks dead soldiers.

The former president’s demand came on the same day that Biden honored fallen troops in a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France, the burial ground that Trump chose not to visit in 2018 and was later reported to have done so while describing the site as “filled with losers.” Trump has denied making the remark—and another in which he allegedly called more than 1,800 Marines “suckers” for being killed—ever since The Atlantic first published his purported words in 2020.

Those denials continued Sunday, first at a rally in Las Vegas. “He said I stood over graves of soldiers and I said: ‘These people are suckers and losers, the dead soldiers from World War I,’’ Trump said, referring to Biden. He went on to claim the whole episode was “made up” and, despite the Biden campaign knowing it’s “phony,” they still “took an ad using it—these are sick people.”

Trump appeared to be referring to an attack ad launched by the Biden campaign on Friday during the president’s visit to Normandy for ceremonies commemorating the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The video featured the reported “suckers” and “losers” quotes, along with audio of Trump mocking the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) as being thought of as a “war hero” because he was captured during the Vietnam War. “I like people that weren’t captured,” Trump added.

“Donald Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about service to his country,” read a post on Biden’s X account featuring the clip.

At the rally in Vegas, Trump accused his political opponents of fabricating stories about him in order to get elected. “Unless you’re a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway?” Trump said, referring to the “suckers” and “losers” comments.

He also took a swipe at the “geniuses” who advised him simply not to mention the allegation. “It just never goes away, I gotta mention it,” Trump told his supporters. “I don’t like mentioning it. But for me to say ‘suckers and losers’ about people that died in World War I in front of military people? It’s not a possibility you could say a thing like that.”

Trump’s fury about the matter continued in a pair of Truth Social posts Sunday. He dismissed the “losers and suckers” claim as “another Democrat Disinformation ‘hit job’” and said only “a sicko with an axe to grind would suggest that anyone would make such a statement.”

“They even made these horrific words into an advertisement, which shows how desperate they are,” the post continued. “No President, especially ‘dumb as a rock’ Joe Biden, has done more for our Military than DONALD J. TRUMP. The Military hates Crooked Joe, and all of the failure he represents. Take down the Fake Ad, Joe, and stop the unprecedented Weaponization of ‘Justice’ against your Political Opponent.”

In another post, he again claimed to have “never said that dead Soldiers are ‘losers and suckers.’”

“Anytime you see that despicable FAKE statement used, remember that it comes from the FASCIST SCUM that is destroying our Country,” he wrote.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

One more time with feeling . . . Ignore the polls!

November 6, 2023

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

    We are one year out from the 2024 general election, and media outlets are busy predicting a future they cannot know. I routinely advise readers to “ignore the polls,” so whenever I write about the polls, readers tell me I should follow my own advice. Fair point. But the poll by the New York Times released over the weekend prompted dozens of readers to send panicked emails asking me to “Talk them off the ledge.” The NYTimes poll will get more coverage in the Monday news cycle, so in anticipation of hundreds of additional panicked reactions, I will once again address the issue of polling. It is a scourge that we will live with for the next year, so occasional reminders that the only poll that matters will occur on November 5, 2024, is in order.

          In short, the NYTimes poll found that Biden is trailing Trump in five of six swing states and that Democrats are losing ground among young, Hispanic, and Black voters. Many voters believe that Trump is better able to manage the economy, that Biden is “too old,” and cannot identify anything that Biden did to improve their lives. Go figure!

          Nothing I write below should be interpreted as saying that polls do not contain valuable information. They can (depending on their quality). Polls include information that helps campaign managers and candidates focus and refine their message. They are NOT predictions. Remember Nate Silver’s article in FiveThirtyEight in 2011, “Is Obama toast? Handicapping the 2012 Election.” If polls taken one year before elections were meaningfully predictive, then each of the following candidates should have quit their first campaigns: Carter, Clinton, Obama, Biden—and Trump.  

          So, why should we not panic over the polls? Indeed, is there a silver lining? (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

          Let’s start with a lesson that we must not forget: The old paradigm of “horse-race” polls no longer applies. Why? Because such polls assume that two legitimate candidates are competing for votes within the system. We have never had a candidate who seeks to overthrow the system. Or who attempted a coup. Or who plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on the first day of his next term. Or who called for the execution of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Or who will use the DOJ to persecute his perceived enemies. Or who was found liable for sexual assault. Or who will support a nationwide ban on reproductive liberty. Or who views Putin as a friend and NATO allies as adversaries and leeches.

          I have not studied the NYTimes methodology, but I am confident it simply asks some variant of, “Which candidate do you support in 2024?” Faced with that limited construct, it is easy to be seduced into making a forced choice without regard to the fact that Trump is an anti-candidate. That error is compounded because the poll does not highlight Trump’s fundamental desire to destroy the system but instead asks about Biden’s age.

          As I have written before, believing that most voters will walk into the polling booth in 2024 and vote only for “Biden vs Trump” is simplistic—and beneath the NYTimes and its expert pollsters. When WaPo/ABC published a poll that was subjected to nearly universal derision for its flaws, I wrote the following:

          The 2024 presidential election features two candidates who are surrogates for different visions of America: Democracy versus autocracy; liberty versus tyranny; dignity versus bigotry; science versus disinformation; personal autonomy versus subservience to Christian nationalism; sustainability versus ecological disaster; safety versus gun violence; global stability versus confrontational isolationism. All of that—and much more—is on the ballot in 2024. The WaPo/ABC “horse-race” poll captures none of that.

          Three more points and then I will stop paying attention to the polls (as I recommend).

          First, Dan Pfeiffer’s article in The Message Box on Substack explains why the NYTimes poll shows the path forward. See Dan Pfeiffer, How to Respond to the Very Bad NYT Poll. If you are worried about the poll and want more details, I highly recommend Dan’s article. Pertinent passages include the following about “double haters” who dislike both Biden and Trump:

Perhaps the simplest explanation of Biden’s political challenges is that he has done a lot of good, popular things, and almost no one knows about them. Navigator tested a series of messages about Biden’s various accomplishments, including allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug costs, the bipartisan law to rebuild roads and bridges, and efforts to create more manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Guess what? All of this stuff is super popular. Medicare negotiating drug prices is supported by 77% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans. The bipartisan infrastructure law has the support of 73% of Americans and a majority of Republicans. Every accomplishment tested in this poll had majority support. It’s hard to overstate how impressive that is in a deeply divided, highly polarized country at a time when the President’s approval ratings are in the low 40s. That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: according to the poll, a majority of Americans heard little or nothing about the accomplishments tested. There is a yawning knowledge gap. Now for more good news (think of this as a positive sandwich); the poll shows that when people are told about what Biden has done, his approval rating goes up. The voters most likely to move are the “Double Haters.”

          My penultimate point: The 2024 presidential election matters a lot. But so do congressional elections, gubernatorial elections, state legislative elections, municipal elections, and more. If—heaven forbid—Trump wins in 2024, a second Trump term with a Democratically controlled Congress is radically different than if Republicans control Congress. And states can be bulwarks of individual liberties if Republicans are able to pass national legislation. So, let’s not put every hope and aspiration into the presidential election. We should do everything we can to win up and down the ballot.

Concluding Thoughts.

          Although I did not intend to devote the entire newsletter to the NYTimes poll, I will stop here. We will be dealing with bad polls, handwringing, and negative press for the next year, so it is worth drawing a line in the sand and saying, “Enough!” The election is not over until it is over—notwithstanding the media’s best efforts to declare defeat a year in advance. And while I am criticizing the media, shame on the media for normalizing Trump as a legitimate political candidate. He is not.

          We will prevail over the long run, no matter what happens in 2024. (To be clear, I believe Biden will win re-election.) But if we have confidence that we will ultimately prevail, we can set aside the apocalyptic fears that we wrongly ascribe to a single election in 2024. We don’t need to panic over every poll.

The NYTimes poll reminds us that we have plenty of work to do in spreading the good news of Biden’s accomplishments. So, rather than needlessly fretting a year in advance about 2024, let’s recognize that we have a year to achieve

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Barbara Rodriguez at The 19th:

Vice President Kamala Harris has long been the target of racist and misogynistic attacks online as a woman in politics who is also Black and South Asian. As she seeks the Democratic nomination for president, the gendered, sexualized and racial disinformation against her could get worse — and experts warn there may be less comprehensive oversight by tech companies to stop its spread this election cycle.

In the days since President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection and endorsed Harris to be his successor, right-wing media personalities and others have posted disinformation and misinformation — intentional and unintentional spreading of false information, respectively — about Harris in memes, videos and writings online. The posts, shared on popular social media platforms, have primarily focused on sexualized and racist narratives about Harris, including claims about her dating history and her eligibility to be president. Disinformation experts who spoke with The 19th said highlighting or linking to more specific disinformation about Harris risks amplifying it.

Nina Jankowicz, cofounder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project, an organization that tracks how deceptive information is spread and its threats to democracy, believes the tech companies that run these popular platforms are not doing enough to stop the spread of disinformation about women candidates like Harris. She noted that some social media moderation systems can miss detecting posts being shared right now about Harris in part because the problematic messages are often coded to hide their meaning.  “People have free speech. People can be critical of people in politics, whether they’re men or women. But what we’re talking about here are posts that go against the platforms’ own terms of service — in terms of violent rhetoric, in terms of sexualized rhetoric, in terms of gender-based or ethnicity-based or race-based harassment,” she said.

Tech companies that run social media platforms have made some public commitments to address disinformation generated by artificial intelligence in election-related content. They’ve also faced scrutiny on the scope of their efforts on overall content moderation.

[...] Jankowicz, herself the target of disinformation, is the coauthor of a study conducted in 2020 and released in early 2021 that analyzed gendered abuse of women candidates. The analysis looked at 13 women across six social media platforms and more than 336,000 pieces of abusive content shared by over 190,000 users over a two-month period. Harris accounted for 78 percent of the total recorded instances of gendered abuse and disinformation.

“Unfortunately, Harris has been targeted with these as long as she’s been in politics. The internet makes them more potent,” added Jankowicz, who wrote “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back,” published in 2022. “These narratives exist and they are being used in a coordinated way in order to undermine the idea that she is fit for office.” Smith said there’s power in the general public being aware of the intention here. “They’re not trolling her just to troll her. There’s a broader effort at play that is connected to undermining women’s participation in democracy and women holding office,” she said. “There is this bigger agenda.” Former President Donald Trump claimed ahead of his party’s convention this month that he would try to share a message of unity to potential voters, though his words and policy proposals have been rife with animosity toward immigrants and transgender people. He has also repeatedly criticized Harris — and not just over differences in policy positions. In early July, he posted on his Truth Social account a veiled reference to Harris’ dating history on a social media post as a means of tying it to her professional ascension.

On that same platform, Trump this week called the vice president — who is also a former U.S. senator, attorney general and district attorney — “dumb as a rock.” Trump has also tried to make fun of Harris’ laugh, which his campaign included in a memo released about her record in public office. The laughter also closes the first attack ad by a pro-Trump political action committee, released this week.  “That focus on style over substance is an attempt to diminish beliefs that she is ‘presidential,’” Kelly Dittmar, an associate professor of political science at Rutgers University and the director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), said during a call Tuesday with reporters. “All of these attacks and the degree to which they resonate reflect the persistent dominance of masculinity and Whiteness in presidential politics, and we see candidates and campaigns double down on these status quo dynamics in messaging and presentation.”

Some politicians used racist tropes to claim Harris was unqualified to run for president. Rep. Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, said on Monday on social media and during a CNN interview that Harris was tapped as vice president through DEI — which stands for “diversity, equity and inclusion” but has been coopted by detractors as a racist message about a person’s qualifications for a job. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made a similar claim on Tuesday on social media. Politico reported that House Speaker Mike Johnson has instructed Republicans to stick to messaging about Harris’ policies instead of her gender and race. It’s not just mainstream online platforms where racist and sexist messaging is running rampant. In the first 48 hours after Harris announced her intention to run for arguably the most powerful job in the world, hate speech about her rose sharply on websites where users are known to share right-wing conspiracies, according to an analysis by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an organization that has been tracking how political discourse is shaping the potential for political violence.

“Women politicians, particularly women of color, have long experienced harassment, misogyny, and racism, sometimes to the point of being driven out of politics,” Wendy Via, a cofounder of the project, said in a statement to The 19th. “What is shameful is that this kind of vile rhetoric in our political discourse is completely unsurprising at this point. We can’t allow ourselves to become numb to the dehumanization of women, especially as we’re being used as pawns in a political power grab and the undermining of democracy.” Hillary Clinton, the first woman to win a party’s nomination for president, talked about her own experiences in facing “sexism and double standards” in an opinion piece Tuesday, where she also spoke of the attacks she endured when she ran for president and the realities that Harris will face in the weeks ahead: “She and the campaign will have to cut through the noise, and all of us as voters must be thoughtful about what we read, believe and share.”

With Kamala Harris running for President, the racist and sexist disinformation attacks against Harris are back in full force.

These folks are scared of a powerful woman potentially becoming the next President, so these folks resort to degrading gender and race-based attacks on Harris.

[simply-ivanka]

Trump’s Best Lies Weren’t Trump’s

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

May 8, 2024

In an act of editorial cowardice, the Economist devotes a leading editorial plus an entire special section to the problem of disinformation yet never mentions the Steele dossier and Hunter Biden laptop lie.

Its package is timely for all the reasons I’ve written about: Disinformation is likely to flow in even greater abundance to influence the 2024 vote. But it also botches the most important insight. The anonymous AI-generated disinformation on the web that preoccupies the magazine’s editors is trivial in effect next to official disinformation from government sources circulated by mainstream media.

The Economist details a surreptitious Russian plot to blame America for dengue fever in Africa. It ignores a story of open disinformation of gobsmacking continuing influence, which has half of America watching as the other half (and most of our political class) lie about what happened after 2016. If the magazine thinks these voters aren’t drawing conclusions that will shape the 2024 outcome, it needs its medication adjusted.

Let’s step back: Political causes may be good or bad, but few or nonexistent are those campaigns or campaigners who have been unwilling to lie in their causes.

Eisenhower lied about the U-2 program in one of the best causes ever, keeping a check on Soviet ICBM development.

Sam Harris, the popular podcaster and neuroscientist, exhibited his essential adulthood when he recognized and approved the laptop lie because of the importance he attached to defeating Trump.

Knowing when you lied and why you lied is psychologically healthy. Do I think Leon Panetta, the longtime respected congressman and Obama CIA chief, is of healthy mind? Yes. He and colleagues saw that it would help Joe Biden to associate Hunter’s laptop with Russia and left unspoken between them that it was a lie.

The Economist, in contrast, gives us a blaring, billboard-like exhibition of the psychological disorder known as splitting. See if you recognize the pattern:

Splitting means claims and assertions hostile to Mr. Trump should be repeated and emphasized; any that aren’t should be suppressed.

The Steele dossier should be trumpeted until it stops being useful for discrediting Mr. Trump and starts to discredit his enemies—in which case it should never be mentioned again.

If a statement is true and favorable to Mr. Trump, the only motive for voicing it is pro-Trumpism. (This will create problems for weather reporters if Mr. Trump says it’s raining and it’s actually raining.)

Russian meddling can’t both have happened and have been trivial—because the first part sounds anti-Trump but the second doesn’t. This is unacceptable to the splitting mind.

I know it would be unthinkable at this late date for our media and political elites to come clean. It would amount to abdicating the election to Mr. Trump.

Telling the truth, unfortunately, needed to start long ago before it could change the moment we’ve reached today.

And yet the perverse consequences ought to be beating us over the head. As David Brooks of the New York Times tweeted after Mr. Trump won 11 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016: “Our job in the media is to capture reality so that when reality voices itself, like last night, people aren’t surprised. Pretty massive failure.”

In 2015 Donald Trump was a noisy celebrity ranting about illegal immigration. Nine years later, he and his legions have an epic narrative to tell themselves, true in many particulars, about the U.S. government and media thwarting them with lies and fabricated evidence.

Most of all, in bold letters, our current fix should recall the wisdom of the media’s former motto: “Without fear or favor.” Or as Walter Lippmann put it a century ago, “In his professional activity it is no business of [the reporter’s] to care whose ox is gored.”

We tell the truth and let the chips fall because we don’t know where the chips will finally land even if we think we do. Moreover, once we allow ourselves to start lying to the public for its own good, inevitably our reasons for doing so become more corrupt and self-seeking over time. Whatever his demerits, the press now paints Mr. Trump in impossibly lurid colors to justify its past behavior. Witness also the “Trump bump” in paid subscriptions and TV ratings. Lying about Mr. Trump works commercially for media owners even as it benefits Mr. Trump too. In fact, nothing has been more profitable, even salvational, for many mainstream media companies than MAGA.

But the ultimate exploiter is Joe Biden, cynically using Mr. Trump’s antichrist image as a lever to shove his unwanted self down his own party’s throat despite age and poor polls.

If Mr. Trump now wins—he would only have to draw a middling hand in November—the recriminations against Mr. Biden deservedly will be scalding and eviscerating. The blame game might wreck the Democratic Party for a generation.