Fake News Just For Right-Wingers: A Huge Industry

a reply to: ColdWisdom

This makes me wonder if the kids did that for a joke. I don't trust anyone anymore.

a reply to: Shamrock6

I watch a lot of movies. Are you talking about Batman???

If I remember it wasn't said as a positive thing there either.

Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean when you say it then.

a reply to: ColdWisdom

How do you know they didn't investigate them???

I'll give you that one, that link most definitely does lead you to a website with an article claiming that a source of fake news was located.

Presumably the link posted above is from a credible and verifiable source. Well...that depends, doesn't it. On what side you're on, left or right.

More shambolic stupidity. So this article you link us to makes these claims which by default you immediately buy into and assume to be true - confirmation bias at work for all and sundry. You should re-title this thread...how to play the game like a good little sheep.

That's my suggestion.

But if we are to assume the claims that fake news was circulated...I honestly don't doubt it was. On both sides, isn't it always on the run up to an election?

There was a lot of real news, also. I saw a lot of Trump supporters get abused and attacked...I saw it after Brexit, also.

Now, as I said earlier, I ain't much one for taking sides based on some politics crap or virtue signalling. But some choices are easy to make...do you side with the people being violent when it's completely unnecessary, or the people being attacked?

Doesn't deserve an answer.

Do you side with the people who seem to be speaking from the heart, and don't employ smoke and mirror tactics, who are being accused of being every intolerable thing under the sun - racist, homophobe, islamophobe, bigot! Or the people who do employ deceptive techniques and are the ones actively abusing the former?

Doesn't deserve an answer.

The harsh reality is this - the truly impartial are the enlightened ones. Keep playing your little games...bad winners and sore losers. Keep telling yourself you're progressive, unique, individual - the proverbial 'snowflake', keep believing in your own little world. When the bubble eventually bursts, reality will consume you.

You're an agent of the system.

originally posted by: ColdWisdom
a reply to: mOjOm

Don't forget to reply to my posts, mOjOm.

Yeah man. I'm responding. I can only type so fast and I'm responding to more than just you.

Relax. I'll get there.

a reply to: mOjOm

Expecting the sun to rise is not a high bar at all.....
John Oliver is my new hero.

a reply to: BuzzyWigs

The same John Oliver who wanted Trump to run in the first place for..entertainment?

High bars indeed.

a reply to: BuzzyWigs

I like him too.

Better than just the information he provides which is usually spot on and quite well researched. I love the activist things he does as well.

The one about finding that dictators cat after making fun of him and messaging back and forth was hilarious. That and how he actually challenges and attempts to change some of the things he talks about. Like buying up all that debt just to forgive it. Or starting his own Church. Great stuff.

originally posted by: JinMI

The same John Oliver who wanted Trump to run in the first place for..entertainment?

High bars indeed.

Well, has it not been entertaining???

a reply to: mOjOm

Yeah man. I'm responding. I can only type so fast and I'm responding to more than just you.

Relax. I'll get there.

Appreciated.

How do you know they didn't investigate them???

Again, I am basing my position on the information they are providing me through their reporting.

I don't see or hear any of these news outlets anywhere talking about police investigations or identifying suspects. No mention even, of any kind of investigation.

They're just doing this because they know that TV news is slowly going the way of the dinosaur.

a reply to: olaru12

So true, my friend, so true. How benign this fear started out with decades ago. What will the neighbors (the Joneses!) think if you don't have the latest car? The latest clothes? The latest (fill in blank)? Today, afraid of getting old, balding, not having the perfect nose/chin, and the list is endless, whatever we can be scared with in order to be sold. Even each other.

Jackson Browne said it. Lives in the Balance lyrics

I've been waiting for something to happen
For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you've seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war
.....
On the radio talk shows and the T.V
You hear one thing again and again
How the U.S.A. stands for freedom
And we come to the aid of a friend
But who are the ones that we call our friends
These governments killing their own?
Or the people who finally can't take any more
And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone
There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire
....
They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they're never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

a reply to: JinMI

Seems entertainment and the opinions of various celebrities and public figures is important to some folks.

I kinda get the impression that the majority of voters placed more stock in what their on-screen idols said and did than they placed in the candidates themselves.

I suppose it's better to get your information filtered through multiple, non-partisan, anti-msm extravaganzas than it is to look directly to the source.

Wonder how they do it...trick folks into this mindset - 'you're one of us, now go and toil and do my bidding while I party s'more!'

And off they go...policing one another, thinking they're of the establishment or part of the bigger picture when they're really just an automaton.

a reply to: desert

Nice - I don't know that song but I'll look it up.

originally posted by: BlueMule
a reply to: NoCorruptionAllowed

Prove it.

Reality already proved it last week. And judging from all the tears and shocked looks, reality wasn't something on the minds of the losers.

originally posted by: ColdWisdom

Again, I am basing my position on the information they are providing me through their reporting.

I don't see or hear any of these news outlets anywhere talking about police investigations or identifying suspects. No mention even, of any kind of investigation.

They're just doing this because they know that TV news is slowly going the way of the dinosaur.

Ok, but how deep did you look??? I mean I've never seen someone get raped. Nor been raped myself. Nor have I raped anyone. Ever. But I'm sure Rape does exist and that it does happen.

How much more looking did you do to verify that these stories were investigated??? Did you follow up at the news sites themselves??? Many of those weren't even news sites but posts by people on facebook. As for the actual news stories themselves that were being used it's not like they go into detail about everything they did to investigate the story. There wouldn't be time for that. That is stuff you'd have to look into yourself.

I'm not saying you're wrong. Stories could obviously be incorrect. But you have to investigate that to find out which it is. Just denying them outright without any reason to think they are is just as bad as reporting them without knowing if they're real or not. Typically news sources have investigations in to what they report. Otherwise they'd get caught and sued for stuff all the time. But that doesn't mean they don't try and slip something in. Still, you'd have to have evidence for that before just claiming it so.

a reply to: samerulesapply

Hollywood, athletes and musicians over finding their own info. What a higher standard to go by. They must feel so enlightened.

originally posted by: desert
a reply to: BuzzyWigs

The far left fringe can buy into conspiratorial, biased, fake news also, but they were never given political power through the democratic Party. (In fact far left conspiratorial extremists are not allowed to run as Democrats.) The Republican Party never shed themselves of their far right fringe, who formed and joined the John Birch Society in the 1950s (which the senior Koch helped at the founding).

There was no political power or money behind the far left fringe, as there came to be with the Koch funded fringe, which rose to Rep Party prominence as conservatives to their left were RINOed out since the 1990s, leaving the true believers claiming the title "conservative".

Here is a tiny part of an interview with Claire Conner, who speaks out about her JBS parents and growing up in the JBS

They just didn’t care about the actual facts?

Well, they just assumed there were no facts. It wasn’t like they investigated it. They said, “No, that can’t be, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.” It’s a very strange way of looking at the world, because my parents, as well read as they were, they read only books that were on the approved list. And it’s probably a very good lesson for all of us: You can’t just read what you already agree with. You can’t, and we shouldn’t. But it is certainly more comfortable.

The Tea Party, the John Birch Society, and the Fear of “Mob Rule”: An Interview with Claire Conner

The GOP was warned by its prominent members in the 1960s not to let their fringe take power. Too bad the party didn't listen.

Thank you for this find desert, very interesting article.

originally posted by: LifeMode
Hillary broke OPSEC laws. Anyone who has dealt with sensitive information is well aware of it. It does not matter if a contributor to her campaign with no grandkids and who does not play golf agrees with it or not. Hillary broke the law. Says so in the NDA she forgot she signed with a witness present who is now blacked out on the form.

People were pissed. Go talk to ANYONE in the military and they will say the same thing. She broke OPSEC laws. Whatever Comey or Lynch said is irrelevant when it comes to voting. People generally know she is a criminal. Those in the know absolutely know it.

It is one of the main reasons she lost. She broke the law then lied, then Comey and Lynch tried to sell the public a broken pencil with no eraser.

General public finally had enough. They used the only power they had; their vote.

But, but, but Hillary, Jesus you and your cohorts are lame.

How deep does one have to go before they feel they've gone deep enough?

SNL?

It's kinda like...the battle of the news, with regular folk choosing a side. He said she said, how deep does anyone go?

Let's see shall we, you posted this link, earlier:

We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned

Which you seem to have taken as gospel. Now, let's examine your analysis of the linked article, people should pay particular attention to the sections you quote, and how completely bereft of evidence they are:

First - your initial claim before you even quoted anything:

So yeah. This is actually really real news......

The first part you quoted:

A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times. We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one. We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. The site was registered anonymously.

Oooh, a cliffhanger! How Hollywood, I can see why this article appeals to you...let's go on:

So we brought in some professional help. By day, John Jansen is head of engineering at Master-McNeil Inc., a tech company in Berkeley, Calif. In the interest of real news he helped us track down the owner of Denverguardian.com. Jansen started by looking at the site's history. "Commonly that's called scraping or crawling websites," he says. Jansen is kind of like an archaeologist. He says that nothing you do on the Web disappears — it just gets buried — like a fossil. But if you do some digging you'll find those fossils and learn a lot of history.

We can assume that since you believe in really digging, that you have contacter Mr Jansen and substantiated these claims? You did say this was real news, after all. Continue...

On a warm, sunny afternoon I set out with a producer for a suburb of Los Angeles. Coler lived in a middle-class neighborhood of pastel-colored one-story beach bungalows. His home had an unwatered lawn — probably the result of California's ongoing drought. There was a black minivan in the driveway and a large prominent American flag. We rang the front doorbell and a man answered, his face obscured by a heavy mesh steel screen. I asked for Jestin Coler. The man indicated that's who he was. But when I asked about Disinfomedia, he said, "I don't know what to tell you guys. Have a good day." But a couple of hours later he had a change of heart. He sent us an email and we set up an interview.

You then made a very brief, to me - rather hasty assessment based on the above:

Sounds pretty real to me.

Wow, the digging is impressive...but the best bit is yet to come:

Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right. "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says. He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it.

And you're analysis of that final piece:

Am I being played? Maybe. But no more than any of us are, and probably a great deal less. Because critical thinking is critical. And Occam's Razor.

So you went from pushing the article as real news, to...sort of looking like you're trying to will yourself to believe it's real. Simply because it confirms your bias.

Now you go on and tell folk they an't diggin' deep 'nuff!

It's that high horse again...it is pretty funny. The whole thing is funny.

Politics is now a comedy.

originally posted by: samerulesapply
Seems entertainment and the opinions of various celebrities and public figures is important to some folks.

Yeah. Apparently it's most important to you since you're stuck on talking about them and their opinions. You seem to think that because people find comedians to be funny that it means they also believe those comedians are where they get all their information from. I don't know where you got this idea from but you seem very dedicated to it.

Maybe it's that superiority thing again that makes you think you know everything about everyone and why they all think what they think. But I don't think you know half as much as you think you know.