Category Archives: Fake News

The war in Ukraine has taken another turn. This week, Ukraine launched its long-awaited counteroffensive against Russian positions in the south. It also reclaimed territory in the northeast. The United States announced an additional $2.8 billion in aid to Ukraine and its neighbors, including $675 million in munitions, vehicles, and field equipment. The finance ministers of the G7 agreed to a price cap on Russian oil (with details to follow). U.N. ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield condemned Russias barbaric "filtration operations" whereby Ukrainian civilians are searched, interrogated, and marked for detention or population transfer.

Vladimir Putin is not pleased. The Russian autocrat threatened to escalate the conflict. On September 2, Gazprom shut down the Nord Stream One gas pipeline to Europe. On September 7, Putin warned that he might ban oil and gas exports to Europe altogether. Then he said he might cancel the deal that allows Ukrainian wheat exports to transit the Black Sea. His indiscriminate shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant turns nearby residents into hostages. "We havent lost anything, and we wont lose anything," Putin declared.

Fake news. Russia has lost a great deal since February 24, when Putin launched his unprovoked war on a neighboring democracy. And the toll is sure to climb. Putin failed to achieve his initial war aim of regime change in Ukraine. Nor did he break the West. He unified it. Germany is spending more on defense. Sweden and Finland joined NATO.

U.S.-led export controls have forced Russia to buy weaponry from ramshackle rogue states Iran and North Korea. Russia occupies some 20 percent of Ukraine. For how long and to what purpose? The flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet is no more. The life expectancy of Russian generals has plunged. Casualties up and down the chain of command are why Putin called to expand the military. Yet he wont impose a general mobilization of either the Russian economy or the Russian people. Why? Because he might not survive the reaction.

Putin is left with threats. He brandishes the oil weapon. He raises the prospect of famine. He drops hints of nuclear war. His goal is to intimidate the democracies into paralysis. He wants to paint a scary portrait of the future so that Western governments abandon Ukraine. The truth is that escalation has risks for both sides. Putin is not the only leader with cards to play. Nor is the United States powerless. President Biden could raise the stakes for Putin in ways that will help bring the war to an end. The moment requires him to act.

America must give Ukraine the means to build on its recent success. The Ukrainians slowed the Russian advance to a crawl thanks to the help of U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS). Sixteen of these systems have been enough to change the trajectory of the war. Imagine what the Ukrainians could do with more of them. According to the Department of Defense, the next shipment of arms to Ukraine will include HIMARS ammunition. It wont include HIMARS platforms.

This is a mistake. In July, former Pentagon official Michael G. Vickers told the New York Times that Ukraine could win the artillery battle against Russia with 60 to 100 HIMARS. Its not that these systems do not exist. They do. It's just that America has not moved speedily enough to send them to Ukraine.

Why? The typical answer is that it takes time to deploy HIMARS and to train Ukrainians to operate them. But bureaucratic delays are surmountable. And the Ukrainians seem to have figured out how to work the HIMARS they have just fine. Another reason for Americas stinginess is that Pentagon officials worry that sending too many HIMARS to Ukraine depletes U.S. capabilities. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Americas aid to Ukraine reduces our own weapons stocks. The fear is America will be left unprepared for contingencies.

The good news is that there is a solution. "There are some problems you can buy your way out of," my American Enterprise Institute colleague Mackenzie Eaglen told the Journal. "This is one of them." Procurement reform combined with a massive increase in the Pentagon budget, aimed at renewing Americas defense industrial base, would allow us to provide more HIMARS to the Ukrainians while readying ourselves for unexpected events. Those unexpected events, by the way, are more likely to occur if Americas enemies perceive our will flagging, Putin gaining, and Ukraine losing ground.

The simple announcement that America plans to send Ukraine as many HIMARS as possible would have an effect. Nor are the HIMARS the only weapons that America can offer Ukraine. There is no better opportunity than now to revisit the error America made in March when it scuttled the proposed transfer of MiGs to Ukraine. The Ukrainians also need tanks. They need the long-range Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to put any Russian asset on Ukrainian territory within reach of Ukrainian arms. And America could assist in the construction of a multi-layered air defense that would protect Ukrainians from Russian air and missile strikes.

Senator Rob Portman recently returned from a trip to Kiev. "Having more air defense systems at every rangeshort, medium, and long-range, would enable people to come back," he said in a September 7 speech on the Senate floor. "This is crucial because one of the issues now is that Ukraines economy has been reduced by about 40 percent because of the terrible war thats being raged." Air defenses protect populations. They would encourage Ukrainian refugees to return to their homeland.

"The Kremlin is counting on Western weakness and believes European leaders will ultimately cave in when confronted by a combination of rising economic costs and escalating terror tactics," wrote Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraines minister of defense, last month. Let's give Putin reason to believe that his threats will backfire. Make it clear to him that a total ban on oil and gas exports to Europe would hurt Russias economy at least as much as it would hurt the Westand that the West is willing to drop its self-defeating green energy obsession in order to cope with the oil shock.

Let Putin know that if he jeopardizes the safe passage of grain exports, President Biden will support labeling Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. The other day the White House repeated its concerns that naming Russia a state sponsor of terror would jeopardize food exports. If Putin backs out of the deal, then there will be nothing left to jeopardize. The blanket sanctions that accompany the terrorism classification would make life hard for Putin, his circle, and their war machine. Deservedly so.

Since 2008, when he invaded the republic of Georgia, Putin has been playing the escalation game by himself. Americas response to his aggression in Georgia, in Ukraine in 2014, and in Syria in 2015 was slow and fitful and half-hearted. In the runup to this years invasion, America miscalculated Ukrainian resilience. The Biden team didnt send Javelin missiles to Ukraine until one month before Putin attacked. Over the past half year, the Biden team has sent weapons to the Ukrainians in dribs and drabs, always with one hand tied behind its back and always eager to tell the world what it wont do.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive offers Biden a chance to unleash the arsenal of democracy for real. Teach Putin that he no longer sets the parameters of this conflict. Do what it takes to give freedom the upper hand.

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Putin Plays the Escalation Game - Washington Free Beacon

A post sharing an URL of a purported article published by The Indian Express is being shared on social media claiming that thousands of people were raking in millions of rupees in a new cryptocurrency investment that is said to be advised by the Indian Business Tycoon Gautam Adani. This purported article reported that Gautam Adani, during an interview with Sonal Mehrotra Kapoor on Good Morning India, advised people to invest in a new cryptocurrency auto-trading program called Ethereum Code, for making money in a short time. Lets verify the claim made in the post.

Claim: The Indian Express article that reported a cryptocurrency investment suggested by Gautam Adani.

Fact: The purported Indian Express article shared in the post is from a dubious & fake website. The Indian Express did not publish any such article reporting such a new cryptocurrency investment promoted by Gautam Adani. Gautam Adani did not promote Etherium Code cryptocurrency in any of his interviews. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.

On carefully observing the purported article shared in the post, one can see the masthead of the purported article stating The Indian Expres, which is different from the The Indian Express masthead printed on the original news website. Further, the URL shared in the post indicates that it leads to a dubious phishing website as it is different from the URL of the Indian Express. Also, we could find several grammatical errors in the purported article shared in the post.

On searching for further details regarding this fake website, we found that this fake website with the domain name rsnmdfgh5l.digital was registered on 12 May 2022. The Registrars name was mentioned as NameSilo, LLC. The registrar contact organization was mentioned as See PrivacyGuardian.org. On opening the home page of this website, it states, Were Coming Soon.. Were working on our new website. Join our newsletter and get notifed. So, it can be confirmed from all these details that the purported Indian Express article shared in the post is published by a dubious website.

When we searched to check whether The Indian Express had published any such article reporting the new cryptocurrency investment said to be advised by Gautam Adani, we could not find any such news report on the official website of The Indian Express. Earlier, The Indian Express through the tweets clarified about similar fake articles attributed to the Indian Express on social media. We could not find any video of Money-control Editor, Sonal Mehrotra Kapoor, interviewing Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani. Also, when we searched to check whether Gautam Adani had advised people to invest in Ethereum, we could not find any news report confirming this information.

Ethereum Code is a dubious cryptocurrency trading platform that asks users to provide names and e-mail addresses to join the community. From all these pieces of evidence, it can be concluded that the purported Indian Express article shared in the post is fake.

To sum it up, this purported Indian Express article reporting a new cryptocurrency investment said to be promoted by Gautam Adani is fake.

See the original post:

This purported The Indian Express article reporting a new cryptocurrency investment said to be promoted by Gautam Adani is fake - Factly

Russian officials who appealed to the country's State Duma to remove President Vladimir Putin from power on the charge of high treason say they have been summoned by police for "discrediting" the Russian government.

Nikita Yurefev, a municipal deputy for Smolninskoe in St. Petersburg, and Dmitry Palyuga, another municipal deputy for the area, both shared screenshots of text messages from the city's police department No. 76.

The pair were ordered to make an appearance at a police station located on Mytninskaya Street in St. Petersburg at 9 a.m. local time on Friday, according to the messages.

They were informed that the purpose of the summons was to draw up a protocol on an administrative offense under a stringent new law that cracks down on dissent over the war against Ukraine.

Yurefev and Palyuga were accused of committing actions aimed at discrediting the Russian government, police said.

It comes after Yurefev published a tweet on Wednesday, writing that the Council of the Smolninskoye Municipal District "sent a proposal to the State Duma demanding to remove Putin from office based on the charges of high treason," Newsweek previously reported.

The treason charge appears to be directly related to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which is described as a "special military operation" by Putin.

"His decision to start the Special Military Operation led to 1) deaths of Russian servicemen, 2) problems in the Russian economy, 3) the expansion of NATO (the border with NATO has doubled!," Yurefev's tweet read.

"Ukraine is militarizing and has received $38 billion worth of weapons to fight Russia. All these are the consequences of the decision to start the Special Military Operation. Putin's actions pose a threat to Russia's security. He should be fired! Adopted at a meeting of the Municipal Council of Smolninskoye," a separate tweet states.

Yurefev said that the draft decision proposed to the State Duma was introduced by Palyuga and signed by six other deputies. The pair said the proposal was supported by a majority of deputies present.

Palyuga told Russian-language independent news outlet MediaZona that all seven deputies of Smolninskoye municipality were summoned.

The appeal says that in the course of the war, "young able-bodied" Russian citizens are dying and that the Russian economy is suffering.

Shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, deputies of the Smolninskoye municipality called on Putin to "stop the bloodshed, immediately withdraw Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine and resign."

Since the war began, Russia has charged multiple officials and even its own soldiers with "discrediting" the country's armed forces and government.

Russia's parliament passed legislation in March imposing jail terms of up to 15 years for intentionally spreading "fake" news about the country's armed forces. The Kremlin has used the law to crack down on those who veer away from Putin's narrative of the war.

Russia introduced Article 207.3 which states that "public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the armed forces of the Russian Federation" is punishable by fines and jail terms of up to three, five, 10 or 15 years.

Article 280.3 was also introduced, which states that "public actions aimed at discrediting the use of the armed forces of the Russian Federation" are punishable by fines and jail terms of either three years, or five years, depending on how damaging the offense committed is considered to be.

Newsweek has contacted Russia's foreign ministry for comment.

Link:

Russian Officials Who Plotted To Overthrow Putin Summoned by Police - Newsweek

So, how should America deal with media that purports to be news but, in fact, is offering a healthy serving of spin, misdirection, and outright lies? if you have any additional ideas, what are they?

Can a nation survive as a democratic republic without an honest and trusted news ecosystem? Is it an actual fact that truthful and reliable news combined with the kind of cultural trust people have in both government and each other as the result of a shared reality are both historic and necessary preconditions for a democracy to work at all?

Thomas Jefferson once famously said that if he was given the ultimatum of choosing to live in a functioning nation without newspapers or a place with newspapers but no national government, hed surely choose the latter.

It was a statement of his generations love of newspapers, literature, and free speech far more than the anti-government spin that rightwingers try for when quoting the author of the Declaration of Independence. No republic in the history of the world had ever survived without an informed, participating electorate, and this nations Founders knew it.

This truth was echoed two generations later when the young French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, spent half a year traveling America and wrote one of the entire centurys best-selling books, Democracy in America, published in 1833.

Astonished, he repeatedly mentions in the book how blown away he is that the dirt-poorest farmer or remote-hollow hillbilly is as literate and enthusiastic about discussing current world events and politics as an upper-class resident of Paris.

Alexis de Tocqueville concluded that our vibrant, free, trusted press was the one thing that set America apart so democracy could work here; it was so critical, he believed, that he was openly skeptical there were enough literate people or a free enough press in France to be able to safely give up the monarchy and imitate America.

Now, it seems, consolidation and the pouring of billions of dollars by conservative billionaires into our media infrastructure has produced a crisis in Americas democracy.

Its frightening people, and theyre looking for solutions.

The Pew Research Center published a surprising new study this week showing that fully 48% of Americans say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means losing some freedom to access and publish content This is up almost 10% from just four years ago.

Similarly, the percentage of Americans, Pew notes, who say freedom of information should be protected even if it means some misinformation is published online has decreased from 58% to 50%.

Depending on the outlet, news is often skewed (either by omission of stories or simply presenting partial information) even on so-called mainstream media; naked lies told by politicians are only rarely called out; and political advertising today is more often deceptive than straightforward.

And Americans know it, and are sick of it.

A Pew study from last November found that roughly two-thirds of Americans believe theyve seen news media slant stories to favor or disadvantage one political party or point of view. Three-out-of-five people said this was causing a great deal of confusion about issues related, for example, to the last presidential election.

The problem is particularly bad on the conservative side of media, in part because theres only a very limited progressive media ecosystem, and in part because (in my opinion) conservative positions are often so unpopular that lies are necessary to bring voters along.

Who in their right mind, after all, is enthusiastic about voting for politicians whose platform includes defunding the FBI, denying toxin-exposed veterans healthcare, forcing 10-year-olds to carry a rapists baby to term, keeping insulin prices almost 10 times higher than in most other nations, and ending Social Security and Medicare?

No wonder so many rightwing radio, podcast, and cable-TV personalities focus instead on trans girls in sports, refugees from Guatemala, and crimes committed by Black and Brown people.

I have colleagues and acquaintances in conservative media who, in moments of braggadocio or drunken candor, have told me straight-up that they know some of the stories they cover are either lies or spun in ways that distort their actual meaning. Their justification is Socrates noble lie doctrine: that a small lie serving a greater good is not really a sin.

One was both shocked and skeptical when I told him that, to the best of my knowledge, Id never promulgated a lie on the air and, when I do occasionally get things wrong, I always try to correct them on-air as soon as possible.

The nonprofit group Media Matters for America has built a solid following and reputation by almost daily identifying naked lies and half-truths being promulgated on Fox News and other rightwing media. Fox hosts and guests most recent spin, for example, is that the FBI spent Tuesday of this week planting evidence at Trumps Mar-a-Lago home.

Brian Maloney used to run a site called the Radio Equalizer designed to hold lefties to account when they lie on the air and used to occasionally skewer me. He hasnt posted on his blog since 2012, however, and his YouTube channel seems moribund. His latest project, Media Equalizer, seems not so much to hold liberal media to account as to complain about liberal politicians and progressive policies.

Either leftie shows like mine and those on MSNBC are generally truthful, or were so small compared to the multi-billion-dollar conservative empires that populate the American media landscape that were not worth covering.

So, how should America deal with media that purports to be news but, in fact, is offering a grotesque serving of spin, misdirection, and outright lies in addition to the factual news that gains them credibility and underpins their coverage?

This is a really, genuinely tough one. Truth in media laws are a legal and political minefield, particularly when it comes to public policy.

For example, is Medicare Advantage a sneaky way to privatize and thus destroy real Medicare, or an innovation allowing competition in the senior healthcare market?

My opinion is solidly in the former camp, but there are some seniors who simply cant afford the premiums for Medicare and a Medigap plan so, for them, the free Advantage programs are barely but definitely better than nothing at all. My opinion, in other words, isnt necessarily a fact and there are arguable shades of gray around conclusions that can be drawn from the facts themselves.

That said, there are objectively definable lies that are regularly told by so-called conservative media and propaganda outlets run by foreign governments. Not to mention the striking reality that 45% of Americans get much or most of their news from Facebook.

And this is serious stuff. Propaganda and fake news represent an existential threat to liberal democracies. When theres no consensus about shared reality, governance even highly compromised governance becomes nearly impossible.

Today in America (and, increasingly, around the world) advocates of dictatorship and oligarchy are using this device to divide and tear apart liberal democracies, from the Americas to Europe to Australia.

Billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch began his rightwing propaganda operation in Australia, throwing that nations political system so deeply into crisis that former Prime Minister Keven Rudd was moved to write an op-ed for the nations largest independent newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, in which he chronicles how Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable.

Rudd then asks, The core question is why? and answers his own question unambiguously:

But on top of all the above, while manipulating each of them, has been Rupert Murdoch the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.

Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.

From Australia, Murdoch moved to the UK where he took over numerous newspapers and media outlets, cheerleading for grifter and Trump wannabee Boris Johnson and his Brexit. He then became an American citizen, which let his company legally own US television networks and stations and now lords over Fox News, arguably the second most toxic source of anti-American and white-supremacist propaganda.

In the social media arena, Facebooks owner and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, oversees what is the largest purveyor of news in the world today, including here in the US.

Zuckerberg, the countrys richest millennial, had a secret dinner with Donald Trump during the Trump presidency, and held multiple meetings with rightwing politicians, reporters, op-ed writers and influencers, according to Politico. I can find no record of him having similar private dinners with either Obama or Biden, nor with any groups of progressive journalists, writers, or influencers.

Numerous sources identify Facebook as one of the major hubs of organizing for rightwing events including January 6th, the rise of Qanon, and the contemporary militia and white supremacist Nazi movements.

His company continues to keep a tightly held secret the algorithm which decides which pages and posts get pushed to readers and which dont, thus secretly deciding what types of news and opinion are most heavily spread across America.

Arguably, their dominance of news dissemination makes Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg two of the most powerful men in America. Another morbidly rich billionaire, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, although apparently hasnt personally influenced or interfered with that publications reporting. But the potential is certainly there: he who has the gold makes the rules, as the old saying goes.

To compound the confusion about who to trust in the news business, about two decades ago two reporters for a Fox station in Florida were explicitly told by station management to alter a story about Monsantos recombinant bovine growth hormone to make it friendlier to Monsanto. They complied multiple times until the alterations reached the point where they believed the story was filled with blatant lies and refused to air it.

The Fox station fired them and they sued for wrongful termination. Fox fought the case, arguing that, as their employer, it could tell them what to say and they had to do it to keep their jobs.

A jury awarded them about a half million dollars, but when Fox appealed the case it was reversed (and Fox then went after the reporters for attorneys fees, threatening to bankrupt them). The court explicitly ruled that news organizations can direct their on-air personalities to lie to viewers.

So, what do we do about this?

Al Franken had a novel idea a few years back, suggesting a way to deal with lying politicians like Trump:

Anyone can call the FCC and lodge a complaint. The FCC then presents the complaint to an adjudicative body comprised of three judges appointed by Republicans and three judges appointed by Democrats. If a majority determines that the statement is untrue, the FCC can warn the president. And if he tweets or tells the same lie again on TV or radio or to a newspaper, he can be fined up to $10,000, or 15 percent of his net worth.

The problem, of course, is the old James Madison quote about our not needing laws if men were angels, and its corollary, that those who administer and adjudicate our laws are as potentially corruptible as anybody else.

For example, what if President DeSantis were to hand-pick the six members? As we learned with the board that overseas the Postal Service, there are more than a few people with a D after their names who are just as corrupt as many Rs: would you trust the outcome?

The FCC already has a policy opposing fake or misleading news. As they note on their website:

The FCC is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press. It is, however, illegal for broadcasters to intentionally distort the news, and the FCC may act on complaints if there is documented evidence of such behavior from persons with direct personal knowledge.

That said, the FCC doesnt regulate the content of cable or internet-based programs; content-wise, their authority is pretty much limited to over-the-air broadcast media like radio and TV.

Libel lawsuits are another remedy for the victims of fake news, but theyre extraordinarily difficult to win in the US given our First Amendment protections and the doctrine that public figures generally cant sue for libel at all.

Canada explicitly outlaws fake news, although that hasnt stopped Fox News from popping up on outlets across that country. Their Broadcasting Act explicitly says:

Prohibited Programming Content:

Its nonetheless difficult to enforce on cable or Internet outlets in Canada, and a similar approach here would run afoul of the First Amendments prohibitions on regulation of freedom of speech, or of the press.

Finland has taken an unique approach to the problem of fake news, particularly on social media, by incorporating news and media training into required elementary and secondary school classes. America could consider the same, although, like the snit we just saw about teaching American history or sex education, it would almost certainly provoke squeals of outrage from rightwingers.

But screw them. America is in a crisis right now caused, in large part, by dishonest actors across the rightwing spectrum of our media and social media.

Forty % of Americans dont believe the results of the 2020 election, and nearly half of Republicans think Democrats engage in ritual drinking of childrens blood and worse. There is no corollary or even similar misunderstanding of reality or bizarre set of beliefs among the left or those in the center.

For the moment, media literacy training in schools across America and requiring transparency from social media both things Congress would have to undertake to succeed seem like the best approaches we can take to both protect free speech and diminish the impact of lies and propaganda on American political and social life.

If the Biden administration were to enforce the nations antitrust laws and break up the media conglomerates, or Congress were to bring back the media ownership limits as they were before being gutted in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, either or both would go a long way toward increasing the social and political diversity of voices across our media public squares.

These will all be hard, but theyre important if we value our democratic republic and want it to survive. And theyre just the start: if you have any additional ideas, Id love to hear them.

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Can American Democracy Survive the "Fake News" Crisis - Random Lengths

Hoax stories, frauds, conspiracy theories and rumors have been around for hundreds of years. Anyone can claim that they saw, heard or felt something. However, with the advent of the internet, all this fake news and propaganda can be manufactured and presented as real.

Anyone can use Photoshop to pretend theyre in a luxurious hotel or hanging around with a few celebrities. Angry idealogues can create fake news articles to prove their point in the comment section of a Facebook post. Of course, conspiracy YouTube channels also purposefully present stories and made-up facts to make people believe that the Earth is flat or that lizard people run the world.

However, things can become much worse. Politicians can use the power of propaganda and fake news for their own agenda. The most recent example is the war between Russia and Ukraine. The Russian government is saying that the war and attacks are a hoax, and many people believe that its real, and the footage going viral is made by staged actors.

With all that said, lets look at the top movies about fake news and propaganda, which will help you second guess everything you see or hear online.

The Social Dilemma is at the top of the list. Everyone whos ever used social media in their life needs to watch it. Seriously. It will make you change the way you look at the internet and enhance your understanding of the algorithm and what its trying to make you do.

Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram are the tech platforms that control the world. The people that work there have control over billions of lives, both directly and indirectly. More than half of the people who have joined extremist groups got directed there because of the algorithm. Countries are creating political disinformation campaigns.

Teenagers and kids using the platforms have poor physical and mental health, and rates of suicide are increasing because of it. The Social Dilemma is a disturbing documentary that will make you throw away your phone, avoid news outlets altogether, and second-guess everything you see online.

After watching the documentary, most people want to become anonymous so that the algorithm doesnt track them anymore. The only way to do that is by using a VPN. Virtual private networks hide your IP address and make you nearly invisible online. Getting a USA VPN is the only line of defense against the trillion-dollar algorithm directed at your brain at every moment.

Twenty years ago, you would never go out with someone you met online. Parents taught their children never to talk to strangers. However, dating apps like Tinder have taken things to a whole new level.

People meet on the app, talk for a while, and get together to have a chat or more. Even though the stigma about dating apps has dropped, The Tinder Swindler shows that there are plenty of people who should never be trusted.

Equipped with a fake name and fake news articles about him being the son of Israels king of diamonds, he bewitched women into falling in love with him. He wore designer clothes on the first date, took them for a ride in his private jet, and lavishly spent in front of his dates.

Soon after, he sent videos claiming he was in trouble, asking for a payment from their credit cards because he didnt want to be tracked. After all, the diamond business is bloody, and he would pay them back immediately. He sent fake checks and fake watches. Then, he went for a new victim. After watching The Tinder Swindler, you will become extra careful when meeting people online.

Inventing Anna is the reverse Tinder Swindler. Instead of a dating app, she uses her social media persona to trick the elites in New York City into thinking that shes an incredibly wealthy German heiress.

Again, social media and the internet play a prominent role in how people perceive her. You can still find the real Anna Delvey on Instagram, which goes on to say just how twisted society has become.

Instead of condemning the behavior of these criminals who created fake identities, people are following them and giving them even more attention. The only thing you can do is to change the way you use and trust the internet and social media overall.

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Top Movies About Fake News and Propaganda - Study Breaks

This film is only available in the United States because of territorial licensing.

A film about Colin Wallace, an intelligence officer who blew the whistle on fake news and was framed for a murder, The Man Who Knew Too Much is a documentary by Michael Oswald about Colin Wallace, a former military intelligence officer involved in psychological operations in Northern Ireland. Colin Wallace spread fake news, created a witchcraft scare, smeared politicians, and attempted to divide and create conflict among communities, organizations, and individuals. He fell out with members of the intelligence community and found himself accused of murder. In conjunction with the public release of the film in October 2021, Colin Wallace has announced legal action against the British Ministry of Defence.

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The Man Who Knew Too Much: Spies, Fake News, and Disinformation - The Epoch Times

The more things change in American politics, the more they stay the same. Thats one possible takeaway from Campaigns, Inc., a new political comedy at TimeLine Theatre Company that marks the playwriting debut of company member Will Allan.

Allans inspiration is the 1934 race for governor of California, and more specifically the work of a duo he identifies as among the first of a new professional breed: the political consultant.

Campaigns, Inc. was the name adopted by the two-person firm of Leone Baxter (Tyler Meredith) and Clem Whitaker (Yuriy Sardarov, late of NBCs Chicago Fire). As the play opens, theyve defected from the campaign of the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor to pitch their services to the Republican incumbent governor, a vulgar blowhard named Frank Merriam (Terry Hamilton), who only ascended to his job upon his predecessors death a few months earlier.

Merriams opponent in the general is Upton Sinclair yes, that Upton Sinclair. The muckraking author of The Jungle, the influential novel about the Chicago stockyards thats made generations of high-school students consider vegetarianism, Sinclair (played here by Anish Jethmalani) was an activist but not a natural politician. He had twice run for office as a Socialist, unsuccessfully. But in 1934, with California still in the throes of the Depression, his E.P.I.C. agenda (End Poverty in California) led him to a surprise landslide victory in the Democratic primary.

At the time, California was a staunchly Republican state a fact that feels so foreign to our current reality that just stating it can get some chuckles from a friendly audience. But Sinclair had both fame and a solid ground game on his side; his campaign had registered more than 300,000 new Democrat voters, and he received more total votes in his primary than Merriam did in his.

Spooked, and willing to do almost anything to avoid the humiliation of handing the state to a Democrat, Merriam is receptive to Baxter and Whitakers overtures. Unable to come up with any real dirt on the principled Sinclair (in a scene that suggests the birth of opposition research), the consultants decide to invent some.

The pair extract nasty passages from Sinclairs books often quoting the stories grotesquely anti-worker captains of industry and printed them on millions of billboards and direct-mail flyers as if they were quotes from Sinclair himself. They enlisted the political editor of the then-conservative Los Angeles Times to print false attacks on Sinclair while also writing speeches for Merriam. Eventually, anti-union movie mogul Louis B. Mayer signed on to create phony, scripted anti-Sinclair newsreels to run before MGM movies.

Candidate Upton Sinclair (Anish Jethmalani) speaks to the people about how his E.P.I.C. plan will improve California in Campaigns, Inc. at TimeLine Theatre.

That this sophisticated of a smear campaign really was deployed many decades before cable news and social media is fascinating history. But the tactics werent new, even if their scale was. What was new, Allans script suggests a little too subtly, is Baxter and Whitakers amoral, party-agnostic attitude toward their work.

Particularly in the scenes between Baxter and Whitaker, Campaigns, Inc. takes on the flavor of the kind of screwball comedy that was popular at the movies in the 1930s. You can understand Allans impulse. The real-life Whitaker eventually divorced his first wife to marry the widowed Baxter, and appealing actors Meredith and Sardarov have the kind of timing and chemistry that you could see slotting right into a period piece, say, the Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert roles in 1934s It Happened One Night.

And yet, in Allans script and in director Nick Bowlings staging, Whitaker and Baxters story often seems to take a backseat to competing interests. As if bound by the old FCC fairness doctrine, Campaigns, Inc. is determined to allot equal time to Hamiltons cartoon-villain Merriam and Jethmalanis too-good-for-this-world Sinclair.

And for some reason, Allan gives far too much focus to Charlie Chaplin. Sinclair was friendly with the silent film legend, played here by Dave Honigman, but Allan makes Chaplin and his own anxieties about a changing Hollywood too prominent. Despite Honigmans engaging performance, Chaplin feels like a distraction.

The number of Depression-era boldface names who played a part in this election is interesting, sure. (Allan even includes a cameo by early film royalty Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford that I suspect will fly over the heads of most audience members.) But Baxter and Whitaker should be the stars here. Ive checked the latest polls, and what Campaigns, Inc. could use is a tighter focus on its central characters mercenary motivations.

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Early days of 'fake news' fuel the politics of 'Campaigns, Inc.' at TimeLine Theatre - Chicago Sun-Times

Whenever a native son gets national ink without causing Louisiana to curl up in embarrassment, we should take a little bow.

All eyes are upon us whenever one of our Republican congressmen favors us with his thoughts. Those thoughts may be breathtakingly crass, as in the Clay Higgins-goes-to-Auschwitz video, or just plain stupid, as when NRA lap dog Steve Scalise asks why 9/11 didn't occasion calls to ban airplanes.

These politicians may give us reason to blush, but Bernard Pettingill from Louisiana has been in the news recently without such an effect.

He is the forensic economist, who may just have made a second presidential term for Donald Trump a little less likely. Pettingill took the stand in a Texas courtroom to catalog some of the lies told by one of Trump's earliest, and most vocal, supporters, the arch-conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Why Jones had any credibility to start with is quite a head-scratcher, given the preposterous yarns he spins, but he is clearly a gifted hornswoggler. The vast sums he pocketed via his Infowars website are proof enough of that.

We have a handle on just how vast those sums are thanks to Pettingill, a Jesuit graduate whose academic record includes degrees from Loyola and Tulane and who has taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Pettingill was called as a witness in a defamation lawsuit filed by the parents of a 6-year-old boy who was one of 20 children murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, when six teachers also died. Jones had repeatedly claimed that Sandy Hook was a hoax dreamed up to give the federal government a pretext to restrict gun rights. The parents who sued had to endure years of abuse and death threats after Jones declared they were actors hired to perpetrate the hoax.

When Jones took the stand in Texas, he conceded that Sandy Hook was 100 percent real," but he evidently does not feel obliged to tell the truth even when he is under oath to do so. Any jury award of more than $2 million would sink us, he testified.

Waiting in the wings was Pettingill, who had the numbers to prove that Jones was still telling whoppers.

Infowars has been bringing in more than $50 million a year for many years, and Jones has paid himself an average of $6 million a year, Pettingill testified. When Jones failed to respond to a lawsuit filed in Connecticut last year, and was ruled liable by default for Sandy Hook, he began dumping $11,000 a day into a shell company that Jones set up as a clawback to pay himself, Pettingill testified.

The jury came back with a damages award of almost $50 million, and it would be a great public service if that did sink Jones and his poisonous fantasies. He has been on hand to brand every terrorist act either a hoax or a government-sponsored false flag operation, joined the chorus claiming that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and denounced Lady Gaga's halftime gig at the Super Bowl as a satanic rite. And that's just a sample of his crackpot notions.

Huge jury awards tend to get drastically reduced on appeal, however, so that, even if more Sandy Hook families are poised to sue, Jones will probably have enough in the bank to soldier on, and back Trump, should he run.

But his endorsement will be greatly devalued this time.

Email James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.

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James Gill: In the war on fake news, this Louisianian is a hero - NOLA.com

Jeanna Sybert grew up the child of two journalists, but resisted going into journalism as she witnessed the challenges her parents faced in the field. But as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, she found she enjoyed studying journalismhow it affects culture, politics, and global conversation.

Now a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, Sybert studies labor conditions for journalists in the United States. Though many see journalism as a duty or a calling or simply a pursuit of the truth, its a job like any other, Sybert says.

Journalists deal with pay cuts, job losses, mistreatment from management, career instability. Even the smallest, family-run newspapers have occupational issues, Sybert documented in a paper in Journalism, despite the popular trope of small local newspaper against the world.

In June, 2021 Sybert published a study on employee welfare at the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette. Her interviews with reporters confirmed findings from other scholars: Journalism in the U.S. is a progressively troubled field. Journalists are stressed, overworked, and demoralized. Public distrust of media, violence against reporters, and the shuttering of print newspapers are affecting journalists personally and as a group. This has consequences for how the news is presented to Americans and how they understand it.

When Sybert conducted her study, the newspaper was going through some very public problems, including clashes with ownership, layoffs, a strike, and boycotts. Her interviews with reporters revealed a tumultuous environment filled with conflict and instability. Journalists at the paper faced a crumbling job market, attacks on the credibility of the press from a sitting president, increased workloads, and the unique challenge of, as Sybert puts it, being expected to be the sense-makers of the crises they go through.

Now, as a member of the steering committee of Annenbergs Center for Media at Risk, Sybert has observed how difficult it is to be a journalist in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Shes concerned about the critical moment in journalism history that we are now experiencing.

Journalists have had to navigate life during a global pandemic while also sharing information about that pandemic to the public. Theyve faced heightened criticism since former President Trump waged a war on media, berating journalists and newspapers alike.

This story is by Hailey Reissman. Read more at Annenberg School for Communication.

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What is it like to be a journalist during the 'fake news' era? Not easy | Penn Today - Penn Today

UPDATED at 9:10 a.m. EDT on 2022-08-10

China's military said it had wrapped up a week of war games around Taiwan on Wednesday, while Taipei cried foul over Chinese disinformation tactics as Beijing ratcheted up pressure in response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosis Aug 2-3 visit to the self-governing island.

The joint military operations in the waters and airspace off the Taiwan had been carried out with "all tasks accomplished and the troops' combat capabilities in integrated joint operations effectively verified," said a statement by a spokesman for the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA).

"The troops under the PLA Eastern Theater Command will pay close attention to the evolution of situations across the Taiwan Strait, continue to carry out military training for war preparedness, organize normalized combat-readiness security patrol in the Taiwan Strait, resolutely safeguarding Chinas national sovereignty and territorial integrity," said the statement. Other PLA drills are going on to the north in the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea, the PLA said last week.

Amid the conflict, a Taiwanese fact-checking organization claimed that one of the most widely used photos of the recent drills by the PLA around Taiwan turned out to be the latest fake news in Chinas disinformation campaign against the democratic island.

The photo, distributed by Chinese state news agency Xinhua, depicts a PLA soldier observing military drills in the waters near Taiwan through a pair of binoculars.

In the background, a Taiwanese warship without a hull number is clearly visible. Next to it is a chimney, later identified as the smokestack of the Ho Ping Power Plant in Hualien County on the east coast of Taiwan.

The Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC), a Taipei-based independent organization, conducted a thorough examination of Xinhuas photo and published the findings on its website on Tuesday.

It said there are too many irregularities, calling the proportions of objects in the photo unreasonable and saying there were obvious signs of manipulation such as the lack of a hull number on the alleged Taiwanese warship and its outline, which TFC said was too clean.

Another photo released by Xinhua in the same batch clearly shows hull number 935 of the Lan Yang, a Taiwanese Navy Chi Yang-class frigate.

Experts and analysts consulted by TFC concluded that the photo is a composite of different images.

Xinhua said the photo was taken on Aug. 5, 2022, the second day of the unprecedented four-day drills conducted by the PLA Eastern Theater Command.

The photo led to widespread speculation on Chinese internet forums that a PLA Navy (PLAN) destroyer had come closer than 12 kilometers (6.5 nautical miles) from the coast of Hualien, well within Taiwans territorial waters.

A states territorial waters are defined by maritime boundaries 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) from its coast.

Several Chinese and Taiwanese media outlets reported that PLAN destroyer Nanjing, where the soldiers photo was taken, was only 11.78 kilometers from the coast of Hualien and the Ho Ping Power Station on Friday morning.

Hybrid warfare

The Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense dismissed the news, describing it as disinformation.

No PLAN vessel has entered our territorial waters since August 4 when the PLA drill started, the Ministry said on Twitter.

China has stepped up its disinformation campaign and cyberattacks as part of hybrid warfare against Taiwan.

Hybrid warfare is a combination of conventional military actions on the ground and hacks, or disinformation campaigns, designed to attack public morale and sow confusion.

Maj. Gen. Chen Yu-lin, deputy director of the Political and War Bureau of Taiwan's Defense Ministry said earlier this week that the current wave of "cognitive operations" started even before the military drills were announced as a response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosis visit.

Pelosi is the most senior U.S. official to visit the island in 25 years. Her visit was condemned by Beijing as a serious violation of Chinas sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Chen Hui-min, TFCs editor-in-chief, told RFA his organization had detected a 30-40% increase in fake reports online since Pelosi's visit.

The biggest difference [from the past] is that it seems to be spreading from English-language Twitter, Chen said.

The Taiwanese Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday it had been hit by 170 million cyber attacks per minute during the height of the tension last week.

China considers Taiwan a Chinese province that must be reunified with the mainland at all costs.

Meanwhile only two percent of 23.5 million Taiwanese people identified themselves as Chinese, down from 25 percent three decades ago, according to a new study by Taiwans National Chengchi University.

UPDATED with an announcementfrom China's military that war games around Taiwan had wrapped up.

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China says it has wrapped up war games around Taiwan, as Taipei hits out at fake news - Radio Free Asia