Category: Recommended

Joan Donovan, a Harvard University researcher who studies disinformation and online extremism, said streamers who rely on their audience’s generosity to fund themselves felt pressured to continue raising the stakes.
“The incentive to lie, cheat, steal, hoax and scam is very high when the cash is easy to acquire,” she said.

There’s something depressing about an internet in which you’re left choosing between Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Murdoch, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of strategy, Danny O’Brien, pointed out to me. It didn’t have to be that way.

We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same.

A former soccer hooligan and founder of the English Defence League, one of Britain’s most notorious nationalist groups, Mr. Robinson has largely been a pariah in his home country but Trump loyalists embraced him much the way they embraced many of the American extremist groups whose members would join the Capitol riot, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

In its rush to find informants to search for terrorists, the government had unwittingly created an incentive system. Many had committed crimes and agreed to work with the authorities in return for leniency; others were promised immigration assistance. (In November 2004, an informant who was afraid that his family would be targeted for his work with the F.B.I. set himself on fire in front of the White House.)

In a federal indictment unsealed on Friday, prosecutors said Carrillo and four members of the Grizzly Scouts, including its leader, “discussed tactics involving killing of police officers and other law enforcement.” The indictment also alleges that the same four Grizzly Scouts tried to thwart a criminal investigation into their activities by destroying evidence of their communications with Carrillo and each other.

“We used to talk about his outbursts at the very beginning as being so fake, just like: ‘This is performative outrage. You’re yelling because you’re playing that character of Alex Jones, who’s supposed to be yelling,’” Mr. Holmes said. “And now whenever you listen to him freak out, you’re like: ‘This guy’s freaking out. This is somebody who is not in control.’”

He recalled seeing a photo of someone in the Capitol mob holding a flag emblazoned with the OAN logo. “I was like, OK, that’s not good,” Mr. Golingan said. “That’s what happens when people listen to us.”

This reminds me: I read that you and your mom have very different politics — she’s a Trump fan. How does she understand your political perspective? I honestly don’t know. There’s definitely some Fox News, OAN News talking points that get thrown around about Hollywood liberals. Here’s something funny that happened: I got an email from her husband, because we’re trying to find common ground. He sent me a video, and it was Michael Douglas talking about the corruption of our political process. He was like, “Is this something we can agree on?” And I’m like, “That video is from my group!” RepresentUs: Their singular mission is get big dirty money out of politics. They’re not a right- or left-wing group. It took him aback: He had sent me a video from my group. Then I tried to tell him: “I’m trying to explain to you: I don’t watch CNN. I don’t love Joe Biden. I’m not a fan of the D.N.C. I want money out of our politics. I want universal health care. I want fair wages.” They didn’t quite know what to make of that. I’m hoping that now that the orange turd is gone, things might settle down a little. But how would they describe my politics? They probably think I’m Karl Marx.

Open mind: “I must confess that my first impulse was to resist these findings. After all, I’ve spent decades with the ideas described above as my lodestar, convinced that journalism serves the public good. And after all, investigative journalism is built on the idea of being society’s watchdog,” writes Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post‘s media columnist, in a piece about the API research. “However, given that trust in the news media has fallen from about 70 percent in the early 1970s to about 40 percent now, according to Gallup — it seems worth viewing this report with an open mind.”

Wil was right. It was a body. It – he – had plummeted 3,500ft, half-frozen, hitting the ground at 3.38pm. He was the man who fell from the sky. The stowaway.