Mapping how power shapes digital platforms. Founder @npovmedia Author of The Gray Lady Winked. Views my own.
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What do @LEGO_Group , Wikipedia, and the Islamic Republic of Iran have in common?
I wouldn't have known how to answer that question a few weeks ago. Then we started following the trail.👇
🚨NEW INVESTIGATION: Search "Iran war" on @WikiCommons and filter by video. One of the top results is a LEGO-style video produced by an organization linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But the video is only the beginning.
We traced the upload trail and found the same editors appearing across Commons uploads, @Wikipedia article edits, and the pages connected to the organizations behind them.
The IRGC didn't need to hack Wikipedia. The system was already there.
Full investigation. Receipts 👇
Snopes continues to deny Ilhan Omar's father was living in the US illegally or that he was a war criminal.
Until last year, @snopes' claims that Ilhan's father was a "teacher educator" presented a block in the information pipeline about the congresswoman.
Major news organizations cited the Snopes "fact-check" alleging that claims related to her father's background were false and were motivated by racism and religious bigotry.
The verifiably true claim — that her father had served in the Siad Barre regime as a senior military official — was discredited by Snopes as a "conspiracy theory."
My piece for @PirateWires in March of last year showed that Snopes' claims were not just evidently false but that English-language Somali news outlets had openly celebrated Omar's father's military service as an officer in the Siad Barre regime army.
Instead of investigating the nature of Ilhan father's service in the regime — e.g. whether he was ever tied to targeting of American soldiers in Somalia — news orgs defaulted to "informing" their readers that Nur Omar Mohamed was a teacher.
This is what Sahan Journal, a Somali-American publication in Minnesota, wrote upon Mohamed's death:
[Nur Omar Mohamed] ended up in Minnesota with his family. Most Americans knew nothing about his prestigious career as a colonel who led a successful regiment in the Somali-Ethiopian war during the late 1970s. To them, he was just another faceless Somali refugee.
During the same period that Snopes was busy discrediting this claim, the company's CEO/founder was busy plagiarizing dozens of articles from journalists, which he posted to Snopes as original content.
David Mikkelson wrote no less than two dozen articles, which the site posted as reliable, verified content, adjudicating on critical information-related issues.
But Mikkelson didn't just publish under some random pseudonym. Instead, he invented an entire back story about the fake journalist of his imagination.
Mikkelson wrote under the name "Jeff Zarronandi," who — according to Snopes' own bio for the ersatz writer — is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author.
According to the Snopes bio, Zarronandi won the coveted journalism prize for his work on "numismatics," the scientific study of currency.
(To quote Congresswoman Omar's comments about about Jewish people: "It's all about the Benjamins, baby!")
Of course, the Pulitzer does not award a prize for numismatics, just as it doesn't award a prize for nephology, onomastics, cliodynamics — or any other weirdly obscure scientific field.
Snopes is built on the premise that it runs processes that are able to identify this kind of fakery.
Despite this, Snopes failed to catch the most flagrantly false information possible, published for months — possibly years — on its own site.
Instead, it had to rely on Buzzfeed (yes, Buzzfeed, of cat listicle fame) to out Mikkelson's gambit.
Yet, news organizations, government agencies, and public perception rested on this one claim concerning a sitting congresswoman whom Snopes appeared to be dedicated to defending, no matter the cost.
Whom to blame.
France is divided over who to blame for and what to learn from weekend riots bbc.in/4hZrX9p
Ashley Rindsberg retweeted
In the end, she always loses her self-control and proves me right.
To wit:
"So even if I could give such permission — I can't — Candace would be free to selectively release only what suits her and serves her narrative. This is selective disclosure dressed up as a demand for transparency. It's heads I win, tails you lose, as it always is with her manipulations."
Knock, Knock @JeremyDBoreing.
Regarding your rather incredulous and specific claim that my fans are either brainwashed or being deliberately misled for correctly gathering that you terminated me for saying “genocide is always wrong”— here is a screen grab from my termination documents.
Of course, you already knew I was fired for this (among other claims which, though I wish I were, I am not at liberty to share because my response must be proportionate to your defamatory violations)— but since you are a tried and true psychopath who feels nothing, you continue to harass, stalk, lie and gaslight those who tell the truth.
Not today, Satan.
Ashley Rindsberg retweeted
It has been like this since 2020.
We at #DRASTIC decided not to waste time with the disinformation tool that @Wikipedia had become on the possible lab origins.
They don‘t do any research and just try to shape the narrative for their political objectives.
This is actually pretty crazy. A handful of editors have shaped everything @Wikipedia has to say about COVID lab leak.
The site almost categorically casts lab leak as a "conspiracy theory."
+ The DEFUSE proposal, a bombshell in the investigation into the origin of SARS-CoV-2 — was more or less ignored, then whittled down, then removed.
+ Animal origin, which is unproven, is presented as settled science.
+ The idea that COVID came from a lab in Wuhan is treated by key editors as as a racially motivated "MAGA" conspiracy theory.
Read the full story below.
Ashley Rindsberg retweeted
This is actually pretty crazy. A handful of editors have shaped everything @Wikipedia has to say about COVID lab leak.
The site almost categorically casts lab leak as a "conspiracy theory."
+ The DEFUSE proposal, a bombshell in the investigation into the origin of SARS-CoV-2 — was more or less ignored, then whittled down, then removed.
+ Animal origin, which is unproven, is presented as settled science.
+ The idea that COVID came from a lab in Wuhan is treated by key editors as as a racially motivated "MAGA" conspiracy theory.
Read the full story below.
A handful of Wikipedia editors have rewritten the story of Covid’s origins to depict ‘lab leak’ as a racist conspiracy — despite the FBI, CIA, and leading scientists all stating they believe the virus likely came from a lab.
Here’s how they buried the truth @AshleyRindsberg👇
This is actually pretty crazy. A handful of editors have shaped everything @Wikipedia has to say about COVID lab leak.
The site almost categorically casts lab leak as a "conspiracy theory."
+ The DEFUSE proposal, a bombshell in the investigation into the origin of SARS-CoV-2 — was more or less ignored, then whittled down, then removed.
+ Animal origin, which is unproven, is presented as settled science.
+ The idea that COVID came from a lab in Wuhan is treated by key editors as as a racially motivated "MAGA" conspiracy theory.
Read the full story below.
A handful of Wikipedia editors have rewritten the story of Covid’s origins to depict ‘lab leak’ as a racist conspiracy — despite the FBI, CIA, and leading scientists all stating they believe the virus likely came from a lab.
Here’s how they buried the truth @AshleyRindsberg👇
Her father was Siad Barre regime colonel. No matter how many times Snopes calls it a "conspiracy theory," it is, and remains, a fact.
This would have disqualified him for entry to the US under the Somali refugee program.
The judge who signed the warrant to raid Rep. Ilhan Omar's DC home is a Hillary Clinton donor who clerked for an Obama appointee. That fact alone demolishes the left's claim that this is some Trump-orchestrated political hit job.
Mike Davis argues the opposite is true: the evidence against Omar must be so overwhelming that even a judge with deep leftist ties couldn't refuse to sign off. The Fourth Amendment requires probable cause of at least one federal crime inside that home, and U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh — appointed by a bench dominated by Obama and Biden picks — found it was there.
Omar's allies in Congress, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamie Raskin, and Rashida Tlaib, cried political revenge. But Davis says the simplest explanation is the most damning one for Democrats: a federal indictment may be coming before Christmas, and the evidence trail appears to reach well beyond Omar alone.
Full story here ⬇️ foxnews.com/opinion/mike-dav…
French authorities have "lost control," per NBC News.
French authorities acknowledge they have “lost control” in major cities as widespread protests, violence and unrest grip the country, prompting calls for curfews to restore order.
The unrest has also disrupted major landmarks, with the Louvre Museum in Paris closing after protesters announced a blockade, while a towering spire in Limoges collapsed in flames. nbcnews.com/world/europe/fra…
Umm.
The first leg of Celine Dion's wildly successful Parisian residency is over – and what a performance it's been. cnn.it/4dM8CWV
Tesla's great gift to humanity will not be environmental.
It will be reducing road deaths to 0.
