Published on May 4, 2019
CNBC COMPLAINING FACEBOOK NOT DELETING INFOWARS ACCOUNTS FAST ENOUGH
Compares removing accounts to a game of whack-a-mole
MAY 3, 2019
While anti-establishment voices are silenced, technological advancements are being made that will bring “fake news” to a whole new level. Who will remain to challenge it?
CNBC lamented shortly after Facebook announced its ban of Infowars that Facebook cannot completely clamp down on accounts, essentially playing “whack-a-mole.” CNBC reported:
It’s yet another sign that while huge companies such as Facebook and YouTube have to fight to keep content under control, it’s tough for both to monitor and remove accounts and content that can pop right back up with new pages. It’s like a big game of whack-a-mole.
Censorship is ramping up around the world as mainstream news outlets rally for “regulations” on the first amendment.
While anti-establishment voices are silenced, technological advancements are being made that will bring “fake news” to a whole new level.
Artificial Intelligence systems are currently being developed that will “deep fake” news articles, just as photos and videos have been infamously faked.
In a little-noticed story in July of 2017, it was revealed that a Google grant of €706,000 was given to the United Kingdom’s Press Association to use artificial intelligence to write news articles.
The A.I. system, called RADAR (Reporters And Data And Robots), comes from Google’s Digital News Initiative.
As reported by the Guardian, RADAR will “…auto-generate graphics, video and pictures to add to stories.”
POYNTER ‘BLACKLIST’ OF CONSERVATIVE NEWS SITES WAS CREATED BY SPLC EMPLOYEE
List contains sites such as Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Breitbart
By Joe Schoffstall
A journalism institute released a “blacklist” of media outlets they deemed as “unreliable” that was created by an employee of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center and overwhelmingly contains conservative new media outlets.
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a Florida-based nonprofit journalism school, released the list on Wednesday and declared dozens of mainstream conservative sites such as the Washington Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Daily Signal, CNS News, and Breitbart as “unreliable” while listing few liberal sites,” Newsbusters reports.
The study notes it trimmed the list “by removing several sites whose stories, though highly politicized, were mostly not fake: alternet.org, cato.org, heritage.org, nationalreview.com, thedailybeast.com, the intercept.com, thinkprogress.org, and weeklystandard.com.”
A majority of the removed sites lean left. Of the removed conservative sites, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank – and not in itself a news site — was taken off the list. However, the Daily Signal, which is hosted by the Heritage Foundation, is included on the list. Another conservative site that was removed from the list, the Weekly Standard, was shuttered in December.
While most of the sites are labeled as “unreliable”, “fake”, or “conspiracy” – or a combination of the three — the Free Beacon is listed as “bias”, a label that prompted further review of the sites that were ultimately removed from the list upon further review and before its release.
Barrett Golding, an employee at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left nonprofit embroiled in controversy over accusations of internal racism from its top management that led to its co-founder, Morris Dees, and president, Richard Cohen, being ousted from the group, created the list for Poynter.
Golding appears to have followed the SPLC “list” model in its creation of “unreliable” news sites, as many of the mainstream conservative sites on the list are thrown in with actual sites that push conspiracy theories. This mirrors the SPLC’s “hate group” list, which contains mainstream conservative organizations alongside racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC’s “hate” list, which it is perhaps best known for today, has helped the controversial — and allegedly internally racist group itself towards its black employees – to garner more than $500 million in total assets, $120 million of which is parked overseas.
“These sites stood next to conservative organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented baker Jack Phillips in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission,” Newsbusters writes. “While the ADF is not a news site, it was likely targeted because Golding works for the SPLC. The ADF is considered a ‘hate group’ by the SPLC and is marked on the ‘hate map.’ The Washington Post even questioned SPLC’s ‘political activism’ and ‘bias.'”
“SPLC has been dropped by Twitter from its Trust and Safety Council and slammed by the mainstream media after multiple scandals rocked the organization. Its hate map even helped shooter Floyd Lee Corkins find the location of the Family Research Council, where he shot and wounded five people.”
Factcheck.org, Fake News Codex, OpenSources, and PolitiFact were also involved in the study alongside Golding.
Washington Post Scrubs Headline Calling Louis Farrakhan ‘Far-Right’
By Justin Caruso
UPDATE 5:23 PM EST: The Washington Post has added a correction to the post in question — after this article was published. The paper held off on a correction on its site for nearly two hours after acknowledging the error on Twitter. The headline on Breitbart’s story has been updated to reflect this change.
The Washington Post described Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “far-right” Thursday, then scrubbed the error from the article’s headline and text without acknowledging the edit.
The far-left newspaper’s coverage of Facebook’s latest move to ban controversial and anti-establishment figures linked Farrakhan with conservative activists, originally posting the headline “Facebook bans far-right leaders including Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous.’”
The false label was also included in the first line of author Elizabeth Dwoskin’s article.
The publication’s official Twitter account posted the same headline with this false information. In a followup tweet, the Post said, “We have deleted this tweet because it incorrectly included Louis Farrakhan, who has espoused anti-Semitic views, in a list of far-right leaders. Facebook banned extremist figures including Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous.’”
However, the paper has not acknowledged any error on the article page itself — or told readers that its editors altered the headline, lead paragraph, and URL after publication.
Despite the stealth correction, the article has received the endorsement of NewsGuard, a Microsoft partner that marks news sources as reliable or not in a web browser extension — even on a cached version of the article with the false “far-right” label still included in the URL.
“This website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard’s standards of credibility and transparency,” a pop-up reads when users mouse over the green checkmark next to the Post‘s name. Among those criteria: “Regularly corrects or clarifies errors.”
NewsGuard similarly defended a stealth edit from corporate media in February, saying that the New York Times did not run afoul of its policy by altering a headline without acknowledging the update.
Another article published in The Atlantic about the Facebook bans used the headline “Instagram and Facebook Ban Far-Right Extremists,” with a photo of Farrakhan in the featured image. As of this writing, it has not been corrected.
Farrakhan, who has praised Adolf Hitler and promotes an anti-Semitic and black nationalist worldview, has a number of well-documented relationships with Democratic lawmakers.
Former president Barack Obama posed for a photo with Farrakhan, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) have long associatedwith the hateful preacher.
Last October, Farrakhan said during an address that he was not an “antisemite” but an “anti-Termite.”
“So when they talk about Farrakhan, call me a hater, you know they do, call me an antisemite–stop it! I’m anti-termite! I don’t know nothing about hating somebody because of their religious preference,” he said
SWEDISH DOCTOR SAYS DEADLY PARASITIC DISEASE HAS DOUBLED SINCE ‘REFUGEE’ WAVE
“Most people are sick from Syria and Afghanistan”
MAY 2, 2019
An infectious diseases doctor has warned that the number of cases in Sweden of Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease which can lead to death, has doubled since the 2015 migrant wave.
“Leishmaniasis is a disease caused by an intracellular protozoan parasite (genus Leishmania) transmitted by the bite of a female phlebotomine sandfly,” according to Medscape.
The parasites that spread the disease are common in the Middle East, Africa and in Mediterranean countries, however it is not normally present in northern Europe.
According to Sara Karlsson Söbirk, an infectious doctor at a hospital in Helsingborg who has studied the issue for 20 years, the number of cases in on the increase.
“We have in a collaboration with the Public Health Authority looked at the number of cases between 1993-2016 and see a peak of 35 cases in 2016, probably a direct consequence of the large refugee wave the year before, when most people are sick from Syria and Afghanistan,” said Söbirk.
She notes that most of the cases were found in people who had emigrated to Sweden or who had traveled in the countries where the parasite was present then returned to Sweden.
The parasites can remain in the body for years before being activated as a result of a weak immune system.
“The attack on internal organs is the most serious form of the disease (visceral leishmaniasis) and usually leads to death if it is not detected and treated in time,” reports FriaTider.
TUCKER RESPONDS TO BRIAN WILLIAMS FACT-CHECKING GRAHAM: ‘PLEASE, GET SOME SELF-AWARENESS’
“Just another fact-check from a guy suspended for lying.”
By Phillip Stucky
Fox News host Tucker Carlson responded to MSNBC’s Brian Williams’ decision to fact-check Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s speech during Attorney General William Barr’s Wednesday hearing on Capitol Hill.
“MSNBC, if you were watching, you may have noticed, could not contain its excitement during the Attorney General’s testimony. During the hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham noted quite correctly that Mueller’s report found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Brian Williams wouldn’t have it, they cut in to call Graham a liar,” Carlson began. (RELATED: Trump Lawyer Reads Directly From Mueller Report To Push Back Against Brian Williams)
“Just another fact-check from a guy suspended for lying. Nice guy, but please get some self-awareness. That wasn’t the only time something like that happened though today, an hour later they cut away again to say that Barr was a big fat liar, too,” he continued.
The Hill’s Joe Concha agreed, “Conforming to the hive, Tucker. Look, I’m a Jersey guy, he grew up down the New Jersey river, he is a nice guy by all accounts. The environment that he is in, he realizes that he has to give his audience comfort food, what they want to hear at this point.”
“And the scary part about that is that he could just pivot into being what he’s become now, which is completely and totally partisan,” Concha concluded. “Remember, he was the anchor, the NBC Nightly News for many many years. And he’s gone the full Dan Rather I would say. These guys were people that you trusted because there they are, CBS and NBC giving you the news and now instead they’ve gone completely and totally from one side to the left and they’ve destroyed legacies in the process, unfortunately.”
The segment came after Williams cut into both Graham’s and Barr’s testimony during Wednesday’s hearings to say that they were lying about the facts in the Mueller report.
“We’re reluctant to do this, we rarely do,” Williams said about interrupting the broadcast of the hearing. “The chairman of the Judiciary Committee just said that Mueller found there was no collusion. That is not correct.”
Graham asserted that Mueller reported no collusion occurred between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, something Williams apparently disagreed with.
It wasn’t the first time Williams called Barr’s statements into question. In April, the MSNBC host called Barr “Baghdad Bill Barr,” a reference to an Iraqi Defense Minister known as “Baghdad Bob” who misstated Iraqi victories under Saddam Hussein.
“It’s already been mentioned around here — it would hearken back to a conflict decades ago — we would not be surprised if some headline writer somewhere came up somewhere with ‘Baghdad Bill Barr’ for what we saw today,” Williams claimed at the time.
Williams spent a great deal of time defending himself against claims of lying about his past when it came to light there were several stories that he reported on that were either complete fakes or greatly embellished.
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