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9 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
get a reliable source
Lurid Trump allegations made by Louise Mensch and co-writer came from hoaxer
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/28/trump-tweets-hoax-louise-mensch-claude-taylor
Mensch and Claude Taylor tweeted details of criminal inquires that didn’t exist
Hoaxer who fed information said she acted out of frustration over fake news
Taylor issues mea culpa on Twitter after being approached by Guardian
Explosive allegations about Donald Trump made by online writers with large followings among Trump critics were based on bogus information from a hoaxer who falsely claimed to work in law enforcement.
Claude Taylor tweeted fake details of criminal inquiries into Trump that were invented by a source whose claim to work for the New York attorney general was not checked, according to emails seen by the Guardian. The allegations were endorsed as authentic and retweeted by his co-writer Louise Mensch.
The source’s false tips included an allegation, which has been aggressively circulated by Mensch and Taylor, that Trump’s inactive fashion model agency is under investigation by New York authorities for possible sex trafficking.
The hoaxer, who fed the information to Taylor by email, said she acted out of frustration over the “dissemination of fake news” by Taylor and Mensch. Their false stories about Trump have included a claim that he was already being replaced as president by Senator Orrin Hatch in a process kept secret from the American public.
snip
The bizarre rise and dramatic fall of Louise Mensch and her ‘Blue Detectives’
https://thinkprogress.org/blue-detectives-collapse-trump-russia-a42a94537bdf/
A year ago, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, a new crop of self-proclaimed investigators burst forth to unspool the Russian conspiracy they claim launched Trump into the White House. Leaning on Twitter as their preferred platform, these voices worked to unwind the Kremlin ties that, in their mind, cost Hillary Clinton the election.
Led by British gadfly Louise Mensch (269,000 followers on Twitter currently) and going by a handful of names and hashtags — including #TeamPatriot — this coterie largely avoided any kind of original reportage, instead opting to try to piece together open-source information that they believed journalists elsewhere had overlooked. In the early days of the Trump administration, they were, as BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel wrote, a “mooring force” for the anti-Trump “Resistance.” With Mensch’s 2017 op-ed in the New York Times on Russian hacking, this group — which Warzel termed the “Blue Detectives” — appeared ascendant.
A year on, though, the group is in tatters, roundly mocked by experts on Russian-American relations, ignored by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff, and barreling quickly toward irrelevance. Where these “Blue Detectives” once looked like they may unearth some kind of smoking gun linking Trump and the Kremlin — or could at least help fill in certain missing pieces of the puzzle — they are now as derided, and derisive, as their earliest critics pegged them. They have become, as Deadspin noted, “the InfoWars of the left.”
At the outset of the Trump presidency, this crew looked like it might have something to add to the conversation: on national security, on America’s degraded democracy. But one year later, they look little better than their target in the White House — especially when it come to peddling the conspiracy theories that provide comfort to both ends of the political spectrum.
snip
New fake news dilemma: sites publish real scoops amid mess of false reports
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/16/fake-news-sites-reports-facts-louise-mensch
The need for vigilance in distinguishing real journalism from “fake news” has become well established since Donald Trump was elected with help from bogus online stories.
But readers are now being confronted with an even tougher challenge: decoding the work of writers whose track records of faulty reporting are occasionally interrupted by stories that are actually true.
The trait has appeared among pro- and anti-Trump writers alike, as bloggers on each side of a chaotic political crisis mix information from knowledgeable insiders with wild allegations about their opponents. Media experts said readers should remain on guard.
“Even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the University of Madison-Wisconsin’s Center for Journalism Ethics. Culver noted that the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer published authentic bombshells on the infidelity of former senator John Edwards in 2008 before resuming its less credible output.
snip
Louise Mensch Is More Dangerous than Facebook
How can you say something is illegal when it's in the constitution?
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/10/youre-not-mad-at-facebook-youre-mad-at-america.html
People are always pissed off at Facebook. I’m often one of them. Their data machine scares the hell out of me, as it does many Americans, but not because I believe they’re doing anything particularly malicious with my personal information. It scares me because they don’t know what they’re doing with it, or who’s using it, or how. Or why. They don’t know their own strength.
When you think about this for a few seconds, the problem becomes clear: I’m not mad at Facebook; I’m mad at America. I’m mad at capitalism. Okay, I’m a little mad at Facebook—but we all got taken last year, including the U.S. government. More accurately, I’m conflicted, and mad, that there’s no ethical way to regulate free misinformation on these vast platforms that have grown beyond the profit motive to become the very infrastructure of profit.
There’s no better example of this problem than Facebook’s role in the 2016 election.
Last month Facebook reported to Congress that Russian entities bought about $100,000 worth of ads that micro-targeted specific voters in specific parts of the country with pro-Trump stories, fake news, and attacks on the Clinton campaign. They’re not alone: Google, YouTube, (owned by Google) and Instagram (owned by Facebook) also reported ad buys. And to be fair, the public is going after Facebook because it was the first of these platforms to own up, after it conducted a long-running internal investigation. Granted, Facebook probably also felt the most pressure, and critics would say it was “long-running” because they dragged their feet. But there’s no denying they were the first to begin opening up.
The press, by and large, hasn’t yet made a similar effort to expose other ad and news (and misinformation) distribution platforms such as Google and Twitter. We’re in for a rude awakening. In the face of that awakening, we need to be more realistic and responsible about who we blame for attacking America, and not say stupid shit like this:
snip (huge article, long and ultra detailed at the link above)
Louise Mensch is a Rupert Murdoch ex-employee/collaborator (she is the RW Heat Street website founder, bankrolled by Murdoch), an ex Tory MP (UK RW party) with multiple atrocious views who self-admittedly damaged her brain with copious amount of drugs:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/louise-mensch-my-mind-is-messed-up-after-taking-hard-drugs-7920094.html
She is a poison pill, a honeypot designed to make actual anti-Trump people like us look insane or like liars or foolish.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/28/trump-tweets-hoax-louise-mensch-claude-taylor
Mensch and Claude Taylor tweeted details of criminal inquires that didn’t exist
Hoaxer who fed information said she acted out of frustration over fake news
Taylor issues mea culpa on Twitter after being approached by Guardian
Explosive allegations about Donald Trump made by online writers with large followings among Trump critics were based on bogus information from a hoaxer who falsely claimed to work in law enforcement.
Claude Taylor tweeted fake details of criminal inquiries into Trump that were invented by a source whose claim to work for the New York attorney general was not checked, according to emails seen by the Guardian. The allegations were endorsed as authentic and retweeted by his co-writer Louise Mensch.
The source’s false tips included an allegation, which has been aggressively circulated by Mensch and Taylor, that Trump’s inactive fashion model agency is under investigation by New York authorities for possible sex trafficking.
The hoaxer, who fed the information to Taylor by email, said she acted out of frustration over the “dissemination of fake news” by Taylor and Mensch. Their false stories about Trump have included a claim that he was already being replaced as president by Senator Orrin Hatch in a process kept secret from the American public.
snip
The bizarre rise and dramatic fall of Louise Mensch and her ‘Blue Detectives’
https://thinkprogress.org/blue-detectives-collapse-trump-russia-a42a94537bdf/
A year ago, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, a new crop of self-proclaimed investigators burst forth to unspool the Russian conspiracy they claim launched Trump into the White House. Leaning on Twitter as their preferred platform, these voices worked to unwind the Kremlin ties that, in their mind, cost Hillary Clinton the election.
Led by British gadfly Louise Mensch (269,000 followers on Twitter currently) and going by a handful of names and hashtags — including #TeamPatriot — this coterie largely avoided any kind of original reportage, instead opting to try to piece together open-source information that they believed journalists elsewhere had overlooked. In the early days of the Trump administration, they were, as BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel wrote, a “mooring force” for the anti-Trump “Resistance.” With Mensch’s 2017 op-ed in the New York Times on Russian hacking, this group — which Warzel termed the “Blue Detectives” — appeared ascendant.
A year on, though, the group is in tatters, roundly mocked by experts on Russian-American relations, ignored by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff, and barreling quickly toward irrelevance. Where these “Blue Detectives” once looked like they may unearth some kind of smoking gun linking Trump and the Kremlin — or could at least help fill in certain missing pieces of the puzzle — they are now as derided, and derisive, as their earliest critics pegged them. They have become, as Deadspin noted, “the InfoWars of the left.”
At the outset of the Trump presidency, this crew looked like it might have something to add to the conversation: on national security, on America’s degraded democracy. But one year later, they look little better than their target in the White House — especially when it come to peddling the conspiracy theories that provide comfort to both ends of the political spectrum.
snip
New fake news dilemma: sites publish real scoops amid mess of false reports
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/16/fake-news-sites-reports-facts-louise-mensch
The need for vigilance in distinguishing real journalism from “fake news” has become well established since Donald Trump was elected with help from bogus online stories.
But readers are now being confronted with an even tougher challenge: decoding the work of writers whose track records of faulty reporting are occasionally interrupted by stories that are actually true.
The trait has appeared among pro- and anti-Trump writers alike, as bloggers on each side of a chaotic political crisis mix information from knowledgeable insiders with wild allegations about their opponents. Media experts said readers should remain on guard.
“Even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while,” said Kathleen Culver, director of the University of Madison-Wisconsin’s Center for Journalism Ethics. Culver noted that the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer published authentic bombshells on the infidelity of former senator John Edwards in 2008 before resuming its less credible output.
snip
Louise Mensch Is More Dangerous than Facebook
How can you say something is illegal when it's in the constitution?
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/10/youre-not-mad-at-facebook-youre-mad-at-america.html
People are always pissed off at Facebook. I’m often one of them. Their data machine scares the hell out of me, as it does many Americans, but not because I believe they’re doing anything particularly malicious with my personal information. It scares me because they don’t know what they’re doing with it, or who’s using it, or how. Or why. They don’t know their own strength.
When you think about this for a few seconds, the problem becomes clear: I’m not mad at Facebook; I’m mad at America. I’m mad at capitalism. Okay, I’m a little mad at Facebook—but we all got taken last year, including the U.S. government. More accurately, I’m conflicted, and mad, that there’s no ethical way to regulate free misinformation on these vast platforms that have grown beyond the profit motive to become the very infrastructure of profit.
There’s no better example of this problem than Facebook’s role in the 2016 election.
Last month Facebook reported to Congress that Russian entities bought about $100,000 worth of ads that micro-targeted specific voters in specific parts of the country with pro-Trump stories, fake news, and attacks on the Clinton campaign. They’re not alone: Google, YouTube, (owned by Google) and Instagram (owned by Facebook) also reported ad buys. And to be fair, the public is going after Facebook because it was the first of these platforms to own up, after it conducted a long-running internal investigation. Granted, Facebook probably also felt the most pressure, and critics would say it was “long-running” because they dragged their feet. But there’s no denying they were the first to begin opening up.
The press, by and large, hasn’t yet made a similar effort to expose other ad and news (and misinformation) distribution platforms such as Google and Twitter. We’re in for a rude awakening. In the face of that awakening, we need to be more realistic and responsible about who we blame for attacking America, and not say stupid shit like this:
snip (huge article, long and ultra detailed at the link above)
Louise Mensch is a Rupert Murdoch ex-employee/collaborator (she is the RW Heat Street website founder, bankrolled by Murdoch), an ex Tory MP (UK RW party) with multiple atrocious views who self-admittedly damaged her brain with copious amount of drugs:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/louise-mensch-my-mind-is-messed-up-after-taking-hard-drugs-7920094.html
She is a poison pill, a honeypot designed to make actual anti-Trump people like us look insane or like liars or foolish.
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