Category Archives: Politics

One of Those Disgusting Facebook Stories I Could Hardly Bear to Read

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Facebook is a right-wing noise machine and the sooner everyone boycotts it, the better. There are alternatives. You can do a search for “Facebook replacement” and invite your valued contacts to follow you there. Or simply start using this terrific app instead:  Telegram.

This is from the informative newsletter Popular Info published by investigative journalist Judd Legum (he’s especially good at getting corporations to stop sponsoring TV racists):

The success of The Daily Wire, the website run by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, on Facebook is mind-boggling. The site has a small staff and primarily aggregates content from Twitter and other news outlets. Typically, its articles are very short, usually less than 500 words, and contain no original reporting.

And yet, last month, The Daily Wire was the seventh-ranked publisher on Facebook, according to the analytics service NewsWhip. Articles published in The Daily Wire attracted 60,616,745 engagements in May. Engagement is a combination of shares, likes, and comments, and is a way of quantifying distribution on Facebook. The reach of The Daily Wire’s articles was equal to the New York Times (60,722,727) and more than the Washington Post (49,219,525).

But that actually understates how well The Daily Wire does on Facebook. While the New York Times published 15,587 articles in May, and the Washington Post published 8,048, The Daily Wire published just 1,141. On a per article basis, The Daily Wire receives more distribution than any other major publisher. And it’s not close.

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What explains The Daily Wire’s phenomenal success on Facebook? Popular Information revealed part of the answer last October. But the full story is much darker.

Popular Information has discovered a network of large Facebook pages — each built by exploiting racial bias, religious bigotry, and violence — that systematically promote content from The Daily Wire. These pages, some of which have over 2 million followers, do not disclose a business relationship with The Daily Wire. But they all post content from The Daily Wire ten or more times each day. Moreover, these pages post the exact same content from The Daily Wire at the exact same time.

The undisclosed relationship not only helps explain The Daily Wire’s unlikely success on Facebook but also appears to violate Facebook’s rules.

How to convert bigotry and fear into shares and likes

The network of large Facebook pages promoting The Daily Wire are all run by Corey and Christy Pepple, who are best known as the creators of Mad World News. Facebook pages controlled by the Pepples include Mad World News (2,176,003 followers), The New Resistance (2,857,876 followers), Right Stuff (610,809 followers), America First (577,753 followers), and American Patriot (447,799 followers).

The reach of these pages is massive. Content posted to these five pages has generated more than 31 million engagements on Facebook over the last three months, according to CrowdTangle, an analytics service owned by Facebook. To put that in perspective, the reach of the network over this time period exceeds the New York Times (28 million engagements), the Washington Post (20 million engagements), and HuffPost (19 million engagements).

How did the pages like Mad World News and The New Resistance grow so big? They did it by exploiting racism, religious bigotry, and violence.

Here is how it works. Most of the content on the five pages in this network consists of links to MadWorldNews.com and TadHaps.com, two websites owned by the Pepples. These sites identify incendiary stories — that are frequently months or years old — that prey on prejudice and fear. The sites then rewrite the stories with no indication that the story is old. This generates a “new” link that is able to thrive in Facebook’s algorithm.

For example, TadHaps.com published a story on June 19, 2020, with the headline “Family Displays ‘Southern Pride’ Sign, Stranger Confronts Them With Gun.” The article describes how a man named Mark Wilson was standing on the side of the road with his family, waving Confederate flags. According to Wilson, a man drove up and pointed a gun at him and other family members. The man then drove away without harming anyone.

It’s not mentioned in TadHaps article, but the incident occurred five years ago, in 2015.

On June 20, 2020, the TadHaps article was then posted to Mad World News, The New Resistance, Right Stuff, America First, and American Patriot Facebook pages. It quickly racked up about 5,000 total engagements on Facebook.

Other stories published on TadHaps in the last few days include a remorseless Black gang member who dragged a police officer behind a stolen car, a fast food restaurant that was changed the name of menu items to be more respectful of Muslims, and a 13-year-old girl who was raped by five men. None of the stories mention that these incidents occurred months or years old.

The purpose of TadHaps is not to inform but to manipulate the Facebook algorithm by recycling old stories that elicit emotional reactions from conservatives.

The Daily Wire’s tactics and Facebook’s rules

Why do these toxic Facebook pages keep sharing content from The Daily Wire? Do the Pepples just really like Ben Shapiro’s site? The Daily Wire did not respond to a request for comment. But the behavior of these pages strongly suggests that The Daily Wire and Mad World News, LLC, the company owned by Corey and Christy Pepple, have a business relationship.

The Daily Wire is the only website outside of those owned by the Pepples that is shared by these five pages. And each of the five Facebook pages shares at least ten Daily Wire links every day. Conspicuously, the Facebook pages share the exact same links from The Daily Wire at the exact same time.

For example, all five pages shared this article from The Daily Wire on Aunt Jemima at 7:30 PM on June 19, 2020.

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These pages all shared this article from The Daily Wire from Chick-Fil-a at 9:30 PM on June 18, 2020.

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The pattern repeats over and over again, ten times or more every day. It’s behavior that strongly suggests that Mad World News, LLC is being paid to promote content from The Daily Wire.

If that’s the case, The Daily Wire could be violating Facebook’s rules. Facebook allows pages to be paid to post content, but the sponsorship must be disclosed using Facebook’s branded content tool.

We define branded content as a creator or publisher’s content that features or is influenced by a business partner for an exchange of value. Creators must use the branded content tool to tag the featured third party product, brand, or business partner with their prior consent. Branded content may only be posted by Facebook Pages and profiles and Instagram accounts with access to the branded content tool.

The activity also appears to violate Facebook’s prohibition on coordinated inauthentic behavior, which includes a ban on activity to “artificially boost the popularity of content.”

In response to an inquiry from Popular Information, a Facebook spokesperson said it investigated the behavior of these pages and found no violation of Facebook’s rules….

The notorious Mad World News

There is no reason that the network of Facebook pages run by Corey and Christy Pepple should have flown beneath Facebook’s radar. Years ago, the Pepples became notorious for exploiting Facebook with poisonous content.

At first, Mad World News was effectively the couple’s blog: they rewrote published articles, added their own commentary as “Christian Conservatives,” and shared their posts on Facebook. As the Pepples’ blog gained traction on Facebook, they began including digital ads and experimenting with the type of stories they featured. Divisive stories, in particular, performed disturbingly well. “We [all] like division
We thrive on it,” said Christy Pepple to The New York Times’ The Daily in 2018. At the time, the site drew roughly 20 million views each month. One month the Pepples made more in digital ad revenue from the site than their combined salaries in the previous year, according to The Daily.

Most of this revenue, however, is generated from deceptive, if not outright false, content. NewsGuard reports that Mad World News repeatedly makes “distorted or misleading claims, including about discredited conspiracy theories”…

In May of this year, NewsGuard flagged a Mad World News piece that accused Anthony Fauci of conspiring with Bill Gates as part of “sinister plans to ‘set up’ President Donald Trump.”

The outlet frequently runs stories targeting Black, Muslim, and immigrant populations. Recent story headlines include: “Atlanta Cops Walk Out In Protest Over Democrat DA’s ‘Sick Secret’ In Brooks Case,” “NYC Black Man Knocks Down 92-year-Old White Woman, Thanks to BLM & De Blasio,” and “Millions Donated to ‘Defund the Police’ Secretly Directed To Biden’s Campaign.”

Despite this, Mad World News’ stories rarely elicit “disputed” labels or disclaimers from Facebook. On the site’s “About Us” page, the platform attempts to excuse itself of fact-checking procedures, claiming that its content “expresses a personal opinion, advocates a point of view, or is self-promotional” and should be treated as such “for the purpose of fact-checking.”

The Daily Wire’s history of playing by its own rules

The Daily Wire’s apparent business relationship with Mad World News isn’t the first time the site has been caught flouting Facebook’s rules. Last October, Popular Information revealed a clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purported to be independent but exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion.

The network clearly violated Facebook’s prohibition on “inauthentic behavior,” which includes concealing “a Page’s purpose by misleading users about the ownership or control of that Page.” But Facebook refused to take action. “Our investigation found that these are real pages run by real people in the U.S. and do not violate our policies,” the company said.

Months later, after Facebook implemented a new policy around page ownership, The Daily Wire was forced to acknowledge it owned and controlled 13 of the 14 pages in the network. Facebook has still taken no action.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a relationship with Shapiro, who Zuckerberg has hosted at his home. According to a source who has spoken with Shapiro, Zuckerberg and Shapiro remain in direct communication.

Unquote.

Meanwhile, some good news for a change. From The Washington Post:

A massive shift away from Trump in six key states indicates serious trouble for his reelection bid. White voters, young voters, old voters and independents are all much less inclined to vote for him in battleground states.

It’s too soon for Happy Dancing and we can’t un-elect Zuckerberg, but we can regulate the hell out of Facebook.

A Reminder Where the Real Money Is

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From Philadephia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch’s newsletter (you can sign up here — it’s free):

>> The billions for a more just, less racist America are hiding in plain sight at the Pentagon 

You couldn’t blame the legions of marchers who’ve taken over some of America’s streets this past month in the name of justice for George Floyd for wondering which army they were fighting. Many protests have been met with weapons of warfare — with choking tear gas (actually, the UN doesn’t even allow that in war!), sharpshooters taking out eyes with rubber bullets, or cops tossing grenades that go flash and bang, occasionally with an armored personnel carrier as a scenic backdrop.

To protesters, the massive response by helmeted robocops is proving their point that America spends too much on policing, and it does! $115 billion a year to be exact. But what if the problem with “militarized police” isn’t only the police but the “militarized” part? … a sickness that manifests itself in warrior cops at home but also drone strikes in an endless U.S. “forever war” overseas.

What if the money to pay for all the social programs that our over-policed cities really need — to hire school nurses and buy new textbooks, and recruit a new kind of army of social workers and drug counselors — isn’t only supporting your local police, but hiding in plain sight on the left bank of the Potomac River?

No political leaders from either party ever ask how taxpayers could possibly afford the $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon’s underwhelming F-35 stealth jet, even as your coronavirus nurse works the ICU wearing a Hefty bag. — Will Bunch

Defund the police? Sure. But real leaders defund the Pentagon.

“Our security investments have been in too many of the wrong places,” Matt Duss, the top foreign-policy advisor to former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, told me this week, in what could arguably be called an understatement. “We’ve need to have a serious conversation about reducing the defense budget.”

Do we ever! The current Pentagon annual budget of $736 billion is larger than military spending by the next 10 biggest nations combined — and we’re talking about places like China, Russia and India. (For the curious, only China’s military spends more than that $115 billion America spends just on cops.) Yet somehow, no political leaders from either party ever ask how taxpayers could possibly afford the $1.5 trillion (yes, with a “t”) that’s gone down a sinkhole for the Pentagon’s underwhelming F-35 stealth jet, even as your coronavirus nurse works the ICU wearing a Hefty bag.

The weird part of this, though, is the way that congressional Democrats — who once could be counted on to at least pay lip service to curbing the military-industrial complex — have thrown in the towel on defense cuts in the Trump era. When Democrats re-took control of the House in 2019, their $733 billion proposal for the Pentagon was only a tad smaller than President Trump’s bloated plan.

“Members of Congress are very concerned about being cast as ‘weak on defense,‘” Duss told me — a problem that’s become deeply rooted in the so-called “war on terror” era, post 9/11. There’s other issues — America’s politically wired allies in the Middle East and elsewhere pushing for a U.S. military presence, and defense jobs scattered across so many congressional districts.

Despite all these roadblocks, Congress, led by Duss’ boss, Vermont’s Sanders, last year turned heads with an unprecedented vote to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen — thwarted, of course, by a Trump veto. Now, in a George Floyd moment where radical change seems possible, Sanders is pushing an amendment to immediate cut defense spending by 10 percent to funnel more than $70 billion into anti-poverty programs.

Currently the most ambitious dreamer among the defund-the-Pentagon crowd is California Rep. Barbara Lee, the only House member to cast a “no” vote on authorizing the anti-terror war in 2001. Her resolution aims to cut U.S. defense spending roughly in half — some $350 million — which would include canceling Trump’s Space Force (the real one, not the badly reviewed TV show) and getting rid of a majority of America’s global archipelago of military bases. Can’t afford it? With a deep economic recession and pressing social needs, can we afford not to?

Taking on the military-industrial complex isn’t a distraction from the demands on the street for racial justice; rather, it cuts to the core of the problem. Whether armed men are firing tear gas into Lafayette Square or Predator drones into weddings in Afghanistan, the amount of money that America spends on suppressing, attacking and killing human beings is obscene. And there’s a new generation, with a new explanation, that’s figuring this out.

Connecting the Dots

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There might possibly be a subtle connection between these two items in the news. I have my suspicions.

From The Washington Post:

As coronavirus cases surge in states across the South and West of the United States, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored.

“It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the last three weeks and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus routines…. “It’s hard to see how [the U.S. economic reopening] ends. There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It’s heartbreaking.”

China’s actions over the past week stand in stark contrast to those of the United States. In the wake of a new cluster of more than 150 new cases that emerged in Beijing, authorities sealed off neighborhoods, launched a mass testing campaign and imposed travel restrictions.

Meanwhile, President Txxxx maintains that the United States will not shut down a second time, although a surge in cases has convinced governors in some states, including Arizona, to walk back their opposition to mandatory face coverings in public.

Commentators and experts in Europe, where cases have continued to decline, voiced concerns over the state of the U.S. response. A headline on the website of Germany’s public broadcaster read: “Has the U.S. given up its fight against coronavirus?” Switzerland’s conservative Neue ZĂŒrcher Zeitung newspaper concluded, “U.S. increasingly accepts rising covid-19 numbers.”

“The only thing one can say with certainty: There’s nothing surprising about this development,” a journalist wrote in the paper, referring to crowded U.S. beaches and pools during Memorial Day weekend in May….

“Many scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on [in the United States], but this didn’t translate into a political action plan,” said Thomas Gerlinger, a professor of health sciences at the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

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Confirmed cases:   Red = United States   Blue = European Union

From Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times:

The American news cycle has become so manic and surreal that there hasn’t been much time to reflect on the revelation, in the new book by the former national security adviser John Bolton, that Dxxxx Txxxx encouraged President Xi Jinping of China in the building of concentration camps for its Muslim Uighur minority.

Bolton’s “The Room Where It Happened” … describes a conversation Txxxx had with Xi at the opening dinner of the Group of 20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, with only their interpreters present: “Xi explained to Txxxx why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Txxxx said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

It is impossible, at this late date, to be shocked by the behavior of our depraved president. Nor is it surprising, given Txxxx’s treatment of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, that he is pro-concentration camp.

But Americans should know that China’s detention of over a million people largely on religious grounds — a project that reports say includes torture, sterilization and forcing Uighur women to sleep with members of China’s Han majority to promote “ethnic unity” — is happening with our president’s behind-the-scenes approval….

There is information here that deserves whatever attention people can muster in the midst of plague and mass protest. Bolton provides, albeit belatedly, firsthand confirmation that Txxxx did exactly what he was impeached for — leveraging American military aid in exchange for Ukraine’s help in smearing Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden: “Aug. 20, I took Txxxx’s temperature on the Ukraine security assistance, and he said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over,” Bolton writes….

Don’t buy this book. John Bolton doesn’t deserve to be rewarded for withholding testimony he had a duty to provide months ago. But don’t dismiss it either. The president cheered China’s concentration camps. At this point in the Txxxx era, it’s a constant challenge not to let oneself be bored by evil.

Unquote.

Coronavirus cases are rising in 81 countries and 20 states, including Oklahoma, where the president is holding an indoor rally tomorrow.

Two days ago, he said the virus is “dying out” and some people may be wearing masks simply to indicate disapproval of him.

Part 2: How They’re Doing It in Seattle

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From The Washington Post:

Antonio Ochoa has no formal security training. But around 3 a.m. on recent Saturday, [he] were called to help defuse the situation unfolding on a street corner. A man had been yelling, and he began punctuating his anger by knocking over a metal trash can.
Ochoa, who is white …, did not engage the man, who is black, directly. Instead, [he] began picking up trash, while giving the man space. He quickly turned apologetic and offered to help clean up.

For the past several days, Ochoa, 28, has been serving as an unarmed volunteer “sentinel,” or guard, in the protest zone. Ochoa, a self-described leftist libertarian recently furloughed from the Seattle International Film Festival, and other volunteers have been serving four-hour shifts to help to keep the peace.

The zone was formed last week amid the Black Lives Matter protests. Activists had gathered at a neighborhood police precinct to call for accountability and an end to police violence. In response, on June 8, police officers left that area. A spontaneous protest encampment has since sprung up outside the building, run by volunteer activists.
Core to the zone is a vision of a self-governed community with no formal policing. Instead, volunteers, many of them avowed police abolitionists, have begun to organize their own safety force.

Among other incidents, these volunteers have confronted a man throwing apples and threatening punches, a car driving toward a large crowd of pedestrians and a vehicle circling the block repeatedly and taking photos. Volunteers say they have engaged with armed visitors from outside the city who came to the zone convinced that Seattle needed saving from left-wing agitators.

They have defused fights, protected store windows from vandals and handled mental-health crises. Protesters rushed to douse the flames when a lone arsonist attempted to set fire to the precinct early Friday. The director of an LGBTQ resource center publicly thanked sentinels from the protest zone Sunday for their assistance watching over a broken window until plywood arrived, attributing the incident to a mental-health or drug-addiction issue with a person who regularly sleeps in the center’s doorway.

Volunteers say this work is a way to highlight what a city without police might look like. “We have a chance to really build something here, so I have a vested interest in defending that as a part of my community,” said Ochoa, who lives in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. “I live on the Hill, and the police presence here has always been tense and kind of malicious.”

Over the weekend, about two dozen people served as sentinels, provided the micro-neighborhood with a round-the-clock security presence. From a folding table under a pop-up tent on the sidewalk, a volunteer coordinated schedules on a whiteboard and notepad.

On Sunday, a half-dozen people inquired about signing up…. The coordinators paired volunteers to establish a buddy system, handed out radios for on-site communication and added phone numbers to a group chat on the encrypted text service Signal.
They offered basic tips in de-escalation: Speak in a low volume, establish a dialogue, use slow hand movements to communicate that the situation is calm, alert offenders that they are being watched.

That was the approach a pair of volunteers took with a man throwing apples at passersby. Ochoa and others watched him carefully, while assuring him that their intention was not to hurt him. He punched one of the sentinels, who did not retaliate. Eventually, the man calmed down and left.

“These alternatives that don’t involve forcing someone to the ground and immediately handcuffing them work and provide for a much safer community in general,” Ochoa said.

Listening and trying to understand the needs of those who are in an altered mental state — whether drunk, high or struggling with mental illness — is essential to the approach.

A sentinel who goes by the name Mark Markinson said addressing conflict in this way helped him calm a person threatening punches, by offering him a slice of pizza. It turned out he was hungry. “I don’t walk up to any situation assuming that I know who’s wrong,” said Markinson, dressed in black and sporting a cap with the trans pride flag superimposed with a rifle decal and the phrase “Defend Equality.”

Markinson describes himself as an anti-fascist, anti-racist community defense advocate. He is a gun owner, but he was unarmed Saturday night. He was serving at the occupation’s southernmost barricade, where eight people practiced pushing aside three metal jersey barriers and three empty plastic water wells to open the barricade’s proverbial gate for local residents and business owners. They had the routine down to 12 seconds.

“The person yelling isn’t necessarily wrong,” Markinson said. “Ultimately, maybe nobody is wrong. You just have to listen to who is in the argument and de-escalate and mediate, possibly try to get those individuals not to be around each other.”

“You just can’t go into that situation with any preconceived notion about who might be causing a problem,” he said. “Often I feel like police officers go into those situations with a lot of preconceived notions.”

Markinson, who is white, said he struggles with his own implicit bias in the face of a culture that ingrains an irrational fear of darker-skinned people. “That’s something I’ve actively tried to combat for a very long time,” he said. “It’s important to make sure that you’re aware that it’s there and try to learn as much as you can about other people….”

Markinson views Seattle’s ongoing experiment as part of a lineage of anarchist neighborhoods such as Exarcheia in Athens, Rojava in northeastern Syria and Free Christiana in Copenhagen. Ochoa draws comparisons to the National Confederation of Labor, which arose during the Spanish Civil War, as well as the small U.S. towns that have eliminated their police departments in favor of neighborhood watches.

The model does have its challenges. On Saturday, dozens of people surrounded a fire-and-brimstone street preacher who regularly disrupts local protests with in-your-face threats of eternal damnation.

When efforts to escort him out peacefully failed, someone dragged him on the ground. One person briefly put him in a chokehold while others blocked attempts to film the incident…. Later that afternoon, a couple dozen people marched up to the precinct with U.S. flags held aloft. A crowd gathered around them, and one of the flags was confiscated.

Firearms present a different challenge. Many of the volunteers are licensed gun owners, but bringing a weapon changes the dynamic. “If you are open-carrying, de-escalation is more challenging because at that point you are also a threat to anyone that you come up to,” Markinson said.

But that can leave volunteers vulnerable. Sentinels say they are particularly concerned about right-wing groups such as the far-rjght Three Percenters and the Proud Boys, a group that has made headlines for its part in violent clashes in Portland, Ore., and New York.

Armed white residents lined Idaho streets amid ‘antifa’ protest fears. The leftist incursion was an online myth.

An uneasy compromise could be seen early Sunday, when a sentinel who gave his name as James Madison stood at the southern barricade with an AR-15 draped over his chest, as he has done on other nights.

Madison said he was standing guard because of reports of a “known threatening vehicle” circling near the autonomous zone. “We found the owner of that threatening vehicle’s Twitter, and he clearly intended to do harm to the protesters based on his tweets,” he said in a text message. “There are a few of us who are armed.”

At the much quieter eastern barricade, Ochoa found that volunteering connects them with the neighborhood in a way they have found lacking. “U.S. culture is extremely atomizing, especially in terms of how suburban neighborhoods and apartment buildings work… The sense of community that I grew up with in a smaller town is completely dissolved as I move into a city, so having community involvement like a neighborhood watch or a rotating council of people making decisions is something I think needs to happen for any sort of brighter future in the United States.”