I recently posted the followig thread on Twitter:
Here’s the deal, #Resisters and #FBRparty people: There are a lot of fake accounts joining our ranks. But that’s okay if you REALLY know what to look for. They’re not going to turn one day and start posting pro #MAGA crap and filling your feed with that. They’re going to flood your feed with fake stories that look GOOD to you. Stories about Roger Stone’s assistant flipping, for example. You need to FACT CHECK before you retweet. Don’t retweet because you LIKE a post. dctribune.org is BOGUS!Retweet because you KNOW it’s true. If you can’t confirm a story on a credible JOURNALISTIC (i.e.newspapers) outlet, it’s not real. If you found it on Share Blue, or Palmer told you, FACT CHECK! If it BASICALLY looks like CNN or CBS, FACT CHECK. If it’s a site you’ve never heard of w/ words like “tribune” or “times”, FACT CHECK! Reading fake pro #maga BS isn’t going to hurt us. Sharing bogus stories will. FACT CHECK!
If you see an account repeatedly posting crap, DON’T block. Expose them. Follow their bogus stories around Twitter and nullify them. In the meantime, FOLLOW back and unite.
If you’re not on Twitter, FBR is Follow Back Resist and people have been using that hashtag to connect with other resisters. At some point bots and other opportunists very predictably seized on the opportunity to get in on the game so genuine resisters started blocking and outing the fakers. That’s what I was doing too, until I started seeing a story from dctribune.org being retweeted a lot. And not by bots. Since I always fact check stories from sites I’m unfamiliar with, I checked the story I was seeing and I couldn’t verify it anywhere. A few days later, another story from the same outlet was getting a lot of retweets. One of those retweets was from a former Obama strategist. Since I already knew this site, it took me less than two minutes to debunk this second story. Two obviously fake, seemingly left wing stories sounded off alarm bells so I did a WHOIS search on the domain. It had been registered two months ago (July 2018) by an anonymous registrant in Ontario, Canada.
Bogus.
That’s when I realized what a lot of these fake FBR accounts were actually going to do. They are going to flood the internet with Breitbart style bullshit tailor made for resistors, thereby discrediting the movement and furthering the “both sides” narrative that many republicans who have run out of ways to defend their party are currently touting.
This is a much smarter strategy than turning around one day and flooding resistors’ feeds with pro Trump bullshit.
So I’ve been sharing this information on Twitter and that thread gets a few retweets a day. But I want to expand on what I was trying to say in that thread of five tweets, because it was a lot more than just “fact check”.
I think that one of the biggest problems that has contributed to our inability to tell the difference between fake stories and real ones started very nobly (at least on the left). In about 2004, the left wing blogosphere exploded with smart, politically engaged people who were appalled by what George W Bush was doing. Back then, those blogs were largely read by other hyper-engaged people who were also appalled by what was going on. This was great for the fact based community since the main stream media mostly dared not speak truth to power.
Many of the bloggers from that era were smart, insightful, and had a gift for catching what most others missed. Marcy Wheeler, Digby, Driftglass, and Nate Silver are a few who I’m still an avid reader of. I like them for various different reasons. Marcy Wheeler has established herself to be an expert researcher on national security issues and she’s my go-to for analysis on the Mueller investigation. Digby and Driftglass are people who make me think about things that I may not have considered, and you all know why Nate Silver is on the list.
My point is that I’m a big fan of and advocate for blogs. They are a great way to help you think about the news that you’ve read in a way that maybe didn’t occur to you. But I don’t confuse blogs with journalism, and I don’t replace my consumption of journalistic articles with blogs. A blogger isn’t going out and speaking with sources, double checking the information that those sources has provided, and breaking well sourced news. Bloggers don’t have any standards for journalistic integrity and verification.
The best blogs with a history of established credibility share their perspectives about the facts presented to them by credible news sources. The worst make shit up for a small audience who enjoy consuming a steady diet of shit (a la Bteitbart). So when you’re reading a really worthwhile blog (obviously the way you’re doing right now), know that you’re getting perspective content. I link to every source I rely on to give you my perspective but you should read my page, fully cognizant of the fact that you’re reading a perspective piece.
You should not confuse this site with The Guardian, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, McClatchy or any of the other journalistic outfits I rely on to formulate my opinions.
I really believe that the conflation of perspective media with journalism has played a big part in confusing people so much that they can’t tell the difference between fake news and real news. When a top level democratic strategist is retweeting total bullshit, that tells me that no one is immune.
Here are a few of the things I do to keep myself in check:
- I DO NOT block out people who I don’t agree with on everything. I often get people on my Facebook or Twitter pages who want to let me know that they “like my stuff”, but this is just unacceptable so “I’m unfollowing you”. Good. You’re too stupid to follow me and if your opinions are so fragile that they can’t handle exposure to differing opinions, you won’t be contributing anything valuable to my page anyway.
- I follow a significant (maybe half) percentage of people who post things I don’t agree with. Not crazy bullshit like Pizzagate but (for example) Hillary supporters who still bash Bernie on a regular basis. Why? First, because I’m very confident in my decision to support Bernie in the primaries. I made a well researched, reasoned and unemotional decision based on my own self interest. Nothing that anyone who made a different decision has to say is going to make me melt or hurt my fee fees. Secondly, maybe we can have a discussion and have a meeting of the minds on some things. Or not. My point is that if you can’t talk to people who are on a different part of the spectrum on the left, you literally can’t talk to anyone. Lastly, you can’t earnestly say that you’re making reasoned decisions if you’re distilling what you’re consuming down to only that which supports those decisions.
- I earnestly believe that the entire spectrum of legitimate governing approaches exists only on what we used to call the left at this point. The “right” has no governing principals left, and are purely a vehicle for propaganda and divisiveness in order to distract people from realizing that they have no governing principals or ideas left. So the self identified left is the whole spectrum now, ranging from neoliberals on the right to democratic socialists on the left. I am decidedly a democratic socialist. For every piece I read that comes from my beloved democratic socialist perspective, I read one from a neoliberal (or democratic establishment type). You have to challenge yourself, if for no other reason, than to more finely tune your perspective. Sometimes I rethink things, and sometimes I end up with the tools to better craft an argument for my perspective. Absolutely nothing happens when you only read what you like.
- There is no one I agree with more than about 80%. If you find yourself agreeing with a website or TV commentator 100% of the time, you’ve turned off your brain and abandoned critical thinking entirely. You have to think about what you’re hearing or reading critically. If you don’t, you’re not being informed: you’re being programmed and you should immediately stop it! Think. Question the premise you’re being given, and most of all: fact check.
This comment always gets me a lot of push back and unfollows, but I’m going to repeat it. I used to be a very big fan of Rachel Maddow’s. She’s brilliant, and she used to have an excellent show (actually, she had several iterations) on Air America. I was super excited when she landed the MSNBC gig. That show is completely different than her shows on Air America. Almost immediately, I noticed that there were a lot of topics that she wouldn’t touch on the MSNBC show. Most of those topics are related to the advertisers on MSNBC. That was actually okay for me, and I completely expected it. I was getting all of that news from other sources, so I didn’t need her for that at all.
One night when the presidential primaries were going on, she had Andra Mitchell on to discuss an accusation that Bernie had made against Hillary. He claimed that she was illegally funneling money into her campaign through state parties. Now, I knew that he lied when he said it was illegal. It wasn’t. So I had no problem with Maddow doing a segment in which she called out my candidate for a lie. And that’s what she and Andra Mitchell did for six minutes. They called him a liar and then cut to commercial. There was no context whatsoever given to the story. His claim that she was funneling money through state parties was 100% accurate. Apparently, Maddow didn’t feel the need to get into how and why that was possible. Just as I knew Bernie was lying, I knew the answer to how and why this funneling of campaign money is legal. In 2014, the Supreme Court issued a terrible decision that greatly expanded the ability of the 1% to buy our politicians. Before the decision in McCutcheon V FEC, there were limits on the aggregate contributions that a person could make in political contributions. In other words, contributors had to adhere to the individual caps on donations to politicians ($2,700 to a congressional candidate) and state political parties (this varies from state to state, but it’s usually around $1,000) but they also had to adhere to an aggregate cap of all of their contributions of $117,000. That means that all of their contributions to candidates and parties added up couldn’t exceed 117k. McCutcheon got rid of that aggregate cap so now, individual donors could contribute the maximum to every state party entity and every congressional politician if they wanted to. That’s how George Clooney was able to throw a $350k a plate fundraiser for Hillary. That 350k was going to be essentially be laundered through state democratic parties and then funneled back to her campaign. So while this practice is legal, knowing how and why it’s illegal would make anyone’s blood boil, regardless of party affiliation. In the case of the democrats, they called these giant washing machines “Victory funds”. Every candidate running in the primary had a “victory fund” opened for them by the national party. Maddow didn’t feel the need to explain any of this. She and Mitchell just stuck to “It’s legal” and for good measure, they mentioned that Bernie also had a “victory fund” that he wasn’t using.
So instead of informing her viewers, and explaining why Bernie’s lie was now a lie, she implied that Bernie was part of the not-corruption. That story had my blood boiling because it was cheap propaganda intended to slam Bernie and prop up Hillary.
To add insult to injury, a few days or maybe a week later, she did a story on how the Supreme Court had just overturned Bob McDonald’s corruption conviction. She spent thirty-five minutes outraged about what this ruling did to campaign finance. The long and short of it is that the Supreme Court didn’t feel that lavish gifts from wealthy donors that preceded those wealthy donors getting lucrative state government contracts aren’t bribes unless there’s direct evidence of a quid pro quo. So if a governor receives lavish vacations and Rolexes from the CEO of (say) a private prison, and that private prison subsequently gets a lucrative contract from that governor’s state, it’s not corruption unless you have a video of a conversation in which the Rolex is given in exchange for that contract, or a contractual agreement. Like the McCutcheon , this was an outrageous ruling that would make anyone’s blood boil. She spent thirty-five minutes boiling her audiences blood, when just a few days earlier, she had no views on essentially the same story.
That’s when she became dead to me. She crossed the line from not touching her advertisers to full blown propagandist. And a year and a half after that, she fell for Trump’s gambit of “leaking” a portion of one year of his tax returns that made him look good. When you take on the role of propagandist, seeing the big picture becomes more difficult.
I pick Maddow because she’s probably the most respected commentator in the left. If you agree with her 100% of the time, or you think that her job is to inform you, you would be wrong. She is manipulating you and propagandizing you on behalf of the democratic establishment. You should find sources that don’t agree with her to expose yourself to, just so that your opinions are factually sound and not merely a product of propaganda.
The best propagandists curate a combination of verifiable facts to manipulate you with. I curate information that I feel is relevant to make my point and share my opinion. I do my best to pour over as much information as I can before forming that opinion, but no one is perfect and the hardest thing in the world to do, is to get out of your bubble. What I offer you is my opinion with curated sources to support that opinion.
You should challenge what I tell you because you shouldn’t trust that I’ve challenged myself enough.
But more important than that, is that you should be able to tell the difference between journalism and everything else. I never cite (for example) Daily Kos as a source on my social media pages or anyone else. If I read something on a blog that is true, I always post that story with a credible journalistic source. I also stay away from fairly (or somewhat) credible left wing sources like Slate because if the story is real, I can post a link to the Washington Post. Not being able to make that distinction is, in my opinion, the single biggest contributor to the propagation of fake news in the world.
I know that fact checking can be tedious and time consuming. But I promise you that the more you do it, the faster and more efficient you will become at it. And that will give you the added bonus of being able to spot an agenda from a mile away. Share Blue’s mission is to further the cause of the democratic party. Not liberalism, not liberal candidates, not your well being, but the democratic party. That is what they’re there for and you should understand that when you post one of their articles. But the more fact checking, reading of differing opinions, and cross checking you do, the easier it will become to spot things like that. I promise. I can sniff out an agenda or bullshit, just as easily as you can all smell when spring is in the air. It eventually becomes second nature.
In the meantime, read nothing but this blog and the content I post on my social media pages, and never, ever question a single thing I tell you because there are NO facts in the world, other than the ones I present!
Lots of good observations in this post, thanks! I agree that you have to research unknown sources before passing on what they report. Since I am working on a project to foster online political discussions, I would be very interested to learn of any resources out there which flag disinformation sites like Breitbart, and fake news sites like dctribune.
One promising new tool I’ve found is available at trusted-news.com, a browser extension which aggregates source evaluations from Snopes, Politifact and an academic named Melissa Zimdars. This is a short article from Columbia Journalism Review describing it: https://www.cjr.org/the_new_gatekeepers/chrome-plugin-fake-news.php.
The extension authors say they plan to incorporate user feedback using a blockchain approach soon. My understanding is that crowdsourced approaches to ranking websites for trustworthiness have failed in the past, but maybe EYEO (the company behind trusted-news and also Adblocker Plus) will get it right.
I list some results below, the extension doesn’t identify fake news or conspiracy sites well but it seems to classify the biggest websites pretty accurately. Its ‘Trustworthy’ level could serve as a pretty good whitelist with one glaring exception:
Trustworthy: guardian, nytimes, dailykos, truthdig, motherjones, slate, huffingtonpost, alternet, RT.com (!!!)
Insufficient data: bitchypundit, dctribune, drudgereport, libertywriters (famous fake news site), naturalnews and infowars (conspiracy)
Biased: foxnews, breitbart, dailycaller
Satire: empirenews.net, onion