Not content with just filing baseless lawsuits against media companies who say mean things about our historically unpopular president, the Trump administration has unveiled a new lazy wrinkle in its war on journalism and free speech.
The website casually throws around words like “biased” and “exposed,” crying about various media reporting on subjects like the president’s death threats against elected officials for reminding the military that they serve the Constitution, for example.
It’s adorable to watch some MAGA-pilled White House intern pretend to do journalism and fact checking. There’s a list of stories that upset Trump, then a cute list of classifications trying to claim news reports aren’t true, with labels like “bias,” “left-wing lunacy,” and “malpractice” (?).
The great irony is that most of the feckless U.S. corporate press generally already covers Trumpism quite favorably. Even their stories and headlines about Trump’s threats against Democratic lawmakers were couched through the lens of Donald Trump’s claims of innocence (see this NBC News story), downplaying the insanity of the president’s often-illegal behavior.
CBS is now owned by Trump’s billionaire buddy Larry Ellison, who is busy turning the already Republican-friendly news outlet into a right wing propaganda mill with the help of Bari Weiss. But even CBS can’t avoid the grumbly whining of the White House and shows up repeatedly on the naughty list:
A cornerstone of lazy right wing ideology around the world for fifty-plus years has been to accuse fact-based journalism and science of having a “bias” if it reveals absolutely anything the right wing doesn’t like. It’s an easy way to quickly discredit any critics of your worldview without having to engage in thinking, introspection, or debate, and it’s been on display for longer than many of us have been alive:
The claims of “media bias” by the right wing comes simultaneously as the U.S. right wing builds arguably one of the biggest and most effective right wing propaganda machines ever constructed (Fox News, The New York Post, Breitbart, The Daily Wire, OANN, Newsmax, Sinclair, CBS, etc.). The right wing’s propaganda efforts routinely take second stage to the false claims of widespread “liberal media bias.”
The U.S. press is, indisputably, center-right and corporatist. As it consolidates, it increasingly serves billionaire and corporate ownership, not the public interest. Layer on fifty years of bullying over nonexistent “liberal bias,” and you get the kind of journalistic fecklessness that was on proud display last election season as the country stared down the barrel of authoritarianism.
These billionaire-owned outlets enjoy doubling or tripling down on their bias claims with “solutions” to the nonexistent “liberal bias” problem that almost always make the problem worse (see billionaire LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s make believe effort to “fix bias with AI,” Bari Weiss’ efforts to “fix CBS bias” by… making it more biased, or Jeff Bezos firing of all the columnists he personally disagrees with).
There are a ton of existing “bias monitors” out there claiming to fix the problem as well, and most of them aren’t particularly reliable, and like Newsguard, have a history of giving unearned credibility to right wing outlets like Fox News or Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. And even they are quick to face “investigations” by Republicans for, you guessed it, bias.
The only people allowed to identify and criticize media bias are, ironically, the most biased and non-credible people America has to offer.
That said, it’s not clear who this bullshit White House website is supposed to be for. The kind of folks trapped in the MAGA delusion bubble aren’t the type who are going to head to the White House website to fact check a story. The entire taxpayer-funded gambit smells of little more than sad desperation in the face of sagging poll numbers and increased media criticism of unpopular, unhinged Trump policies.
And now that most corporate media outlets have gotten their massive tax cuts and mergers approved, they’re likely to show slightly more backbone over the next year or two — especially as the president’s health, influence, and political power wanes. This weird little performance art isn’t going to help.
When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television.
He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that place, it’s like living in hell,” he said, a comment that became an internet meme as some Portland residents juxtaposed it with tranquil images of the city.
Trump didn’t say which channel he watched; he said at one point he saw something “today” and at another “last night.”
The evening before, on Sept. 4, Fox News aired a two-and-a-half-minute segment spotlighting protests outside a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland. Similar footage aired the morning of Trump’s remarks. The president went on to announce Sept. 27 on Truth Social that he would send troops, saying that he was “authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”
He later said he’d told Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, that “unless they’re playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down.”
ProPublica examined months of Fox News’ coverage and reviewed more than 700 video clips posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others in the three months preceding the Sept. 4 broadcast.
The review found that the news network repeatedly provided a misleading picture of what was happening in Portland.
As The Guardian and The Oregonian/OregonLive have reported, Fox News on Sept. 4 used footage from the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd and said it was from 2025. We found two clear cases from that night as well as one that seemed to match a scene filmed at a key site of the 2020 protests. Fox also mislabeled two other dates of actions shown on screen, and one broadcast implied that a protest from elsewhere was happening in Portland.
Fox News chyrons about Portland the week of Trump’s remarks carried phrases like “violent demonstrators,” “protesters riot,” “anti-I.C.E. Portland rioters” and “war-like protests.” One host said protesters were attacking federal officers.
This portrayal of protesters as routinely instigating violence or rioting was also misleading.
As ProPublica reported last week, most clashes between protesters and police before the Fox News segment did not result in any criminal charges or arrests alleging protesters committed violence. What’s more, based on news releases from federal and local authorities, charges and arrests for assault, arson or destruction of property were almost entirely confined to a period that ended the night of July 4.
Videos after that date captured numerous images of federal officers forcefully moving in on protesters without corresponding criminal charges alleging protester violence.
A spokesperson for Fox News did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.
The Department of Homeland Security did not answer requests to comment on its officers’ tactics.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said of action on the ground in Portland: “This isn’t a peaceful protest that’s under control, like many on the left have claimed, it’s radical violence. President Trump is taking lawful action to protect federal law enforcement officers and address the out-of-control violence that local residents have complained about and Democrat leaders have failed to stop.”
Here’s how Fox News’ coverage of the Portland story was misleading.
Fox News Said It Was 2025. It Wasn’t.
Protests in 2020 in the wake of Floyd’s murder by a police officer attracted large, sometimes violent crowds to Portland — along with a federal law enforcement response authorized by Trump.
The protests outside the ICE facility have typically been far smaller. Still, Fox spliced footage from 2020 into its coverage this year and claimed it was from 2025.
The Fox News correspondent in the segment that aired the night Trump was watching TV said: “On this night in late June, police used tear gas.”
A Sept. 4 Fox News segment aired footage from 2020. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica
The accompanying image appears to be not from the ICE building but from the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, more than a mile away. A nearly identical scene was shown in a Fox News video five years earlier. Footage that aired Sept. 4, shot at a slightly different angle, blurs out spots where graffiti was visible on the building in Fox’s July 2020 broadcast.
Almost immediately after showing the courthouse scene, the segment cuts to another image as the correspondent says, “federal police used tear gas and flashbangs.”
On screen at that moment is a U.S. Navy veteran who was pepper-sprayed and repeatedly struck with a baton. But it didn’t happen in September 2025. The video was posted on social media on July 18, 2020.
A Sept. 4 Fox News segment aired a clip originally posted to X on July 16, 2020. Video by Joanna Shan/ProPublica
The Fox News segment about the ICE protests soon shows an American flag burning.
That image was posted on social media July 16, 2020.
The location: the base of a downtown Portland statue more than a mile away from the ICE building where protests are happening in 2025.
After mislabeling 2020 events as 2025, Fox’s Sept. 4 evening broadcast explicitly drew a connection between the two periods.
“The protest chaos, which began with riots aimed at social justice in 2020, has severely damaged Portland’s reputation,” the correspondent said.
Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast explicitly drew a connection between 2025 and the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd. Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
The dramatic footage at this moment shows fires in the street and was broadcast on Fox on Aug. 19, 2020, the day after a crowd smashed through windows and set items on fire in the headquarters for the government of Multnomah County, where Portland is located.
Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast used footage originally broadcast Aug. 19, 2020. Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
We don’t know for certain which broadcast got Trump thinking about Portland. The White House did not respond to questions about what Trump watched. But the president said on Sept. 5 that what he’d seen about Portland on TV was “unbelievable.”
“I didn’t know that was still going on,” he said. “This has been going on for years.”
The reality: Portland’s 2020 social justice protests, which resulted in hundreds of arrests and continued for months, turned sporadic by early 2021. Protests in years since have led to occasional property damage, but nothing in Portland has matched the scale of events that followed Floyd’s death.
Portland police Chief Bob Day said at a Sept. 29 press conference that the city had been inaccurately portrayed through the lens of the protests in 2020 and 2021.
“What’s actually happening, and the response we’re seeing both from Portlanders and from the Portland Police Bureau,” Day said, “is not in line with that national narrative. And it is frustrating.”
A Riot That Wasn’t
In a Sept. 2 segment featuring the video from a day earlier, anchor Bill Hemmer said it shows “riots raging.” Anchor Trace Gallagher teased another Sept. 2 news segment by once again showing the video, saying, “It’s a riot outside a Portland ICE facility.”
On a Sept. 2 segment featuring Katie Daviscourt’s Sept. 1 video, anchor Bill Hemmer describes the Sept. 1 protests as “riots raging.” Videos show the violent moments that happened after federal police advanced on protesters. Fox News
The Sept. 4 segment shows Julie Parrish, an attorney for a neighbor of the ICE facility, accusing Portland police of saying, “Meh, we’re just gonna let violent rioters do this for 80 straight nights.”
The physical behavior of protesters that was captured on the video is not violent. The camera instead shows federal agents advancing on them. In the moments before officers tossed munitions into the crowd, videos show, one protester was blowing bubbles. The Portland police did not declare a riot, a legal designation that allows for an elevated police use of force. (They declared a riot just once, a police spokesperson said, on June 14.)
The Sept. 1 protest had “little to no energy,” according to an internal Portland police summary, before federal officers dispersed the crowd to collect a prop guillotine that had been brought. Katie Daviscourt, a Trump-aligned commentator who filmed the clips, noted on X that protesters were having dance parties and that their main problems were “not leaving restricted areas, burning a flag, and possessing a deadly object (guillotine).”
ProPublica found a similar pattern for the three months before Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast: clashes that on most days and nights had no criminal allegations of protester violence to explain them.
After dozens of arrests and charges were announced in June through July 4, federal prosecutors accused just three people of crimes at the ICE building in the roughly two months leading up to Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast.
During that same two-month time frame, ProPublica’s review found numerous instances of police using force: videos from more than 20 days or nights with federal officers grabbing, shoving, pepper-spraying, tackling, firing on or using other munitions on protesters.
No local arrests or federal criminal charges were announced on these days or nights, and only a handful of dates corresponded with incidents of protester aggression later asserted by federal authorities in their legal case for sending troops.
Asked whether Fox News accurately represented her footage, Daviscourt said: “I stand by my four months of accurate reporting.”
Parrish told ProPublica she had collected evidence that “shows ongoing and persistent activity” outside the facility that under statute and police directive “would be considered riotous, unlawful assembly and/or disorderly conduct.” She declined to share this evidence, saying it was privileged as part of her client’s file.
Her lawsuit on behalf of a neighbor living near the ICE facility, which sought to require police to enforce Portland’s noise ordinance, was dismissed.
The Reappearing Neighbor
A Sept. 5 “Fox & Friends” segment showed a neighbor from an apartment building confronting protesters over noise, shouting at protesters: “Turn that (bleep) down, it’s midnight! … We the people need sleep!”
Fox said it happened Tuesday, which would have been Sept. 2. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt said, “This has been going on for months now, but a lot of this since Labor Day,” as the video shown on screen sandwiches footage of the neighbor between other scenes from the Labor Day protest.
“This is a chaotic city,” co-host Brian Kilmeade said.
Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
The next day, the clip of the neighbor appeared again on Fox News. This time, the network said the footage was from Wednesday, or Sept. 3.
Fox News. Screenshot by ProPublica.
In reality, the confrontation was captured on video months before. Daviscourt published the video on June 29 on X.
On the two September nights that Fox said the neighbor’s confrontation happened, ProPublica’s review found no videos of violent clashes posted on social media, and federal authorities announced no arrests.
For example, according to a Portland police email from 11:22 p.m. on Sept. 3: “There are still about 20 people hanging around but only 4 were even on the sidewalk in front of the building.”
Misrepresentations Continue After Trump’s Guard Order
On Sept. 28, the day Trump’s order was implemented, a Fox News broadcast played a clip of Kotek saying that Guard troops were not needed in Portland, then immediately cut to a clip of a hectic scene of protesters clashing with police.
“Wish she could see some of those images,” the anchor said. Sarcastically, as a co-anchor chuckled, she added: “Look at that. Just a peaceful protest.”
A small box on the screen showed the footage wasn’t from Oregon.
Fox News has a problem: when you build your entire editorial model around feeding your audience’s biases, you stop asking whether the stories feeding those biases are actually true. Case in point: last week, they published—and then quietly rewrote—a story about SNAP recipients threatening to “ransack stores,” based entirely on AI-generated videos that never happened.
Rather than running a correction or retraction, they simply rewrote the article at the same URL, with the same timestamp, transforming a story about “SNAP beneficiaries threatening to ransack stores” into a story about “AI-generated videos going viral” even though the article doesn’t make any sense. The deception is in the architecture: casual readers following the original link would have no idea the entire premise had been fabricated.
The timing of this matters. With the still ongoing battle over the Trump administration breaking the law to deny SNAP benefits to deserving recipients, the loyal state media folks at Fox News needed some sort of blatantly bullshit, racist story to make it sound like SNAP recipients were ungrateful.
After all, Trump-loyal media has been gleefully platforming Republicans lying about who gets SNAP benefits and what they do with it for a while. And Fox News needs to keep up.
And Fox News knows better than most that the easiest way to fan the flames of a culture war is to engage in a form of “nut picking.” Going searching, often on social media, for an isolated random person saying something crazy, and then presenting them as if they’re mainstream or common, entirely to make biased bigots feel that the people they hate really are as bad as they want to believe.
But the AI element adds something new here. Why go hunting through X or TikTok to find some rando wack job to show off as “Exhibit A” when someone can just make an AI-generated video faking someone even crazier than anyone actually online?
On Friday, “production assistant” Alba Cuebas-Fantauzzi at Fox News Digital, who seems to specialize in publishing culture war nonsense, took things to another level, publishing an article claiming that “SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown.”
Except, as would be obvious to anyone who did even the most basic reporting, the video was entirely AI generated. The women did not exist. Their complaints did not exist. It was digital fiction presented as fact.
Fox News fell for it completely. And when called out, rather than acknowledge the error with a proper correction, they simply rewrote the article at the same URL, keeping the same timestamp, but now pretending it was a story that AI videos of fake SNAP beneficiaries had “gone viral.”
Why did they go viral, Fox News?
The fucking gall.
The new version transforms the story into one about how AI-generated videos “have gone viral”—as if that was what they’d been reporting on all along. They insert phrases like “which appears to be generated by AI” into the text and massively shorten the piece, cutting out the quotes from “conservative commentators” who had also fallen for the fakes. But they keep the original timestamp, creating the impression that this is what they’d published from the start.
I mean, here’s the original opening:
And then the revised one with the inserted “apparently generated by AIs” added in:
The edited version is incoherent. The text still refers to “the same woman” making complaints—but there is no woman. She never existed. The entire premise evaporated, but they kept enough of the original scaffolding that sentences now reference people who don’t exist and events that never happened.
Fox News eventually added this “editor’s note” to the bottom:
Editor’s note: This article previously reported on some videos that appear to have been generated by AI without noting that. This has been corrected.
This “editor’s note” fundamentally misrepresents what happened. The article didn’t fail to “note” that videos were AI-generated. The article existed because Fox News believed the videos were real. The entire story was predicated on the false premise that actual SNAP recipients were making actual threats. When that premise collapsed, so did any justification for the story existing at all.
But here’s what makes this worse than a simple mistake: even if these had been real people, this would still be garbage journalism. Taking random social media posts and framing them as representative of an entire group — in this case, SNAP recipients — is a tactic that’s been used to demonize marginalized communities for years. Find the most outrageous-sounding person you can, amplify their voice, and present them as typical of everyone who shares their identity or circumstances. It’s nut-picking dressed up as trend reporting, and news organizations know better.
Fox News absolutely knows better. But when your business model depends on feeding your audience a steady diet of confirmation bias—particularly when the administration you’ve backed is facing criticism for illegally cutting benefits—the incentive structure points away from verification and toward amplification of anything that fits the narrative.
The real story here is that Fox News’ entire editorial model is designed to be fooled by exactly this kind of content. When you build a system optimized for finding stories that confirm your audience’s biases about marginalized groups, you create an infrastructure perfectly suited to amplify fabricated rage bait.
And when you get caught? Just memory-hole it with a stealth edit and move on to the next outrage. No real correction, no accountability, just a quiet rewrite that most readers will never notice.
It’s the institutional rot made visible: a news organization so committed to feeding confirmation bias that it can’t distinguish between real outrage and AI-generated fiction—and when the fiction is exposed, would rather gaslight its readers than admit the error, or to learn anything from it.
We’ve got another cross-post for you this week, and this time it’s also a live panel recording. Recently, Mike joined a panel at Boston University Questrom School of Business which was recorded for WBUR’s Is Business Broken? podcast, alongside professors Marshall Van Alstyne and Nadine Strossen, and moderated by host Curt Nickisch. The discussion is all about Section 230 specifically and the regulation of speech more broadly, and you can listen to the whole thing here on this week’s episode.
As BestNetTech stories attest, Wikipedia has been attacked in the past for publishing true information that somebody doesn’t like. As well as wanting articles to be censored, those behind such attacks often also demand the names of those who worked on the article. Something similar is now happening in India, where the Indian news agency Asian News International (ANI) has filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court, claiming to have been defamed in an article on Wikipedia, and seeking 20 million Indian Rupees (about US$240,000) in damages. The Wikipedia article on ANI explains the background:
At the time of the suit’s filing, the Wikipedia article about ANI said the news agency had, “been accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions”. The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing, “false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency’s reputation, and aimed to discredit its goodwill”.
On 5 September, the Court threatened to hold Wikimedia guilty of contempt for failing to disclose information about the editors who had made changes to the article and warned that Wikipedia might be blocked in India upon further non-compliance.
Buckling under the court’s pressure, Wikimedia agreed to submit data of the editors of ANI’s Wikipedia page to the High Court in a sealed cover. However, it proposed redacting personal details of these Wikipedians from public court records and serving notice in the case to them, to ensure confidentiality.
Wikimedia’s decision to share user information with the court may lead to users who edited the ANI page getting involved in the suit. This is a matter of concern for Wikipedia editors, who see this as an infringment of their freedom of speech. “Disclosure of the identities of contributors without an offence being established first will have a chilling effect on the community,” researcher, technologist and Wikipedian Rohini Lakshané explained to Scroll
There is a lively discussion about the case and its implications on the Wikipedia Community pages, a very detailed explanation of what has happened in a Wikipedia Signpost article, and a petition to the Wikimedia Foundation. The latter’s signees say that they are “profoundly concerned at the suggestion that the Foundation is considering disclosing identifying private information about volunteer editors to the Delhi High Court”, and they call upon the Foundation to “prioritize the safety and well being of volunteers, even if it comes with a risk of legal action against the Foundation, or other costs.” The petition concludes:
Any other action risks having a chilling effect on the work of volunteers across the project, and only makes it more likely that such pressure will be exerted in future. In short, it jeopardizes the future of our shared project.
That applies not just to the Wikipedia project in India, but elsewhere. Giving in to demands to reveal the identity of people working on articles in India is likely to embolden those in other countries who would like to make awkward facts disappear and to punish those who dare to reveal them.
For decades, academics have been trying to warn anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either “news deserts,” or local news that’s mostly just low-calorie puffery and simulacrum. Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” fixing local journalism just wasn’t profitable enough for the dipsy brunchlords that fail upward into positions of prominence at most media companies, so the internet… didn’t.
Those same academics will then tell you that the end result is an American populace that’s decidedly less informed and more divided, something that not only has a measurable impact on electoral outcomes, but paves the way for more state and local corruption (since fewer journalists are reporting on stuff like local city council meetings or local political decisions). It also opened the door to authoritarianism.
Every six months or so, a news report will emerge showing how all manner of political propagandists and bullshit artists have rushed to fill the vacuum created by longstanding policy failures and our refusal to competently fund local journalism at scale.
Of particular problem has been so-called “pink slime” newspapers, or fake local news papers built by local partisan operatives to seed misinformation and propaganda in the minds of poorly educated and already misinformed local voters.
Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University studied the phenomenon in 2022 and found that there were 1,200 bogus local news outlets around the country, all feeding gullible readers a steady diet of misleading bullshit (on top of the bullshit they already consume online).
And, as expected, the problem is accelerating as we head into another election season. The total of such fake newspapers has tripled since 2019, and now roughly equals the number of real journalism organizations in America. In many instances, these networks are better funded and better organized than real journalism orgs, which find themselves relentlessly under fire by those with wealth and power who’d prefer journalism simulacrum over hard-nosed reporting:
“Kathleen Carley, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said her research suggests that following the 2022 midterms “a lot more money” is being poured into pink slime sites, including advertising on Meta.
“A lot of these sites have had makeovers and look more realistic,” she said. “I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of that moving forward.”
Angry at the factual reality espoused by academia, science, and journalism, the ever-more-extremist U.S. right wing has engaged in a very successful 45+ year effort to undermine U.S. journalism, academia, and even libraries at every turn, and then replace them with a vast and highly successful propaganda and delusion network across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, and now the internet.
It’s a massive propaganda ecosystem that extends way beyond fake newspapers. It’s a self-contained participatory alternate reality where ideology is king and facts no longer matter. It’s everything academics spent decades warning us about. And, if you somehow hadn’t noticed in the Trump era, it’s working. Just ask your family members who think a NYC real estate conman is pious.
Democrats tend to be feckless and often incoherent when it comes to coherent and forceful counter-messaging to increasingly radical right wing propaganda. They also haven’t understood the severity of the problem, and have generally avoided having any kind of coherent media reform policies. If they respond to the problem, it will likely involve behavior that looks similar.
Meanwhile many in the academic and journalism industries still don’t seem to have the slightest awareness they’re under systemic, existential attack, often blaming the implosion on ambiguous but somehow always unavoidable market realities.
But the evidence is everywhere you look. Journalists are being fired by the thousands; folks with expertise are being replaced by incompetent brunchlords; and the ad-engagement based infotainment economy continues to shift from real reporting to controversy-churning, distraction-engagement bait.
But we do absolutely none of that because it’s simply not profitable enough. And in a country where mindlessly chasing wealth always takes top priority, you ultimately get what you pay for.
Censorship has always been the name of the game when governments push “fake news” laws. First of all, laws like these allow governments to decide which news is “fake” and which news is “credible.” Those pushing these laws claim they just want to ensure citizens aren’t misled. But, in reality, governments just want more options at their disposal to control the narrative.
Singapore has never been considered a free speech paradise. For that matter, it’s not really high on the list of human rights respecters, despite being a tourist destination. I mean, the country still enforces a death penalty for drug violations, which is even harsher than the punitive practices adopted by the United States, which has never met a Drug War it didn’t love fighting, even though it has yet to rack up a sustained win over the past several decades.
So, when Singapore decided it would get on board the “fake news” train, it was readily apparent the government simply wanted more control over what citizens said, as well as new surveillance powers that would help the government ensure more citizens said what the government wanted them to say.
One of the first deployments of the law confirmed these suspicions. Despite running its own counter-speech website (named “Factually” and I am not even kidding) that gave the government the power to deliver its version of the facts when faced with statements or reporting it didn’t like, it decided to pull the trigger on its “fake news” law to prosecute opposition party leader Brad Bowyer.
Bowyer’s criminal sin was suggesting (with evidence on hand) that the Singapore government had participated in some bad investments — problems that were partly due to the opacity surrounding government contract bidding, which the Singapore government felt its citizens shouldn’t be allowed to examine. Rather than simply use its “Factually” website to address the concerns raised by Bowyer, it also ordered him to post a “correction” of his own on top of his published allegations.
This is, of course, the exact thing laws like these are designed to do. And that’s why they should always be greeted with suspicion and open criticism the moment they’re proposed. (Waiting until the law is enacted to raise concerns just means your concerns will be considered a criminal act.)
This latest use of the “fake news” laws is a bit more unexpected. I wouldn’t exactly call this a show of good faith, but it is rather surprising that the law would be wielded against a close relation to someone in power. Here’s Hannah Fang with the details for Jurist:
The Ministry of Law of Singapore enforced the country’s fake news law Tuesday against Lee Hsien Yang, the younger brother of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, for a Facebook post regarding recent political scandals involving the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP). In the Facebook post published on July 23, Lee Hsien Yang claimed that “[t]rust in the PAP has been shattered,” referring to several recent incidents involving high-profile officials in the government and the PAP.
Under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), if the Singapore government deems certain online information false or misleading, it has the authority to compel the publisher to insert links to fact-checking statements, to censor the information and to invoke criminal charges. Following the POFMA order, Lee Hsien Yang issued a correction notice on his Facebook on Tuesday.
On one hand, going after the brother of a powerful political figure lets citizens know that no one is immune from the law. On the other hand, it shows a powerful political figure is willing to punish his own sibling because his sibling had the audacity to draw attention to apparent ongoing corruption that likely involves the prime minister himself.
And, according to this report, this targeting of a PM’s brother follows several recent deployments of the law to shut down comments and reporting about ongoing corruption investigations involving several government leaders, with those allegations ranging from misuse of power to secure favorable property rental agreements to engaging in extramarital affairs with other government employees.
What none of this indicates — even given this somewhat surprising use of the law — is that the law’s existence is justified. If the government wants to avoid being implicated in corruption probes, perhaps government employees should stop engaging in acts that resemble corruption. At the very least, they should try to keep it in their pants while on the clock. And if a PM targets a family member, it doesn’t mean the law is good and being deployed honestly. It just means a PM can’t even handle being criticized publicly by the people closest to him. And that’s definitely a problem that can only be made worse by “fake news” legislation.
For decades, academics have been trying to warn anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters has created either “news deserts,” or local news reporting that’s mostly just low-calorie puffery and simulacrum. Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” fixing local news just wasn’t profitable enough, so the internet… didn’t.
Those same academics will then tell you that the end result is an American populace that’s decidedly less informed and more divided, something that not only has a measurable impact on electoral outcomes, but paves the way for more state and local corruption (since fewer journalists are reporting on stuff like local city council meetings or local political decisions).
But that’s just the start of the problem. Every six months or so, a news report will emerge showing how all manner of political propagandists and bullshit artists have rushed to fill the vacuum created by longstanding policy failures and our refusal to competently fund local journalism at scale.
These reports have repeated noted that increasingly, what uninformed Americans think is local news is actually just political or corporate propaganda. It’s something the original Deadspin highlighted in that popular Sinclair Broadcasting video a few years back:
More recently, outlets like the Washington Post and NPR have documented how political operatives are increasingly creating free, fake “pink slime” local newspapers that look like the kind of newspapers and local news websites locals are used to, but are just propaganda designed to mislead and misinform, usually to the benefit of a local politician or company.
While some Democratic politicians have embraced the tactic, researchers say the overwhelming majority of the efforts are the product of Republican operatives who’ve increasingly embraced conspiracy theories and propaganda to try and counter unfavorably shifting electoral demographics:
[Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University] notes the difference in scale. She counts 64 such pro-Democratic newspapers and news sites. That’s equal to about 5% of the right-wing publications she has been monitoring.
Last week the Washington Post profiled how top Republican political campaigns in Illinois used a private online portal last year to directly shape coverage and request favorable stories and op-eds via a large network of “media outlets” that present themselves as local newspapers, but, well, aren’t:
Screenshots show that the password-protected portal, called Lumen, allowed users to pitch stories; provide interview subjects as well as questions; place announcements and submit op-eds to be “published verbatim” in any of about 30 sites that form part of the Illinois-focused media network, called Local Government Information Services.
The portal was created by a man the Post says pretends to be helping to fix local news, but, well, isn’t:
The network is run by Brian Timpone, a businessman and former television broadcaster who told federal regulators in 2016 that his publishing company was filling the void left by the decline of community news, “delivering hundreds and sometimes thousands of local news stories each week.” He did not respond to requests for comment.
While the portal was widely used by Republicans in the state to influence voters, the Post says that Democratic politicians weren’t invited and didn’t even know of the portal’s existence. The end result, again, is a flood of websites (and sometimes actual, physical papers passed around for free) designed to look like local news, despite being anything but:
The typical homepage of a Local Government Information Services website looks like an ordinary local publication. Headlines about college Republicans appear alongside notices of spring wine walks. The sites have titles like Prairie State Wire, Peoria Standard and West Cook News.
The Post notes that since its founding in 2016, Local Government Information Services has more than doubled its total number of sites, and has been in recent conversations with the Trump campaign. How effective these fake paper efforts are may not be measurable, but in conjunction with existing propaganda wings of the GOP (AM radio, Fox, OANN, Newsmax, Daily Caller, popular far right influencers), it seems naïve to think the impact on voting, polling, and opinion isn’t meaningful.
Given the increasingly radical and unpopular nature of modern GOP policies (see: the erosion of child labor protections, the assault on abortion, the steady assault on environmental protections, the slow but steady dismantling of effectively all competent corporate oversight, tax cuts for billionaires), they’ve increasingly focused attention on gerrymandering, eroding voting rights, and propaganda.
AI tech like ChatGPT will, of course, likely make this kind of propaganda easier and cheaper to produce at scale, whether we’re talking about creating fake news or flooding regulators with fake public support for unpopular policies. And of course there’s nothing really stopping Democrats from ramping up their own propaganda; encouraging a disinformation arms race.
For years, companies have been offering questionable services to downrank and bury information their customers don’t want surfacing during Google searches. And for years, these tactics have routinely involved abuse of copyright law, forged/faked court orders, and the filing of bogus lawsuits in hopes of securing default judgments from inattentive judges.
This is more of the same. Documents leaked to Forbidden Stories and shared with the Washington Post have uncovered the unsavory tactics (and even more unsavory customers) of Eliminalia, a Spain-based reputation management company with one hell of an origin story. This is from the Washington Post’s extensive report on the leaked documents, which details how Eliminalia founder Diego “Didac” Sanchez came to believe this company must exist:
When he was 12, he accused a local businessman of molesting him multiple times. The man was convicted of sexual abuse in a highly publicized trial and was imprisoned in 2007.
Years later, as a teenager, Sánchez publicly recanted his story, saying he had made it up. A panel of judges declined to overturn the conviction, however, citing additional evidence in the case, court records show.
Sánchez got news accounts of the abuse allegations removed from the internet, he wrote in the autobiography. He did not say how he did it, or what specifically was removed, but he wrote that he recognized a business opportunity.
Nothing in the documents suggests Sanchez decided to go into an extortion-like business by drumming up nasty allegations and making victims pay to have them removed from the internet. But that set of paragraphs sure seems to suggest it might have been a viable option.
Eliminalia does not seem to engage in any overt criminal activities. Instead, it appears to engage in a bunch of dishonest tactics. These tactics include creating fake sites to host (and backdate) copied content so the original could be targeted with bogus copyright claims. Here’s how this tactic works, as described in the Forbidden Stories article, which details interactions between a targeted publisher of critical journalism (Mexican reporter Daniel Sanchez) and the bogus persona concocted by Eliminalia (Humberto Herrera Rincon Gallardo) to get the content removed.
In January 2020, Gallardo filed a claim with Digital Ocean, Pagina 66’s US-based hosting provider, alleging that Sánchez had copied his content illegally. As proof, Gallardo linked to a third-party site that had published a replica of Sánchez’s piece, but with a falsified earlier publish date and fake author: Humberto Herrera Rincón Gallardo.
This time, the strategy worked. Digital Ocean ordered Sánchez to remove his article from Página 66’s site, or it would go black.
That was the tactic Eliminalia chose to go with after impersonating the EU Commission with a bogus takedown letter claiming GDPR violations: committing apparent perjury by faking up a copyright complaint.
Eliminalia also creates bogus news sites by the dozens, flooding the internet with low-value posts supposedly written by people who want worse content written about them buried.
Researchers from Qurium linked the 600 fake news websites to Eliminalia’s parent company, Maidan Holding, according to Tord Lundstrom, Qurium’s technical director. The websites’ IP addresses — each a string of numbers identifying where a site is hosted — are clustered together sequentially, Lundstrom said, and registration data from the websites’ hosting providers show that the IP addresses were assigned to Maidan.
The fake news sites contain real news copied from legitimate media organizations, and many have names that are similar to real outlets — the London New Times, CNNEWS Today and Le Monde France. But tucked amid those headlines are at least 3,800 articles that prominently feature the names of customers identified in the Eliminalia records…
So, the sort of stuff we’ve seen before, only on a much more massive and, apparently, lucrative scale. But given the company’s origins — a man trying to right a wrong he’d caused by wiping the internet of his false molestation accusation — Eliminalia seems more than willing to help far less altruistic people cover up evidence of their wrongdoing.
Its U.S. clients included a popular reality-TV personality publicly accused of sexual misconduct and a California biotech entrepreneur who had been convicted of financial fraud and is now fighting charges he hired a hit man to kill a business associate. The leader of a major religious charity in Chicago that faced criticism over its executives’ salaries also turned to Eliminalia, the records show.
Eliminalia did work for an Italian spyware company that had been fined for selling surveillance technology to Syria’s autocratic regime, and for a Swiss bank that had drawn public scrutiny over Venezuelan clients who were suspected of money laundering. It also worked on behalf of a well-known traveling circus clown who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Switzerland.
Here’s more, from Forbidden Stories’ reporting:
Forbidden Stories identified Eliminalia clients in 50 countries across five continents. The leak of around 1,500 current and former clients includes details of Eliminalia’s business dealings with a medical doctor who reportedly operated a torture center during Chile’s dictatorship and was found guilty of homicide; former bank officials at Banca Privada d’Andorra, accused of money laundering for corrupt Venezuelan officials; and a Brazilian businessman implicated in a global prostitution network, among others.
And now that this has been exposed by the documents and the great reporting at both of the above-mentioned sites, Eliminalia is attempting a disappearing act of its own. Reporters visiting its Barcelona office were informed it was now a company called “Idata Protection,” a (you guessed it) data protection service in no way affiliated with the work performed by the entity that owns it, Eliminalia. Its founder was also nowhere to be found.
Ugly tactics and even uglier customers. That’s not surprising. The entities that tend to seek out reputation management help are those that have destroyed theirs by being awful. For a little while, dodgy takedowns and black hat tactics actually get the job done. Sooner or later, though, it almost always seems to fall apart. But just as much as disintegration is inevitable, so is the rise of another company just as awful to take its place.
While traditional local papers deserve no shortage of blame for their failure to adapt, media scholars have long pointed out that media consolidation paved the way for a lot of the problems we’re seeing today. The end result of consolidation was the gradual elbowing out of small local news outfits, leaving the sector peppered with propaganda mills like Sinclair Broadcasting, or hollowed out, hedge fund run papers.
A lack of local, quality news has created a vacuum that’s increasingly been filled by political propagandists. Said propagandists have increasingly created “pink slime” news outlets that look like local news, but exist exclusively to spread bullshit and political propaganda.
And once again, they’re highly active ahead of the midterm elections. A new report by NPR documented how residents around the country have been receiving fake newspapers from fake news outlets, filling their heads with fake election misinformation:
Schoenburg first noticed these papers several election cycles ago, born out of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, which crusaded against greater taxation and regulation. Since then, they have spread across the state, presenting themselves as down-home newspapers in multiple communities with names that hark back to times before people relied on social media to find out out about developments in their communities.
NPR tried to contact story authors at the “papers,” and couldn’t find a single real person. Pri Bengani, a senior researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University (she just wrote a full report that’s worth a read), told NPR that she had counted more than 1,200 bogus local news outlets around the country, all feeding gullible readers a steady diet of misleading bullshit (on top of the bullshit they already consume online).
Researchers have already measured how the death of local news at the hands of consolidation has left Americans less informed and more divided than ever. Nobody has genuinely measured the impact of filling that void with political propaganda. While NPR found that about 5% of these fake news outlets were coming from Democrats, the rest were forged by a broad, right-wing coalition:
She documented instances in which the sites and the larger network provided advertising, SMS messages, robocalls and websites as well as consulting and production costs. Timpone is not the only key figure in the system. Bengani also found links to a huge Texas PAC and a major Republican donor who is an oil-and gas-billionaire. In Texas, articles blamed wind power for the failure of the electrical grid there last year. (That has been discredited by multiple mainstream news outlets.)
Republicans actively opposed financing the press, actively opposed media consolidation restrictions, and have waged a concerted, 45-year effort to build an alternative reality propaganda empire designed to trick Americans into supporting policies that routinely operate against their best interests. Not only that, they managed to get most of the remaining press to act as if this isn’t happening.
Fixing a problem like this requires a multi-tendriled approach we show no interest in adopting. We need more creative funding for journalism untethering it from industry influence and ads. We need better education standards. We need tougher media consolidation guidelines. We need campaign finance reform. We need voting reform. We need a press that can call out right wing propaganda for what it is, instead of hiding between nebulous “bothsideism.” We’re doing… none of that.
Instead, what we mostly get is a lot of hyperventilation about “disinformation,” followed by lengthy conversations about what’s not possible courtesy of the First Amendment. There the problem sits like a giant turd nobody wants to touch. The NPR piece, for example, presents the problem in great detail — then offers not a single coherent vision for how we can do absolutely anything about it.
