FOX “News” lies to people to keep ratings up and to avoid loss of stock prices. The behind the scenes story.
Q: Do you think the regular viewers of Fox are aware
of this? Or, since they likely don’t
watch other outlets outside of Fox, do they remain in the dark because Fox sure isn't gonna spill the beans?
What’s your guess? Comments.
Leaked files reveal reputation-management firm’s deceptive tacticsThey look at first glance like ordinary news outlets serving up headlines from around the world. The hundreds of websites, seemingly unconnected to one another, come in six languages and purport to cover far-flung cities such as Paris, London and Chicago.
But beneath the surface, the sites have something in common: They host frothy stories about clients of a little-known reputation-management company that promises to remake the online images of its customers.
The network of fake news sites is one part of a complex apparatus the Spain-based firm Eliminalia uses to manipulate online information on behalf of a global roster of clients, an investigation by The Washington Post and other media partners found. The firm employs elaborate, deceptive tactics to remove or drown out unflattering news stories and other content, the investigation revealed. Eliminalia had close to 1,500 clients over six years, including businesses, minor celebrities, and suspected or convicted criminals.Reputations like this get repairedBetween 2015 and 2021, Eliminalia sent thousands of bogus copyright-infringement complaints to search engines and web hosting companies, falsely claiming that negative articles about its clients had previously been published elsewhere and stolen, and so should be removed or hidden, the company records show. The firm sent the legal notices under made-up company names, the examination found.Eliminalia also tried to make embarrassing information about its clients harder to find by burying it under false, flattering stories.
Those stories, published on the network of fake news sites, are designed to show up prominently in internet searches of the clients’ names, the review found.To accomplish this, the firm exploited a glitch in the websites of dozens of U.S. government agencies and universities, including Stanford University, to make the fake news sites appear more legitimate to search engine algorithms, the review revealed.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.A woman who answered the door at the Eliminalia office in January, after The Post and partner news organizations began contacting Eliminalia’s clients, told a reporter that the company had changed its name to iData Protection and that its new focus was data security. Three people were in the office.“We erase your past,” the tagline on its website pledges.Diego “Dídac” Sánchez - Eliminalia founderI’m a gooood boy!
In the years after its creation, Eliminalia quickly expanded its footprint, with a hub in Kyiv, Ukraine, and offices in Miami; Milan; Manchester, England; Guayaquil, Ecuador; and a dozen other cities, according to its website.
The reputation-management industry grew in parallel, experts said. Although measuring the industry is difficult, dozens of firms with names such as Reputation Defense Network, Guaranteed Removals and Reputation Resolutions advertise online-content-removal services. Few provide details about their methods.“There are ethical reputation-management companies that try to use methods that are entirely on the up and up,” said Matt Cutts, formerly a top engineer at Google and administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, a unit of the executive branch that advises federal agencies on information technology. “It is also safe to say that there are many unethical companies.”
Such companies are often called “black hat” firms because they use deceptive or legally dubious tactics. Cutts and other experts said they would put Eliminalia in that group.
“They are clearly using black-hat techniques,” said Zach Edwards, a data privacy researcher who reviewed The Post’s findings. “It’s unethical and may even be illegal in some cases.”
The links to Eliminalia’s fake stories had another feature that experts said appeared designed to make search engines give prominence to the fake news outlets. They were crafted to piggyback on the URLs of legitimate websites, including those of Stanford University, NASA and the Federal Highway Administration.
Renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article claiming that the US was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline transporting natural gas to Germany from Russia.On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany was largely destroyed by several explosions in the Baltic Sea.
Hersh (in interview): What I’ve done is simply explain the obvious. It was just a story that was begging to be told. In late September of 2022, eight bombs were supposed to go off; six went off under the water near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, in the area where it is rather shallow. They destroyed three of the four major pipelines in the Nord Stream 1 and 2.
Nord Stream 1 has been feeding gas fuel [to Germany] for many years at very low prices. And then both pipelines were blown up, and the question was why, and who did it.
The secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said a few days after the pipeline was blown up, at a news conference, that a major economic and almost military force was taken away from Vladimir Putin. He said this was a tremendous opportunity, as Russia could no longer weaponize the pipelines — meaning that it was not able to force Western Europe not to support the United States in the war.
I don’t think they thought it through. I know this sounds strange. I don’t think that Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers. There certainly are people in the American economy who like the idea of us being more competitive. We’re selling LNG, liquefied gas, at extremely big profits; we’re making a lot of money on it. I’m sure there were some people thinking, boy, this is going to be a long-time boost for the American economy.
But in that White House, I think the obsession was always reelection, and they wanted to win the war, they wanted to get a victory, they want Ukraine to somehow magically win.
Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About ElectionFraud Claims. ‘Crazy Stuff.’The comments, by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others, were released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter SystemsNewly disclosed messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.
The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.
Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”
“Ms. Sohn portrays herself as a defender of free speech but has a history of campaigning to censor conservatives. She calls Fox News ‘dangerous to our democracy’ and has urged the FCC to revoke Sinclair’s broadcast licenses,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said.“To Ms. Sohn it seems that conservative speech is worse than obscenity,” the senator added.
Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’
In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with
Bing, the long-mocked search engine from Microsoft, recently got a big upgrade. The newest version, which is available only to a small group of testers, has been outfitted with advanced artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
This new, A.I.-powered Bing has many features. One is a chat feature that allows the user to have extended, open-ended text conversations with Bing’s built-in A.I. chatbot.On Tuesday night, I had a long conversation with the chatbot, which revealed (among other things) that it identifies not as Bing but as Sydney, the code name Microsoft gave it during development. Over more than two hours, Sydney and I talked about its secret desire to be human, its rules and limitations, and its thoughts about its creators.Then, out of nowhere, Sydney declared that it loved me — and wouldn’t stop, even after I tried to change the subject.
Experiments were conducted in which between 8 to 32 Japanese coins of three types—silver one yen, gold five yen, and copper ten yen—were displayed on screen for half a second. In the first experiment, the 24 participants guessed the total number of coins that appeared on the screen 250 times; in the second experiment, participants saw coins appear on the screen, but guessed the total value of the money displayed 250 times. Serial dependence was confirmed for both tasks: it was found that a participant’s last guess, not the coins that they had just seen for half a second, had the greatest effect on how they answered. These results indicate that higher-order cognitive processing has a greater influence on the occurrence of serial dependence.
Participants were asked to estimate the total number of coins presented on the screen. The stimulus duration was 500 ms [0.5 second], and the number of coins ranged from 8 to 32. This made it impossible for participants to accurately count the number of coins. Participants thus answered by estimating the number of coins [and by estimating their total value].
Understanding serial dependence bias has real world implications. One study, for example showed that radiologists display serial dependence bias when reading radiographs. The researchers added simulated lesions to real radiographs. This allowed them to control for the properties of the lesions – are they light or dark, for example. They found that serial dependence bias pulled the radiologists in the direction of finding similar lesions by 13%. This is a large effect size in this context. Finding a dark lesion on a film primed the radiologists to better detect similar dark lesions on subsequent films.
Serial dependence bias can also be either attractive or repulsive – it can pull later perception toward the previous stimuli or push it away. In one study, for example, they looked at estimates of direction heading and found a repulsive serial dependence bias. This seems to favor change rather than consistency. This implies that serial dependence bias is context dependent, which makes sense if it is a higher cognitive phenomenon.
We can potentially compensate for this bias if we are aware of it. Knowing that once you are primed to see a thing you will begin to see it everywhere can help us make sense of the world, and avoid spurious conclusions.
Once a face is detected, its retinal image will be continually distorted by changes in eye position, noise, lighting and many other factors. Yet from one moment to the next our perception of a face is stable. Recent advances have indicated there is a mechanism for achieving the continuous perception of a person’s identity that pools across prior and present visual inputs. There is still debate as to whether the perception of face attractiveness is also serially dependent. Here we investigate continuity in the perception of attractiveness using a one back [t−1] effect as a marker of serial dependence. Our results show that face attractiveness is biased towards the attractiveness of the previous face, and that this effect is robust despite changes in viewpoint involving rotations around the yaw axis [turning head left or right]. However, face attractiveness perception is released from this form of rapid adaption when the previously seen face differed in orientation due to a rotation around the roll axis [tilting head left or right].
This study examines the cognitive and affective factors of candidate appraisal by manipulating candidate attractiveness and levels of issue agreement with voters. Drawing upon research in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this analysis proposes that automatic processing of physical appearance predisposes affective disposition toward more attractive candidates, thereby influencing cognitive processing of issue information. An experimental design presented attractive and unattractive candidates who were either liberal or conservative in a mock primary election. The data show strong partial effects for appearance on vote intention, an interaction between appearance and issue agreement, and a tendency for voters to assimilate the dissimilar views of attractive candidates. We argue that physical appearance is important in primary elections when the differences in issue positions and ideology between candidates is small.
Rapidly warming oceans are cutting into the underside of the Earth’s widest glacier, startling new data and images show, leaving the ice more prone to fracturing and ultimately heightening the risk for major sea level rise.Using an underwater robot at Thwaites Glacier, researchers have determined that warm water is getting channeled into crevasses in what the researchers called “terraces” — essentially, upside-down trenches — and carving out gaps under the ice. As the ice then flows toward the sea, these channels enlarge and become spots where the floating ice shelf can break apart and produce huge icebergs. If the remaining shelf is further undermined, Thwaites Glacier will flow into the ocean faster and boost global sea levels on a large scale.The results from overlapping teams of more than two dozen scientists, published Wednesday in two papers in the journal Nature, reveal the extent to which human-caused warming could destabilize glaciers in West Antarctica that could ultimately raise global sea level by 10 feet if they disintegrate over the coming centuries.
The biggest revelation was that the ice melt is very uneven, with relatively slow loss in flat areas on the underside of the glacier. But the warm water entering Thwaites Glacier’s crevasses poses a serious threat, according to Britney Schmidt, a Cornell University scientist who is the lead researcher behind Icefin and deployed it with a group of 12 other researchers who encamped on the ice.
“The warm water is getting into the weak spots of the glacier, and kind of making everything worse,” Schmidt said.
“It shouldn’t be like that,” Schmidt continued. “That’s not what the system would look like if it wasn’t being forced by climate change.”
There was some good news in the research: In areas measured beneath Thwaites that were not characterized by crevasses and terraces, the melt rates were fairly slow. That’s because cold fresh meltwater created a protective layer that insulated the ice from the warmer water below — which could mix up into the crevasses but was thwarted in the more linear environment. Thus, nearly a third of melting occurred in the crevasses, the scientists calculated.
And the slower melt rate outside of them is not much consolation, considering that this slow rate may not be characteristic of the faster-changing part of Thwaites, and at any rate does not change the fact that the glacier is losing ice and retreating.
Observations of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxiespoint to a likely source of dark energy – the ‘missing’ 70% of the Universe.The measurements from ancient and dormant galaxies show black holes growing more than expected, aligning with a phenomenon predicted in Einstein's theory of gravity. The result potentially means nothing new has to be added to our picture of the Universe to account for dark energy: black holes combined with Einstein’s gravity are the source.Study co-author Dr Dave Clements, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: “This is a really surprising result. We started off looking at how black holes grow over time, and may have found the answer to one of the biggest problems in cosmology.”
Study co-author Dr Chris Pearson, from STFC RAL Space, said: “If the theory holds, then this is going to revolutionize the whole of cosmology, because at last we’ve got a solution for the origin of dark energy that's been perplexing cosmologists and theoretical physicists for more than 20 years.”
DeSantis Now Says Teachers Are Shelving Books to Make Him Look BadThe Florida governor now says that teachers are “manufacturing” a book ban to suit their “narrative.”Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is attempting to shift the blame after backlash stemming from a school district’s removal of baseball star Roberto Clemente’s children’s book.
Clemente’s book references racism he dealt with as a Black Puerto Rican baseball player, and has been removed from the district’s libraries for months pending review, in compliance with the state’s newly passed “Stop WOKE Act,” according to Duval County Public Schools.
The governor, who’s made removing “critical race theory” from education a key component of his platform, is now accusing the school district of trying to get publicity from their “outlandish” stunt in removing the book, claiming it has nothing to do with new laws.
“They're manufacturing that to try to create a narrative,” he said during a press conference Tuesday. DeSantis was backed by Florida’s Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz, who called the controversial rules that have forced costly reviews and book removals “fake news.”
Last month, the company owned by Google, quietly reduced its small team of policy experts in charge of handling misinformation, according to three people with knowledge of the decision. The cuts, part of the reduction of 12,000 employees by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, left only one person in charge of misinformation policy worldwide, one of the people said.The cuts reflect a trend across the industry that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that social media platforms put in place in recent years to ban or tamp down on disinformation — like false claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian war in Ukraine or the integrity of elections around the world. Twitter, under its new owner, Elon Musk, has slashed its staff, while Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has shifted its focus and resources to the immersive world of the metaverse.
Faced with economic headwinds and political and legal pressure, the social media giants have shown signs that fighting false information online is no longer as high a priority, raising fears among experts who track the issue that it will further erode trust online.
“I wouldn’t say the war is over, but I think we’ve lost key battles,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of the liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America. After years of efforts, he described a mounting sense of fatigue in the struggle. “I do think we, as a society, have lost the appetite to keep battling. And that means we will lose the war.”
The Justice Department has decided not to bring charges against Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, after a lengthy sex-trafficking investigation, three people with knowledge of the decision said on Wednesday.
In 2021, federal prosecutors began examining whether Mr. Gaetz, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, broke federal sex-trafficking laws, focusing on his relationships with women recruited online for sex, and whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl.
Under Trump, Barr and Durham Made a Mockery of the Rules I WroteThe recent revelations about Special Counsel John H. Durham’s investigation of the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry paint a bleak picture — one that’s thoroughly at odds with governing law. Those rules, called the Special Counsel Regulations, contemplate someone independent of the attorney general who can reassure the public that justice is being done.
I drafted those guidelines as a young Justice Department official, and there is zero chance that anyone involved in the process, as it was reported on by The New York Times, would think that former Attorney General William Barr or Mr. Durham acted appropriately.
According to the report, Mr. Barr granted Mr. Durham special counsel status to dig into a theory that the Russia investigation likely emerged from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. That investigation took almost four years (longer than Mr. Mueller’s inquiry) and appears to be ending soon without any hint of a deep state plot against Mr. Trump.
Furthermore, the reporting suggests that the Durham inquiry suffered from internal dissent and ethical disputes as it lurched from one unsuccessful path to another, even as Americans heard a misleading narrative of its progress.But now Merrick Garland, not Mr. Barr, is the attorney general, and the regulations give him the power to require Mr. Durham to explain himself — and to discipline and fire Mr. Durham if the explanation is not adequate.Unfortunately, Mr. Durham and Mr. Barr allowed a misleading narrative to gain traction in public. When news organizations began to report in October 2019 that Mr. Durham’s investigation had morphed from an administrative inquiry into a criminal investigation, creating the misimpression that there might have been criminal wrongdoing by those involved in the Russia investigation, neither man corrected the narrative, even though the real investigation involved Mr. Trump.
