Disinformation

[PizzaSnake]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/worl ... media.html

"The scheme appears to be part of a secretive industry that security analysts and American officials say is exploding in scale: disinformation for hire."

"Private firms, straddling traditional marketing and the shadow world of geopolitical influence operations, are selling services once conducted principally by intelligence agencies.

They sow discord, meddle in elections, seed false narratives and push viral conspiracies, mostly on social media. And they offer clients something precious: deniability."

[youthathletics]

Is their way of covering their tracks on the entire Trump Presidency?

[Typical Lax Dad]

Is their way of covering their tracks on the entire Trump Presidency?

Target audience.

[PizzaSnake]

Litmus test: which narrative is closer to truth - Republican or Democrat?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/31/us/p ... elosi.html

[Farfromgeneva]

I recall in b school early mid 2000s meeting (interviewing) with a fairly deeply connected and powerful “corporate competitive intelligence advisory firm” in the DC area. It seemed tantamount to corporate and political espionage but barely in the legal side of the line. I’d presume this is an extension of that type of business with the advent of mass immediate communication.

Then you have guerilla marketing. Problem in society (or one of many) IMO is there is far less interest in winning “heads up I’ll tell you the goddamn play we’re going to run and we’re going to outexecute you” style as it’s cleaner and creates far longer term advantages than crediting ones own sub environment/sub market/sub economy that can be controlled and dominated without having to openly compete. It’s an ethos problem. Perhaps everyone ought to go read Weber’s Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism again mixed with a does of phenomenology and emergent force Hayekian economics? My largest concern today, even though we’ve never practiced anything close to Platonic caveman ideal of capitalism or democracy per se, is that we seem to be heading towards all binary outcomes vs a broad array/spectrum type or environment. Makes me wonder if our cognitive and dilaiectic biases skew against being able to think in a totally holistic or non linear manner.

[youthathletics]

Voting disinformation. As one commenter noted, does not seem like this d-representative of Texas, knows much about texas.

[youthathletics]

What would you name the players?

I’ll start:
Saul- the deep state
Witness - the media
Judge - POTUS
Real Criminal - politicians
Stand In Criminal - we the people

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C731Lggp ... BldGIyd2g1

[LaxFan2311]

The experts told us Joe was fine.
The experts told us to take the vax.
The experts told us the laptop was fake.
The experts told us the border is secure.
The experts told us inflation is transitory.
The experts told us 2020 was the MOST legitimate and secure election in history.

Democrats lie constantly

[runrussellrun]

The experts told us Joe was fine. experts? Like that hottie WH press person? experts
The experts told us to take the vax. That was TRUMP
The experts told us the laptop was fake. you think it really would have mattered in the election ?
The experts told us the border is secure.
The experts told us inflation is transitory.
The experts told us 2020 was the MOST legitimate and secure election in history.

Democrats lie constantly Yes, only them.

https://rumble.com/v4tme50-unsafe-and-i ... ntary.html

[OuttaNowhereWregget]

And some wonder why the liberal media (but I repeat myself) have such a bad reputation--pedaling this pathetic palaver. Cringeworthy.


"President Biden has many adversaries in this year’s election. There are his Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, and the independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And then there is the distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.

In the last two weeks, conservative news outlets, the Republican National Committee and the Trump team have circulated videos of Mr. Biden that lacked important context and twisted mundane moments to paint him in an unflattering light. Among other things, they created the impression that the president:

Wandered off during a meeting with other Group of 7 leaders, an image that The New York Post ran on its front page (he was greeting paratroopers)

Was escorted out of an event by his wife, Jill Biden, while President Emmanuel Macron of France stayed behind to greet veterans (a longer video showed Mr. Biden greeting veterans before his exit and then walking out with Dr. Biden)

Struggled to sit down at a D-Day commemoration ceremony (after seemingly hesitating for an uncomfortable few seconds, he eventually took a seat when the next speaker was announced, as did others), an image that spawned wild and false claims. It also generated approximately 12,000 mentions across social media platforms — an unusual level of attention — and 372 English-language articles, according to Chiara Vercellone, a senior staff analyst for NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation

A New York Times review of these videos found that some scenes were cut short and taken out of context, while other clips were cropped in a way that omitted crucial details when compared with additional footage.

Campaigns and political groups have long disseminated damaging videos of their opponents, sometimes misleadingly edited ones.

But the flurry of clips released this month is a fresh reminder of the steep, multifront and evolving challenge that Mr. Biden, 81, faces in convincing voters that he is spry enough to serve another term. As polls show a close race, many Americans harbor doubts about his fitness — and selectively sliced snippets from his routine public appearances are fueling those worries and sending conspiracy theories spiraling across social media.

“They’ll go around the world twice before the truth can even wake up, and in many cases people never hear what the truth is,” said former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a rare Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s who is supporting Mr. Biden. “If you see those and that’s all you see, you’re going to walk away thinking there’s something wrong, like something’s going on, because you haven’t seen the truth and the correction, so yeah, I do think it’s damaging.”

Driven by clips of Mr. Biden’s appearances at high-profile events commemorating Juneteenth and D-Day, posts on the social media platform X concerning his age and mental competence surged nearly 2,000 percent over the last two weeks compared with average activity, according to data from the firm PeakMetrics.

Some of the videos of Mr. Biden circulating during this year’s campaign are clearly manipulated to make him look old and confused. Others cut out vital context to portray him in a negative light, a process sometimes known as a “cheap fake” because it requires little expense or technological skill to create.

And some are simply brief, unedited clips of an octogenarian president who is an uneven public speaker prone to verbal miscues, who shuffles at times (his doctor has said he has a “stiffened gait,” partly because of arthritis) and who is otherwise showing signs of his age, his greatest and most persistent political liability.

The videos that are misleadingly cropped “follow a formula,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, the dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

“They are low-cost and super easy to produce by clipping a video or narrowing the frame to eliminate or change the context, no fancy tech or A.I. needed,” he said. “Biden’s actual visuals, especially his physical unsteadiness and measured and stiff gait in a cropped frame, make the cheap fakes easier to produce and distribute rapidly. No question, we’ll see this spike.”

A Marquette Law School poll released last month found that 79 percent of voters saw Mr. Biden as too old to be president, while 54 percent said the same about Mr. Trump. At 78 years old, the former president has had many of his own verbal stumbles, alongside his extensive record of promoting conspiracy theories and lies.

Charles Franklin, the director of that poll, said the video clips fed a public perception that Mr. Biden was too old.

“People that already are concerned about his age are quick to accept what they see in the video, and not question whether that’s selectively edited,” Mr. Franklin said. “But seeing image after image of him, or video after video of him, over the last few years, also boosts the perception that he’s too old.”

Mr. Biden has long been the subject of deceptive videos, including during his successful 2020 race.

But as he struggles with weak job approval nearly four months before Election Day, there are signs that years of damaging clips — however misleading many of them are — pose a real political risk."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/us/p ... ideos.html

=================================

Thankfully--some at the NYT can still interpret properly what they see. From columnist Maureen Dowd:

Maureen Dowd Compares Biden to Trump in Absolutely Scathing Op-Ed Calling For Him to Step Down
Jun 29th, 2024

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd compared President Joe Biden to Donald Trump in a scathing op-ed Saturday over his not stepping back from the Democratic ticket in November.

Following Thursday’s CNN debate, Democrats privately and publicly have urged Biden to step back from his candidacy to allow a replacement to be selected to run against the presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump. Biden has ignored calls to pull out of the race and vowed to continue running against Trump during a recent speech.

Dowd’s article “The Ghastly vs. the Ghostly” likened the two candidates by claiming Biden’s “hubris is infuriating” and that he’s only running for the Oval Office “for himself.”

“He’s being selfish. He’s putting himself ahead of the country. He’s surrounded by opportunistic enablers,” Dowd wrote. “He has created a reality distortion field where we’re told not to believe what we’ve plainly seen. His hubris is infuriating. He says he’s doing this for us, but he’s really doing it for himself.”

“I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about the other president,” she wrote.

“In his misguided quest for a second term that would end when he’s 86, he has succumbed to behavior redolent of Trump,” she said. And he is jeopardizing the democracy he says he wants to save.”

Throughout the piece, Dowd emphasized her point that Biden “has clearly been declining for the last couple of years” but that his desire “to prove he could be a better president than the one who sidelined him” has fueled him.

Dowd concluded that his debate performance was not just “an off night.”

“Biden looked ghostly, with that trepidatious gait; he couldn’t remember his rehearsed lines or numbers. He has age-related issues, and those go in only one direction,” she said. “It was heart-wrenching to watch the president’s childhood stammer return.”

“His wife and staff will build their protective wall ever higher and shoo away reporters, pressing on the age spiral, ever more vigorously,” Dowd wrote. “But Biden, Jill and Democratic leaders have to face the fact that this is an extraordinarily risky bet, with — as they drum into us — democracy on the line.”

https://www.mediaite.com/media/maureen- ... step-down/

[njbill]

Yeah, we get it. You don’t like Biden. So don’t vote for him. You have posted the same thing multiple times now. Don’t you have anything else?

[JoeMauer89]

Yeah, we get it. You don’t like Biden. So don’t vote for him. You have posted the same thing multiple times now. Don’t you have anything else?

Cmon njbill,

You are accusing him of doing what you do on a daily basis, just for the other candidate. It's the SAME concept.

Joe

[njbill]

Nope. I don’t post articles.

[NattyBohChamps04]

Yeah, we get it. You don’t like Biden. So don’t vote for him. You have posted the same thing multiple times now. Don’t you have anything else?

Cmon njbill,

You are accusing him of doing what you do on a daily basis, just for the other candidate. It's the SAME concept.

Joe

Except it's not about the candidate, as njbill said. ONW is posting nearly the same stuff on multiple threads. Duplicate stuff. And a lot of it not on topic to the thread. Rather just to voice his opinion that he hates Biden. It's funny because you usually scold people for their blind hatred of one person and they should be more open minded in what the other side thinks. njbill doesn't really do the duplicate posting stuff, clogging up and derailing the ongoing discussions.

As far as the duplicate stuff, for instance you'll notice ONW brings up Israel a ton in a half dozen threads - 2024, Biden/Harris Era, France, Is America Racist, the Trump thread, Jihad Thread, and more. Most of it isn't especially on topic to the thread, but more a chance to say he hates Dems. And we already have a dedidated Israel thread where most of that stuff would fit better.

ONW's post above is a perfect example as there's not much in his post here that touches on actual misinformation. And the little that is there is mostly stuff heavily edited stuff put out by the right to paint Biden in a bad light. Probably a better fit for the Biden or 2024 thread.

In the end we all know Biden is old and misspeaks. And Trump is just as old, with as many or more of his own age related mental issues, and more physical health related issues.

Would you like to speak to the issues at hand regarding either forum etiquette or disinformation, or just what you think njbill's thoughts are?

[OuttaNowhereWregget]

:30 clip