A vast network of shadowy news sites promote conservative talking points mixed with floods of algorithmically generated "news"

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/19/liberty-principles.html

3 Likes

A similar tactic is the “official” party voting guides which will have a bunch of items that align with the party position, and a single item reversed whose passage or non-passage is in the interest of the people who mailed it.

8 Likes

I thought “Pink Slime” was Trump’s stripper name.

Seriously though, welcome to the future. It sucks balls.

8 Likes

Indeed. It seemed so much more fun in the pages of cyberpunk books.

9 Likes
10 Likes

The next time I’m abducted by space aliens, I ain’t going to ask to come back to Earth.

10 Likes

I’m beginning to think the internet is not a tool for good.

I’m thinking it’s enabling the worst part of humanity- intellectual laziness and gullibility.

It’s a lot easier to believe something when people tell you it’s true, and when everything you surround yourself with is echoing the exact same words, and you’re already stupid- you’re going to listen to the echos. And now the echoes reach every idiot in America.

The majority of people at least in this country are not intellectually curious. I have a feeling they don’t use the internet to actually learn things but rather be told them by whoever they feel like listening to.

Also- for the record- you know how something is a talking point? When you listen to the news as much as I do, and you start hearing the exact words in the same order in the same argument made by person after person all representing the same viewpoint.

I’ve heard this phenomenon a lot since Trump was elected with Republicans- nearly every response from multiple news sources is always quoting Republicans using the exact same canned responses. “there was no quid pro quo”- how many times was that exact phrase used by countless Republicans in countless examples of being quoted? And repeated ad nauseam, in the last 2 months?

You can always tell its a talking point lately when you hear what comes out of the White House and then people repeat the exact words the very next day for the next month.

These slimy pieces of shit must sit in a room somewhere rehearsing this stuff as it’s literally fed to them by il Douche

5 Likes

Dude no, say it ain’t so…

5 Likes

This looks like a job for “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States”.

The owners or operators of these sites are linked with firms that were previously sanctioned by the FEC for violating the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. The parent organizations include LGIS, Franklin Archer, Metro Business Network, or Dan Proft’s PAC Liberty Principles.

Serial grifters can’t resist moving on to the next scam after they’re nailed for the last one.

6 Likes

Can the opposition start having phony virtual readers visit the site to misinform them on which stories are working?

5 Likes

The future apparently sucks Trump’s balls. Which is so, so much worse.

And I am so, so sorry for that visual.

5 Likes

The internet is a wonderful thing that doesn’t make something like this inevitable or even necessarily possible.

But internet advertising surely does.

Something like this can only reach people who are selling their attention on the open market. If people were only looking at content they’d paid for, they wouldn’t stand for their trusted news sources taking bribes, and they wouldn’t pay for content that subordinates quality to peddling some horrific agenda.

I blame advertising for a ton of other stuff which I’d be happy to hold forth on, but this specific case makes itself: if it weren’t for advertising, this couldn’t happen at all.

3 Likes

I think they also have a deplorable instructable on how to get the sites picked up by Google News. At least on the phone, I have to block at least one everytime I take a shit.

5 Likes

Yeah I know.

Is it okay to sometimes actually be surprised at being jaded?

I honestly remember what the internet was like in the early 2000s and nothing that we have now that was intrusive or pervasively invasive existed other than pop-up ads. God it was truly wonderous at the beginning, only 4 chan and SomethingAwful had assholes.

Or at least that’s how my drunken haze of college remembers it

6 Likes

Nope, they all had assholes:

6 Likes

Algorithms. Algorithms everywhere!

3 Likes

Cheese Balls

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.