I can’t believe I even have to explain this this, but posing as a sexual-assault victim is a despicable thing to do. It hurts actual victims by making the public even less likely to believe their stories, while many are already too afraid to come forward because they’re worried they’ll be written off as liars. I know the president of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe; he’s always been kind to me, and yet I still have to say that I’m absolutely horrified by these actions.
.. (Because a 14-year-old from a broken home definitely had the resources to take on a district attorney in a he-said-she-said legal battle!)
.. As a I previously wrote in a column for National Review, the Washington Post’s reporting about Roy Moore was nothing like that Rolling Stone campus sexual-assault story that turned out to be false. Rolling Stone relied on only one, single unidentifiable source, while the WaPo had four on-the-record victims — and their stories were backed up by more than 30 corroborating sources.
.. The worst part of all of this, though, is that it doesn’t even matter: The fact that Project Veritas’s sting backfired, and wound up being an additional argument for the victims, will be completely lost on anyone who needs to understand it. O’Keefe himself knows this; he actually sent out a fundraising email after the news of his botched sting broke (insisting that “we already got our story”), and I’m sure he’ll get donations from it.
Sexual harassment accusations against Charlie Rose and Glenn Thrush feed the ‘fake news’ narrative
Vox reported that Thrush, a White House correspondent for the New York Times, masks a penchant for unwanted advances under the facade of a mentor.
.. The notion that these men successfully misled many colleagues and the public about their true natures feeds the “fake news” narrative pushed by President Trump, U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore and others.
.. If they were fake in the way they presented themselves, the reasoning goes, maybe they were fake in their reporting, too. Maybe lots of reporting is fake.
.. It is a logical leap to say that sexual harassment equals fake news, but the reality is that the alleged actions of Thrush, Rose and others open the media to questions about further deceptions.
Silicon Valley Can’t Destroy Democracy Without Our Help
But while Russian meddling is a serious problem, the current sentiment toward Silicon Valley borders on scapegoating. Facebook and Twitter are just a mirror, reflecting us. They reveal a society that is painfully divided, gullible to misinformation, dazzled by sensationalism, and willing to spread lies and promote hate. We don’t like this reflection, so we blame the mirror, painting ourselves as victims of Silicon Valley manipulation.
At the hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, squarely blamed the tech companies for Russian interference. “You bear this responsibility,” she said. “You’ve created these platforms.”
But we, the users, are not innocent. Some of the Russian propaganda on social media was cribbed from content that was posted by Americans. Yes, social media helps propaganda spread farther and faster. But Facebook and Twitter didn’t force users to share misinformation. Are Americans so easily duped? Or more alarming, did they simply believe what they wanted to believe?
.. The real crisis is Americans’ inability or unwillingness to sift fact from fiction, a problem that is worsened by the mainstream media’s loss of credibility when it comes to setting the record straight... Facebook’s algorithms may encourage echo chambers, but that’s because the company figured out what users want... The real problem is that Americans don’t have a shared sense of reality... A couple of years ago, I was part of a team that tried that very experiment. We ran a Silicon Valley start-up called Parlio, which was later acquired by Quora. Parlio aimed to be a social media platform for civil debate. But what we discovered was that people loved the idea of reasoned debate, then decided that those debates took too much time. Thoughtful content was also less likely to go viral, and many users are addicted to the sugar rush of virality. So while people liked the idea of eating their vegetables, they still gravitated to Twitter’s candy aisle.Social media platforms magnify our bad habits, even encourage them, but they don’t create them. Silicon Valley isn’t destroying democracy — only we can do that.
Twitter Contractor Deletes Trump Account: Could they also post Fake Tweets
If that employee can delete the account, could that employee put out fake tweets in the president’s name?
What would have happened if that departing employee had decided to Tweet out a message like “LAUNCH THE NUKES!!!” under the president’s name? No, that would not have begun the process of launching America’s nuclear arsenal, but it is easy to imagine an immediate panic. The North Korean regime might very well launch a military strike in an attempt to pre-empt an American attack.
In other words, Twitter has gained an enormous power over public discourse, and it’s still effectively controlled by people with the maturity and sense of responsibility of disgruntled teenage fast-food workers.