How Fake News Turned a Small Town Upside Down - Sensationalist Headlines

[t]https://i.imgur.com/HnAVHE4.jpg[/t] [url]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/magazine/how-fake-news-turned-a-small-town-upside-down.html?_r=0[/url] [quote]After he finished watching the video, Brown called the police chief, Craig Kingsbury, to get more information about the case. Kingsbury said that he couldn’t discuss it and that the police reports were sealed because minors were involved. Brown made a couple phone calls: to the mayor and to his colleague at the paper who covers crime. He pieced together that 12 days earlier, three children had been discovered partly clothed inside a shared laundry room at the apartment complex where they lived. There were two boys, a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old, and a 5-year-old girl. The 7-year-old boy was accused of attempting some kind of sex act with the 5-year-old, and the 10-year-old had used a cellphone borrowed from his older brother to record it. The girl was American and, like most people in Twin Falls, white. The boys were refugees; Brown wasn’t sure from where. In his article about the meeting, Brown seems to anticipate that the police chief’s inability to elaborate was not going to sit well with the people whose testimony he had just watched. That weekend, Brown was on his way to see a movie when he received a Facebook message from Jim Dalos Jr., a 52-year-old known to Twin Falls journalists and police as Scanner Man. Dalos is disabled; he works six hours a week as a dishwasher at a pizzeria but spends most of his time in his apartment, sitting in a reclining chair and drinking Diet Pepsi out of a 52-ounce plastic mug, voraciously consuming news. He reads the local paper, old issues of which litter his living-room floor, and keeps the television blaring — usually Fox News. He got his nickname because he constantly monitors an old police scanner, a gift he received as a teenager from his father, and often calls in tips to the media based on what he hears. He also happens to live at the apartment complex, Fawnbrook, where the laundry-room incident occurred. Dalos told Brown that he had seen the police around Fawnbrook and that the victim’s mother told him that the boys had been arrested. He also pointed Brown to a couple of Facebook groups that were created in response to the crime. Brown scrolled through them on his cellphone and saw links flying back and forth with articles that said that the little girl had been gang raped at knife point, that the perpetrators were Syrian refugees and that their fathers had celebrated with them afterward by giving them high fives. The stories also claimed that the City Council and the police department were conspiring to bury the crime. Over the weekend, Brown plowed through his daily packs of cigarettes as he watched hundreds, then thousands, of people joining the groups. Their panic appeared to be piqued by a mass shooting, the deadliest in American history, that had just occurred at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. The perpetrator had declared allegiance to ISIS. The commenters also posted stories that claimed refugees were responsible for a rash of rapes in Europe and that a similar phenomenon in the United States was imminent. “My girl is blond and blue-eyed,” one woman wrote. “I am extremely worried about her safety.” The details of the Fawnbrook case, as it became known, were still unclear to Brown, but he was skeptical of what he was reading. For one thing, he knew from his own previous reporting that no Syrians had been resettled in Twin Falls after all. He woke up early on Monday to get a head start on clarifying things as much as possible in order to write a follow-up article. Before he got into the office, a friend texted him, telling him to check the Drudge Report. At the top, a headline screamed: “REPORT: Syrian ‘Refugees’ Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho.”[/quote] TLDR in a small town in Idaho during the 2016 election, a sex crime between children is turned into a false story about a gang rape by Syrian refugees, which is then spread on alt-right sites such as Breitbart. The town's leaders and its local newspaper attempt to debunk the story but are accused of a cover-up and doxxed, with abusive messages and death threats catching the attention of the FBI. Russia organises an anti-refugee rally in the town as its bots spread the story further. Ultimately the judge sends the kids to corrective therapy, for which he is accused of corruption and doxxed. The Breitbart reporter covering the case quits in protest after they pull coverage, seemingly to avoid a lawsuit. He ends up getting a job at Russia's propaganda network, Sputnik.

God, Russia [I]really[/I] know how to use the Internet as a weapon don't they.

[QUOTE=Bob The Knob;52719132]Russia organises an anti-refugee rally in the town as its bots spread the story further. [/QUOTE] this is an extraordinarily ambitious claim and i didn't see anything in the article to really validate it. as a matter of fact here's the direct quote: [QUOTE]Later, it turned out that fake Facebook accounts linked to the Russian government helped to spread stories about Twin Falls and even organized one of the rallies there. [/QUOTE] facebook accounts quote unquote linked to the government, organizing just one of the rallies. no source, no verification. like i said, very ambitious.

[QUOTE=tharmas;52719179]this is an extraordinarily ambitious claim and i didn't see anything in the article to really validate it. as a matter of fact here's the direct quote: facebook accounts quote unquote linked to the government, organizing just one of the rallies. no source, no verification. like i said, very ambitious.[/QUOTE] Here are articles about it [url]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/us/politics/russia-facebook-election.html?mcubz=3[/url] [url]http://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-russia-used-facebook-events-to-organize-anti-immigrant-rallies-on-us-soil[/url] [url]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-russia-linked-groups-used-facebook-to-meddle-in-2016-election/[/url]

[QUOTE=Bob The Knob;52719209]Here's are articles about it [url]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/us/politics/russia-facebook-election.html?mcubz=3[/url] [url]http://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-russia-used-facebook-events-to-organize-anti-immigrant-rallies-on-us-soil[/url] [url]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-russia-linked-groups-used-facebook-to-meddle-in-2016-election/[/url][/QUOTE] once again, i'm not seeing verification of those claims, just the papers outright stating "this group was russian". nor am i seeing anything suggesting that even if they were russian that it was the result of the russian government and not just independent groups in the country.

Jesus, and this is just one story in one town. Imagine this happening across the whole Midwest and it makes sense why they turned to Trump.

Oh hey, my home town made national news! You know, in a way it's funny how overblown this thing became to everyone else while no one in Twin seems to care. If I remember right Breitbart also went after Chobani, which built a yogurt plant here a few years ago. That plant was a godsend to dairymen like my father, who before that plant was built were having trouble finding buyers for milk. Needless to say he and his buddies were furious at Breitbart's attempts to discredit Chobani. Fake news can do a lot more harm than people might realize.

That's fucked up. They're willing to throw the entire town under the bus to push their agenda. That's more fucked up.

[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;52720262]That's fucked up. They're willing to throw the entire town under the bus to push their agenda. That's more fucked up.[/QUOTE] And they'll get away with it every single time

its honestly scary how one prick can lie or skew the truth and get thousands of these anti-muslim weirdos champing at the bit to get revenge. it's like they have complete disregard for what's true as long as it makes them mad.

this isn't the first or the last time breitbart made completely fake allegations against brown people really makes you think huh?

This brand of degeneracy is killing America.

[QUOTE=tharmas;52719228]once again, i'm not seeing verification of those claims, just the papers outright stating "this group was russian". nor am i seeing anything suggesting that even if they were russian that it was the result of the russian government and not just independent groups in the country.[/QUOTE] :hairpull: anyway, remember like two(?) years ago when breitbart wasn't banned and its articles got posted here on the reg? a lot of users were taking it at face value too. good on fp for being ahead of the trend, i guess.

[QUOTE=tharmas;52719228]once again, i'm not seeing verification of those claims, just the papers outright stating "this group was russian". nor am i seeing anything suggesting that even if they were russian that it was the result of the russian government and not just independent groups in the country.[/QUOTE] Hey man, they were registered to [email]PutinOnTheRitz@yahoo.ru[/email], what more do you want?

[QUOTE=RenegadeCop;52721110]The best defense against this isn't more military, it is more education. I doubt anyone in the White House will ever realize that, though.[/QUOTE] Ironically, Mattis probably would.

[QUOTE=tharmas;52719179]this is an extraordinarily ambitious claim and i didn't see anything in the article to really validate it. as a matter of fact here's the direct quote: facebook accounts quote unquote linked to the government, organizing just one of the rallies. no source, no verification. like i said, very ambitious.[/QUOTE] They probably figure theyre Russian since theyre probably linked to Russian IPs and email addresses, and Facebook has admitted to having a rash of Russian bots shitposting fakenews on Facebook during the election. Its not tough to put 2 and 2 together.

When you destroy people's lives to push your bigoted agenda. They never cared about the victim and its family. And Bannon was in the governement for over 6 months and had access to more information than we can imagine. It's so easy for Russia to fuck with america, it's scary. And the driving force is credible baby boomers reposting shit on facebook that confirms their paranoiac biases. It's sad to see a cop and judge trying to do the the right thing and extremists fucks harassing them over facebook headlines. Fuck the waste pit that has become facebook.

[QUOTE=RenegadeCop;52721110]The best defense against this isn't more military, it is more education. I doubt anyone in the White House will ever realize that, though.[/QUOTE] Problem is that more educations also tends to be a good defence against the GOP, which they wouldn't like

[QUOTE=jonu67;52719144]God, Russia [I]really[/I] know how to use the Internet as a weapon don't they.[/QUOTE] that or people have been so indoctrinated by breitbart and fox news that its now a strategic liability. turns out networks that do nothing but spread paranoia will cause local paranoia. you'd thonk we'd have learned this with McCarthy but nope rodger ailes created this new insidious form of it.

[QUOTE=Sableye;52721955]that or people have been so indoctrinated by breitbart and fox news that its now a strategic liability. turns out networks that do nothing but spread paranoia will cause local paranoia. you'd thonk we'd have learned this with McCarthy but nope rodger ailes created this new insidious form of it.[/QUOTE] Your phrasing implies it's one or the other when it's pretty clear from the article and supplemental evidence that it's both. Right-wing media has established credibility in the eyes of its target audience, and Russia has exploited it as a weapon to destabilize American politics. Most people already know the kind of disinformation Breitbart and their ilk spread. What people are just starting to recognize is how much of it ties back to Russian interference.