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Right-Wing and Fake News Writers Are Now Going After Elon Musk (qz.com)
Fake news galvanized US president-elect Donald Trump's supporters, and sullied his enemies. Now it may be Elon Musk's turn. Quartz adds: The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has his fair share of detractors, but a new era in a public relations battle to discredit him appears to be taking shape. Bloomberg reports that hard-right groups are lining up to back misleading websites and fake journalists who attack Musk's business empire. Many of the attacks on Musk begin with something factual: His businesses were built, legally, with the help of billions in government contracts and incentives for renewable energy and space transport. But they go on to accuse Musk of fraud and wasting taxpayer dollars; some compare him to a convicted felon. At least three conservative sites have run negative pieces about Musk -- by a nonexistent writer named "Shepard Stewart" -- that include "Elon Musk Continues to Blow Up Taxpayer Money With Falcon 9" and "Elon Musk: Faux Free Marketeer and National Disgrace." Two later retracted the stories. "There's a very obvious precedent" for this, says Sam Jaffe, managing director of Cairn Energy Research Advisors. "That's Hillary Clinton." Musk tweeted this week, "Can anyone uncover who is really writing these fake pieces?"
Actually, having thought about this slightly more, another possible motivation occurred to me: there is a fair bit of evidence of Russian meddling in this election and that some of the anti-Hillary propaganda came from Russian sources to try to push the election to the candidate they favored. By the same token, Musk is potentially a real danger to Russian interests, since Russia is heavily oil dependent and also has an advantage when the US is dependent on Russia for manned space launches. If they have the now existing resources and hooks into the US public, then using it to harm Musk is a natural thing.
I am a right winger. We like Elon Musk. He produces a quality product at a decent price. He is against over regulation in his industry. This fucking epidemic of stories about fake news this week is ridiculous. The Liberal media lost big, predicting a Hillary landslide, and they NEED a scapegoat to blame for their own idiocy. Trust in the media is at an all time low, and people aren't fooled by the MSM putting on a different hat and calling themselves "impartial fact-checkers" anymore. So the new plan is to declare any website we don't like as "fake news" and tie them into the other demonized group we made up, the "alt right". They are the enemy and they must be stopped.
The motivation? Page views. Duh! It makes a lot of ad money. They don't give a damn about the consequences as long as the ad revenue keeps flowing.
I think you missed the point of this whole "fake news" controversy. These twenty-something goofballs start a fake news site to make money off the alt-right, and alt-right news sites who don't do any fact checking immediately pick up the stories.
In the past few days, there have been several interesting interviews with some of the people who run fake news sites. The reason th doing it. Alsoey say that fake news doesn't work on the Left will blow your mind.
I heard about this story yesterday on NPR, about an alt-right fake-news writer living in Los Angeles.
TL/DR: Jestin Coler (the fake-news writer) claimed that he does it to show how easily hoodwinked people are by fake news, but when pressed, he admitted he could make lots of money doing this. A few interesting quotes from his interview:
The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly false or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.
[...]
We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Make no mistake this is serious and these people are paid. It's about money and preserving the old energy business structure. Musk needs to hire massive PR and counterattack.
Suddenly all this uproar over "fake news".
Hell-effing-o: Magazines like The Enquirer and others have been around for - how long?
*Now* suddenly its a big concern? Because - wait! - the right exposed their coverup of Hillary's seizures.
One thing that Republicans/Conservatives (speaking as one myself) need to do better is recognized that racism still actually exists, but may not be typically seen by most white people. I heard the lone black Republican senator was pulled over seven times in a year. He admitted a couple of those were for speeding, but others seemed to be for trivial matters, or nothing at all.
From the senator:
Scott went on to describe a time an officer pulled him over and began questioning if the car he was driving was stolen. "An officer pulls me into the median and starts telling me that he thinks perhaps the car is stolen. Well, I started to ask myself because I was smart enough not to ask him, asking myself, is the license plate coming in as stolen? Does the license plate match the car? I was looking for some rational reason that may have prompted him to stopping me on the side of the road."
It's unfortunate that the movement got started on a very questionable incident, in which it became apparent that the police did nothing wrong, because it gave the political opposition a reason to disbelieve the rest of the story. That shows the damage that "fake news" can do.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I've noticed over the last 15 years that news reporting appears to deliberately incite rage in it's consumers. I conclude the reason is because happy news doesn't cause interaction that can be measured, while outrage causes people to post comments, link, and send to friends. These actions can be tracked, and if it can be tracked, it can be monetized. An example is Info Wars site. Most of their news is extremely slanted and almost seems to jerk the froth out of their average reader's mouth, while simultaneously reporting things dishonestly. When one bothers to fact check and independently confirm their stories, it is my opinion that they are almost without exception false to fact or put in the worst light possible. Nor is it confined to such fringe lunatic sites, this is found in Fox, Breitbart, Drudge, and to a lessor extent in CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, and NPR.
TL;DR: News is worthless. They all have an agenda and they all push it.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Some of them are paid, but there are a lot of useful idiots amplifying their messages.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
So you dismiss the ONLY information (even though COROBORATED eyewitnesses are MUCH more reliable) ... and instead accept the account of the person with every incentive to lie ?
And that is how the police have shot 1039 unarmed black men in America in 2016 alone. That's almost 3 a day. And it's a list that includes way too many 12 year old boys with toys who were never a threat to anybody.
I would believe the right was in any way sincere about anything they say (And not just being a bunch of racist fucks) if the NRA had actually spoken out about the ONLY example in the entirety of the Obama administration's tenure where a gun right was actually violated. But it didn't matter because it was a black guy who was shot for owning a legal gun which he didn't in any way threaten the police with, and we have video proving he did nothing wrong. The NRA never even made a public statement about the incident.
They glorify white guys who carry loaded AR15's into restaurants to scare children - but the one time somebody was actually harmed by a government official for exercising his second amendment rights they pretended it never happened. Black people aren't supposed to have the right to bear arms I guess ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
There was a good article comparing the coverage of the deaths of Michal Brown and Eric Garner. Garner's death happened first, and there was broad consensus that it was wrong. The police in that instance did something bad, and had few defenders in the media or elsewhere. And thus: nobody paid attention to it because there was nothing to talk about.
Only after the death of Michal Brown did Eric Garner's death come into the larger public's attention, because Brown's death was not nearly so clear cut. People disagreed about whether or not the officers were in the right in that case, and arguing gets people's attention. Arguing makes people angry in a way that the events themselves do not.
So the lesson was: your cause may be right, but if you want to actually accomplish anything then it's more important to be controversial than it is to be completely correct.
Welcome to Corporate America. In Argentina we have elected a guy who convinced everyone he wasn't going to pass the crisis down to the lower classes, and amid his first government actions he cut the export taxes to mining down to Zero, penalized the unions by pushing a tax reform which makes you pay more if you negotiate a raise above their projecred inflación numbers (which are obviously rigged downwards), and criminalizes social protest. Whatever USA gets in terms of asymetrical social growth, It has been tester in Latin America previously.