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Fake News Prompts Gunman To 'Self-Investigate' Pizza Parlor (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A rifle-wielding North Carolina man was arrested Sunday in Washington, DC for carrying his weapon into a pizzeria that sits at the center of the fake news conspiracy theory known as "Pizzagate," authorities said Monday. DC's Metropolitan Police Department said it had arrested 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch on allegations of assault with a dangerous weapon. "During a post arrest interview this evening, the suspect revealed that he came to the establishment to self-investigate 'Pizza Gate' (a fictitious online conspiracy theory," the agency said in a statement. "Pizzagate" concerns a baseless conspiracy theory about a secret pedophile group, the Comet Ping Pong restaurant, and Hillary Clinton's campaign chief, John Podesta. The Pizzagate conspiracy names Comet Ping Pong as the secret headquarters of a non-existent child sex-trafficking ring run by Clinton and members of her inner circle. James Alefantis, the restaurant's owner, said he has received hundreds of death threats. According to Buzzfeed, the Pizzagate theory is believed to have been fostered by a white supremacist's tweets, the 4chan message board, Reddit, Donald Trump supporters, and right-wing blogs. The day before Thanksgiving, Reddit banned a "Pizzagate" conspiracy board from the site because of a policy about posting personal information of others. Alefantis, the pizzeria's owner, told CNN, "What happened today demonstrates that promoting false and reckless conspiracy theories comes with consequences. I hope that those involved in fanning these flames will take a moment to contemplate what happened here today, and stop promoting these falsehoods right away."
The pizzagate psychos are now being told this was clearly a 'false flag' operation to cover up and discredit a world wide pedophile ring... running out of a fucking pizza place.
Jesus wept, this country is doomed.
The son of Trump's likely National Security Advisor is one of those gullible simpletons
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It's interesting how much these fake news social media campaigns are drawing out the nutcases. It makes sense, social media tools are designed to reinforce one's beliefs and continuously show you things that interest you -- as well as relevant ads of course! I could definitely see a conspiracy nut get hold of an idea from Facebook or Twitter, then have it keep popping up in his feed over and over again, then have his friends repost it, then see streams of tweets reconfirming their beliefs.
Social media in this case is kind of like conservative talk radio, in that the most devout listeners to it seem to get locked into a feedback loop over certain ideas, never to change them again. Their host is angry, gets the listeners riled up and the audience feeds on the anger.
That said, this whole story is a pretty sad statement on how we treat mentally ill people these days. New York (where I live) is completing the process of shutting down almost all of their custodial-care institutions and dumping people out onto the streets. Basically, you'll need to be Hannibal Lecter to get an inpatient psych bed, so you'll likely end up in prison instead -- or if society's unlucky, you'll just sit there stewing for years until something makes you snap and shoot up a pizza place. I'm not saying we should go back to the bad old days of locking people up for depression, giving them lobotomies or abusing them...but I do think deinstitutionalization went way too far. People should be able to seek a diagnosis for mental illness without stigma, and get treatment if they need it. I'm convinced this is why we have so many mass shootings in the US. Look at Adam Lanza (the Newtown guy) -- according to all accounts, his mother basically hid his developing mental illness for years and refused to accept there was a problem. But, the sad thing is that even if she had sought help for him, she wouldn't have been able to get it.
He was a nutcase, just like in this instance.
Apply Occam's Razor.
One nutcase, wound up by online trolls.
Why are we calling this "fake" news instead of "incorrect news" or "wrong news" or "wacko conspiracy theory"?
Because "fake news" has a very clear meaning that should be apparent to anyone who knows what the word "fake" means. Where do you use the word "fake"? You use it in places where something that is known to be false by the originator has the appearance of truth.
That's different from "wrong" or "incorrect" because those can result from simple errors. "Fake" implies that the person who creates the "news" KNOWS it's fake.
Fake news can have lots of different motivations.
-- It can be satire or parody, like the Onion.
-- It can be produced by people who just want to make money -- as it apparently were in this past campaign by some Balkan teens (who are hawking this fake news just like people hawk fake watches or "designer" purses).
-- It can be deliberate propaganda, made up by someone with a particular perspective intended to energize (or outrage) other people with that perspective.
-- It can even be a hoax created by those who want to embarrass their opponents by getting them to "take the bait" and then reveal that it's BS all along (again, something that multiple people have admitted doing to try to sabotage the past election).
All of these things are encompassed by the clear and unambiguous word "fake," i.e., something KNOWN TO BE false that looks like the real thing.
There are lots of folks who have been reading headlines about "fake news" recently and assuming it's about something else -- e.g., partisan sites spreading biased propaganda. But that's NOT FAKE NEWS. That's opinion or biased reporting or whatever. It may have its own problems, but biasing or distorting news by selectively choosing what to report or how to report it is NOT FAKE NEWS.
Actually making something up and knowingly publishing something literally false ("Person X did Y in city Z" when you know that didn't happen) *IS* fake news.
What we consider "left" is somewhere between centrist and moderate right in the rest of the first world.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
> It's not like pedophile scandals are that rare among people in power.
Uh, yes they are fucking rare.
Just because you've seen a handful of them busted on the news doesn't make it common, it just means you are yet another innumerate. How many people in power are there? Tens of thousands - celebrities, congress, their staffs, corporate officers, millionaires, etc. Add them all up and then compare them to the number of cases of pedos among them. Its no different, probably less in fact, than the ratio of pedos to non-pedos in the general population.
Its precisely your kind of stupid-ass logic, completely untethered from reality, that let idiots like the shooter convince themselves that pizzagate is real.
I'm not going to knock Jon Stewart, he did an excellent job. But he was a comedian who was less of a joke than the rest of the news. That is what our problem is.
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That would only be relevant if there were a 50:50 ratio of black and white people. In fact your own link doesn't suggest what you are suggesting, it instead accepts that black people are more likely to get shot by cops and blames it on them being violent criminals.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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