Tag: fake news

Trump Lawyer Alina Habba Did NOT Make Jury Request Mistake, Admits Judge.

Donald Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, did not fail to tick a box to request a jury trial in the New York civil fraud case despite widely circulated claims. Judge Arthur Engoron amended his comments of “nobody asked for” a jury trial on Wednesday following the false reports, arguing the claim “keeps coming up”. He explained that New York Attorney General Letitia James “clearly checked off non-jury” before the proceedings began.

“It would not have helped to make a motion, nobody forgot to check off a box,” Engoron explained, adding the punishment sought by the state of New York is an “equitable” remedy rather than a “legal” remedy.

Habba, who was forced to defend herself and the former President’s legal team amidst the false accusations, said in court following clarification, “Thank you, your honor. Press, did you hear that? I didn’t ‘forget to check the box’.”

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Hilarious: NBC News Instantly Exposed As Liars After Claiming They “Gained Access” To X Community Notes System

When NBC News published a hit piece claiming that Twitter/X’s Community Notes fact checking system rarely corrects posts and asserting that they “gained access” to the system, both claims were instantly revealed to be untrue… by Community Notes itself.

“Elon Musk has touted Community Notes as a way to fight false and misleading information on X,” NBC News tweeted.

The outlet then declared”@NBCNews gained access to the system, and found that on posts containing known misinformation, few posts were ever corrected. Many fact-checks were delayed.”

The claims were quickly revealed to be complete BS, hilariously by Community Notes.

One note reads, “NBC did not ‘gain access’ to any special Twitter system they merely had one of the many thousands of community notes contributors show them that some misleading posts had yet to have any notes added.”

It adds that “Any 6 month old account with a verified phone number can join the program.”

Another points out that it is completely erroneous to suggest some back room employee is approving notes, as implied by NBC.

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A Dozen Media Outlets that Fell for Fake News on Mar-a-Lago

Several media outlets, both mainstream and left-wing, fell for the fake news Friday that former President Donald Trump had sold or transferred ownership of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to his son, Donald Trump Jr.

The story originated in a mistaken report on the Zillow real estate website. But it was “to good to check” for many websites:

Breitbart News reported exclusively that the story was fake before Zillow confirmed the information was wrong.

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DeSantis Doubles Down On Opposition To Marijuana Legalization, Claiming Colorado’s Illicit Market Is ‘Bigger And More Lucrative’ After Reform

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, has reaffirmed that he would not legalize marijuana if elected to the White House—arguing contrary to evidence that the reform has actually increased the size of the illicit market in Colorado.

During a campaign event in Iowa on Saturday, an attendee told DeSantis that she knows people whose children developed “cannabis-induced psychosis” and asked about whether he would move to legalize or reschedule cannabis under federal law if he became president. In response, the GOP contender made clear that he “would not legalize,” echoing anti-marijuana arguments he previously made in June.

“I think what’s happened is this stuff is very potent now. I think when young people get it, I think it’s a real, real problem, and I think it’s a lot different than stuff that people were using 30, 40 years ago,” DeSantis said. “I think when kids get on that, I think it causes a lot of problems and then, of course, you know, they can throw fentanyl in any of this stuff now.”

The candidate then pivoted to a broader discussion about the harms of substance misuse, stating that there’s an “open air market” for illicit drugs in San Francisco, and that society has “totally decayed” under policies that “really help these folks use drugs.”

DeSantis did acknowledge that Floridians have access to medical cannabis under a constitutional amendment that voters approved, saying that “we abide by that” but noting that “states have handled cannabis differently” and he would not “take action now to make it even more available.”

Florida voters may have the choice to expand access regardless of the governor’s position, as the state Supreme Court is currently considering whether a marijuana legalization initiative will appear on the state’s 2024 ballot.

“I would not do that,” DeSantis said on Saturday. “And the places that legalized it like Colorado and California, you know, the argument was—and honestly it wasn’t a crazy argument—’Look, we know people are going to use marijuana. It is a drug. If you legalize it, then you can tax it, regulate it, and it’s going to end up being safer for people.’”

“But what’s happened in Colorado, the black market for marijuana is bigger and more lucrative than it was before they did the legalization,” the governor said. “So the legalization I don’t think has worked.”

DeSantis didn’t provide data or cite any sourcing to support that argument. But private and government analyses have suggested that Colorado has in fact significantly reduced the influence of the illicit market in the decade since enacting legalization.

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No, a WEF official did not call for ‘eliminating’ conspiracy theorists

A July 25 article in The People’s Voice included a headline declaring “Top WEF Official: ‘Dangerous Conspiracy Theorists Must Be Eliminated.’”

“A top World Economic Forum (WEF) official has called for so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ to be banned from accessing the internet due to their ‘dangerous’ belief that a global cabal of elites control the world,” the article began.

It’s a reference to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims among other things there is a satanic cabal of global elites taking part in an international child sex trafficking ring. 

The article was shared more than 300 times on Facebook in five days according to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool.

There is no evidence, in the article or elsewhere, that Yuval Noah Harari made any such comments. The article also incorrectly identifies Harari as a World Economic Forum official, when he has no role with the organization. The People’s Voice routinely publishes baseless claims.

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How To Create a Fake News Cycle

Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media to pillory him as an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is having a moment. A recent poll from CNN of all places showed him earning 20% of Democratic primary voters – and that was before his Joe Rogan interview and shirtless push-up video went viral. Kennedy’s support only confirms the titanic loss of trust between voters and mainstream media.

Except for those in the business, few people understand the inner workings of the media world. As a doctor and lifelong Democratic voter who pulled the lever for Biden in 2020, I had no clue. Prior to COVID-19, I trusted that what I was reading represented the truth. My experience running the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) quickly disabused me of that idea.

The first wave hit in December 2020, when I testified in the Senate that corticosteroids were saving my COVID patients’ lives. My recommendations weren’t just ignored – they were attacked, and I was personally ridiculed as a fraud and Trump puppet. My life and career were upended. I felt forced to resign my faculty position. It was cold comfort when a few months later, a large study confirmed my testimony and government agencies added steroids to the standard of care for COVID patients.

I struggled to make sense of it through much of 2021. The Biden administration and the mainstream media single-mindedly pushed untested vaccines even as the FLCCC accumulated more and more evidence that cheap, generic medicines could stop COVID. As I detailed in my new book, “The War on Ivermectin,” simply presenting evidence that doctors were using the medicine to treat and prevent COVID around the world was a dog whistle for the mob.

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Eric Adams’s Fallen Cop Photo Is a Fake

Democratic New York City mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly shown off a picture of a murdered police officer, saying he has kept the picture in his wallet for decades. In reality, the picture was a Google printout that Adams aides altered last year to make it look like “the mayor had been carrying it for some time,” the New York Times reported Thursday.

Adams has used the picture to tout his image as tough on crime, saying last year that the killings of two police officers “reminded him of the 1987 line-of-duty death of a friend, Officer Robert Venable,” according to the Times report. “I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet,” Adams said. One week later, the mayor posed for a picture in which he held up the photo of Venable. He has “repeated the moving anecdote”—and held up the Venable photo—multiple times since.

But the photo “had not actually spent decades in the mayor’s wallet,” the Times reported. Adams had, in fact, instructed City Hall employees to print out a Google image of the fallen officer and make it look older, “including by splashing some coffee on it.” Two former City Hall aides confirmed that “they were informed about the manipulated photo last year, not long after it was created.”

This is far from the first time Adams has faced accusations of manipulating the truth. The mayor, who claims to be a vegan, was caught ordering fish only days after he ordered New York City schools to serve only vegan food on Fridays, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

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“You just lied” – Elon Musk dismantles BBC reporter over “hate speech” claims, accuses BBC of spreading “misinformation”

In an interview with the BBC at Twitter headquarters on Tuesday night, owner Elon Musk called out the BBC reporter for lying about an increase in hateful content since he took over.

BBC reporter James Clayton asked Musk why there is “so much more hate speech on Twitter” since his takeover. Musk responded by challenging the reporter to provide one instance.

After Clayton hesitated, Musk said, “You said you’ve seen more hateful content but you can’t name a single example. Not even one.”

Clayton responded, “I’m not sure I’ve used that feed for the last three or four weeks, and I…”

“Then how could you see the hateful content?… I’m asking for one example. You can’t give a single one.” Musk interjected. “Then I say sir that you don’t know what you’re talking about … because you can’t give a single example of hateful content, not even one tweet. And yet, you claimed that the hateful content was high. That’s false. You just lied!”

Clayton then said there are “many organizations that say that kind of information is on the rise.”

“Give me one example,” Musk insisted.

Musk also referred to a thread by Twitter user @KaneokaTheGreat, which included a video of venture capitalist David Sacks explaining that the left “uses hate speech as a red herring to mask their true intention of exerting political censorship and controlling the narrative.”

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What one tweet can teach us about “Fake News”

At the time I just laughed it off. It’s an absurd little piece of propaganda, but hardly the most egregious.

But, for some reason, it stuck in my head and started bothering me. After 48 hours or so I realized what about it was bothering me, and that it is actually an interesting microcosmic case study on what the era of “fake news” really means.

Everything about this tweet is fake. Everything.

The letter itself is obviously fake. The absurd zenith of the “children being precociously political” meme that became a running joke years ago.

Even if “Charlotte” exists, those aren’t her words, just a rough regurgitation of her parents’ brainwashing. And Charlotte almost certainly doesn’t exist.

There’s no reason to even suppose any physical letter exists at all and it isn’t just a photoshopped CG image. It easily could be.

The tweet itself is also fake – or at least pretend – because there’s no way President Biden operates his own social media accounts. I honestly doubt he’s even mentally capable of doing so. Rather, as Five Times August points out in another tweet, the Whitehouse employs a few “platform managers” and “social media directors”.

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Legacy Media in Shock as Award-Winning Progressive Blogger Found to Have Never Existed

Germany’s legacy media are in shock after it was found that an award-winning progressive blogger they heaped repeated praise on never actually existed.

Julia “Jule Stinkesocke” Gothe — a paraplegic pediatrician in Hamburg — is a famous blogger in Germany who has repeatedly received awards for her writings on progressive issues ranging from green politics to disability activism.

Operating since 2009, her work has earned her many accolades, with German state-owned broadcaster Deutsche Welle awarding her for running the best German-language blog in 2012.

However, it now appears that the famous blogger never existed in the first place.

According to a report by Bild, numerous inconsistencies with Gothe’s life story have been creeping up over the last number of years, prompting some netizens to question the reality behind the allegedly disabled blogger’s online presence.

Alarm bells however really started to go off after one teacher in the country found that all of the pictures allegedly depicting “Gothe” were actually of Kylie Harris, who is described as being a relatively unknown pornstar from Australia.

From there, it was soon revealed that out of the many progressive causes, Gothe had gotten involved with, nobody claimed to have actually met her in person.

Even when she would win awards, the blogger would reportedly never attend the event in person, and would often only communicate with various activists through a third party.

None of these groups or publications appear to have made an attempt to try and independently verify Gothe’s identity before this point.

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