Sarah Palin gets called out again for using her website to post Right Wing articles as click-bait.

Courtesy of New York Magazine: 

A quick scroll through sarahpalin.com reveals that there are ads and there is a “U.S. Debt Clock” ($19 trillion and counting). At the bottom of every page, under the tab labeled “more,” there is an ad section labeled “you may also like.” It features all manner of shady clickbait: a guide to which celebrities “are jerks in real life,” photos of tacky jewelry, and a drawing of what appears to be diseased feet. You see this kind of thing in pop-up ads that look like fake websites, or at the bottom of real websites that are stuck in another era of the internet. There’s also an online store, where you can purchase Palin’s books and DVDs of Sarah Palin’s Alaska. And there is “Her Story,” a short biography complete with oddly stretched photos of the woman herself. 

Most prominent on the website, though, are short articles that are presented as news. 

Many of the posts are just bad aggregation, condensed and rewritten versions of reports from other publications — like the Daily Caller, Fox News, and Politico, as well as less well-known sites such as Weasel Zippers — that shape and distribute news so that it confirms a conservative worldview. You might call it fake news or propaganda, with headlines like, “YES! Trump Fulfills Campaign Promise to Help the Coal Industry” (approximately 70 jobs were created, by a private company, at a coal mine in Pennsylvania) or “EVIDENCE FOUND! Trump Was Right on Voter Fraud …” (12 people in Indiana were charged with submitting fraudulent voter-registration applications, while Trump claimed that “millions” of undocumented immigrants had voted illegally in the 2016 election). 

Others are just random write-ups of viral videos; one reads, “Two INCREDIBLE Performances Are Leaving Americans SPEECHLESS.” Once in a while, there will be a column or two.

The article goes on to list all of the ways that Palin desperately attempted to stay relevant, from her stint as Fox News contributor, her doomed reality shows, and her incredibly temporary foray into subscription based internet TV. (Interestingly they did not even bother to mention Palin's book writing endeavors. Probably snootily only want to give credit to book authors who actually write their books.)

The article goes on:

Palin doesn’t write much. Initially, she penned a few of the articles, with titles like “INSANE”; “Trig’s School of Life. We’re all learning!”; “Alpha Males … Hot Hot Hot”; and “You, Sir, Are Unfortunately Being Used by Democrats.” 

But now, her sole contribution is when, about once a day, she publishes something called “SWEET FREEDOM DAILY DEVOTIONAL.” Occasionally, perhaps owing to error, it’s referred to as “SWEET FREEDOM DAILY DEVOTION” or even just “DAILY DEVOTIONAL,” no “sweet freedom.” These begin with scripture and end with a word of advice. On Saturday, her instruction was, “Today, quit waiting until circumstances are just right before you praise the Lord. You already have so much to thank God for, so what are you waiting for?” The contact form for press inquiries on sarahpalin.com doesn’t work, and an interview request, forwarded to Palin through a friend and associate of hers, was not answered as of press time.

(I hate to break it to New York Magazine, but it is most likely that those contributions of Palin's were almost completely written, or rewritten, by others.)

New York Magazine also attempted to contact the people who actually produce the content for sarahpalin.com,  but none of them would consent to an interview, and the only response was from a woman who did not submit her work to the website, was not sure how it got there, and was never paid for her "contribution."

This is actually the third time that Palin has been called out for her shitposts and click bait heavy content.

The first was back on February 1st of this year, on The Daily Banter, and the second was only nine days later on the Huffington Post.

I think that the only reason more new outlets have not pointed out the obvious is because they have forgotten that Palin is still alive.

I used to look forward to the days when we could dance around the rotting corpse of Sarah Palin's career, but to be honest it is getting a little old.

Now I am looking forward to dancing around the rotting corpse of Donald Trump's career.

I wonder if THAT will ever get old?

The Huffington Post finally reaches the conclusion that we did last month, that Sarah Palin is now a shitposter whose website is a honeytrap for clicks.

Courtesy of HuffPo:  

Former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has several websites that regularly feature misinformation labeled as news. 

Her website, www.sarahpalin.com, features a column called “News” filled with largely aggregated stories written with a conservative slant. Those stories often feature misinformation and falsehoods.

HuffPo then goes on to give examples of fake or extremely exaggerated stories such as this:

As you can see by how this is written it is designed to pique your interest, but once you click the link it is invariably completely false or not at all as interesting as the title suggests.

This is clearly click bait and it is Sarah Palin's new, and possibly only remaining, method for bringing in revenue.

With SarahPAC essentially shut down, and her judge show aborted prematurely, Palin does not have any real income stream on which she can rely.

However if she thinks blogging is going to, in any way, replace her SarahPAC donations, well she is about to learn a very hard lesson indeed.

Especially once her few remaining fans read this disclaimer: 

There is a disclaimer on Palin’s website that the articles “DO NOT necessarily reflect the views held by Governor Palin,” but articles from the site are often featured on her Facebook page, which has 4.7 million “likes.” 

Seriously WHO among her tiny handful of supporters is going to want to read articles featured on Sarah Palin's website that she not only does not write, but which may not even reflect her point of view?

Let's face it Sarah Palin's brand is dead.

So dead in fact that even I can hardly be bothered to ridicule her any longer.

The Washington Post interviews Paul Horner, impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire about how easy it is to fool people these days.

Remember this?

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

On why it is easier to get fake news passed around than it was several years ago:  

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

On whether or not he thinks his fake news helped get Trump elected:

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

 Here is that ad. If it looks familiar it's because several trolls tried to pass it off as real here on IM as well.

On how easy it is to dupe Trump supporters:

I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters — they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].

On how great a Trump presidency will be for his fake news sites:  

It’s great for anybody who does anything with satire — there’s nothing you can’t write about now that people won’t believe. I can write the craziest thing about Trump, and people will believe it. I wrote a lot of crazy anti-Muslim stuff — like about Trump wanting to put badges on Muslims, or not allowing them in the airport, or making them stand in their own line — and people went along with it!

On how lucrative all of this is for him right now:  

Right now I make like $10,000 a month from AdSense.

Must be nice. I don't make anything even close to that.

I guess these days real news is just not as lucrative as fake news.

WaPo also has another story, about two guys who proudly call themselves "the new yellow journalists," and who also make a ton of money writing inflammatory false stories and shopping them to Facebook.

After reading these two articles, and then adding the Russian hacks, the Wikileaks data dumps, and the FBI putting their thumb on the scale, it is really not that surprising that Trump won the electoral college.

After all this was a perfect storm of stupid.

We thought that having so much information at our fingertips would improve people's ability to access facts, but instead we find that their lack of intelligence combined with laziness just makes many folks easy targets for propagandists, hoaxers, and shit posters who fill their heads with nonsense and confuse them on the difference between fact and fiction.

For his part Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg now says that he has a plan for filtering out the BS and only allowing REAL news outlets to post their stories, but how long will it be before these "yellow journalists" find their way around those new filters?

And ultimately is it kind of too late now that the worst outcome has already been realized?

The managing editor of Snopes thinks that the damage is likely irreparable: 

But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.” 

The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. “When you’re on your fifth story of the day and there’s no editor because the editor’s been fired and there’s no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don’t have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up,” she says.

If she's right and journalism has been tainted beyond repair than what does that mean for all of us moving forward?

That's a question for which I am not sure I want to know the answer.

Samantha Bee interviewed her first sitting President last night.

I am just going to sit here and try really hard not to make comparisons with Trevor Noah's abysmal interviewing skills.

I already blew it, didn't I?

Okay now as impressive as that was, and that was the marquee piece of last night's show, Bee's interview with the Russian trolls may have been even more impressive and important to this election cycle.

Now I have absolutely NO idea how Full Frontal was able to get two folks who are clearly worried about protecting their identity to consent to an interview, but it is a pretty impressive accomplishment.

In fact I am not sure that any so-called REAL media outlet has bothered to do the same.

After watching that piece it put a couple of things into perspective for me.

Such as the possibility that the reason that this photo gets the trolls so pissed off is not because it demonstrates a collusion between Putin and Trump, or makes Trump seem like Vladimir's little bitch, but because they see it as showing their dear leader as a possible homosexual which they find intolerable.

So now that we have established that the majority of the pro-Trump trolls are likely Russian shit posters, we can finally rest assured that his support is largely financed by Russia and NOT the result of inbreeding and our broken education system.

I don't know about you but I feel a little better.

Billionaire tech superstar revealed to be Trump supporting "shitposter."

Courtesy of the Daily Beast: 

A Silicon Valley titan is putting money behind an unofficial Donald Trump group dedicated to “shitposting” and circulating internet memes maligning Hillary Clinton. 

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey financially backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America, a self-described “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit” in support of the Republican nominee. 

Luckey sold his virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, and Forbes estimates his current net worth to be $700 million. The 24-year-old told The Daily Beast that he had used the pseudonym “NimbleRichMan” on Reddit with a password given to him by the organization’s founders. 

Nimble America says it’s dedicated to proving that “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real,” according to the company’s introductory statement, and has taken credit for a billboard its founders say was posted outside of Pittsburgh with a cartoonishly large image of Clinton’s face alongside the words “Too Big to Jail.”

So I have a confession to make. I don't only think about politics 24 hours a day.

And one of the things that really attracts my attention outside of the world of politics, are new technologies.

And virtual reality has been extremely interesting to me.

Because of that interest I have been following Palmer Luckey and his work on the Oculus Rift for years now.

And now those two interests are colliding in a very uncomfortable manner.

Courtesy of the Guardian: 

“We know Hillary Clinton is corrupt, a warmonger, a freedom-stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on Independence Day, the bad kind that strips freedom from citizens and grants it to donors,” Luckey wrote on a Reddit thread introducing his initiative, using the pseudonym NimbleRichMan. 

Luckey’s support for Trump may be unusual in a tech industry that has a tendency to support Democrats, but it is his embrace of the dark side of Trump’s internet army that is so alarming. We may be used to the incredibly wealthy supporting pro-business politicians by writing checks to the Republican party, but the full-on embrace of “shitposting” and the bigoted online harassment that so often comes with it is something else entirely. 

Shitposting is not intended to add to an online discussion but to shut it down with, well, shit. It is the opposite of the ideals of good faith, open discussion made possible by the internet.

So yeah it's not just that Luckey supports a highly divisive candidate, who attracts support from some of the most hate filled people in the country, but that he also financially supports, and participates in shitposting, which is essentially the kind of uber trolling that most of us here have seen frequently.

And it is made worse by the fact that Luckey at first tried to minimize his participation in the group by going on Facebook and saying this:  

I am deeply sorry that my actions are negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners.The recent news stories about me do not accurately represent my views. 

Here’s more background: I contributed $10,000 to Nimble America because I thought the organization had fresh ideas on how to communicate with young voters through the use of several billboards. 

I am a libertarian who has publicly supported Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in the past, and I plan on voting for Gary in this election as well. I am committed to the principles of fair play and equal treatment. I did not write the "NimbleRichMan" posts, nor did I delete the account. Reports that I am a founder or employee of Nimble America are false. I don’t have any plans to donate beyond what I have already given to Nimble America. 

Still, my actions were my own and do not represent Oculus. I’m sorry for the impact my actions are having on the community.

Unfortunately for Luckey one of the Daily Beast reporters tweeted this e-mail exchange where Lucky admits that he is "NimbleRichMan" and that he did indeed write those posts on Reddit.

One more email: Luckey clearly states in here that the NimbleRichMan account represents him. pic.twitter.com/RC4mXPFDkM

— Gideon Resnick (@GideonResnick) September 24, 2016

Ouch, that means Luckey has just been caught lying to his many, many supporters.

And that is not good because Luckey is the cherubic face of one of the hottest pieces of technology to come along in a decade or more, and there are literally billions and billions on the line.

What's more there are many competitors on the horizon, including Sony, who are more than likely going to take advantage of this news to pull consumers away from the Oculus Rift, which could cost investors, including Facebook,  hundreds of millions of dollars in the long run.

If that happens this could be yet another case of an association with Donald Trump negatively impacting a company, and literally destroying a young man's career.

Though to be honest it is a little hard to feel too much sympathy for a guy in his twenties who made 2 billion on a device that he started building in his garage.