Logged into Bing this morning and saw this odd little snippet:
Trump Treats Putin Like a Confidant
Does Trump ‘reportedly’ treat Putin like a ‘confidant’?
I can believe it, but is it true?
I looked for the source, Business Insider.
Who owns Business Insider?
Business Insider was launched in February 2009 and is based in New York City. Founded by DoubleClick’s former CEO Kevin P. Ryan, Dwight Merriman, and Henry Blodget
Ok.
Business Insider is nine years old, possibly center-left and uses a cickbait style.
You can tell it’s click-bait because…
Click bait…
Are other media outlets reporting this story?
I ran a search for Trump treats Putin like a confidant:
Google Search Results #!
The top five results are Business Insider, Reddet, YouTube and a December
2016 piece on Kissinger by Politico.
The YouTube video is of an unnamed ex-intelligence chief who says the U.S.
needs to treat Vladimir Putin as an equal.
The recent revelations from Silicon Valley giants Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—revelations that Russia likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on politically targeted advertising that spread disinformation—illustrate how Moscow is pursuing long-standing foreign policy goals while adapting to changing technology. The political ads appeared to address both sides of the U.S. political divide, reaching millions of Americans. The goal of these ads appears to be the widening of domestic divisions and amplification of existing fears. Some Facebook ads, for example, supported the Black Lives Matter movement, while others aimed to paint the organization as a danger to society. Some ads appeared to highlight support for then-candidate Hillary Clinton, while others attempted to alarm potential voters by showing her popularity with Muslim women. In a number of cases, the ads were targeted directly at key demographics in Wisconsin and Michigan.
The House and Senate Majority does nothing to stop Vladimir Putin from using the internet as a weapon against the American People.
Here’s what Microsoft Bing had as the lead story in the U.S. last Friday:
Bing, Fox News Category U.S.
Examine the headline and ask yourself who processed the photos, who chose
the wording and the layout, and why?
Why is this racist opinion peace the lead story on my Bing news feed?
Maybe the answer is simple, but how many people ask why?
“No one believed in Trump, not even a little bit,” Soldatov says. “It was a series of tactical operations. At each moment, the people who were doing this were filled with excitement over how well it was going, and that success pushed them to go even further.” Andrei Soldatov
Gaslighting makes it hard to know what’s real because the lies are based on a smattering of truth.
MS Bing category, the U.S. South
Saturday July 5 Screenshot Bing
According to Bing the lead story in the South is this Fox headline
about a Mother who stopped a kidnapping.
The lie is in the frame
For Fox, the story is about the firing of a gun, which is why the
headline is a lie.
The writer tortured English to make sure we knew that Mother had a gun.
Texas mom shoots man who tried to take car with her kids inside a gas station!
That sentence is almost not English.
Fox has headlines in all of Bing’s regional categories in the U.S.
This was the big story in the Midwest last night.
Category U.S. – South
Heroic white vet on a lonely MAGA hatted parade of patriotism. It’s as
if he’s braving persecution.
And why are the photos of three criminal looking men from Latin America in the upper right of the screen? Why does Fox call these men ‘non-Citizens’?
I checked in with Bing this morning for the lead story in the United States and again, the lead is from Fox.
The Lead Story in the United States on Microsoft Bing, July 6, 2018
Do I sense persecution as an emerging Trumpian theme?
This is supposed to be a random video but we know from the 2016 campaign
that Putin hired actors and staged events.
Active Measures includes the staging of events for the media.
I think it’s propaganda because it fuels the stereotypes and racial
animosity that gave Putin the edge in 2016.
Fox wants me angry.
U.S. investigations are mostly focused on what Russia did in 2016, instead of what it will inevitably do in 2018 and 2020. The Atlantic
What can the average American do to protect themselves from this inevitable onslaught of lies?
Trump can’t gaslight people who know what he’s doing. Trust your eyes and ears, if you think you heard the President say he fired Comey over Russia, you did hear him say it.
False information sometimes comes from trusted friends who haven’t verified their sources. My friends and I agree to verify all news reports. If we can’t verify a story it’s false.
If a story is only on marginal outlets on the political extremes it’s either a distortion of the truth or an outright a lie.
Protect yourself from disinformation on social media by following different people with different points of view.
Legitimate news sites list who runs the site and have a straightforward mission statement with an easy to verify listed of owners and staff. A news site without an ‘about us’ section is a fraud.
Verify quotes. If you read that President Obama says he’s going to run again
in 2020 run a search. If he said it, read the context. A quote out of context is
the same as a lie.
Opinions are not fact.
Sean Hannity is not reporting news, he’s telling you what he wants you to think: