AP: Cyborgs, Trolls and bots: A guide to online misinformation

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hanimmal said:

'People say' is bullshit.

https://www.rollitup.org/t/ap-cyborgs-trolls-and-bots-a-guide-to-online-misinformation.1005699/post-16338883
I really don't understand why this is not being screamed from the rooftops.


Unless somehow these companies have some kind of reason they might want to put pressure on their cable news for it to stay out of the headlines?
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I would also be curious how easy it would be to piggy back off these and use them to create fake accounts to do things like sending micro donations to politicians and making sock puppet accounts on forums.




This below is why the entirety of the Republican argument of 'people are upset and worried' is bullshit.



They are also being spammed so they have plausible deniability to pretend like it is not because a vast majority of all the right wing noise is just manufactured propaganda narratives being spammed so much that it looks to people who are barely paying attention that there might be something to their obvious lies.

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Monday that aims to punish social media companies for their moderation decisions, a move that Silicon Valley immediately criticized and likely sets the stage for potential legal challenges.

The legislation would bar Internet companies from suspending political candidates in the run-up to elections. It also would also make it easier for the Florida state attorney general and individuals to bring lawsuits when they think the tech companies have acted unfairly.

Legal experts and tech industry trade groups immediately raised concerns about the constitutionality of the law and warned that it gives the government too much power over online speech.

Trump, Republicans express outrage over extension of Facebook ban

DeSantis, a potential 2024 Republican presidential contender, pushed for the legislation’s passage amid conservatives’ complaints that tech companies censor them — charges that the companies vehemently deny.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube’s decisions to suspend former president Donald Trump’s account in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have only heightened the stakes.

“Today, Floridians are being guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley power grab on speech, thought, and content,” DeSantis said in a tweet. “We the people are standing up to tech totalitarianism with the signing of Florida’s Big Tech Bill.”

DeSantis first announced his support for the bill shortly after the tech companies’ suspended Trump, but the legislation, had it been effect, would not have affected the tech companies since Trump at the time was not an active candidate for office. The law creates fines of $250,000 per day for banning candidates for statewide office, and $25,000 for candidates for local office.

The law also includes provisions to protect people who aren’t running for office, allowing them to bring lawsuits against the companies if they think they’re being inconsistent about content decisions.

DeSantis signed the bill at an event at Florida International University in Miami, where he spoke from a lectern with the sign that said “Stop Big Tech Censorship.” DeSantis was flanked by other Florida Republicans, as well as James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, a non-profit organization known for using undercover tactics to expose what it says is liberal bias in the mainstream news media. Twitter earlier this year banned O’Keefe’s account, and he has sued the company for defamation.

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School in California, described the bill as bad policy and warned that some of its provisions are “obviously unconstitutional” because they restrict the editorial discretion of online publishers. He said some aspects of the law also would be preempted by a federal Internet law known as Section 230 that shields Internet companies from lawsuits over posts, photos and other content shared on their services.

“I see this bill as purely performative, it was never designed to be law but simply to send a message to voters,” Goldman said in an interview.

The Technology 202: New report calls conservative claims of social media censorship 'a form of disinformation'

The Florida legislation, which takes effect July 1, underscores how Republicans are increasingly targeting tech giants in state legislatures, while their ability to take action at the federal level is limited as Democrats control Washington.
The Biden administration recently revoked a Trump era executive order that called on the Federal Communications Commission to rethink the scope of Section 230 and when its liability protections apply.

The Texas Senate has approved legislation similar to Florida’s that would prevent large tech companies from blocking or discriminating against a user based on their viewpoint or their location within Texas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) has expressed support for that bill. North Carolina and Louisiana state lawmakers have introduced similar bills.

“It’s open season on the Internet at the state level,” Goldman said.

Washington lawmakers are also debating the future of social media legislation. Members of Congress from both parties have introduced bills taking aim at Section 230, but there’s been very little bipartisan agreement about how the law should be changed. Democrats largely think the tech companies aren’t doing enough to police the spread of viral falsehoods, hate speech and content inciting violence, while Republicans argue the companies have gone too far.

Kurt Opsahl, the deputy executive director and general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the debate over the control of the Internet is critical. But the Florida law fails to address the key problems.

“There’s a lot to be done with providing more information and transparency,” he said in an interview. “It doesn’t end up being very helpful to pass an unconstitutional bill that is going to be challenged immediately and likely to never go into effect.”

Trade groups representing the tech industry argued that the Florida law could make it harder for tech companies to take down potentially harmful speech from their services.

“If this law could somehow be enforced, it would allow lawful but awful user posts including pornography, violence and hate speech that will make it harder for families to safely navigate online,” said Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel at NetChoice, a trade association whose members include Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Tech trade groups also took issue with an exemption Florida lawmakers created for companies that own theme parks, which could apply to websites operated by Disney, whose Disney World is a major Florida tourist attraction, or Comcast, which owns Universal Studios Florida.

“If the Florida legislature actually believed that efforts to protect Internet users from harmful content threatened free expression, it wouldn’t be excluding digital services that own local theme parks,” Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said in a statement.

State legislatures across the country are increasingly passing legislation to regulate tech giants in the absence of action from Washington. Earlier this year, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed data privacy legislation into law, and Maryland enacted a first-in-the-nation tax on online advertising.

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hanimmal said:

DeSantis' lame attempt to keep the Republican's ability to spam lies to their cult unchallenged by using his government office to troll social media companies and waste millions of Flordia taxpayer's money in the inevitable lawsuits.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/24/florida-gov-social-media-230/
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There are about 330 million people in America. So when we talk about percentages of Americans, even a small figure — say, 1 percent — translates into a lot of people. If 1 percent of Americans were each to send me $5, I’d suddenly have $16.5 million in the bank. If you don’t believe me, let’s give this experiment a try.

When we’re talking about 15 percent of Americans, we’re talking about nearly 50 million people, the populations of California and New Jersey combined. It’s a lot of people. And that, according to new research published by PRRI on Thursday, is the number of Americans who say they believe the most out-there components of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

PRRI’s findings come from a survey conducted with IFYC in which they asked people specifically about components of QAnon. For example, they presented this exact statement, which is often presented as the most extreme iteration of the conspiracy theory’s belief system:

“The government, media and financial world in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”

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And it was with that, that specific belief, that 15 percent of respondents said they agreed.

On two other statements, similar levels of agreement emerged. When the pollsters asked if Americans agreed that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders” — again, a theme in QAnon — 1-in-5 said they did. On a more alarming proposition, that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” the level of agreement was again 15 percent.

This is a really surprising level of support for fundamentally baseless or anti-democratic sentiment. But, as you might expect, it’s also not evenly distributed. Republicans, for example, are more likely to agree with the statements above than are Democrats. Those who say they have the most trust in Fox News as a news source generally agree with the statements about as much as Republicans do, which makes sense given the overlap of those two groups.

The media consumers who stand out the most, though, are those who give the most trust to far-right networks like One America News or Newsmax. Among those respondents, at least 4-in-10 agreed with the idea of a satanic cabal and nearly half believed that a storm was coming.



Those are really staggering numbers. It’s been clear for some time that far-right media is fertile soil for conspiracy theories, given the often-loose relationship they have to objective fact. One America News in particular has been shown to be promoting false claimsrepeatedly. So it’s not surprising OAN viewers appear to be more likely to believe the most ridiculous components of QAnon.

What isn’t clear is the direction in which causality points. Is it the case that One America and Newsmax viewers are more likely to believe in QAnon because of the networks’ coverage? Or do people who are sympathetic to the QAnon conspiracy theory instead find themselves more drawn to those networks. After the 2020 presidential election, we saw some self-selection along those lines as some viewers (encouraged by Donald Trump) abandoned Fox News and its insistence on accurately reporting Trump’s loss in favor of Newsmax or OAN where the election was falsely presented as still unsettled.

That’s a key point in all of this. One of the developments that followed the splintering of the media ecosystem with the emergence of social media is that audiences for ideas more easily formed independently of any organization. There could easily emerge a sentiment held by millions of people into which media outlets could tap, preformed audiences looking for someone to agree with them. This isn’t only true of false conspiracy theories, but for any institution willing to cede objectivity to advertising dollars, it proved useful. So you get entities willing to coddle false claims in an effort to gain attention.

“At the end of the day, it’s great for news,” Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy said of Trump’s false stolen-election claims last November. “The news cycle is red-hot, and Newsmax is getting one million people per minute, according to Nielsen, tuning into Newsmax TV. I think it’s good.”

There was a market for nonsense and Newsmax was happy to step in.

What the PRRI survey also found, though, was QAnon believers didn’t limit their conspiracy theorizing to simply satanic cabals or political violence. They were also more likely to believe false or unfounded claims about the 2020 election and about the coronavirus pandemic.



It’s just this muddle of false assertions swirling in a truth-indifferent universe. There are millions of people who want to believe what they want to believe and there are media outlets that cater to that, perhaps reinforcing or expanding those false belief systems. Only a small fraction of Americans say they most trust far-right networks like Newsmax and One America, according to PRRI: that block constituted 3 percent of respondents.

Which, again, is about 10 million people.

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Lawyers for at least three defendants charged in connection with the violent siege tell The Associated Press that they will blame election misinformation and conspiracy theories, much of it pushed by then-President Donald Trump, for misleading their clients. The attorneys say those who spread that misinformation bear as much responsibility for the violence as do those who participated in the actual breach of the Capitol.


“I kind of sound like an idiot now saying it, but my faith was in him," defendant Anthony Antonio said, speaking of Trump. Antonio said he wasn't interested in politics before pandemic boredom led him to conservative cable news and right-wing social media. “I think they did a great job of convincing people.”

After Joe Biden's victory in last year's presidential election, Trump and his allies repeatedly claimed that the race was stolen, even though the claims have been repeatedly debunked by officials from both parties, outside experts and courts in several states and Trump's own attorney general. In many cases, the baseless claims about vote dumps, ballot fraud and corrupt election officials were amplified on social media, building Trump's campaign to undermine faith in the election that began long before November.

The tide of misinformation continues to spread, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote Wednesday in a decision denying the release of a man accused of threatening to kill U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

“The steady drumbeat that inspired defendant to take up arms has not faded away,” Berman wrote in her ruling ordering Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr. to remain in custody. “Six months later, the canard that the election was stolen is being repeated daily on major news outlets and from the corridors of power in state and federal government, not to mention in the near-daily fulminations of the former president.”

The defendants represent only a fraction of the more than 400 people charged in the failed attempt to disrupt the certification of Biden’s victory. But their arguments highlight the important role that the falsehoods played in inspiring the riot, especially as many top Republicans try to minimize the violence of Jan. 6 and millions of others still wrongly believe the election was stolen.

At least one of those charged plans to make misinformation a key part of his defense.

Albert Watkins, the St. Louis attorney representing Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon shaman, likened the process to brainwashing, or falling into the clutches of a cult. Repeated exposure to falsehood and incendiary rhetoric, Watkins said, ultimately overwhelmed his client's ability to discern reality.

“He is not crazy," Watkins said. "The people who fell in love with (cult leader) Jim Jones and went down to Guyana, they had husbands and wives and lives. And then they drank the Kool-Aid.”

Similar legal arguments failed to exonerate Lee Boyd Malvo, who at age 17 joined John Allen Mohammed in a sniper spree that killed 10 people in the Washington, D.C., area in 2002. His lawyers tried to argue that Malvo wasn't responsible for his actions because he had been deluded by the older Mohammed.

Attorneys for newspaper heiress Patty Hearst also argued, unsuccessfully, that their client had been brainwashed into participating in a bank robbery after being kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army group.

“It's not an argument I've seen win," said Christopher Slobogin, director of Vanderbilt Law School’s Criminal Justice Program, a psychiatry professor and an expert on mental competency.

Slobogin said that unless belief in a conspiracy theory is used as evidence of a larger, diagnosable mental illness — say, paranoia — it’s unlikely to overcome the law’s presumption of competence.

“I’m not blaming defense attorneys for bringing this up,” he said. “You pull out all the stops and make all the arguments you can make,” he said. ”But just because you have a fixed, false belief that the election was stolen doesn’t mean you can storm the Capitol.”

From a mental health perspective, conspiracy theories can impact a person’s actions, said Ziv Cohen, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University. Cohen, an expert on conspiracy theories and radicalization, often performs mental competency exams for defendants.

“Conspiracy theories may lead people to commit unlawful behavior,” Cohen said. “That’s one of the dangers. Conspiracy theories erode social capital. They erode trust in authority and institutions.”

Lawyers for Bruno Joseph Cua, a 19-year-old accused of shoving a police officer outside the U.S. Senate chamber, attributed his client’s extremist rhetoric before and after the riot to social media. Attorney Jonathan Jeffress said Cua was “parroting what he heard and saw on social media. Mr. Cua did not come up with these ideas on his own; he was fed them.”

In a Parler posting a day after the riot, Cua wrote: “The tree of liberty often has to be watered from the blood of tyrants. And the tree is thirsty."

Cua's attorney now characterizes such comments as bluster from an impressionable young person and said Cua regrets his actions.

Antonio, 27, was working as a solar panel salesman in suburban Chicago when the pandemic shut down his work. He and his roommates began watching Fox News almost all day long, and Antonio began posting and sharing right-wing content on TikTok.

Even though he'd never been interested in politics before — or even voted in a presidential election — Antonio said he began to be consumed by conspiracy theories that the election was rigged.

Court records portray Antonio as aggressive and belligerent. According to FBI reports, he threw a water bottle at a Capitol police officer who was being dragged down the building's steps, destroyed office furniture and was captured on police body cameras yelling “You want war? We got war. 1776 all over again” at officers.

Antonio, who wore a patch for the far-right anti-government militia group The Three Percenters, is charged with five counts, including violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds and obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder.

Joseph Hurley, Antonio’s lawyer, said he won't use his client’s belief in false claims of election fraud in an attempt to exonerate him. Instead, Hurley will use them to argue that Antonio was an impressionable person who got exploited by Trump and his allies.

“You can catch this disease,” Hurley said. Misinformation, he said, “is not a defense. It’s not. But it will be brought up to say: This is why he was here. The reason he was there is because he was a dumbass and believed what he heard on Fox News.”

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The FBI earlier this year tried to obtain records associated with people who accessed an article on USA Today’s website about the killing of two FBI agents as they tried to search a Florida apartment — sparking a legal fight and once again fueling concerns that federal law enforcement is not following its own guidelines when seeking news outlets’ data.

The bureau’s request to Gannett, which owns USA Today, came in late April but spilled into public view only recently after the company resisted it in court.

FBI agents sent the company a subpoena asking for records, including IP addresses and mobile identification information, of those who accessed a Feb. 2 article about the shooting during a 35-minute window that same day.

The subpoena said the demand related to a criminal investigation and asked USA Today not to disclose its existence “indefinitely.” It was unclear, though, precisely what the FBI was investigating or how electronic records pointing to those who accessed the story might advance that inquiry. The subpoena, which did not seem to seek readers’ names, was previously reported by Politico.

In a statement, USA Today publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth said the organization would fight the demand for the materials.

“Being forced to tell the government who reads what on our websites is a clear violation the First Amendment,” she said. “The FBI’s subpoena asks for private information about the readers of our journalism. We have asked the court to squash the subpoena to protect the important relationship and trust between USA TODAY’s readers and our journalists.”

The shooting occurred when agents went to serve a warrant at a Sunrise, Fla., apartment to which they had linked an IP address suspected of possessing child pornography, people familiar with the matter have said. The man inside, the people have said, opened fire through the door — killing Special Agents Daniel Alfin, 36, and Laura Schwartzenberger, 43 — then took his own life. The bureau has identified the shooter as 55-year-old David Lee Huber and said the agency’s Inspection Division is investigating the matter.

Slaying of two FBI agents in Fla. raises questions about intelligence, tactics

On May 22, Charles D. Tobin, a lawyer with the firm Ballard Spahr who represents Gannett, wrote to the FBI agent who sent the subpoena and objected to turning over the records, asserting that they “fall squarely under the protections of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the United States Attorney General’s regulations for subpoenas to the news media.”

Tobin noted that Justice Department policies call for law enforcement, in most circumstances, first to notify and negotiate with media members’ whose records they seek, and to get the attorney general’s personal approval. Agents did not appear to have followed the policies, Tobin asserted. On May 28, a day before the deadline the FBI had given the media company to respond to its demand, Gannett asked a judge to quash the subpoena. A ruling on the company’s motion has yet to be issued.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, including on whether the attorney general was notified of the subpoena. An FBI spokeswoman also declined to comment. The subpoena was signed by a supervisory special agent, J. Brooke Donahue, and faxed to Gannett by a different agent, Tracie E. Smith. Reached by phone, both declined to comment.

The Justice Department has in recent weeks disclosed three separate instances in which it secretly sought reporters’ phone records during the Trump administration — for their work at The Washington Post, CNN and the New York Times. The moves drew condemnations from media outlets and First Amendment advocates, who asserted that such tactics could have a chilling effect on reporters’ ability to gather information about the government.

President Biden vowed last month that he would not allow his administration to take journalists’ phone or email records, calling the practice “simply wrong.”

Wadsworth, the USA Today publisher, said the news organization was particularly surprised to have received the subpoena because of Biden’s comments.

“The subpoena is also contrary to the Justice Department’s own guidelines concerning the narrow circumstances in which subpoenas can be issued to the news media,” she said. “Our attorneys attempted to contact the FBI before we moved to fight the subpoena in court and afterward. Despite these attempts, we never received any substantive reply nor any meaningful explanation of the asserted basis for the subpoena.”

It was not immediately clear whether Biden’s comment would cause the FBI to back off its request to USA Today. The moves to seek journalists’ phone records were aimed at identifying sources for news stories, rather than particular readers. Gannett’s lawyers noted that prior court rulings affirm First Amendment protections for readers and publishers alike.

The Justice Department has under both political parties been aggressive about pursuing leak investigations and — at times — seeking journalists’ records to advance that effort. President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., faced significant controversy over collecting the phone records of journalists working for the Associated Press and Fox News. In 2013, he issued new, tighter guidelines for how such materials should be obtained.

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The world of Internet trolls — the gaslighting, the fabrications, the nastiness — is now a fact of life in the Web ecosystem nearly everywhere.

But something new is happening here: Experienced public relations experts in the Philippines are harnessing the raw energy of young and aggressive social media shape-shifters.

How social media companies outsource their dirty work to the Philippines

They are dramatically altering the political landscape in the Philippines with almost complete impunity — shielded by politicians who are so deep into this practice that they will not legislate against it, and using the cover of established PR firms that quietly offer these services.

It is also showing signs of going global — with the Philippines as a hub — as the United States and countries across the world move into another election cycle in the troll age.

“This is what disinformation will look like in the U.S. in 2020,” said Camille François, chief innovation officer at the New York-based social network analysis company Graphika.

Political manipulation, she said, does not need to come from an ill-intentioned enemy state. It can originate with those who have cut their teeth in the competitive worlds of advertising, media and marketing. Social media companies, she added, were caught off guard before — notably in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 — and could be yet again with this new iteration.

“The Philippines shows us trends that are headed this way,” said François, who led a report commissioned by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigating Russian trolls in the United States. “And, it is 2019, the market is global — so they will find jobs outside of their own nation.”

Facebook’s second-class workers are waging a quiet battle



'Get into your character'

He calls his operation a “white troll” farm, now an industry-wide term.

“Positive trolling” is another way to describe it, said the owner of a public relations firm that now specializes in these services. The idea, he said, was to counter the vitriol of the “black trolls” in the Philippines, linked to strongman President Rodrigo Duterte, whose supporters have turned online intimidation into an art.

The troll operator said he watched from the sidelines in 2016, when Duterte and his allies harnessed the power of self-declared patriots online and turned them into an organized cyber-mob — the Die-hard Duterte Supporters, or DDS. He was shocked to see female candidates and opposition leaders being humiliated on Facebook, threatened with rape and even death.

When Duterte assumed the presidency in 2016, the idea of a “white troll” farm took shape in the PR executive’s mind.

Duterte-linked trolls “use this power to peddle lies, concoct fake news, brainwash people,” he says in an interview. “I said, at least people should be influenced properly.”

His rules are strict: no harassment, no targeting of women or minorities, no fake news. Comments cannot be posted through a simple copy-and-paste job; they must always be new and original. Yet the online accounts that power his business are still largely fabricated names and backgrounds.

White House escalates war against Facebook, Google and Twitter



Listen on Post Reports: The surge of troll farms in the Philippines

These sparring matches — between live, paid social media operatives — are the latest evolution of this industry. It is also the clearest sign that inauthentic social media behavior has seeped into every layer of politics in the Philippines.

“It is really unique to the Philippines. We haven’t seen so many other countries that are using live moderators to battle it out,” said Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher at Oxford University who has studied misinformation campaigns worldwide. “This idea of the troll versus the troll, it is quite new.”

The operator of the white troll farm is among those who, having perfected their craft at home, dream of growing beyond the borders of the Philippines. He is hoping for global expansion, even if he starts small by exploring the market in regional countries such as Singapore.

“Why not?” he challenged.

A lie 10,000 times

Filipinos spend the most time online in the world — more than 10 hours on the Internet a day — according to social media analytics firm Hootsuite. The country is also one of Facebook’s biggest markets. In some cities, there are more users on the platform than the population.

For Duterte’s trolls and social media operatives, this was fertile ground.

Among the targets of their most vile and aggressive troll campaigns are imprisoned Sen. Leila de Lima, an outspoken critic of Duterte’s war on drugs; former opposition Sen. Antonio Trillanes, whose term ended in June; and prominent journalist Maria Ressa, named one of Time’s 2018 people of the year.



Some gave themselves away easily. In March, a Twitter account in support of Sen. Sonny Angara was found using a profile photo of a dead Filipino girl, murdered in the United States last December.

The account has since been taken down. But an image search by The Post also uncovered the same photo being used in accounts supportive of politicians Bong Revilla and Grace Poe, a former presidential candidate.

The Post also found Twitter accounts supportive of Angara and Poe misleadingly using photos belonging to a travel blogger, a software start-up founder, at least two beauty pageant candidates, “The Apprentice Asia” winner Jonathan Yabut, and Filipino American social media personality Bretman Rock.

Revilla, Poe and Angara all won Senate seats in the midterm elections. Poe led a Senate hearing on misinformation last year, and she described the problem as something that “plagued” society.

However, she pushed back on the idea that lawmakers should legislate it for fear of censorship.

All three denied that they utilize such services.

'We're determined, too'

The Philippines is one of the countries where Facebook offers its “Free Basics” service, providing free Internet access to a small number of websites and Facebook itself — essentially turning the platform into the de facto Internet. The main Philippine cellular providers also offer cheap Facebook data packages.

Facebook is now using the Philippines as proof that they can right their wrongs. After apologizing for not acting sooner, the company has staffed up a local office in Manila — a rare move for Facebook — and launched a digital literacy program.

Hundreds of Facebook pages linked to Philippine troll farms have been removed from the platform, including digital marketing group Twinmark Media. It controlled a so-called digital news website, Trending News Portal, that posted unverified and salacious articles critical of Duterte’s opponents.

In late March, the social media platform removed 200 pages, groups and accounts that they said were linked to Nic Gabunada, who was the head of Duterte’s social media strategy during the 2016 campaign.

The social media analysis company Graphika, which helped Facebook archive this content before its removal, said these pages glorified Duterte’s war on drugs, which human rights groups say has resulted in the deaths of more than 20,000 people in police raids and extrajudicial slayings.



Another wave came after the news organization published a commentary on a list of names supposedly linked with the drug trade, from a whistleblower who called himself “Bikoy.” Among them was Paolo Duterte, the leader’s son, who has denied the charges.

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STILLWATER, Minn. — Sean G. Turnbull displays many of the hallmarks of a successful upper-middle-class family man, a former film producer and marketing manager for one of the country’s largest retail corporations who lives in a well-appointed home in this Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb. Former colleagues describe him as smart, affable and family-oriented.

But for more than a decade, the 53-year-old has also pursued a less conventional path: anonymously promoting conspiracy theories about dark forces in American politics on websites and social media accounts in a business he runs out of his home. His audience numbers are respectable and his ad base is resilient, according to corporate records and interviews.

Turnbull has identified himself online for 11 years only as “Sean from SGT Reports.” He has amassed a substantial following while producing videos and podcasts claiming that the 9/11 attacks were a “false flag” event, a “Zionist banker international cabal” is plotting to destroy Western nations, the coronavirus vaccine is an “experimental, biological kill shot” and that the 2020 election was “rigged” against former president Donald Trump, according to a Washington Post review.



He declined to go into detail about the finances of his operation but said a crackdown by social media companies on what they call misinformation has made it more difficult for him to make a living.

“I’m surviving, but I’m a fighter and I’m going to stay,” said Turnbull, who has athletic features, tousled hair and horn-rimmed glasses.

He said he has striven to remain anonymous to keep the focus on his message and ideas.

“I never wanted to appear in my videos because I wanted the message to be the star,” he said.

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Turnbull on why he has tried to remain anonymous: "The message is paramount"

The Post identified Turnbull by reviewing state incorporation records from 2012 for a company in Minnesota that has the same name as his website and lists him as founder.

After a Post reporter recently visited him at his home, Turnbull agreed to an extensive on-the-record interview on the condition that he could record it. Two days after the interview, he then requested that his full name not be included in this story. The Post is publishing Turnbull’s name because his identity as SGT’s founder already appears in public records and he voluntarily sat for an on-the-record interview without the condition of anonymity.
In a video he published on his website in late June, he said he expected this article to be “a hit piece because I was honest with [a Post reporter] about my views about this election, which I believe was rigged.”

Turnbull has kept his identity private even as his website has been named in two recent court cases.

Identifying himself as the founder of SGT Report but calling himself “Michael Doe,” Turnbull joined others who were banned from YouTube in filing a federal lawsuit in October in California. At the time, SGT Report’s two YouTube channels had more than 630,000 and 107,000 subscribers, respectively, and their videos had been viewed a total of more than 146 million times, according to the claims in the lawsuit and an archive of the channel available through the website altCensored.com.

Turnbull’s website was also cited in evidence presented against an Alabama man arrested Jan. 6 after he drove to Washington ahead of the Capitol riot with an arsenal of weapons and molotov cocktails in his truck, police said. Included in court documents was a handwritten note police said they seized from Lonnie Coffman’s vehicle that quoted Abraham Lincoln about overthrowing “the men who pervert the Constitution” and listing SGTReport.com as “good guys.”





Working from a home office in a 3,500-square-foot house that he said he built in 2003 and is valued at more than $700,000, according to government appraisal records, Turnbull broadcast accounts of impending apocalypse.

One video in October 2010, called “Red Alert: Total Collapse Near,” featured Turnbull warning of economic disaster and positing that deceptions from powerful people in government and the banking industry flowed from a coverup of the true cause of 9/11. It received 42,000 views, according to altCensored.com.

“We’re talking about a doomsday scenario for our republic,” Turnbull said in the video. “This is a epic, epic meltdown problem that we are seeing and it’s all going to happen in November.”

“It’s not too late to buy silver or gold,” he said in another part of the video.

By August 2011, his website, SGTReport.com, was displaying banner advertisements for multiple gold and silver dealers, according to archived images of the site on the Internet Archive.

Turnbull said his “first precious metal sponsor” was a gold and silver dealer called Miles Franklin, which paid him for a banner ad as well as a “very, very small” commission on gold and silver purchases that originated from his site. He declined to say how much revenue that and other gold and silver advertising have generated. Miles Franklin, a Minnesota-based company, did not respond to a voice-mail message seeking comment.

Turnbull also said he learned about a YouTube program that allowed him to bring in advertising revenue for commercials that aired with his videos. “I was shocked that there could be any earnings potential,” he said.

On May 25, 2012, he incorporated SGTReport.com LLC in Minnesota. Turnbull said that within two years, he began to realize his operation could become a sustaining full-time job.



His mother, mother-in-law and neighbors, he has said in his videos, have not heeded his warnings about the coronavirus vaccine, which he has called “death stabs” under headlines such as “Vaxxed people will die in two years. The republic even sooner.”






Turnbull, identifying himself as “Michael Doe,” wrote in a court filing that he assumed his channels were terminated because “they have a widespread audience reach, I am not a member of the mainstream media, and my content has at times focused on or questioned mainstream media or government.”

Turnbull acknowledged in the interview with The Post that he is Michael Doe.

“I am proceeding under a pseudonym in this case because I have maintained my anonymity with respect to the work that I do and the speech that I offer to the public,” he wrote in a court filing, offering few details about his background except that he had earned a degree in broadcast journalism from University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire in 1992.



His lawyer offered an additional reason he and others wanted to remain anonymous.

“If the speech of the Plaintiffs is actually threatening or connected to ‘real-world violence’ as YouTube seems to suggest in its blog post, then the Plaintiffs could be subject to criminal liability,” the lawyer for the plaintiffs wrote in court files.

The lawsuit is in its preliminary stages.

In the meantime, Turnbull has shifted yet again to new platforms.

He has a fundraising page on the website SubscribeStar, which allows his followers to choose between $3 and $40 monthly subscriptions that offer services ranging from access to his videos and interviews to personal handwritten letters or calls thanking subscribers. He is also providing a streaming channel through an Internet platform called Secure Server TV that allows his videos to be streamed for a $3.99 monthly subscription.

Turnbull did not respond to an emailed question about the number of subscribers on the sites.

During the interview, he said he has no plans to halt his venture.

“I'm not going to just cower and go away because this apparatus has been turned and weaponized against me and my speech,” he said.

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BudmanTX said:

hey does sky news austrailia fit this bill........jc... as a spreader of dis-information?

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hanimmal said:

IMO yeah man no question.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/sky-news-australia/
View attachment 4938698

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BudmanTX said:

ck this BS out......make me wonder who owns these asshats....

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hanimmal said:

Yeah, 'according to a interview with New York Post' (the female says this at the start of her rant about someone who is not the POTUS or being put in charge of middle east peace, the national pandemic response, grifting the public, etc). Which is just a different arm of the world wide propaganda machine that Rupert Murdoch owns.




So basically they get to site totally seemingly legit (super well funded) news website companies in UK (the Sun) USA (New York Post) and Australia (Sky News) owning a entire narrative for the entire english as a first language countries. And then he can have the writers site sources form the other papers to gain 'credibility' from what looks like different news sources. And by the time it hits Fox News tv trolls screens it cements the lies with people watching those shows for entertainment, but mistaking it for the news.

And since these countries are all speak English, their trolls/brainwashed masses, can push the story out into the feeds of every American selling them on whatever it is that they want to push to turn the word 'Democrat' into a bad word. Because they can speak english really well and are all culturally similar.

(note to self: look up Forbes, I remember them pushing a lot of stuff on Youtube lately with political trolls in hearings)


God then she snowflakes about the Russian investigation that she says 'is proven false' which is a flat out lie that is regurgitating the Barr obstruction.

I really think it is some kind of thought process that they are trying to program that just because someone doesn't get arrested and convicted of a crime, they are not doing it/have done it.

Trump asked for and received help from the Russian military. His campaign manager then smuggled the Russian military the data files on their campaign strategy and all the data on the American public that the Republican party gave to Trump when he became their nominee. That was then used to attack over 100 million Americans nonstop for years.


And that was just on one platform. When you consider that every website has been under constant attack pushing this same shit into relevance it is just one giant circle jerk of propaganda that people get stuck in that is really just one big con.

https://www.rollitup.org/t/ap-news-trump-campaigns-russia-contacts-grave-threat-senate-says.1028063/post-15756562

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BudmanTX said:

kinda figure.......i started listening to it.....and i was like WTF this is total bullshit........i've been finding these POS things on my youtube feeds......and i'm like there is no way i asked for this shit...why....smh

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