Well get ready. Seems like this is going to be the Trump campaign's final stab attempt.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lashes-out-new-york-post-429486

That Durham investigation fell the fuck apart and Barr can't even show their face.

The fact that it wasn't even brought up here for 24 hours says something.

This doesn't even deserve oxygen. Haberman really played herself amplifying the story.

Real clowns do clown things.

The only reason this will get any burn is because of Twitter/Facebook's actions which fed into the right's persecution complex. But what're they gonna do? Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Shout out to Rudy Giuliani who continues to find new ways to debase and tell on himself

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giuliani-posts-footage-of-himself-mocking-asians-to-youtube

outside of initially being uncritically amplified by maga haberman (nyt) and jake sherman (politico).

its still funny to me that...our intelligence agencies, the repub majority senate intelligence committee, fox news internal leadership, and even a previous giuliani co conspirator all said that this burisma/hunter biden attack was a russian disinfo op. and the dude giuliani was working with was even sanctioned by trumps/mnuchins treasury department as a russian agent (which giuliani copped to on camera and tried to act like he didnt know).

and then giuliani still pulled this half ass keystone cop shit and a rupert murdoch outlet actually laundered it.

its also funny that this was their october surprise...and even if it were 100% true...nobody would give a fuck about it outside of the right wing fever swamp (who aint voting for biden anyway).

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/10/14/21516194/hunter-biden-new-york-post-facebook-twitter-removed

https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-post-hunter-joe-biden-giuliani-red-flags-disinformation-2020-10

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-hunter-biden-new-york-post-story-fact-checkers-2020-10

I have no idea why anyone in Drumf's campaign thought any legitimate news outlet would treat this "story" as remotely credible

https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1316493707852603392?s=21

the Michigan domestic terrorism plot to instead focus on Pelosi's allusion to the 25th Amendment as 'COUP-COUP' on the cover....

alas, there are much deeper depths

Sad thing is a lot of working class people just pick up this rag out of habit. It's widely available and does not have the stigma of people elitist like the NY Times.

I thoroughly despise the entire publication.

Biden already got all emotional about his son being a former addict in the debate. All he gotta do is keep repeating what he said then and it would be a blip.

Everybody's dirty in politics.


Edit: Just searched and that laptop story sounds sketchy-as-hell. I thought this was about Biden's son being a druggie and using his connections to party and make $$$.

both the content and the story behind how it was obtained is hilariously suspect

Bannon has spoken about this method of propelling a story cultivated and speculated about in the right wing media bubble into the mainstream news sphere.

Your reaction "hey probably true, politicians are all dirty" while based on a logical cynicism, is exactly what they were going for.

>Your reaction "hey probably true, politicians are all dirty"
>while based on a logical cynicism, is exactly what they were
>going for.

>
>Your reaction "hey probably true, politicians are all dirty"
>while based on a logical cynicism, is exactly what they were
>going for.
>


Dude can fuck out of here

>Bannon has spoken about this method of propelling a story
>cultivated and speculated about in the right wing media bubble
>into the mainstream news sphere.
>
>Your reaction "hey probably true, politicians are all dirty"
>while based on a logical cynicism, is exactly what they were
>going for.
>

Twitter bans the story due to its “hacked materials” policy. I haven’t read their terms and conditions but if the emails are hacked, they are authentic. If they aren’t authentic, they can’t be hacked...

I guess their policy probably states that they preemptively ban materials that if authentic must have derived from a hack (and that otherwise would run afoul of different rules presumably relating to disinfo)?

If the laptops really got dropped off at a repair shop, is the owner free legally to disseminate them? I wonder what the language of twitters policy said about what the definition of a hack is...

I get that they want to squash some of the bullshit. But instead of fixing their algorithm and providing a better product they just made up a policy and acted as arbiters of the truth and curated content.

2020 is very weird times.

although they just changed their hacked material policy as a result of this


www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

>Twitter bans the story due to its “hacked materials”
>policy. I haven’t read their terms and conditions but if
>the emails are hacked, they are authentic. If they aren’t
>authentic, they can’t be hacked...

Or it's all BULLSHIT - and transparently so.

Claims he “didn’t see“ but merely assumed Hunter Biden was the person who dropped off the laptops that supposedly contained the emails is so suspicious.

One possible scenario seems like; someone hacked Hunters emails, put them in these laptops to launder them then dropped them at the guys store.

When the owner was interviewed, he stated he didn’t personally see Hunter Biden drop off the laptops (nor did anyone), but now Giuliani is claiming that a “very inebriated” Hunter did.

https://www.mediaite.com/radio/rudy-giuliani-changes-laptop-story-now-claims-hunter-biden-left-it-at-store/amp/

random computer shop guy repairs the laptop, and then just starts keyword searching all the emails on it for burisma...ok fam

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

the nypost even reported it lol.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkWc0BzWAAImA_d?format=jpg&name=medium
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EkWc0B3WsAIRm5I?format=jpg&name=medium

these dickheads didnt even bother to look up where he lived at the time that they said hunter biden dropped his laptop off at a local delaware computer repair shop.

also...what rich person doesnt have applecare with extended warranty and instead is taking *3* macbooks to some local repair shop and skipping out on an absurdly low $85 bill?

This is why they impeached Trump - he was asking Ukraine to make up some shit he could tout like this. They refused, so they had to go with a computer store owner who's legally blind but he's pretty sure these are hunter beidne's machines.

I like this take:
Giuliani's latest B.S. Ukraine smear failed. You can thank the Trump impeachment for that

https://www.salon.com/2020/10/15/giulianis-latest-bs-ukraine-smear-failed-you-can-thank-the-trump-impeachment-for-that/

Excerpt swipe:

To quickly recap the latest in Giuliani's impotent machinations: Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist currently indicted on federal money laundering and obstruction charges, tips off the New York Post that the former NYC mayor has had in his possession what they claim are emails from Biden's son, Hunter Biden. Giuliani's story of how he got these emails is, to put it charitably, implausible. He says they were obtained from a computer supposedly left at a Delaware repair shop which the owner then turned over to him, for some reason. Perhaps a likelier explanation, as New York magazine's Jonathan Chait suggests, is that the emails may have been sourced from Russian agents that Giuliani knows.

The emails, which have not been independently verified, purport to show the younger Biden trying to set up a meeting between his father, who was vice president at the time, and executives at a corrupt Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, where he served on the board of directors. Joe Biden's schedule shows he did not attend such a meeting, and the campaign says the Post didn't ask for comment on that allegation. But this is supposed to be evidence that Joe Biden is corrupt.

There's every reason to be suspicious of this weak attempt at an October surprise. It's important to remember that Trump got impeached because he tried to conjure up false evidence for these same bogus accusations by blackmailing the Ukrainian president into announcing a fraudulent "investigation" into Biden.

Moreover, it's a matter of record that Joe Biden's only involvement with Burisma was working with international authorities to fire a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who had failed to investigate Burisma. So even if there was an effort made by Burisma to corrupt Joe Biden, it failed. The emails, even if they're real, just prove he refused to get involved.

And so the efforts to pump this up into a big deal are failing. But without impeachment, there's a very good chance that Giuliani's gambit would have worked as intended, which is to flood baseless insinuations across the mainstream news media, including the New York Times.

Obviously the blind computer repairman who is pro-Trump and a useful idiot of (and possibly criminal accessory to) Rudy is a huge pos...but how tf can a blind man repair computers?

What an inspiring scumbag.

https://visionaware.org/your-eye-condition/what-is-legal-blindness/

1: A visual acuity of 20/200 or less in the better-seeing eye with best conventional correction (meaning with regular glasses or contact lenses).

Snellen Eye ChartThis is a 20/200 visual acuity measurement, correlated with the Snellen Eye Chart.
If you can only read line 1 (the big “E”) from 20 feet away while wearing your regular glasses or contact lenses, the doctor records your vision (or visual acuity) as 20/200 with best correction.
Update: In 2007, the Social Security Administration updated the criteria for measuring legal blindness when using newer low vision test charts with lines that can measure visual acuity between 20/100 and 20/200. Under the new criteria, if a person’s visual acuity is measured with one of the newer charts, and they cannot read any of the letters on the 20/100 line, they will qualify as legally blind, based on a visual acuity of 20/200 or less.
Part 2 of the U.S. definition of legal blindness states this about visual field:


#2: OR a visual field (the total area an individual can see without moving the eyes from side to side) of 20 degrees or less (also called tunnel vision) in the better-seeing eye.

>
>What an inspiring scumbag.
>
>

Biden will still win, but it's not going to be a landslide - Trump will crack 250 EVs, but he won't win back MI or WI. Probably not PA, either. This will probably also be the year OH finally votes for the losing candidate (would be the first time since 1960).

(from link)

Weeks before the New York Post began publishing what it claimed were the contents of Hunter Biden’s hard drive, a Sept. 25 segment on a YouTube channel run by a Chinese dissident streamer, who is linked to billionaire and Steve Bannon-backer Guo Wengui, broadcast a bizarre conspiracy theory. According to the streamer, Chinese politburo officials had “sent three hard disks of evidence” to the Justice Department and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi containing damaging information about Joe Biden as well as the origins of the coronavirus in a bid to undermine the rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/chinese-billionaires-network-hyped-hunter-biden-dirt-weeks-before-rudy

Are we forgetting Trump outing intelligence agents around the world and causing untold deaths?

https://twitter.com/SaysSimonson/status/1318620742116888577

another rupert murdoch outlet with a lot more cache (in the minds of readers) than the ny post. so its prolly still bullshit but will have more of a veneer of legitimacy.

trump mentioned on a campaign call that the wsj is working on a big story so is team is prolly coordinated their messaging campaign with whoever is working on the story.

Who should off himself after this.

Yeah I said it.

Who should off himself after this.

Yeah I said it.

I’ll be voting for Tulsi

It’s total sarcasm.


I.m not part of the rat fuck faces

There's like 20 different "revelations". All kinds of underage sex tapes, back room business deals. I saw one image with a scale and some cocaine. Don't know what that one was about.

You would think they would home in on one. But they are scatter shotting this which kind of works to discredit any miniscule bit of credibility that was there.

It is Elvis spotted with Bigfoot territory now

no one who isnt already qanon level camp trump cares about this.

>There's like 20 different "revelations". All kinds of
>underage sex tapes, back room business deals. I saw one image
>with a scale and some cocaine. Don't know what that one was
>about.
>
>You would think they would home in on one. But they are
>scatter shotting this which kind of works to discredit any
>miniscule bit of credibility that was there.
>
>It is Elvis spotted with Bigfoot territory now
>
Correct. They are focusing all efforts on this

...it's time to pack it in. No one cares.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/1AIeYgwnqeBUxh6juu/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952483avop7c06e25vkruflynnm738tfzc8wp0l8erm&rid=giphy.gif

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/tucker-carlson-lost-only-copy-of-documents-nailing-biden.html

On Wednesday night’s show, Tucker Carlson reported that his team had acquired incriminating documents. However, they sent them from Washington to Los Angeles, and the documents disappeared. And they neglected to make any copies. So now the only copy of the documents that would nail the probable next President of the United States are gone:

>hahahahhahaaa

Lost in the mail.

Politico needs to update the article they did and add that.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/28/trump-conspiracy-theoryhunter-biden-433131

when they get together and discuss the type of dumb shit their viewers fall for.

And claim that it isn’t their dick, it is in fact Hunters dick.

And I know it was supposedly a FedEx or UPS or whatever but still.

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

just like he knows better than to name the company who lost his imaginary documents

the motherfucker can lie

The details, the sheer number of people involved in the search, the time frame, the company's involvement in the recovery

If you already believe these documents exist and are legit, it would be easy to see you eating this bullshit up.

ass motherfuckers

imagine being too hackish for the questionable-standard outlet *you* founded.

dude is throwing a hissy fit because none of his reporters are going all in on the discredited hunter biden laptop story.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1321869227226222593
-----
My Resignation From The Intercept

The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.

https://t.co/dZrlYGfEBf?amp=1
-----

its prolly not too hard to imagine what type of outlet he *will* pop up at next.

and being supported by right wing internet trolls.

dude killt his entire credibility in one election cycle.

also shows what *his* true aim became with that outlet.

https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1321896097099489283

https://twitter.com/JohnnyMcNulty/status/1321878568738181123
-----
Glenn Greenwald is like if Ralph Nader spent the back half of his career defending car crashes.
-----

I'm still not the biggest fan of their work

But they got this one correct.

for the intercept to finally take a stand against you?

geezus.

the highlights of glenns final season were caping for bill barr, promoting tara reade, getting reality winner locked up, and trying to launder known russian disinformation against hunter biden.

>the highlights of glenns final season were caping for bill
>barr, promoting tara reade, getting reality winner locked up,
>and trying to launder known russian disinformation against
>hunter biden
.
>

**********
"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"

jk no link

not yet anyway. buts its coming

but never fear Taibi and the Chapo dudes will still be here to fight the good fight I'm sure

Useful of idiots

with the majority of political discourse on OKP and many other places with these lines from the resignation "That’s the crisis that journalism, and more broadly values of liberalism, faces. Our discourse is becoming increasingly intolerant of dissenting views, and our culture is demanding more and more submission to prevailing orthodoxies imposed by self-anointed monopolists of Truth and Righteousness, backed up by armies of online enforcement mobs.

Some of my favourite takes from Twitter:

I don't understand how anyone who calls themselves a leftist can hate Glenn Greenwald. What do you dislike? That he effectively subverts the most popular cable news show? That he makes powerful, empirical indictments of the pathologies in both the Democratic & Republican parties? That he broke the Snowden story? That he exposed Brazilian right-wingers and fascists? I don't agree with everything he says. I don't agree with anyone about everything! Neither do you! The idea that Greenwald is a useful idiot for the right or a Dave Rubin type character is so beyond stupid that I can't even and I never use that phrase. Goodnight.

https://twitter.com/aishaismad/status/1321973192777486341?s=20

Assange is in solitary.
Snowden's in exile.
Corbyn's suspended by his own party.
Now Glenn Greenwald's been censored by The Intercept.
There's a war on truth-tellers & you could be next.

"First they came for Assange and I said nothing..."

https://twitter.com/DrJillStein/status/1321897520096825344?s=20

People who want to claim that a person is “on the right” or “on the left”or whatever should be able to identify a few positions and beliefs the person holds indicative of that ideology. Those terms reference an ideological belief system; they’re not tribal identifiers.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1321972270449991680?s=20

Censored??? Jesus, you don't even know the terms.

Dude will fall fall ANY Russian information - whether it is true or not.

Assange did actively try to fuck America by helping the Republicans who Russia supported.

Snowden did break the law - so he does belong in jail. When he gets there you can put some money on his books so he's comfy.

And you never seems to mention Reality Winner in any of this, just the people Russia favors. Once someone leaks something AGAINST Russia you stop caring about them.

So weird.

>And you never seems to mention Reality Winner in any of this,
>just the people Russia favors. Once someone leaks something
>AGAINST Russia you stop caring about them.

She's mentioned many times in his letter: "The most egregious, but by no means only, example of exploiting my name to evade responsibility was the Reality Winner debacle. As The New York Times recently reported, that was a story in which I had no involvement whatsoever. While based in Brazil, I was never asked to work on the documents which Winner sent to our New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. I did not even learn of the existence of that document until very shortly prior to its publication. The person who oversaw, edited and controlled that story was Betsy Reed, which was how it should be given the magnitude and complexity of that reporting and her position as editor-in-chief.

It was Intercept editors who pressured the story’s reporters to quickly send those documents for authentication to the government — because they was eager to prove to mainstream media outlets and prominent liberals that The Intercept was willing to get on board the Russiagate train. They wanted to counter-act the perception, created by my articles expressing skepticism about the central claims of that scandal, that The Intercept had stepped out of line on a story of high importance to U.S. liberalism and even the left. That craving — to secure the approval of the very mainstream media outlets we set out to counteract — was the root cause for the speed and recklessness with which that document from Winner was handled.

But The Intercept, to this very day, has refused to provide any public accounting of what happened in the Reality Winner story: to explain who the editors were who made mistakes and why any of it happened. As the New York Times article makes clear, that refusal persists to this very day notwithstanding vocal demands from myself, Scahill, Laura Poitras and others that The Intercept, as an institution that demands transparency from others, has the obligation to provide it for itself.

The reason for this silence and this cover-up is obvious: accounting to the public about what happened with the Reality Winner story would reveal who the actual editors are who are responsible for that deeply embarrassing newsroom failure, and that would negate their ability to continue to hide behind me and let the public continue to assume that I was the person at fault for a reporting process from which I was completely excluded from the start. That is just one example illustrating the frustrating dilemma of having a newsroom exploit my name, work and credibility when it is convenient to do so, while increasingly denying me any opportunity to influence its journalistic mission and editorial direction, all while pursuing an editorial mission completely anathema to what I believe."

I don't think Russia is the bogeyman but they probably didn't like these: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Russia

Sounds like Glenn's a stupid asshole and even people who work at the company he founded had enough of his shit.

But yeah, Russia's great, comrade fuck nuts.

i question the mods telling me you're not

https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/10/30/glenn-greenwalds-self-hack-i-could-go-on-and-on/

The Intercept agreed that Greenwald's assertion that liberal media was unwilling to even approach Biden about this topic and had gone too far to disavow it was one worth exploring and strongly supported by evidence.

But Greenwald asserted that because Hunter Biden had done what he did, it meant that Joe Biden was corrupt. The Intercept didn't want to risk its journalistic integrity by publishing it without evidence to support that.

then Greenwald asserted that THE INTERCEPT was being favorable to Biden... without evidence. The Intercept was one of the ONLY news outlets that didn't bury the Tara Reade story. They have had no problems printing negative news stories about Biden.

Look:

When it comes to Greenwald's reporting, I absolutely am with him on the bullshit that is "Russiagate". Even if Trump has a "Hunter Biden" relationship with Russian entities, the narrative that Russia is being every Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party failure and Trump "success" is plainly bullshit. And news outlets that parrot that narrative, especially MSNBC, are full of shit.

He's been one of the best reporters on the mess in Brazil, largely because he lives there.

But there's one thing about Greenwald that's always pissed me off and that's his free speech absolutism, his non-partisan absolutism that results in the worst kind of "both sides-ing" that ends up beneifiting the far right. Going on Fox News is not necessarily a bad thing. Having an audience with Tucker Carlson, even. But this motherfucker does not push back when Carlson and the like opportunistically use the news he provides to their own end, to a wider audience that filters up to the likes of Donald Trump.

His disdain for Hillary Clinton is as thinly veiled as my own. But sometimes Greenwald's posturing comes off as if neither fascism, nor white supremacy, nor the intersection of such is not a dealbreaker for him.


In this manner he resembles the Intellectual Dark Web motherfuckers who frame their situation in right-wing terms and sound like they're being persecuted.

That self-ether actually supports my assertion.
He acts like he was fired when he actually quit.
To that I say, FOH.

Is Republican Attack on Social Media Giants Part of an Effort to Invalidate Election Results?:
https://youtu.be/bNWyz0LP7mY

MEET THE MAN WHO COULD LEAD THE GOP’S WAR ON PLATFORM MODERATION
Brendan Carr is next in line to run Trump’s FCC. His first task? Regulating social media.:
https://www.theverge.com/21280814/brendan-carr-section-230-republican-party-regulation-social-media

watching it all unravel.

I can’t wait until it’s over...

This story has EVERYTHING, AI generated faces, the Epoch Times, a Q drop.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/how-fake-persona-laid-groundwork-hunter-biden-conspiracy-deluge-n1245387

How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge

A 64-page document that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump appears to be the work of a fake "intelligence firm."

Oct. 29, 2020, 5:30 PM EDT
By Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny
One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden's laptop, a fake "intelligence" document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden's son and business in China.

That document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake "intelligence firm" called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.

The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen's profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer told NBC News that no one by that name had ever worked for their company, and no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches.

One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of the document when asked about it by NBC News, and said that Aspen does not exist.

Despite the document's questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.


Inside the false conspiracy theory being pushed on the Bidens
OCT. 23, 202004:43
The document and its spread have become part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden's presidential campaign, which moved from the fringes of the internet to more mainstream conservative news outlets.

An unverified leak of documents including salacious pictures from what President Donald Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Delaware Apple repair store owner claimed to be Hunter Biden's hard drive were published in the New York Post on Oct. 14. Associates close to Trump, including Giuliani and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, have since promised more blockbuster leaks and secrets, which have yet to materialize.

The fake intelligence document, however, preceded the leak by months and helped lay the groundwork among right-wing media for what would become a failed October surprise: a viral pile-on of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.

Behind Typhoon
The Typhoon Investigations document was first posted in September to Intelligence Quarterly, an anonymous blog "dedicated to collecting important daily news," according to its "about" section. Historical domain records show the blog was registered to Albert Marko, a self-described political and economic advisor, who also lists the blog on his Twitter bio. When asked about the provenance of the document, Marko said he received the document from Balding.

Balding, an associate professor at Fulbright University Vietnam who studies the Chinese economy and financial markets, posted the document on his blog on Oct. 22, seven weeks after it was initially published.

"I had really not wanted to do this but roughly 2 months ago I was handed a report about Biden activities in China the press has simply refused to cover. I want to strongly emphasize I did not write the report but I know who did," Balding said in an email.

Balding later claimed to NBC News he wrote some of the document.

"I authored small parts of the report and was involved in report preparation and review. As a researcher, and due to the understandable worry about foreign disinformation, it was paramount that the report document activity from acknowledged and public sources," Balding said. "Great care was taken to document, cite, and retain information so that acknowledged facts could be placed in the public domain."

Image: Martin Aspen deepfake
A viral dossier about Hunter Biden was written by "Martin Aspen," a fake identity whose profile picture was created by artificial intelligence.TyphoonInvesti1 / via Twitter

Balding said Aspen is "an entirely fictional individual created solely for the purpose of releasing this report" and said "the primary author of the report, due to personal and professional risks, requires anonymity." Balding did not name the document's primary author.

Balding claimed that the document was commissioned by Apple Daily, a Hong Kong-based tabloid that is frequently critical of the Chinese government. Apple Daily did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to posting the document to his blog, Balding also promoted it in far-right media, appearing on Bannon's podcast and China Unscripted, a podcast produced by The Epoch Times, a pro-Trump media outlet opposed to the Chinese government.

Balding, an American who taught economics at China's Peking University HSBC Business School until 2018, is often critical of the Chinese government. Earlier this year, Balding made news as a source uncovering a global bulk data collection operation from the Chinese company Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology.

Blog posts highlighting the most salacious parts of the document, including articles from the Intelligence Quarterly Blog, Revolver News and Balding's blog, received 70,000 public interactions — which includes reactions, comments, and shares — across Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, according to social media analysis tool BuzzSumo.

Balding's blog was the primary driver of virality in conservative and conspiracy communities. The report itself was shared across Facebook and Twitter around 5,000 times, according to BuzzSumo, and more than 80 sites linked back to the blog, which was shared more than 25,000 times on Facebook and Twitter. Hyperpartisan and conspiracy sites like ZeroHedge and WorldNetDaily led the pack.

After promising a big reveal one day earlier, the document was also posted on the extremist forum 8kun by Q, the anonymous account behind the QAnon conspiracy theory movement.

On Twitter, the document was pushed by influencers in the QAnon community as well as Dinggang Wang, an anti-Chinese government YouTube personality who works for Guo Wengui, a billionaire who fled China amid accusations of bribery and other crimes. Republican Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, tweeted the document to his 2.3 million followers.

'Immediately suspicious'
The document gained attention from disinformation researchers in part due to the image of the document's author.

Elise Thomas, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, first spotted tell-tale signs of a fake photo when she went searching for Typhoon Investigation's Aspen on the web. Thomas found a Twitter account for Aspen named @TyphoonInvesti1 that had posted a link to Typhoon's Wordpress page that contained the document on Aug. 15.

The profile picture for Aspen showed immediate signs of a computer-generated image that can be created by computers and even some websites. Aspen's ears were asymmetrical, for one, but his left eye is what gave away that he did not really exist. Aspen's left iris juts out and appears to form a second pupil, a somewhat frequent error with computer-generated faces.

"The most obvious tell was the irregular shape of the irises," Thomas said. "The profile picture looks pretty convincing in the Twitter thumbnail, but when I popped it up into full view I was immediately suspicious."

Thomas then consulted with Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at the analytics company Graphika, who noted the other telltale sign of a computer-generated face.

"One of the things he and his team have figured out is that if you layer a lot of these images over the top of one another, the eyes align," said Thomas. "He did that with this image, and the eyes matched up."

Other parts of Aspen's identity were clearly stolen from disparate parts of the web. Aspen's Facebook page was created in August and featured only two pictures, both from his "new house," that were tracked back to reviews on the travel website TripAdvisor. The logo for Typhoon Investigations was lifted from the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, a digital literacy nonprofit.

Aspen claimed on his LinkedIn to work for a company called Swiss Security Solutions from 2016 to 2020. Swiss Security Solutions denied ever employing anyone named Aspen, and told NBC News it found two other fake accounts pretending to have worked for the company.

"Martin Aspen was never a freelancer or worker of the Swiss Security Solutions. We do not know this person. According to our Due Diligence Software, this person does not exist in Switzerland," Swiss Security Solutions Chairman Bojan Ilic told NBC News, adding that the company has reported the profile to LinkedIn.

Fake faces
Computer-generated faces have become a staple of large-scale disinformation operations in the run-up to the 2020 election. In December 2019, Facebook took down a network of fake accounts using computer-created faces tied to The Epoch Times. Facebook removed over 600 accounts tied to the operation, which pushed pro-Trump messages and even served as moderators of some Facebook groups.

Last month, Facebook removed another batch of computer-generated profiles originating in China and the Philippines, some of which made anti-Trump posts.

Renee DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said that computer-created identities are becoming a common occurrence for disinformation campaigns, in part because of how easy they are to create.

DiResta, who helped examine a ring of AI-generated faces tied to the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA last month, said computer-generated profile pictures can be used to "build an army of fake people" to artificially support a cause or for making "disinformation operations harder to discover."

"One of the things that investigators look at to understand the narrative that is spreading is whether the accounts are authentic, whether they're real," said DiResta. "If they were to use a stock photo, it confirms something dishonest is likely happening. By using an A.I.-generated face, you're guaranteeing you won't find that person elsewhere on the internet."

it gave me hope that Trump and them know an L is coming and this was the Hail Mary.

I want to find a way to donate to these disinformation researchers for real


we so need them right now

>I want to find a way to donate to these disinformation researchers for real

Not only them but really anyone investigating and researching to expose all the corruption we currently face. It's hard to keep up with.

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1321975533786275847

UPS lost our package... in the mail

they found the package but they found the flash drive but mysteriously lost the documents.

They're a great company!

or course me made copies. we get lots of documents, but we have to look through them first.

You know what, Hunter's a good guy battling some demons, and he's not running for president. we should probably leave this whole thing alone.