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Time Magazine Picture Controversy

I didn't know where else to post this, so feel free to move it, delete, merge, etc. I posted it on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Communists for Kerry but just in case, here it is as well.

  • Additional media links showing notability - Time Magazine (April 25, 2005, Vol. 165, No. 17, Page 34) published a CFK picture that caused controversy and mockery on the Web. The sources below have the old link to Time, it's been since changed and is hidden behind a paywall, but the story about it with a beautiful picture can still be found in Daily Kos. This is already a second article about CFK in Daily Kos, which shows its authors thought CFK was notable. Following the controversy, Time editors had to change the caption under the picture and post a retraction. In the current online version of the article, the original picture gallery with captions has since been removed, but it was preserved on Daily Kos.
Here are the photos: The actual Time page has "Communists For Kerry" banner cut off at the top, but the online version from the picture gallery, preserved on Daily Kos, shows "Communists For Kerry" at the top of the banner. The images are below.
Many other blogs wrote about this controversy: Hannity.com, Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, ProtestWarrior, E-Nough, Viking Pundit, Ex-Donkey. A collection of links (most of them dead by now) was captured on this CFK page.
--Atbashian (talk) 20:51, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
  • Sources of more media coverage - The CFK site is still browsable through the Wayback Machine. Its Media Watch section has 2 pages leading to various media publications:
--Atbashian (talk) 20:57, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
Hello Atbashian, recommend you delete your new pair of comments from the AfD. They are just cluttering things up. If there is too much noise, nobody will figure out that pretty good refs are being discovered. And yes, the TimeMag (and to a far lesser extent DailyKos) coverage are helpful towards satisfying WP:GOLDENRULE. But you are not going to convince people by splashing a big banner up everywhere. Wikipedians at AfD are fundamentally lazy, and want things handed to them *fixed* and completely *finalized* rather than piecemeal and one link at a time. Just add refs you run across at new subsections of Draft_talk:Oleg_Atbashian, and I will add them into the big list there, and (for the ones which are applicable to CFK) also add them to the Big Green Box which contains your earlier refs. Some wikipedians, the serious ones, will open that box, and ones that are REALLY serious like Exemplo347 and myself will open a dozen or two dozen refs and look with our own eyes at what they say.
But nobody wants to wade through arguing, especially by people that are closely associated with the topic of the article, trying to sway the discussion by posting again and again. I understand that you are interested in trying to prevent deletion, and that you are glad to have found the TimeMag stuff (and indeed per WP:PAYWALL it need not be accessible for free it still counts as WP:RS though the depth/breadth needs assessing). But it was already added to the Communists for Kerry article, right? It's just buried in the noise. You are not helping highlight TimeMag, you are making more visual noise. This was not your intent, I understand, but it is the end-effect.
So please take my advice, you and Powderday need to let the AfD process run, and try not to constantly add MORE AND MORE arguments. Instead concentrate on building TERSER AND HIGHER-QUALITY arguments, a clean list of the best sources only. That is why I'm having Powderday take their wiki-axe to the Communists for Kerry body-prose. It improves the signal-to-noise ratio, and makes it more likely that wikipedians who are unwilling to sort through FIFTY mostly-crappy refs, will actually see the FIVE pretty-good refs: TimeMag, Neil deGrass Tyson, sentence in WaPo, FoxNews goof-and-retration, et cetera. That is what I'm building over at Draft:Oleg Atbashian, the only-the-best-refs version. Make sense? If nobody has REPLIED to any individual comment you made at AfD yet, you can always *remove* your own AfD comment. Or if you like, I can again modify your comments for you, to make sure you don't accidentally cross any unwritten wiki-lines. Let me know if you do want this. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:08, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
OK, your advice is highly appreciated, I will work along with the links. We can always add content after the re-instatement of the page. Please let us know once we can start using the "useful links" to start adding "text". GreetingsPowderday (talk) 22:31, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
Powderday, for some of your comments another wikipedian has already replied, so you cannot remove YOUR comment without getting THEIR permission first, but you can remove any comment of yours which has *not* received a reply yet... that will help tidy up the AfD. And I can answer any questions/comments you have here, the point is not to say you should not ASK just to say you should not ask at AfD specifically.
As for adding body-prose, you can start using the 'useful' aka definitely WP:RS sources which will definitely help demonstrate WP:GOLDENRULE is achieved and WP:GNG is satisfied, at *any* time. Either in Draft:People's Cube or in Draft:Oleg Atbashian or even with serious care in Communists for Kerry in mainspace.
That said, writing prose is hard, because wikipedia has a LOT of subtle policy-standards: you have to NOT stick so closely to the source that you commit WP:COPYVIO, and you have to NOT stray so far from the source that you commit WP:SYNTH/WP:OR, and you very much have to stick to WP:NPOV and stay impeccably neutral. Which is very exquisitely difficult to do, and do well, for somebody that is closely connected to the topic-matter. I find it very challenging, and I am *not* closely connected, which means it is doubly-hard for people that CARE. Can be done, but takes a lot of practice to get right. So if you want to start writing sentences, go for it, but do your best to *summarize* neutrally just-the-facts, no hyperbole, no bias, no spin, no WP:PUFFERY.
I don't recommend it at this point, however, because although having sentences is somewhat helpful in convincing other wikipedians to vote keep at AfD, in an intangible way only, the real key to seeing keep-votes is to have WP:SOURCES that demonstrate the topic-matter satisfies WP:GOLDENRULE. So I always concentrate on sources first, and save the sentence-writing until later. Usually I've found that, if the sources *are* clearly good enough, wikipedians will not only vote 'keep' they will start pitching in and helping. But our sourcing is still weak, for CFK, and very obscured/confused by all the WP:BLOGS and the WP:ABOUTSELF and in some cases WP:SYNTH. So I'm putting most of my work into the Draft:Oleg Atbashian, which is not *quite* as well sourced as Billionaires for Bush, but is getting closer. I'll go add the two that Snit333 found, and the TimeMag one, right now. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:46, 16 January 2017 (UTC)

apparently you ARE on a static IP

I get lost in that article, but ok, it just wasn't clear to me from the way you phrased it. I am trying to come at this from another angle and am off on my own draftspace. I like what you have so far; I think I had quibbles about section order, but I am sure these are discussable. Iand will be back to your article once I do my brain dump over in my corner. It's coming out sounding a lot like an essay at the moment and definitely needs references but it does introduce some concepts that I haven't see on the current article (information silo, communication network). My own demo, but not ready to show. Just wanted you to know I am working on this. Elinruby (talk) 15:11, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, mostly static although it changes every NN months. Take your time, and feel free to use whatever draftspace you want to use. But don't be nervous about stepping on toes in the "main" draftpage of Draft:fake news as she is written, just fix the section-ordering please to what it ought to be in your eyes, because the goal here is to build something that enjoys at least a two-way consensus, and then expand that into three-way and four-way and so on. There are not very many editors active at fake-news-website, in terms of doing massive content additions, but there are quite a few of the group that are potentially active in that fashion, if we can build an article-structure that they like better than what the article currently offers. So after I get some of the existing article content (and refs) integrated into the draftspace, and after your braindump is also integrated, and we both think it is rough-n-ready for a comparison, we can open up a new thread and propose the swap-over. I'm mostly interested in getting the structure right, so that we can solve the constant this-page-needs-a-huge-rewrite perennial discussion on the talkpage (and get rid of the recentism/coatrack aspects). This is not easy, because as with any broadly-applicable concept that has a fluid definition, it is tempting to write a million-kilobyte-article that covers everything in detail. But I expect we'll be able to resist the temptation, if we tread carefully. Best, 47.222.203.135 (talk) 15:32, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

warning, large amount of reply-fodder below, if I have been unclear please feel free to demand a shorter version in two sentences of any point :-) 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:51, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, agreed. Don't worry, this is just my thought process not a competing version. I thought I would see what structure I came up with if -- rather than nibble around the edges of a problem like I ususlly do -- I started from scratch with my own structure. [snip]... Elinruby (talk) 07:33, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
Well, competing visions is not problematic in my view as long as we all eventually (meaning not just you and me but the other people working hard on the 'real' article in mainspace) come to an agreement on a specific layout-form that best addresses the topic area, and best will satisfy the readership's need to be informed about a complex topic. Because the topic is complex and multi-faceted, there are GOING to be competing visions -- you see[citation needed] the topic mostly in terms of the technological aspects of infosec and IT, whereas my 'competing vision' is that there is a narrow core definition which is a web threat called 'fake news websites' plus a wide variety of analogies and historical parallels that are related but distinct, whereas Sagecandor sees[citation needed] the topic as primarily political and primarily about 'fake news online'. None of these visions are incorrect in a factual sense, but they definitely impact how we structure the article -- what we talk about in the intro-paragraphs of the lead, what subsection-title we use, and what we explain *in* the article as opposed to wikilinking unto elsewhere on wikipedia. So in short Elinruby, please develop your competing vision of an article-structure that has a broad historical focus (a point where you disagree with sagecandor who believes fake news is a very modern phenomena and historical parallels are of minimal use except to be "very briefly" noted in passing) plus a solid consistent focus on *mechanisms* of publication / detection / spread / mitigation / etc (which as you note the present article is pretty lax about detailing). Simultaneously I will try to flesh out the article-structure option, which concentrates on WP:CONCEPTDAB, and presents the topic as being a very strict and narrow core definition (website which intentionally publishes falsehoods and pretends to be a legit news entity in order to deliberately scam the advertising-industry out of clickbait cash) in a few paragraphs, and then spends the rest of the paragraphs explaining the use of 'fake news (metaphor)' to describe how many MANY other realworld phenomena have been noted by RS as similar to 'fake news' or as metaphorically being 'fake news' in some sense, plus outlines the historical parallels and related concepts. Once we have some rough demonstrations of the various visions, we can hash out on the talkpage which article-structure makes best sense from the perspective of the readership, and (of secondary importance) with respect to WP:PAG. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:51, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
...[cont'd]... I just today realized though I had many kbs written about fake news vs fake news site. Why are these two different articles anyway? were you involved in that discussion? Elinruby (talk) 07:33, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
There are *not* two different articles. There *was* a move-request, to attempt to rename 'fake news website' into the much broader topic of 'fake news' but that did not achieve consensus, yet at least. Fake news is just a redirect to fake news website. But this is at the heart of the various competing visions -- methinks Sagecandor would prefer to see the article-structure centered around the idea of 'fake news online' aka a sub-sub-category of news which is modern-only ('online') and also deliberately false ('fake'). Whereas for my own part, I think very strongly that would be a WP:POVFORK of the topic news which incorrectly elided historical parallels like yellow journalism and black propaganda and so on (only 'online') as well as being insufficiently careful about the important-in-my-view distinction between a fake-news-SITE which is the core concept, and a mere fake-nwes-STORY which pretty much *any* website can propagate (see the discussion of whether facebook *having* fake news means it *is* a fake news SITE... it is definitely not one). There are a bunch of opinions on the topic, besides my own view and the words I've put into Sagecandor's mouth here, see the move-RfC on the fake news website talkpage. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:51, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
...[cont'd]... Part of my problem with this is my suspicion that the main thing that is different in 2016 is scale and the only reason it is in the news is that Hillary Clinton has discovered them, and anything Hillary Clinton says is news. I also think this is may well be a manifestation of my own cynicism. Elinruby (talk) 07:33, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
I would agree with you that WP:RECENTISM is a severe problem with the 'fake news controversy' (several of the people in the rename-RfC strongly backed a rename to that title), and it is unbalancing the article, but whether or not your suspicion abut scale is correct in the real world -- see my paragraph about the analogies of junk mail versus spam and yellow journalism versus fake news online in draftspace -- to avoid WP:SYNTH you will need some solid sources that specifically discuss scale being a key difference w.r.t. the current flurry of concern. I think those may be starting to exist, there is a lot of churnalism about famous-person-so-and-so-said-foo, but there are also some stories that are taking the long view and comparing the 1890s events with the 2016 phenomena, so please pursue your hunch and see if the RS exist to back it up. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:51, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
...[cont'd]... These sites are essentially clickbait sites, right? The difference is that the content is political. Elinruby (talk) 07:33, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
Sorta yes and sorta no. My definition of clickbait is that the site publishes headlines that are deliberately written as narrative hooks, which are intended to attract clicks, and thus boost advertising revenue. Prof Zimdar called Redstate a 'fake news' website on that basis alone (she and the RS that copycatted her both eventually retracted the accusation). But of course, under that definition almost every modern news organization is guilty. Usually they write *true* stuff (albeit often biased), such as the USN&WR article which was titled "stay away from these 'fake news' websites at all costs". Which is practically the definition of clickbait and sensationalism. 'At all costs' sheesh, you would think it was somebody fresh out of social networking school who decided to switch careers to journalism. You also find clickbait that is 'false news' (as opposed to fake), such as this WaPo headline where they misquote the Pope: "Pope Francis compares media who spread fake news to people who are excited by feces"[1] Ironically, despite saying right at the top of the damn newspiece that it is NOT a piece of 'fake news' but a correct bit of journalism, WaPo screwed up and mistranslated or otherwise truncated the pope's actual words, as is obvious per official translation from argentinian spanish into english,[2] as well as from other RS which did not screw up and truncate the pope's quotation.[3][4] So I think that the difference between clickbait as a broad metaphor, and clickbait-scams, is that their must be an attempt to financially defraud the advertising-infrastructure. WaPo was not trying to defraud the industry, they just screwed up in a translation from spanishSlang-to-belgianFrench-to-britishEnglish-to-americanClickbaitHeadline, which is still bad, but not a scam. Fake news sites are, in the narrow strict definition, entirely composed of completely made up stuff, and pretend not to be. Thus, although The Onion is composed of made up stuff, it does NOT pretend to be real. (Cf The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.) So political content is not a primary differentiator, although political content is a primary concern of the RS, because they are pushing the theory that 1.) Clinton lost to Trump because gullible voters believed fake news about her, 2.) Russian KGB/GRU agents under direct personal control of Putin were behind the sites which originated that specific fake news, and 3.) the armed incident related to Pizzagate conspiracy theory proves it. In other words, the differentiator according to the mainstream media, is not that internet hoaxes are new, and not that conspiracy theories are new, and not that propaganda is new, and not that whispering campaigns are new, but that because a recent series of events can be seen in a partisan light, it has become fashionable to blame the imminent end of civilization, on 'fake news'. See also perfect storm, cognitive dissonance, and media sensationalism. The political aspect of 'fake news' is given more ink, because the consequnces of political-content internet-hoaxes has suddenly become crystal clear to a segment of the establishment-media and establishment-political-class that both would previously have considered it irrelevant, in other words. On wikipedia, at least, there have often been troubles with editing pages related to novel theories in physics for instance, despite the popularity of such ideas on the wider internet. 'Fake news' is a similar, because most people are going to approach the topic with a specific external-to-wikipedia worldview, and that never works out very well. So I am hopeful that we can all keep our cool, and get through this initial phase of article-construction in a friendly fashion  :-) 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:51, 25 December 2016 (UTC)
...[cont'd]... Is Pizzagate traceable to one particular site? (besides reddit?) Elinruby (talk) 07:33, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
See, this is the kind of question that I think is important, iff we are writing an article about 'fake news websites'... as opposed to an article debunking conspiracy theories (for the good of the readership -- cf our vast number of coatrack articles debunking perpetual motion machines and attacking their proponents for the good of the readership), and doubly-especially as opposed to an article pushing a political viewpoint (cf WP:ARBPIA). My reading of pizzagate#Origins suggests that the conspiracy theory started as a tweet from an Unperson, was picked up by chat-forum which describes itself as concentrating upon "UFOs, Conspiracy, Lunatic Fringe, Politics, Current Events, Secret Societies, etc" and then to 4chan trolls, but the first time it was reported as 'news' was by the YourNewsWire website -- which my own WP:OR indicates is partly legit news (wikipedians *had* cited them as a ref in Saleh v. Bush which needs WP:TNT but that is another story for another time) and partly flat-out-conspiracy-theories like Pizzagate. CBS tags YourNewsWire as a 'fake news site' specifically, but the pizzagate article just uses guilt by association and says that the author of YourNewsWire was "formerly associated with professional conspiracy theorist David Ickes" .. sigh. And of course, following the backtrail further, wikileaks released the actual emails to the public, and prior to that event, two separate Russia-landmass-based cracker-gangs broke into the DNC webservers (June 2015 and March 2016 but acting independently of each other evidence suggests), both of which are "linked to" but not strictly "part of" FSB-nee-KBG and GRU respectively, and are accused of being the people that leaked the emails to wikileaks. (Wikileaks says it was not the Russian crackers which were the source of their dataset, but that it was a leaker -- they don't specify if they mean a leaker who worked for the DNC, or a leaker that had access to the internal Russian systems, or a leaker that had access to the quasi-independent Russia-based cracker-gang's systems, or what exactly -- it is all very unclear and fuzzy). Nobody to my knowledge has accused either wikileanks or the Russians (governmental or extralegal) of generating nor propagating the pizzagate conspiracy theory, but without the email-publications there would be no pizzagate; the actual emails themselves have never been attacked as being faked or falsified, however, that I am aware of at least. So the leak was truthful/accurate, and then a debunked/false conspiracy theory formed, which first spread via internet forums and chatrooms but was later further publicized via YourNewsWire and InfoWars and other conspiracy-oriented websites (which are sometimes but not always called 'fake news sites' depending on who you ask). 47.222.203.135 (talk) 12:51, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

on the various subtle variations in meaning of 'corporate censorship'

...I don't care about Blue Coat (which has been acquired by the way so I am not boosting it). I am just not sure what it call it -- web appliance? hardware proxy? Also, there is a huge jump in law from corporate censorship to the Firewall of China but in technological terms the only difference is scale, And corporate censorship, hmm, I am not sure how you intend the term, but in the United States at least the case law has rather firmly established that employers have a perfect right to filter their employee computers and monitor them as they see fit since they are also responsible for anything they do. Except if they are a platform like youtube or Instagram, in which case the DCMA applies. This is why FB and Google wanted to be platforms: the safe harbor laws Elinruby (talk) 09:08, 26 December 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I understood you were not a BCN marketer already of course.  :-) They are just a placeholder for a more-general concept. Placeholder for what exactly though, is what we need to determine -- I think they are a small corner of a larger topic, question is, what topic do we point to? We may run into a situation like with media analysis where plenty of individual orgs have bluelinks, but the broader topic itself is *not* yet bluelinked. It took a couple thousand words to properly answer your question about what I mean by 'corporate censorship' which I pasted into your user-talkpage since we are already pretty dense here on this talkpage... and even then I still didn't come up with a good answer for what to call BCN-like technology, or the application thereof in six qualitatively-distinct ways that fake-news and fake-news-websites might engender.
..BCN sells stuff that is used by corporations, but also by govts as you pointed out with your syria-link in the draft see-also. Wikipedia lumps BCN in with a few other companies that build censorship-infrastructure. As you point out further up this talkpage, there are plenty of legal complexities -- because the employer is legally liable for what their employees do on the internet, censorship of what employees do (and 'incidentally' see) is therefore legal despite the 1st amendment against govt interference in that fashion. Outside the USA, many countries (syria/china/etc) do not have the 1st amendment, and employ similar technology, sometimes from the very same firms that service the corporate-censorship-of-employees-market within the USA.
..Now, when you start talking about suppressing fake-news-websites and/or fake-news-stories, once again the same core technological mechanisms will be re-applied. But as outlined in my replies above, suppressing fake-news-sites is mostly a network-based-technique: you identify the domain and IP which is hosting the material, and then you blacklist it from being visible to the vast majority of the populace. This type of censorship is in the legal category of suppressing-freedom-of-the-press, where the fake-news-site is considered to be a publisher-entity (aka "corporate" even though they may not be a legally registered corporation in any actual jurisdiction). By contrast, suppressing fake-news-stories is a much bigger job, since it requires far-more-difficult-to-implement automated content analysis, and in the end boils down to censoring forbidden words and ideas, aka the legal category of suppressing-freedom-of-expression. One thing is a regulation on corporations in a specific industry, the other thing is a regulation on thought.
..In the midst of all that, the odd niche of 'platform' which fbook and goog try very hard to occupy, is partially caused by tension between those categories, and by the legal distinction between the author of a book, and the president of a trucking-company which the author pays to ship pallets of books around the country, aka the difference between the originator of information and the transmission-vector thereof. Fake-news-websites sometimes originate content, and always at least *modify* content (e.g. copyright infringement on legit news-stories to replace the legit authors with their own fake-news-site URLs). But they are also usually actively involved in driving distribution via the transmission-vector, in some cases paying for banner adverts hyping their fake-news-site, in some cases creating virtualized armies of fbook usernames (sometimes meat puppets and sometimes sockpuppets), and so on. So blocking fake-news-stories is extremely difficult, but blocking the activities of the owners of the fake-news-sites is NOT as simple as you might expect ... they are not merely domain names and a hosting server-infrastructure, that core stuff tends to be augumented by a lot of effort designed to bootstrap the transmission-vectors like fbook/goog/etc, compare SEO and CRM but applied to scamming people rather than ethical marketing of legit products.
..So to answer your question, I don't say "corporate censorship" to mean, censorship of employees by their employers, I mean it as a shorthand for censorship of corporations (aka attacks on freedom-of-the-press). Wikipedia's corporate censorship article claims to be about censorship-of-employees-by-their-employer in the lead-paragraph -- which is ultimately a weird form of censorship-of-corporations-by-the-govt since it is directly driven by the governmental legal-system framework which *makes* employers legally liable for what their individual-citizen employees do -- but as soon as you get into the body-prose the article starts talking about the more usual type of censorship-of-corporations:

Many broadcasters are fighting [the governmental regulators like the FCC in the 1960s], not for free speech, but for profitable speech ... unlimited right [unfettered by government regulations of the television industry] to broadcast profitable commercials for cigarettes....

Then it goes on to talk about censorship-of-corporations-by-other-corporations as a fairly subtle example of money corrupting purportedly-honest journalistic ethics:

...A breakfast-food sponsor deleted the line 'She eats too much' from a play [by exerting influence on the broadcaster who depends on their advertising dollars] because, as far as the breakfast-food company was concerned, nobody could ever eat too much. ...Networks generally have underplayed or ignored events and statements unfavorable to food processors and soap manufacturers ... [ABC] had tailored some of its documentaries [in the 1960s] to fit the corporate desires of [3M which buys a lot of television advertising for consumer products]...

Once you start reading the key section for our purposes here, the stuff about censorship-of-news-media-corporations by the government, and also by themselves (either for their own internal reasons or by external corporations applying pressure in the form of potentially withholding advertising dollars), shows up:

...corporate censorship in the news publishing business... can occur as self-censorship... 'virtually impossible to document' because it is covert ... 'tendency [of news journalists] is to avoid getting yourself or your boss in trouble [with advertisers or with the government or with other powerful external groups]. So an adjective gets dropped, a story skipped, a punch pulled... like that Sherlock Holmes story – the dog that didn't bark.' ...self-censorship is not misreporting or false reporting, but simply not reporting at all. ...many small actions... produce... 'homogenized, corporate-friendly media' ...tendency to avoid any controversial journalism that might embroil the news company in a battle with a powerful corporation or a government agency. ...in the current [dire-for-the-traditional-news-media-firms economic] climate business trumps journalism just about every time. ...cartoon clip from SNL that satirized the concentration of media ownership ('Disney, Fox, Westinghouse, and good old GE [own] networks from CBS to CNBC [and] can use them to say whatever they please [and] put down the opinions of anyone who disagrees')... was itself subject to that very same censorship... removed from the program for all subsequent [re-broadcasts] ... cf Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#Nightline_controversy ... [news] publishers are 'by no means passive conduits for the transmission of cultural products from producers to consumers' but are influenced to take an active role in that transmission by motives of profit, ideology, values, or even reasons of state. ...'inadequate' coverage of the legislation and FCC actions suggests a built-in conflict of interest for news media ... many newspapers are also owned by the same corporations ... news media companies which benefited directly from the legislation, lobbied in its favour, and even helped to draft it ... information affecting the large media company's economic interest is kept from the public's eyes and ears ... the exclusion of Ralph Nader from the three presidential debates ... et cetera

..So, with that background in place, we have in the case of hypothetical censorship of fake-news-sites, MOST of the actually-being-proposed techniques I've seen in the RS depend upon censorship *by* corporations... not of their contractual employees, but of their individual-citizen customers! This is being encouraged by some governmental figures, obviously, with the underlying implicit threat (and sometimes *quite* explicit as in the case of the Italian regulator quoted in the current mainspace article) that if the corporations don't immediately being to 'voluntarily' censor their individual-citizen customers, the government will pass legislation to regulate the corporations (not necessarily w.r.t. censorship but just as an economic weapon) and force them to censor their individual-citizen customers. Which is a pretty complex legal landscape, and will be tough to explain to the readership in a few short sentences. And that's just talking about governmental encouragement of corporations to 'voluntarily' censor fake-news-sites as a means of avoiding retaliatory regulations.
..Once you start talking about facebook trying to censor actual fake-news-stories, by preventing arbitrary blacklisted words-n-ideas from being transmitted from individual citizen X over to individual citizen Y via the facebook infrastructure, you have opened up another kettle of fish entirely (in a legal and political sense as well as in the exponential increase in technological difficulty). No longer is facebook merely blacklisting the domain names of an allegedly-harmful sites which publish fake-news... and per my threat-analysis above this is NOT unwise... in much the same way that facebook presumably already blacklists the domain names of bank-account-phishing websites and malware-infected-websites and so on, as a helpful protection for their individual username-holders... once facebook commits to blacklisting ideas, they have joined twitter executives in the social-engineering-through-corporate-coercion realm, and have begun exercising the right to refuse service to individual-citizen customers on the basis of disliking the political ideas held by that individual-citizen customer. Cf Sweet Cakes by Melissa.
..There is also no longer any infosec benefit to be claimed: blacklisting the domain of www.abcnews.com.co means that fbook individual-citizens are no longer able to visit any links thereto VIA clicking on them within facebook's website infrastructure, which prevents the fake-news-site-owners from getting any clickbait revenue thataway, and also incidentally prevents fbook individual-citizens from reading fake-news-stories ON THAT EXTERNAL SITE via fbook (but simultaneously prevents them from getting malware/phishing/XSS/similar attacks that theoretically might be propagated BY that site). There is no additional infosec benefit to blacklisting the *ideas* contained with the fake-news-stories, so that not only can facebook individual-citizens no longer click links to www.abcnews.com.co they can also no longer pass along sentences such as "Faux protesters were hired, paid in cash" / "SCOTUS revokes Scientology's tax-exempt status" / "Armed extremist shoots 3 cops inside whitehouse" / "Obama bans assault weapon sales". Depending on how the keyword-blacklist is implemented, they might not even be able to type such things into (or upload such things onto or embed imagefiles containing or conceivably even link unto websites saying) such sentences. So there is no infosec benefit, and a huge spike in the infotech costs... but of course, there is a political benefit (or at least an ideological benefit) for whichever ideological group controls the censorship-levers, and specifies the verboten keywords.
..We have had government regulations of speech-by-corporations for a very long time now, but I think the fake-news-controversy is the first time we have had governments threatening to regulate corporations unless they censor what their individual-citizen customers can say (which per 1st amendment or equivalent most western governments cannot do directly). I expect there will be plenty of sources like the Ars Digita one, which delve into the tech-methods gory details of how google and fbook and the rest are planning to implement fake-news-website-countermeasures and the vastly more difficult and controversial fake-news-stories-countermeasures, but I also think we need to be on the lookout for sources which discuss the legal-and-constitutional ramifications of the two distinct forms of censorship (fake-news-site vs fake-news-ideas), and the novel way in which politicians are working in concert with nominally private sector entities to make this new spin on censorship, actually stick. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 15:21, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

mechanism used for CIPAV installation

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/associated-press-sues-fbi-over-fake-news-story/

  • "...FBI created a fake news story
  • with an Associated Press byline [misattributed aka 'misappropriated' per AP lawyers]
  • then e-mailed it to a suspect
  • to plant malware on his computer.
  • ...Comey [said] 'We do use deception at times to catch crooks, but we are acting responsibly and legally'
  • ...one of [the FBI's] agents impersonated an AP journalist.
  • The 2007 operation ...
  • FBI e-mailed the fake news story... to a suspect's MySpace account.
  • The e-mail was made to look like it came from The Seattle Times.
  • When the suspect clicked on the link [within the email? or within myspace?],
  • FBI software revealed his location and IP address to agents working the case.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/newspaper-outraged-as-fbi-creates-fake-seattle-times-page-to-nab-suspect/

  • ...type of 'phishing' attack...

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/fbi-created-fake-seattle-times-web-page-to-nab-bomb-threat-suspect/

  • ...Kathy Best, editor at the Seattle Times, said 'Not only does that cross a line, it erases it. ...Our reputation and our ability to do our job as a government watchdog are based on trust. Nothing is more fundamental to that trust than our independence — from law enforcement, from government, from corporations and from all other special interests.... The FBI's actions, taken without our knowledge, traded on our reputation and put it at peril.'
  • ...a software tool called a Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier (CIPAV) ... lets the FBI 'geophysically' locate a computer and its IP address... the software is activated when someone clicks on the bogus link.
  • [local] police were unable to identify a suspect... contacted the Northwest Cyber-Crime Task Force
  • ...the FBI in Seattle obtained a search warrant to 'deploy' the CIPAV software
  • after the task force, which is run by the FBI, received a public tip about a suspect.
  • Special Agent Norman Sanders, in seeking the warrant, said the bureau
  • would send a 'communication' to the suspect's computer that would make the computer identify itself
  • ...warrant does not say that 'communication' would be a bogus news story that appeared to be published online by The Seattle Times.
  • The case was taken up by the U.S. Attorney's Office, which helped draft and approve the warrant.

So, if one were to read between the lines, the FBI composed a fabricated HTML email, made it look like it was an online story by the Seattle Times (without asking them for permission to use their trademark), gave a byline from the Associated Press (again without permission to use their trademark), and conceivably used any of these mechanisms:

  • an embedded web beacon imagefile within the email (which would transmit the IP address of the computer used to view the email as soon as the suspect clicked on the email to open it up), or
  • created an HTML link within the email which visually appeared to be 'Seattle Times' but when clicked went to a non-typosquatting FBI.gov domain name (the equivalent of The Seattle Times in other words), or
  • created a spoofed www.FakeSeattleTimes.fbi.gov domain name, or a spoofed www.seatt1et1me5.com domain name (either of which would transmit the IP address as soon as the suspect clicked to open the email and then clicked to view the typosquatting URL), or
  • created an HTML link within the email which *actually* went to the www.seattletimes.com/name-of-fake-story (that when clicked would give the suspect an HTTP 404 page-not-found error), and then subsequently got the IP address of the computer visiting that non-existent webpage via the ISP of the real seattleTimes

There are a few other possibilities, but those are the ones that seem most probable. After the FBI had the suspect's IP address in hand, simple IP geolocation would have sufficed to get them to the correct city, though actually getting to a residential street address would require additional steps, methinks.

Now, the fourth possibility is the most 'expensive' aka outlandish variant, because it requires subpoena of the ISP's traffic-logfiles or talking to the NSA or similar such gymnastics, but is also the most bulletproof because the email-contents would not merely look as if the story and the link were from the Seattle Times, they would be the legit website of that newspaper! The first three options are less 'expensive' because they do not require anything but the falsified contents of the HTML email, with #1 being the most-likely-to-succeed since all it requires is that the subject open the email (or just preview the email), whereas #2 and #3 would require that the subject click to read the email, and then click again to follow an embedded link of some type. Note that it is also possible that the FBI combined option #1 with option #4, and inserted a web-beacon into the HTML email which attempted to display www.seattletimes.com/fav1c0n.png (or some other non-existent URL at the legit domain-name), and then got the traffic-logs from the ISP/NSA/similar. In the actual 2007 sting incident, the suspect was a fifteen year old with a myspace account, so probably the 'expensive' mechanisms were not needed, but I'm guessing that the FBI didn't develop this tactic for catching high school kids, it sounds more like something that would be effective against mafia kingpins and similar high-level criminals.

At the end of the day, as far as what the newspaper&magazine sources say explicitly, we don't know the technological mechanism by which the FBI accomplished their deed, just that it was software called CIPAV and that two trademarks were misappropriated without permission, plus an IP address was involved, and there was a 'link' of some type (but no details on what type). But, if we go outside the magazine&newspaper RS which tend to gloss over the technical details, from reading the EFF website on the FBI tech, CIPAV is considerably more advanced than merely a misleading href or even a web beacon imagefile URL. "In 2007 after Wired reported on evidence that the FBI was able to use 'secret spyware' to track the source of e-mailed bomb threats against a Washington state high school EFF submitted a FOIA request for information on the technology. The documents we received discuss endpoint surveillance technology the FBI calls a 'web bug' or a Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier (CIPAV) which seems to have been in use since at least 2001."[5]

"What is CIPAV and How Does It Work? The documents discuss technology that, when installed on a target's computer, allows the FBI to collect..."[6] webserver-logfile-data including IP address, last URL, browser version&type&envvars, OS type&version&serialnum&lang, as well as more invasive LAN-and-registry-level-data including MAC address, OS username&corpnameIfAny&netbiosname, open communication ports, running programs, installed software&hardware, and 'other information' (unspecified). Which strongly suggests that the FBI in deploying CIPAV, is not merely using a web beacon (despite the 'web bug' nickname for CIPAV methinks), but is installing spyware/malware which cracks into the suspect's PC and surreptiously installs itself (aka *now* we are talking web threat in no uncertain terms) by exploiting security holes in common web browsers (or maybe the HTML-email-reading submodule of email readers which tends to be an integrated web browser .dll/.so).

EFF guy continues: "It's not clear from the documents how the FBI deploys the spyware, though Wired has reported that, in the Washington state case, the FBI may [emphasis added] have sent a URL via MySpace's internal messaging, pointing to code that would install the spyware by exploiting a vulnerability in the user's browser. ...once the tool is deployed, 'it stay[s] persistent on the compromised computer and ...every time the computer connects to the Internet, [FBI] will capture the info'.... According the [FOIA] documents, the FBI has used CIPAV in cases across the country—from Denver, El Paso, and Honolulu in 2005; to Philadelphia, California, and Houston in 2006; to Cincinnati and Miami in 2007. ...requests from FBI offices around the country to the agency's Cryptologic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU) for help installing...."[7]

So it was not just a one-time technique, some type of mere IP-address-grabber trick, that ends when the suspect closes their 'fake news story' email message (or "internal myspace message" depending on whether we believe the Seattle Times or the EFF). Rather, the fake-news-story was just the metaphorical equivalent of a trojan, which used social engineering in the form of fake news to get the suspect to click something (might have been an upstream webserver which exploited a browser security flaw to install the spyware-payload... or theoretically could even have been an email attachment titled "YourNameMentionedInTheSeattleTimes.exe" though that seems a wee bit too obvious :-) and CIPAV is the equivalent of a monitoring(-only?) type of spyware, in the classic sense of 'meant for [domestic] espionage purposes'. It is unknown whether the monitoring-spyware-payload obscured itself within the PC, by using rootkit techniques or similar (EFF does not say but wikipedia article kinda claims CIPAV is 'unknown to the operator' of the target PC). See also, CALEA legislation, which was the primary motivation for the EFF guy's research effort.

https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/o1607.pdf

  • "...developed a plan to surreptitiously insert a computer program into the individual’s computer that would identify his location. An FBI undercover agent posed as an editor for the Associated Press (AP) and attempted to contact the individual through e-mail. During subsequent online communications, the undercover agent sent the individual links to a fake news article and photographs that had the computer program concealed within them. The individual activated the computer program when he clicked on the link to the photographs, thereby revealing his location to the FBI. FBI and local law enforcement agents subsequently arrested the individual..."
  • "...on November 6, 2014, FBI Director James Comey wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times defending the FBI’s actions. In particular, Comey stated that the “technique [the FBI used to identify and apprehend the individual who sent the threats] was proper and appropriate under Justice Department and F.B.I. guidelines at the time” and that “[t]oday, the use of such an unusual technique would probably require higher level approvals than in 2007, but it would still be lawful..."
  • "...FBI policies in 2007 did not expressly address the tactic of agents impersonating journalists ...the FBI adopted a new interim policy in June 2016 ...clearly prohibits FBI employees from engaging in undercover activity in which they represent, pose, or claim to be members of the news media, unless the activity is authorized... by the head of the FBI field office... [then] by the Undercover Review Committee at FBIHQ, and approved by the Deputy Director, after consultation with the Deputy Attorney General..."
  • (So, as far as this OIG report is concerned, in other words, the FBI can still, as of 2016, internally approve impersonation of journalists during undercover investigations. And there is no mention of what sort of approval-process, if any, is required for FBI personnel to fabricate fake-news-stories *without* necessarily impersonating any specific journalist, but possibly involving brandjacking/website_spoofing/etc.)

Definitely a lot of sources on this stuff. Timberline bomb threat is a redlink, because per BLP1E the event itself was not that notable-by-wikipedia-standards -- ought to get a sentence in Timberline High School (Lacey, Washington) however where currently we have nada -- but the fallout therefrom *was* definitely notable (since CIPAV had been used for many years). Best make a new subsection of fake news website for dealing with the FBI sting operations and the fallout therefrom w.r.t. the news media, plus if time permits upgrade the CIPAV article to better cover the technological aspects and the tactical aspects. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 09:18, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AP.FOIA_.lawsuit.pdf

  • "...nature and extent of the FBI’s impersonation of journalists and news organizations. Defendants have improperly withheld the records requested by Plaintiffs in violation of the law and in opposition to the public’s strong interest in obtaining information regarding a law enforcement practice that undermines both the credibility and independence of the news media."
  • "...in 2007 the FBI had masqueraded as a member of the news media — specifically, as the AP — in order to deliver surveillance software to a criminal suspect’s computer."
  • "...the FBI had obtained a warrant to deliver a specific type of surveillance software known as...CIPAV... to a social media account associated with the threats. Once delivered, the CIPAV would send 'the activating computer's IP address and/or MAC address, other environment variables, and certain registry-type information to a computer controlled by the FBI'..."
  • "...in order to successfully deliver a CIPAV to the bomb threat suspect’s computer, FBI agents had sent an electronic communication with a link to a fake news article headlined, “Bomb threat at high school downplayed by local police department” and “Technology savvy student holds Timberline High School hostage”; the FBI attributed its fabricated story to “The Associated Press.” See id. [the EFF FOIA stuff] at p. 62; see also Gene Johnson, FBI says it faked AP story to catch bomb suspect, The Associated Press (Oct. 28, 2014),[8] When the FBI’s bomb threat suspect clicked on the link, he unknowingly downloaded the CIPAV. In addition to confirming that FBI agents had fabricated and distributed a phony AP story in order to dupe a suspect into downloading surveillance software..."
  • "AP's General Counsel Karen Kaiser hand delivered to the DOJ a letter addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder, expressing concern over the FBI’s actions, and asking for additional information regarding how often, and under what circumstances, the FBI poses as a member of the press. See Gene Johnson, AP asks for accounting of fake FBI news stories, The Associated Press (Oct. 30, 2014),[9]; Letter from Karen Kaiser to Attorney General Holder (Oct. 30, 2014), [10] Ms. Kaiser’s letter protested “in the strongest possible terms the FBI’s fabrication and publication of a fake Associated Press news story in connection with its June 2007 investigation,” stating: “The FBI both misappropriated the trusted name of The Associated Press and created a situation where our credibility could have been undermined on a large scale.... It is improper and inconsistent with a free press for government personnel to masquerade as The Associated Press or any other news organization. The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Wikipedia bluelinks: inauthentic misattribution as a type of forgery, disinformation as distinct from misinformation (although such a phrase tends to be used with international contexts such as the 2016 Countering_Foreign_Propaganda_and_Disinformation_Act and the 1995_CIA_disinformation_controversy... what is the buzzword for domestic disinformation if not propaganda?), closest match on wikipedia seems to be Forgery_as_covert_operation#Literary_forgery ("Forgery is used by some governments and non-state actors as a tool of covert operation, disinformation, and black propaganda" though again the context tends to be internationalized), contrast with the first sentence of False_document and compare with quasi-related identity document forgery and identity theft and maybe even Signature forgery (depending on how specifically the FBI agent impersonated the reporter).

The FOIA lawsuit by AP and nonprof The Reporters Committee (prolly same as Reporters_Committee_for_Freedom_of_the_Press) does specifically talk about 'impersonating... news organizations' and not just impersonating specific individual journalists. Also, according to the AP court-docs at least, the end result was to have the suspect click on a link (which used a clickbait fake news article headling), after which via an unspecified mechanism the CIPAV spyware was installed on the suspect's PC, and that furthermore the CIPAV software would phone home to "a computer controlled by the FBI" but does not say whether that controlled-computer was located in an ISP or at FBIHQ or what exactly. Thus we don't know whether the FBI used a fake-news-website per se, but they did utilize *some* kind of messaging-vector to spread their fabricated fake-news-stories, and they did later use *some* kind of internet node upstream from the subject's enduser-device. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 10:15, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

fake news is somewhere, over the rainbow

from somewhere up the page -- any router will allow an access control list and may come with a default list. Usually of an if then or if then else form. Some devices can do deep packet inspection and yes you can filter the internet for particular words.Elinruby (talk) 07:39, 4 January 2017 (UTC)
I am still trying to work my way back around to scraper site, and incorporate those refs :-)
Noticed your cleanup work there, thank you. Meanwhile, back at the ranch... there is a new effort by Carl to create a proper article at fake news, not just a DAB page, and once completed this will allow us to also have a proper article at fake news website which is *specifically* about fake-news-sites (with the concept of fake-news being covered at the parent). If you want to help Carl, Elinruby, and maybe get some of your Draft:Fake news reconsidered effort incorporated, please feel free. I also will be attempting to get big chunks of Draft:fake news as it is written, as you oh-so-whimsically titled it Elinruby, shoved into the new&improved fake news space. There *may* also be some improvements to the hoax article, Carl began working on those but was reverted. And there are several other new faces that are helping in the area now, if you want to please join in. Also ping Sagecandor, who I hope is just enjoying a long restful vacation slash WP:WIKIBREAK, and will return reinvigorated to help retain all the hard work they put in. 47.222.203.135 (talk) 22:32, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
I have been meaning to get back to this. I got rather distracted by the large number of articles for blog-scraping, webscraping, news-scraping or whatever...and a bit frustrated. I am involved in several big and ugly articles so I went off and tidied off some previous work I had sitting in the queue of the translation tool -- messy stuff about medieval history in Provence but its value never gets questioned, as opposed to the Mexican punk rock articles wbich are ALWAYS tagged as within seconds of hitting mainspace, grumble. Bottom line, yes, I will be back -- I am quite alarmed at the way these things are conflated in political discourse right now. Elinruby (talk) 18:54, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
No worries, Elinruby, I dumped scraper site in your lap because I didn't want to deal with the spaghetti either ;-)
As for fake news website and friends, I am still plugging away on those, mostly in my own draftspace since the articles keep getting locked against anons, but at the moment am otherwise occupied in the wikipediverse, trying to pull an old-school Article-Rescue-Squad rabbit out of the hat with some folks at AfD that are right on that fine knife-edge between fake-news-troll-group and brilliant-satire-so-funny-it-hurts, depending on which piece of their artwork one runs across in the WP:RS and whom is doing the reporting and analysis thereon. Life's rich pageant and all that. Best, 47.222.203.135 (talk) 19:39, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation: J. Michael Waller (January 18)

Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by SwisterTwister was:
This submission's references do not adequately show the subject's notability. Wikipedia requires significant coverage about the subject in reliable sources that are independent of the subject—see the guidelines on the notability of people and the golden rule. Please improve the submission's referencing (see Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners), so that the information is verifiable, and there is clear evidence of why the subject is notable and worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia. If additional reliable sources cannot be found for the subject, then it may not be suitable for Wikipedia at this time.
 The comment the reviewer left was:
What would especially help is focusing with all available book reviews for him.
Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.
SwisterTwister talk 03:12, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

AfC notification: Draft:J. Michael Waller has a new comment

I've left a comment on your Articles for Creation submission, which can be viewed at Draft:J. Michael Waller. Thanks! DGG ( talk ) 05:37, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
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