Tag Archives: fakery

Engadget reports: Since 2012, Yelp has caught nearly 5,000 businesses engaging in shady tactics, like paying customers for favorable ratings or hiring people to write phony reviews. Now, the company has a new tool to help people — and maybe the feds — track businesses that have tried to manipulate their standing on the review platform. Yelp is releasing a …

Axios reports: The super PAC supporting Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign altered footage to include the sound and sight of fighter jets flying over the Florida governor in its video promoting his campaign launch. The video by Never Back Down, called “A President for the People,” includes a scene with DeSantis raising his arm to the sky in front of a …

The Associated Press reports: A freshman state lawmaker in Ohio falsely claimed to have graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to the prestigious university, and he has stepped down from a House committee leadership post after that revelation. Rep. Dave Dobos, a Columbus-area Republican, attended MIT in the 1970s and 1980 and studied economics but did not receive …

Florida Politics reports: Florida’s new Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo did not treat COVID-19 patients at UCLA as he has asserted, charges a report that aired Monday night on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. The 12-minute segment began with Maddow recapping the controversies surrounding the right-wing “America’s Frontline Doctors” group, of which Ladapo was a member, as well as some …

The Associated Press reports: A seven-month investigation by the Associated Press and the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University, found that China’s rise on Twitter has been powered by an army of fake accounts that have retweeted Chinese diplomats and state media tens of thousands of times, covertly amplifying propaganda that can reach hundreds of millions of people …

National Geographic reports: On the fourth floor of the Museum of the Bible, a sweeping permanent exhibit tells the story of how the ancient scripture became the world’s most popular book. A warmly lit sanctum at the exhibit’s heart reveals some of the museum’s most prized possessions: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient texts that include the oldest known …

As of this writing, this woman still has her job. A senior Trump administration official has embellished her résumé with misleading claims about her professional background — even creating a fake Time magazine cover with her face on it — raising questions about her qualifications to hold a top position at the State Department. An investigation found that Mina Chang, …

USA Today reports: The Museum of the Bible in Washington quietly replaced an artifact purported to be one of a handful of miniature Bibles that a NASA astronaut carried to the moon in 1971 after an expert questioned its authenticity. The move follows an announcement last year that at least five of 16 Dead Sea Scroll fragments that had been …

The New York Times reports: President Trump on Friday abruptly dropped his plan to nominate Representative John Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, as the nation’s top intelligence official. The announcement, made on Twitter, came after questions about his qualifications and whether he had exaggerated his résumé. Law & Crime reports: In a 2015 press release, Ratcliffe’s House website stated, “When serving …

The Washington Post reports: Distorted videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), altered to make her sound as if she’s drunkenly slurring her words, are spreading rapidly across social media, highlighting how political disinformation that clouds public understanding can now spread at the speed of the Web. The video of Pelosi’s onstage speech Wednesday at a Center for American Progress …

The Hill reports: The majority of the most active accounts on Twitter that post messages in support of the U.K.’s Brexit Party show signs of automated activity, leading researchers to believe they are so-called “bot” accounts, according to an investigation. A probe by the Institute for Strategic Discourse first reported by The Mirror found that the Brexit Party, a political …

The Daily Beast reports: In a press release today, Museum of the Bible announced that independent scientific testing on five fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls on display at the museum had been completed. The tests “concluded that the five fragments show characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin and therefore will no longer be displayed at the museum.” In other words they …

The Daily Beast reports: Gina Loudon, the Republican commentator and author, recently declared that she has scientific evidence that Donald Trump might be the “most sound-minded” president in history. It’s a claim that might carry more weight if her new book didn’t falsely describe her as having a doctorate in psychology. Loudon, who worked as a surrogate for the Trump …

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports: State House candidate Melissa Howard admitted Monday that she lied about having a degree from Miami University, apologized and declared she intends to stay in a race that has drawn national attention after it came out she was displaying a fake diploma and had gone to great lengths to deceive people about her college credentials. “I …

The Daily Beast reports: The former Green Party candidate in a congressional race has been exposed as a Republican plant with ties to the GOP congressman he supposedly sought to challenge. Michael Zak petitioned to run under the Green Party ticket in New York’s 27th congressional district, a seat currently held by Rep. Chris Collins. Zak’s candidacy petition listed as …

Courthouse News reports: A quadriplegic man who emerged from a coma in 2004 claims Christian publisher Tyndale House published a fake near-death story about him going to heaven, which was concocted by his father after they survived a severe car accident. Alex Malarkey, 19, claims in a lawsuit filed Monday in Dupage County, Ill., that Tyndale House Publishers has made …

The New York Times today unmasked celebrities and media figures who seek to inflate their importance by purchasing fake Twitter followers. An excerpt: All these accounts belong to customers of an obscure American company named Devumi that has collected millions of dollars in a shadowy global marketplace for social media fraud. Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses …

“Hi, this is Bernie Bernstein, I’m a reporter for the Washington Post calling to find out if anyone at this address is a female between the ages of 54 to 57 years old willing to make damaging remarks about candidate Roy Moore for a reward of between $5000 and $7000 dollars. “We will not be fully investigating these claims however …

CNN reports: Vice President Mike Pence left a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday after some players knelt during the National Anthem, saying he did not want to “dignify” the event. The pool of journalists accompanying the vice president was not allowed into the stadium and was asked to stay in their vans. …

CNN reports: President Donald Trump’s appointee to a Department of Energy post says inflammatory comments that appeared to have been made by him online were the result of “cyber attacks and Internet crimes” committed against him over the past several years by “imposters in social media.” William C. Bradford, Trump’s appointee to head the Energy Department’s Office of Indian Energy, …