🤥 Faked Up #27

The Onion attempts to buy InfoWars, BlueSky braces for disinformation, and Reuters corrects a video of the Amsterdam riots

Hey there! After two fully free issues, I’m putting this one entirely behind a paywall.

My goal is to eventually make Faked Up cover the 20% base salary cut that I took to leave Google. I need to earn your $, not guilt you into paying, so I’m working on additional subscriber-only resources such as a library of misinfo studies. If there’s anything in particular that would make paying a more appetizing proposition for those on the fence, let me know at mantzarlis@protonmail.com.

This newsletter is an ~8 minute read and includes 74 links.

HEADLINES

Donald Trump’s pick for chair of the Federal Communications Commission thinks fact-checkers are part of a “censorship cartel.” X is suing California over bill AB 2655, which would require platforms to block or label election disinformation.1 The headmaster of a Pennsylvania school targeted by deepfake nudes resigned to avoid a lawsuit over mishandling the incident. Misinformation surrounding the failed bombing of Brazil’s Supreme Court included posts falsely claiming to show the attacker took a photo with former President Jair Bolsonaro. Spanish fact-checkers claim Valencia’s floods tested the EU Digital Services Act — and the DSA failed.

TOP STORIES

THE ONION WARS HAVE ONLY JUST BEGUN

Last Thursday, The Onion announced it won an auction for InfoWars.

If finalized, the auction would make the satirical publication the owner of infowars[.]com and its store, which claims to have made 22.4 million in sales in the first nine months of this year. Other assets (such as they are) include almost 300 domains with deranged names like 911chronicles[.]com, alejandrojones[.]com, goblinlove[.]com, joeroganexposed[.]com and newsguardexposed[.]com.

All this is up for sale as part of the court-mandated liquidation of the assets of supplement peddler Alex Jones. This follows a defamation suit won by the families of the Sandy Hook school shooting, whom Jones falsely and abominably accused of lying about the tragedy.

The Onion’s bid included a reported $1.75M in cash and an agreement by some Sandy Hook families to forgo a share of the damages they were due. The court-appointed trustee deemed this bid preferable to the $3.5M offered by First United American Companies (FUAC), which is affiliated with Jones.

FUAC immediately complained that the in-kind contribution by the families is “Monopoly money,” which gives you an idea of how seriously the Jones universe takes repaying the victims of his slander.

The bankruptcy judge appears willing to give FUAC the benefit of the doubt and requested to review the auction because he is dissatisfied with the “process and transparency.” A hearing has been scheduled for Monday.

To add further chaos to the mix, lawyers for X filed a notice of appearance in the bankruptcy case in order to get access to all relevant documents. Jones was duly fawning towards Elon Musk in a video posted on Sunday, in which he also equated his situation to that of Jews in Nazi Germany.

The Onion CEO Ben Collins is nonplussed, saying that “We expected all of this, obviously. Buying this site was always going to be fun later on, but annoying right away.” And Jones is certainly feeling the pressure. On Tuesday, he posted that sales were down by half as fans worried that profits from his designer knives, Star Wars-themed posters and seamoss capsules would go to The Onion instead.

In the same video, Jones notes that while InfoWarsStore[.]com is in limbo, his show is being sponsored by The Alex Jones Store, which is “owned by great patriots in Arkansas with their own factories.“ Through what sounds like a licensing agreement for his name, Jones appears to have found a way to continue to monetize even if his websites get taken away from him.

But Collins, formerly a reporter on the disinfo beat, is betting that ridicule will work better than fact checks on a noxious liar like Jones. He’s supported, in principle and through advertising money, by the gun regulation nonprofit Everytown.

Collins told On the Media that “we’ve tried fighting this battle [against misinformation] just being like ‘Actually this is what’s true.’ And it doesn’t work when the weight of the other side is like your whole identity is constructed around these lies […] We’ve tried to battle that with facts, and unfortunately they don’t feel good enough.”

“InfoWars as a media empire being revealed as farce and hopefully in a few years being associated with this ridiculous joke, I hope that’s how history remembers him.”

Here’s hoping, indeed.

DISINFO ON THE HORIZON?

Last week, I wrote that BlueSky was having a moment. In the seven days since, the Musk-free alt-Twitter has added approximately 5 million new users, growing by about a third to more than 20 million. (I’m assuming most joined after reading Faked Up.)

While I’m delighted to see my feed buzzing, I’m also on the lookout for growth in deceptive activity. Impersonation seems to be the one that stands out for now as a surge of new users seeks names they know from elsewhere on an unfamiliar surface.2

Already in September, an account impersonating Financial Times chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch tried to pitch me a crypto investment (what else).

BlueSky has since added an “impersonation” label to that account, but there are now two more imposters operating without warning. One of them has 1,000 followers.

Of the top ten accounts tied to a named human that showed up in the “Catch Up” feed that lists the most popular posts of the day on November 19, at least six have at least one impersonator account. Targets include actors Mark Hamill (1, 2, 3, 4) and George Takei (1, 2, 3) former U.S. Congressman Adam Kinzinger and lawyer George Conway (1, 2).

Bots are also an issue: The pseudonymous data analyst Conspirador Norteño found a network of 9 spam accounts all claiming to be a Hong Kong native in the Bay Area. The accounts started sharing political news, but their goal isn’t fully clear and their reach limited. I separately found a modest number of AI-generated “models” of the kind that are huge on Instagram trying to build a presence on BlueSky.

Finally, there’s government disinformation. As ISD’s Joe Bodnar pointed out, on Tuesday Russian state-controlled media RT appears to have landed on the platform (at the moment, it has only 169 followers).

For now, this is relatively small fry. But it’s an indication that BlueSky’s “stackable moderation” that leans heavily on labeling and user choice will no doubt be tested. Already, the platform is encouraging big brands to self-verify by linking their domains. More is no doubt to come.

INFLATED VIEWS OF HIMSELF

An analysis by researchers at Queensland University of Technology and Monash University claims there was a significant increase in engagement with right-leaning X accounts after Elon Musk’s endorsement of Donald Trump on July 13.

While this increase may have been organic in nature and tied to the increasingly partisan nature of the platform, one metric caught my eye. Views of Musk’s own tweets went up by 138% compared to his average for the first part of the year.

If this was intentional, it would not be unprecedented. In 2023, Platformer reported that Musk had ordered X engineers to inflate the reach of his posts by a factor of 1,000. If he was willing to do that because (allegedly) his Super Bowl tweet performed less well than Joe Biden’s, it is hard to imagine that he wouldn’t have done the same in the interest of an election he described in cataclysmic terms.

FAKE AND LARCENOUS

In Faked Up #14, I uncovered almost 1,000 Instagram accounts that, more or less transparently, used AI-generated pictures of attractive humans to monetize.

In an incredibly detailed follow-up co-published today by 404 Media and Wired, Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler find that some of these accounts are not just deceptive, they are building their fake personas off of the images of real models and adult content creators.

One of them told 404 Media that “while there may be other changes to Instagram’s algorithm that could have contributed to this, since the explosion of AI-generated influencer accounts on Instagram her ‘reach went down tremendously,’ from a typical 1 million to 5 million views a month to not cracking a million in the last 10 months.”

To add insult to injury, the folks monetizing these fake women are often men.

ACADEMIC FRAUDS

A researcher in molecular microbiology and immunology posted an interesting thread about being targeted by a fake researcher on X (h/t Dan Brickley). The attacker had a legitimate-looking profile on ResearchGate but had swapped her name into papers published by others. The end purpose is unclear but it is now the third case this month of attempted academic fraud that hits my feeds (the other two were an attempt at bribery and an entirely fictitious journal). For anyone out there citing studies, this is a good reminder to always confirm the authors’ identities.

RFK JR.’S REVIEWS ARE IN

Anti-vaccine leader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been named to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Former and current directors of the CDC told NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny that they were “concerned” and “speechless.” On the other hand, his nomination was warmly welcomed by Mikki Willis, the author of the conspiracy documentaries Plandemic.

Kennedy has a history of false statements on everything from childhood vaccinations to fluoridated water. He has fanned antivax sentiment in America and beyond. In 2019, he supported campaigners against the measles vaccine in Samoa, shortly before an outbreak killed 83 people in the Polynesian country.

It remains to be seen whether Kennedy will be able to maintain his constituency in government. An Instagram photo of him eating McDonald’s and drinking Coke on Trump Force One after excoriating junk food did not go down well with supporters.

“What’s up with the coke?” asked one user. “Please tell me this is AI 🤦,” posted another.

REVISITING AMSTERDAM’S CLASHES

Earlier this month, a video filmed by Dutch photographer Annet de Graaf was mislabeled by Reuters as showing fans of Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv being attacked in Amsterdam. On Nov. 12, The New York Times issued a correction to its own article citing the video having independently confirmed from other footage that the video “shows a group of Maccabi fans chasing a man on the street.”

More baffling still, Sky News updated its coverage in the opposite direction, making it less accurate. France 24 has a good overview of the sorry mess in the video below:

CITATION DISTORTED

Italian far-right leader Matteo Salvini is a fan of Donald Trump and has been making the case that the tariffs promised by the incoming U.S. president won’t affect Italy’s fragile economy. To do so, on several talk shows he has been dramatically touting for the camera an old fact check by Pagella Politica showing that Italian exports increased during Trump’s first term in office. As the fact-checkers have pointed out, that analysis did not develop a counterfactual of what exports would have looked like without the tariffs.

NOTED

1. Not even Spotify is safe from AI slop (The Verge)
2. Fox News is Back at the White House. Plus, No Joke, The Onion Buys Infowars. (On the Media)
3. Absurd AI Slop About How Elon Musk Will Fix America Is Megaviral on Facebook (404 Media)
4. Would the misinformation bill hurt free speech? (ABC News)
5. Despite Community Notes, most content reviewed by fact-checkers in Europe goes unaddressed on X/Twitter (Science Feedback)
6. Combating Repeated Lies: The Impact of Fact-Checking on Persistent Falsehoods by Politicians (Media and Communication)
7. Apparent AI Hallucinations in AI Misinformation Expert's Court Filing Supporting Anti-AI-Misinformation Law (Reason)
8. Conspiracy theory spreading on social media about Starlink interfering with election results (Center for an Informed Public)
9. A look at Dr. Oz’s health care record as he’s nominated to key post by Trump (PBS News)

1 This is a different law from AB 2839, which was temporarily blocked in October.

2 Accounts that BlueSky’s moderation service has labeled as impersonators should be queriable, but I haven’t figure out how (if you have tips, let me know!!).