Misogyny fills the plane crash data void

🤥 Faked Up #35: Online mob assigns guilt to female pilot, Google runs ads for an antisemitic antivax Flat Earther, and Brazilian scammers reach millions on Facebook.

Faked Up is coming to you via Ghost.io rather than Substack, as promised. Can you let me know if something looks funky? This newsletter is a ~6 minute read and includes 55 links.

HEADLINES

A Chinese influence operation posed as an NGO calling for the Spanish government to be overthrown. Apple and Google finally removed the deepfake porn-generating app DeepSwap. Channel 4's misguided deepfake porn documentary may have broken the law. Poland's vice premier claims Russia is offering €4,000 to Poles willing to spread disinformation. Italy's main newswire hosted ads claiming Hamas was on UNRWA's payroll. The CDC website was purged of several datasets, including ones about STDs and vaccines, to comply with an executive order banning "DEI content." A Massachusetts man has agreed to a guilty plea for creating AI chatbots that lured men to the house of a woman he was stalking. The International AI Safety Report claims evidence of harm from fake AI content is inconclusive. Google's AI gave Elliott Smith a posthumous Grammy for best rap album. AI slop is seeping into American public libraries.

TOP STORIES

The DEI crash-and-switch

We still don't know what caused the deadly collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter near Reagan National Airport last week.

The National Transportation Safety Bureau has promised a preliminary report within 30 days, but President Trump repeatedly claimed that diversity initiatives might be to blame for the deadliest plane crash on U.S. soil since 2001*.

Low-quality sources filled in the gaps with speculation and falsehoods. NewsGuard found multiple low-credibility and Russian-aligned websites falsely identifying one of the helicopter's pilots as Jo Ellis, who is openly transgender. Ellis later released a "proof of life" video to dispel the rumors.

In parallel, Trump orbit figures like Elon Musk and Dinesh D'Souza recirculated a two-year-old video from the confirmation hearings of Phil Washington, who was nominated by Joe Biden to lead the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Several versions of the video gathered tens of millions of views over the past week.

The posts cast Washington, who is Black, as a "DEI hire" for failing to answer questions posed by Republican senators. Washington was endorsed by two previous FAA administrators who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents. He withdrew his nomination and never served as FAA Administrator.

This is context that's nowhere to be found in the many, many posts of this video that beat the drum of the "DEI crash" narrative. The narrative seeding worked: in the week after the crash, [mr washington faa] was a breakout Google search query related to the FAA.

Focus for evidence-free theorizing has now shifted on the junior pilot on the flight, identified on Friday as Rebecca Lobach. Over the weekend, [rebecca lobach dei] was also a top Google query related to the pilot's name. The same string is also the first suggested search on Elon Musk's X.

Top results claim with no evidence that Lobach "was promoted higher without qualifications because she worked for Joe Biden & She Was a Lesbian (LGBTQ). That's DEI for you, Trump was right." In a sign of what this is ultimately about, a far-right user tied Lobach to Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace. Mace is no fan of DEI, but like the Black Hawk pilot, she is a woman.

The situation is similar on other social media. An Instagram post with 4,600 likes claims that Lobach's role as a Biden White House military social aide is evidence that "Trump was correct in saying this may have been caused by DEI." Many comments point to her 450 hours of flight experience as being insufficient; the Army had previously noted that the two pilots on board were "experienced" and had logged 1,000 and 500 flight hours (I think this refers to the two men on board with her, but the latter may be Lobach).

All the most liked comments on Breitbart's Instagram post about Lobach either speculate that the pilot had sinister motives or attribute the crash to her gender and sexuality. One that has been liked 246 times reads: "Sooooo in other words : a lesbian with few experience who was hired on the sake of diversity caused the death of 67 people. Yes she was the pilot.."

Clearly, a lot of things went wrong in order for a military helicopter and a plane to crash over America's capital on the evening of January 29.

The NTSB will determine whether Rebecca Lobach was in control of the helicopter and made a fatal mistake. She may have done.

But the online mob doesn't wait for evidence. The concerted campaign to attribute the crash on "DEI" first tried to implicate a trans woman and a Black man that had no role in the event. It then settled for blaming the woman.