An Autopsy of Corporate Media BS
An Autopsy of Corporate Media BS
Calling Dr. Comstock!
Remember how you would play the game telephone as a kid? Bobby would start with a word and whisper into Sean’s ear, but Rachael didn’t want to get close to Sean because he was just picking his nose and as his hands down his pants the whole time, so he kind of yell whispers it to Rachael, and then Rachael’s breath smells like tuna fish, and Katie doesn’t want to inhale Rachel’s breath, so Rachael kind of sign-languages it to her. That’s how you end up with “Nelson Rockefeller” from “balloon.”
But what would happen if everyone along the chain intentionally gets the word wrong? It takes the fun out of it and makes me want to punch them all in the face.
Finally, imagine Katie at the end is the New York Times, and the sources are all booger-eating, ball cheese-picking, tuna fish-smelling assholes who want to ruin everyone’s fun time.
This is just another day at the Times office or any other corporate media establishments. They base stories on questionable research, which itself is based on further questionable research, followed by more layers of dubious research. It’s like a Russian Nesting Doll of Bullshit.
To uncover what they are doing takes clicking all the links on the article, the links on those articles, and so on. Who has time for that? I did and decided to prove my thesis by dissecting a recent New York Times article.
Since there are several layers of research here, to help you keep track of what research layer we’re on, I’ve created a handy map so you can find your way out of this hellscape.
Let’s go:
On December 2nd, the Times published a hit piece on Elon Musk’s Twitter and the increase of “hate speech” (whatever that means) on the platform.
The first thing to point out is that this article is not in the op-ed section but is run as a news article, which is a joke. But, I will ignore the voluminous amount of biased language because I want to focus on the data laundering aspect of the article.
UNPRECEDENTED! To quote the movie The Princess Bridge, I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.
Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.
And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.
Why doesn't Elon re-open the triangle slave trade already? That doesn't sound good until you add the context that there are 500 million tweets sent per day. This means the slurs against black Americans went from .00002564% to .00007752% of daily tweets. Ok, maybe let’s hold off on the ships for now.
How many accounts did those come from? Who knows, because they never tell us. It could have been just ball-picker Sean from the telephone game sitting in his mom’s basement firing up from bots.
Also, the Times says the above findings come from “the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms…,” and they do not link to the specific data sources. They attribute all the data to this blob of sources. This is akin to the “unnamed sources” these media organizations have become so accustomed to using as sources that they can never be fact-checked.
Later in the piece:
The shift in speech is just the tip of a set of changes on the service under Mr. Musk. Accounts that Twitter used to regularly remove — such as those that identify as part of the Islamic State, which were banned after the U.S. government classified ISIS as a terror group — have come roaring back.
ROARING back, you see. They are not just increasing but ROARING like a lion that’s about to devour you and all your liberal friends! Watch out! Should I build my ISIS panic room now, or if it can wait until interest rates come down?
This data comes from the research firm Global Network on Extremism and Technology ( Gnet Research). Let’s go down one level of hell.
Following Musk’s purchase, a Twitter account appeared and began retweeting Islamic State content while impersonating a fitness and Only Fans model with more than 304,000 followers on Twitter, 3.23 million followers on YouTube and more than 6 million followers on Instagram. The account is one of a pair, the other using an avatar of a lingerie model whose sole purpose is to amplify tweets, Twitter Spaces, and other content by Islamic State supporters on the platform.
There are more problems in this paragraph than with Ye’s appearance on Alex Jone’s show:
What is the name of the account? They never name it, but probably for a good reason, because my face would probably melt, a la the Nazis in Indiana Jones, when they look at the Ark of the Covenant if I looked at their Twitter account. And I am much too handsome to have a melted face.
If ISIS accounts have come ROARING back, I would expect to see more than a single account cited. We’ll get to that later.
How does an Islamic State account suddenly “appear” with 304,000 followers? That would seem to dispel the theory that the account suddenly “appeared” like a stripper with nipple tassels popping out of a giant birthday cake, no?
How does one go about “impersonating a fitness and Only Fans model” on Twitter? I mean, Twitter isn’t a college frat’s Halloween party where a jihadi can dress up as a sexy kitty-cat and then surprise everyone with the Kalashnikov he was hiding in fishnets. It’s pretty easy to tell the focus of the account. If I go to Ben Shapiro’s Twitter and find a baseball tweet, was he actually a baseball writer this whole time, impersonating a conservative commentator?
Finally, the mention of the account’s Youtube and Instagram followings is very odd. News flash for the people at Gnet…Elon musk only bought Twitter. If I buy a Honda hatchback, it may seem like my neighbor’s Bently, but in fact, they are not the same thing (though I’ll be happy to trade with you, Carl). However, what is worth mentioning is that the nameless account has 10x and 20x more followers on Youtube and Instagram, respectively, than on Twitter. In fact, the mention of that would tell me Elon is doing a pretty good job limiting this person’s reach.
Later, the Times cites the Gnet study, which claims, “[i]n the first 12 days after Mr. Musk assumed control, 450 accounts associated with ISIS were created, up 69 percent from the previous 12 days….” But that study actually comes from another study Gnet cites, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).
Down further into the bowels of hell, we go.
From Gnet:
Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) research teams have been tracking and monitoring terrorist groups and their supporters across various platforms, and have observed an emboldened set of extremists take to Twitter once again and succeed in carving out footholds, however small. In the first 12 days of the takeover, ISD tracked 450 new Islamic State Twitter accounts – a 69 per cent increase over the previous 12 days.
Is that a lot, going from 264 accounts to 450 over 12 days on a platform expected to have 335M users by 2023? Oh, and what methodology did the ISD use for their analysis? No clue because the Gnet didn’t source it. Surprise, surprise.
But they also note that
…a minimum of 30,000 Islamic State accounts [were found] during October and November of 2014
and
[i]n 2019, ISD found that 590 Islamic State accounts flooded the platform in the wake of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s death in a singular week.”
In other words, this has been an ongoing problem for nearly a decade now. They also note that the account removal rate, when comparing the 12 days before and after Musk’s acquisition of the site, stayed the same (27% vs. 28%)
So, in summary.
The ISIS problem was dramatically worse in 2014
There was a spike in 2019 due to political events
Despite the media’s chicken little predictions that the site would implode in on itself after Musk fired a considerable percentage of their Trust & Safety team, the removal rate of ISIS accounts has stayed the same, with their marginal increases over the past few weeks.
A conspiracy on the level of the Kennedy assassination, this is not.
Now let’s introduce a new player onto the team, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).
From Gnet: “Adding to the anxiety has been research into a resurgence of hate speech at unprecedented levels. The Network Contagion Research institute noted that slurs targeting Black people rose 5,000 percent after Musk closed the deal.”
Here is the chart showing the increase:
5,000%!!!!!!!!!!! From 500 to 1,500 per day. Remember, there are 500 million Tweets sent each day. So this is an increase from 0% to 0%.
Also, note that the report is from October 28th, the day after Elon closed the Twitter deal! I mean, at least give the guy a chance to staff the moderation team with his preferred Klan members before judging the results, ok?
Also, was the search done on the word “n word”? Because if it was, that doesn’t seem like a term a White Nationalist would use in their tweets. And if they searched for the word, that means they had to have thought of the word and typed it in somewhere (maybe even multiple times!). Where can I report them for a hate crime? I need these hate-mongers brought to heel, or I will literally self-combust. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gnet then cites some bang-up work from Montclair State University (MSU).
So let’s add MSU into the mix:
From MSU:
A team of faculty from the Joetta Di Bella and Fred C. Sautter III Center for Strategic Communication in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University today released a study on the increase in hate speech on Twitter in the hours immediately after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform, a transaction that created the perception by extremist users that content restrictions would be alleviated.
Again with the day after Elon bought the platform stuff.
But wait….
We stop this article to bring you breaking news!!!!! I may have been wrong about Elon’s evil plot all along. His day-one to-do list was just leaked, and it supports NCRIs and MSUs concerns.
My sincere apologies for the misinformation. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Now, let’s go back to the top:
I know that may have been hard to follow, but that is the point. These corporate media conglomerates couch their “news” in infinite layers of nonsense, which makes it nearly impossible for normies to figure out what’s going on, so they must accept what, in this case, the Times is telling them…even though it is based on trash research.
You should be happy I kept it this simple, as there was an entirely separate track I could have gone down, where the Times, incredibly, cites Media Matters for their research. The Times is either utterly unconcerned about this self-own, or more likely; they believe their readers don’t care.
But before I sign off, there is one more quote I had to address:
But Mr. Musk has denied claims that hate speech has increased on Twitter under his watch. Last month, he tweeted a downward-trending graph that he said showed that “hate speech impressions” had dropped by a third since he took over. He did not provide underlying numbers or details of how he was measuring hate speech [emphasis added].
Based on what we’ve reviewed, that last sentence takes some balls.
Until next time
_Comstock
An Autopsy of Corporate Media BS
Thank you for the detailed analysis of how media misinformation is propagated. It always amazes me how they can take, not a mole hill into a mountain, but an an hill into Mt. Everest.