Dammit!

The Washington Compost has put out a list of “fake news” sites and Powdered Wig is not included. What do we have to do? We endeavor daily to piss off as many liberals as we can. I feel very empty right now. We have failed.

“Fake news” is liberal code for “news liberals don’t want you to hear,” and we at Powdered Wig deliver it thick every day. It’s what we do. Smacking liberals around like a kitten playing with a cornered mouse is our favorite thing in the world. It is better than sex with a supermodel…. I guess.

The newest liberal cause du jour is shutting down “fake news” sites because “fake news” leads to horrible things like liberals losing elections, despite massive Democrat election fraud. We can’t have that.

In order to pull off this “fake news” hoax, the liberal dimwits must first find a particular boogeyman. I know, how about Russia? It is easy to blame the Russians and get enough morons to actually believe that we are still in the Cold War. Yeah, that’s the ticket, the Russkies are behind it all, feeding sham stories to so many American patriots behind so many keyboards who happen to have tens of millions of loyal readers, and voila! FAKE NEWS!

First, let’s identify real fake news (wrap your head around that oxymoron). Fake news is “Extraterrestrials Kidnapped and Impregnated Barbara Bush and Jeb is ET’s Little Brother,” the sort of headline that might have you chuckling in the checkout aisle of your local grocery store. Fake news is NOT “Obama’s Birth Certificate is Fake, According to Forensic Experts.” That is REAL news, and according to computer scientists, quite accurate.

You may recall Barack Hussein parroting the “fake news” mantra nearly every day over the past few weeks, clearly a leftist attempt to shut down right wing news and commentary websites like Powdered Wig. Don’t let it happen! Only We the People can prevent it. It requires massive and vocal opposition. Right now the volume of the “fake news” grievance is at warning order level. You can be certain that it will build to a deafening roar if left unopposed.

So, give it a break, Barack Hussein! No one is listening to your mindless drivel anymore. You are the lamest of lame ducks and a sorry excuse for an American. Put your “fake news” in your pipe with your global warming and your steaming pile of socialism and smoke it! You are finished. Drag your miserable ass to Hawaii and enjoy the rest of your parasitic life. Take WaPo with you!

Rest assured, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, we at Powdered Wig will be working very hard to make the “fake news” list and doing all we can to expose liberals as the vile, corrupt scoundrels that they are.

From The Washington Post

The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.

Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of Web sites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.

“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

During a Facebook live discussion, reporter Caitlin Dewey explained how fake news sites use Facebook as a vehicle to function and make money. (The Washington Post)

Watts’s report on this work, with colleagues Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, appeared on the national security blog War on the Rocks this month under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” Another group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns.

The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.

PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted the propaganda efforts of the Soviet Union.

The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.

Read more….