Deception Watch: AstroTurf, Lobbying, and Dirty Politics
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-01 13:42:51 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-01 13:42:51 UTC
Media Bias
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The BBC has been accused of yielding to political pressure since the last election and allowing a right-wing bias to emerge in its journalism.
The serious criticism by a distinguished media professor suggests that the BBC has compromised its impartiality by depending too heavily on sources from business, the media, law and order and politics.
Covert Marketing
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Two-time "Worst Company In America" winner Electronic Arts isn't doing its publicity department any favors. The company's new freemium game Dungeon Keeper tricks frustrated players into leaving bad reviews on its own site, instead of on the Google Play Store, Gamasutra reports.
Politics
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Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., is defending his actions after he physically threatened a reporter at the Capitol after President Barack Obama's State of the Union address.
The confrontation began Tuesday when Michael Scotto, a reporter for New York cable news station NY1, asked Grimm about a Justice Department investigation into his campaign finances.
After cutting the interview short, Grimm told Scotto, "You ever do that to me again I'll throw you off this (expletive) balcony." He also threatened to "break (Scotto) in half."
NY1 posted video of the incident on its website.
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The Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity (through its Wisconsin Reporter and Watchdog.org websites) has aggressively attacked the "John Doe" probe into possible campaign finance violations during Wisconsin's 2011 and 2012 recall elections. Its outlets have also published new information about the apparent targets of the investigation, but they have omitted an important detail: Franklin Center has close ties to individuals and groups that may be caught up in the John Doe.
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Google, the tech giant supposedly guided by its “don’t be evil” motto, has been funding a growing list of groups advancing the agenda of the Koch brothers.
Organizations that received “substantial” funding from Google for the first time over the past year include Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Federalist Society, the American Conservative Union (best known for its CPAC conference) and the political arm of the Heritage Foundation that led the charge to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act: Heritage Action.
South Korea
Revisionism
Consumerism and Distraction
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This ad strongly promotes the values of consumerism, and implies that consumerism leads directly to happiness. In the ad, the girls bought these shoes, are wearing them, and are now fashionable, popular, and happy. This message encourages the belief that spending money and obtaining material goods is the only path to happiness for girls. This big lie will lower girls’ self-esteem and perhaps cause them to purchase unnecessary goods in their quest to appear cool and likeable.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Biggest "AI Companies" (Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft) Borrowed (Additional Debt) About $100,000,000,000 in a Year
- Who will be held accountable for all this?
- In 2009 Microsoft Was Valued at ~150 Billion Dollars, Now They Tell Us Microsoft Lost ~1,000 Billion Dollars in Value. Does That Make Sense?
- Or Microsoft lost 700 billion dollars in "value" in less than two weeks
- Microsoft Stock Crashed When Alleged Vista 11 Numbers Disclosed
- And last summer Microsoft indicated that it had lost 400 million Windows users
- It's Not About Speed, It's About the Message (or Its Depth)
- Better to write news than to just link to news if there's commentary that the news may merit
- Mobbing at the European Patent Office (EPO) - Part IV - EPO Can Get Away With Murders, Suicide Clusters, and Systematic and Prolonged Bullying by 'Team Campinos' ("Alicante Mafia" as Insiders Call It)
- Nobody in the Council or the EU/EC/EP gives a damn as long as laws are broken to fabricate 'growth'
- Jeff Bezos Isn't Just Killing the Washington Post, He's Killing Thousands of News Sites/Newsrooms (in Dozens of Languages) That Rely on It for Many Decades Already
- Not just slopfarms; even the Ukraine-based reporters are culled by Bezos, who's looking to please the dictators of the world
- Central Staff Committee Confronted António Campinos for Giving His Cocaine-Addicted Friend Over 100,000 Euros to Do Nothing, Just Pretend to be Ill, While Cutting the Salaries of Everybody Else
- "On the agenda: Amicale framework & Financial assistance for courses"
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- Links 07/02/2026: More White House Racism, "Europe Accuses TikTok of Addictive Design"
- Links for the day
- Silent Mass Layoffs: It's Not the Revolution, It's the Loophole and the Hack ("Low Performers" or "Underperformers")
- Layoffs by another approach
- Mark Shuttleworth (MS) Pays Salaries to Microsoft (MS) Employees
- Canonical selling Microsoft
- Links 07/02/2026: Windows TCO Rising, Lousy Patents Invalided
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Leadership: Stop Taxing Us, Tax Only Poor People
- Does Microsoft create jobs?
- In Case You've Missed It (ICYMI), Google's Debt More Than Doubled in a Year
- Wait till it "monetises" billions of GMail users with slop
- PIPs and Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Still Going on, It's "Forever Layoffs" (to Skirt the WARN Act)
- American workers out
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 06, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, February 06, 2026
- Stressful Times for Team Campinos ("Alicante Mafia") at Europe's Second-Largest Institution
- Keep pushing
- Growing Discrimination in the European Patent Office (EPO)
- it's a race to the bottom, basically
- Converting FOSDEM Talk on Software Patents in Europe Into Formats That Work for "FOS" and Don't Have Software Patent Traps
- transcoded version of the video
- Google News Drowning in (or Actively Promoting) Slopfarms Again
- LLM slop is a nuisance
- Gemini Links 07/02/2026: "Choosing a License for Literary Work" and "Social Media Is Not Social Networking (Anymore)"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 06/02/2026: Git and Email Patches; MNT Pocket Reform
- Links for the day
- Geminispace Net Growth in 2026 About a Capsule a Day
- A pace like this means net gain of ~300 per year, i.e. about the same as last year
- Benjamin Henrion Warned About the Illegal and Unconstitutional Unified Patent Court (UPC) in FOSDEM 2026
- Listen to Benjamin Henrion
- Economies Crashing Not Because of Slop Improving 'Efficiency' (That's a False Excuse) and 'Expensive' (Read: Qualified) Workers Discarded in Race to the Bottom
- Actual cocaine addicts are pushing out moral people
- IBM's CEO Speaks of Layoffs, Resorts to Mythical (False) Excuses
- This has nothing to do with slop
- Links 06/02/2026: Voter Intimidation and Press Shutdowns in US, Web Traffic Warped by LLM Sludge
- Links for the day
- Does Linux Torvalds Regret Having Dinners With Bill 'Russian Girls' Gates?
- See, the rules that govern the Linux Foundation and its big sponsors aren't the same rules that apply to all of us
- IBM: Cheapening Code, Cheapening Staff, Cheapening Everything
- IBM's management runs IBM like it's a local branch of McDonald's. IBM is a junk company with morbid innards.
- GNU/Linux Measured at 6% in One of the World's Largest Nations
- Democratic Republic Of The Congo
- Linux Foundation Operative Says We and Our Software All "Owe an Enormous Debt of Gratitude" to a Software Patents Reinforcer
- The only true solution is to entirely get rid of all software patents
- How to Win Lawsuits in 5 Simple Steps
- Keep issuing threats every week and send 60 kilograms of legal papers to the target
- More Than 99% of "AI" Companies Aren't AI, They're Pure BS
- We need to discard those stupid debates about "AI" and reject media that gets paid to participate in such overt narrative control (manipulation like The Register MS)
- AI Used to Save Lives, Now "AI" is a Grifting Scheme That Burns the Planet and Will Crash the Economy
- What the media calls "AI" (it gets paid to call it that) is the same stuff that could instead be dubbed "algorithms"
- Living in Freedom When 'False Flag Operations' Like EFF Get Captured by Billionaires to Take Freedom Away
- There are many ways to think of Software Freedom
- Amutable is a Microsoft Siege Against Freedom in GNU/Linux, Just Like the People Who Brought You 'Secure Boot' Controlled by Microsoft
- Do whatever is possible to avoid Amutable and its "products"
- Growing Focus on Publication
- Over the past ~10 days we always served more than a million Web hits per day
- "Going to be a large number of Microsoft layoffs announced soon"
- Everybody knows a giant wave of layoffs is coming Microsoft's way
- End of the 'GPU Bubble' and NVIDIA Finally Admits It Won't Bail Out Microsoft OpenAI Anymore
- circular financing (financial/accounting fraud)
- Corrupt Media Won't Hold Accountable Rich People for Role in Pedophilia
- Journalistic misconduct or malpractice is a real thing
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 05, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, February 05, 2026
- EPO Management ("Alicante Mafia") Not Properly Sharing Information on Scale of Strikes by EPO Staff
- disproportionate (double) deductions in salaries against people who participate in strikes, which are protected by law
- Gemini Links 06/02/2026: Slop/Microslop, Home Assistant, and Valid Ex Commands
- Links for the day
- Blackmail evidence: Debian social engineering exposed in ClueCon 2024 talk on politics
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Bitcoin crash: opportunity or the end game?
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Changes at the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
- SRA is basically a waste of money
- Claims That IBM Will Lay Off 20% (or 15%) of Its Workforce This Year Unless It Finds a Way to Push Them All Out by Threats, Shame, Guilt
- Where are the articles about IBM layoffs?
- IBM Isn't a Serious Company Anymore, It's a Ponzi Scheme Operated by a Clique and It Misuses Companies It Acquires to Prop Up or Legitimise the Scheme
- IBM seems like it's nothing but a "Scheme"
- Google News Drowning in Slop About "Linux" (Slopfarms Galore)
- Google should know better than to link to any of these slopfarms, but today's Google is itself a pusher of slop
- Links 05/02/2026: EU Commission Gutting Net Neutrality
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 05/02/2026: NixOS Books and Monochrome Emojis
- Links for the day
- Links 05/02/2026: Canadian Government Uses US LLMs to Override Expert Opinions, NVIDIA Troubles Due to Enablement of Mass Plagiarism ('Piracy') Misleadingly Obscured as "Hey Hi"
- Links for the day
- Explaining the Letter From JUDGE SYKES FRIXOU, Threatening Me Around the Time GNOME's Nat Friedman Lost His CEO Job at Microsoft GitHub and His Best Friend Got Arrested for Strangulation
- this letter (with annotation) is critical
- Linuxiac Not Rehabilitated, It's Still Full of LLM Slop (Part of a Trend)
- The Web as a resource/source of information is perishing
- "Sponsored by Azul" to Write Fake 'Article' About Azul, Quoting Azul Itself
- The "journalism" industry [sic] became so utterly corrupt
- JuristGate is for sale: three billion Swiss francs for a domain name
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Like Microsoft and IBM, the 'Alicante Mafia'-Governed EPO Does PIPs Nowadays (at the EPO, It's "Professional Incompetence Procedure")
- So "PIPs" are definitely in the EPO and we saw letters sent to staff
- Time for Change, More New Articles, Less Curation
- The oligarchy wants to gut the real press and replace media with slop and social control media (or social control media with slop in it, i.e. their own voices, mechanised)
- Gemini Links 05/02/2026: Coercion, Antibiotics, and LVDT Project
- Links for the day
- Almost 1,600 EPO Employees Went on Strike Last Week
- There is another strike coming 2.5 weeks from now
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 04, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, February 04, 2026