What's going on here?

[Gast]

3/

Koch Network
Building a White Supremacist Constitution one brick at a time over 60 years.

The hate is now automated, corrupt, & well funded.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/07/17/bill-gates-charles-koch-and-three-other-billionaires-are-giving-1-billion-to-enhance-economic-mobility-in-the-us/

https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/11/the-koch-network-is-pushing-trump-to-accelerate-ai-documents-show/

https://progressive.org/latest/like-dad-charles-koch-bircher-new-documents/

With AI, the wealthy skip paying for hate-for-hire campaigns like Facebook, Tenet Media, or the Russian Internet Research Agency

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/top-facebook-exec-sheryl-sandberg-just-apologized-for-racist-ad-targeting/

https://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/8/kochs_anti_civil_rights_roots

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/who-sponsored-the-hate

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5326284-birchers-conspiracies-trump-legacy/

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/did-the-john-birch-society-win-in-the-end

[Gast]

@mttaggart @catsalad wait, was there *any* truth in there whatsoever? Like, it sounds like it was 100% made up?

Just like the Daily Mail is known for?

[Gast]

@mttaggart ALAS, THE MOONSHARK HAS EATEN YOUR LINK.

[Gast]

4/

https://arlenegoldbard-1818.medium.com/flood-the-zone-25e592e1fc39

https://www.vice.com/en/article/steve-bannon-jan-6-trial-arguments/

https://www.wral.com/this-infamous-steve-bannon-quote-is-key-to-understanding-americas-crazy-politics/19984533/

https://www.persuasion.community/p/trumps-firehose-of-falsehood

Pam Bondi's performance in congressional hearings was an excellent example of Russian-style media manipulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

Firehosing & automation
https://mediamanipulation.org/definitions/distributed-amplification/

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/14/6/391

[Gast]

@mttaggart this seems so unlike Benji Edwards, I'm really surprised

[Gast]

@Npars01

Bondi's rendition looked more like the classic (and abhorent) cartoon version of hysterical female pms. Not how to impress the board in the western world. These women Trump goes for are all broken and the men stupid.

[Gast]

@http_error_418 @mttaggart @catsalad No, I saw the original Git page yesterday and there was a blog post from him after.

It's a mess, but it's real.

[Gast]

@Sobex @bnys @mttaggart
and while this was a faster response than the trans hit piece of a couple years ago, it's the same playbook: lock comments, promise an investigation, and hope it dies down over the weekend.
A pity really. A place I used to value. For me, the anti-trans piece was the end.

[Gast]

@bnys @mttaggart Berger is an embarassment

[Gast]

@mttaggart

They surely pulled it and it now has their moonshark 404 page, the moonshark ate the AI slop.

Edit: since the story itself was about an AI agent, we can dub this a clusterfuck.

[Gast]

@mttaggart

More like ArseTechnica, am I right?

@arstechnica

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@inpc Keep reading the thread friendo

[Gast]

@mttaggart did you archive that?

[Gast]

@mttaggart@infosec.exchange dead internet theory is true again

[Gast]

@mttaggart ah:

We are doing an investigation right now to figure out exactly what happened. Given that it's Friday afternoon we probably won't have something to report back until Monday, but we will follow up with an explanation for our readers. Edit: Monday is a holiday, my bad, and I don't know what we'll be able to say, so I don't want to over-promise anything.

OK, we’ll wait and see…

[Gast]

@mttaggart@infosec.exchange

Hey remember in 2022 when @arstechnica@mastodon.social published a story about a hoax which the source they used admitted was a hoax but they wrote the article as if it was real? That article is still up.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250921080857/https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/11/oculus-co-founder-makes-a-vr-headset-that-can-literally-kill-you/

RE: https://transfem.social/notes/ae7rksgrr9t400e0

[Gast]

@mttaggart Fuck! I thought that was real

[mttaggart@infosec.exchange]

@staringatclouds The event is real. The quotes in the story were hallucinated.

[Gast]

@Npars01

Need more evidence? Evil.

[Gast]

@mttaggart I'd have more respect for them if they replaced it with a retraction page. But then, I have low expectations for Ars.