Month: February 2019

Bogus Copyright Complaints Sought to Suppress Michael Moates Sexual Harassment Claims

At least three young women have accused conservative writer Michael Moates of sending sexually suggestive messages

Multiple bogus copyright complaints sought to suppress sexual harassment claims made last year against conservative writer and D.C. Chronicle founder Michael Moates.

The complaints, sent in Moates’ name over a five-month period starting October, requested that Google delist six news articles concerning Moates’ alleged misconduct towards three young women, including two underage girls.

Michael Moates (source)

The three women, Purity Thomas (16), Hadassah Cohen (17), and Kylie Thomas (20), assert that Moates sent them inappropriate and sexually suggestive messages during discussions online and over text message. The claims, including that Moates told Cohen that she “couldn’t possibly be telling the truth that [she] was a proud virgin…because [she] was too gorgeous for that,” were first reported in October by Right Wing Watch, a liberal watchdog site of conservative media.

According to statements and screenshots posted online, Moates texted Purity Thomas—then 15—that she was a “beautiful crazy chick.”

“This is Michael, correct?” Thomas asked in reply.

“Yes lol,” Moates wrote back. “Sorry I made a mistake lol”

Thomas, currently the executive director of pro-life women’s group reLOVE, had reached out to Moates to discuss her experience of being physically assaulted during a protest. But after talking to him, “[she] thought, ‘You’re not coming anywhere near my team,’” Thomas told Right Wing Watch.

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In another exchange that allegedly took place over Facebook, Moates propositioned Kylie Thomas, an advocate for sexual and domestic assault survivors, to go on a date with him.

“Maybe I can get you drinking if I can get that date,” Moates suggested.

“Sounds bad,” Thomas replied. “Sounds like a reason mothers give daughters pepper spray.”

“LOL I would never take advantage,” Moates wrote back. “lol more of hey your cute youve been drinking lets go to dinner haha.”

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Shortly after the story was picked up by Raw Story and a number of other media outlets, someone sent Google three copyright complaints in Moates’ name requesting that the search engine remove the offending articles because they included Moates’ personal Facebook and Twitter photos. Last week, another three complaints were sent to Google, also in Moates’ name.

“The self-taken photograph with Fox News commentator Sean Hannity was taken from Facebook,” reads one of the complaints. “Photograph (selfie) taken with Tomi Lahren,” reads another.

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U.S. copyright law stipulates that the publishing of copyrighted photos might be considered Fair Use if used in a journalistic context, as with the Right Wing Watch and Raw Story pieces.

“The fair use of a copyrighted work…for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting…is not an infringement of copyright,” Section 107 of the Copyright Act states.

In an e-mail, Techdirt reporter Tim Cushing said that the use of Moates’ photos was “clearly fair use.”

“Moates’ use of social media is a key aspect of this story, so the use of screenshots of his social media posts isn’t copyright infringement,” said Cushing. “At best, Moates should be contacting the sites directly and requesting they remove the photo. Targeting the entire URL is just an attempt to remove a critical article under the pretense of protecting his IP [Intellectual Property].”

Moates with Sean Hannity (source)

It remains unclear if Moates sent the complaints, as he didn’t reply to a request for comment. But in September, Moates told The Daily Beast reporter Lachlan Markay that he planned to file libel lawsuits against a number of conservative women who’d made sexual harassment claims against him. 

As of publication, Google has not delisted the targeted articles.

Former Trump Campaign Aide Michael Caputo Is Enlisting MAGA Supporters to Shield Him From Antifa

200 members of the MAGA Quick Reaction Force are prepared to face down anti-fascist protesters at Michael Caputo’s home and office

Michael R. Caputo (source)

Former Trump campaign communications adviser Michael R. Caputo has created a new mass text system to alert nearby Donald J. Trump supporters to Antifa protests of his home and office.

The new system was announced on the MAGA Quick Reaction Force website (MAGA-QRF.com), which was registered by Caputo’s public relations company in November shortly after anti-fascist protesters targeted the Washington, D.C. home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“My family has endured dozens of threats of death and violence due to my high-profile Trump connection and my involvement as a witness in the bogus Russia investigation,” Caputo said in a statement published on MAGA-QRF.com. “I’ve developed a way to push back on Antifa protesting outside my home or office, which is more likely than you might think…I assembled a group of 200 nearby Trump supporters who have pledged to come on a moment’s notice to assemble peacefully between my house and the Antifa protestors to assure my wife and children don’t even see them.”

Antifa, a loosely organised, militant anti-fascist movement whose tactics involve physical violence and harassment, gained notoriety in 2017 following its protests of prominent alt-right figures such as professional provocateur Milo Yiannapoulos and white supremacist Richard Spencer.

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“I’ve installed a mass text capacity on my smartphone to reach them [members of the MAGA Quick Reaction Force],” Caputo explained in his statement. “I’ve tested the system. Within minutes, Antifa will be vastly outnumbered.”

It’s not Caputo’s first attempt to mitigate the damaging personal repercussions of his involvement in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference. 

Caputo recently set up two legal funds, one to cover the costs of his “voluntary cooperation with multiple US Government investigations,” and another to raise $100,000 on behalf of former Trump campaign adviser and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, who was indicted last month for allegedly lying to congress about his interactions with Wikileaks during the 2016 presidential election.

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Shortly after his own testimony to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee in July 2017, Caputo initiated a surreptitious campaign to purge his Wikipedia biography of his work for Russia state-backed media company Gazprom.

Via “Ex-Trump Aide Scrambles to Scrub Russia From Bio” by Lachlan Markay, The Daily Beast, November 6, 2017:

Former Donald Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo is determined to prove that he did not work for Vladimir Putin, and he’s using every tool at his disposal to do so—from a congressional ethics complaint, to a defamation lawsuit, to a surreptitious Wikipedia edit campaign.

Sean Dwyer, an employee of Caputo’s PR firm, Zeppelin Communications, was blocked from Wikipedia in August after he was caught using multiple pseudonymous accounts to purge Caputo’s page of alleged Putin ties, according to an investigation by the site’s editors. After the accounts were exposed as what Wikipedia calls “sock puppets”—multiple accounts run by the same person as part of a coordinated editing campaign—Dwyer admitted he had financial ties to the subjects of his edits…

Given what Caputo characterizes as widespread—and even malicious—misrepresentations of his work in Russia, “Wikipedia inaccuracies barely even make it on my radar,” he said.

And yet, Dwyer’s editing campaign, which was first reported by independent blogger Dean Sterling Jones, shows that Caputo was at least aware of the claims and determined to purge them. Dwyer did so through four different “sock puppet” accounts, according to Wikipedia’s investigation, and edit logs show he repeatedly attempted to remove language from the page that tied Caputo’s work for Gazprom to any efforts to burnish Putin’s reputation abroad.

Though it’s fairly common, “sock-puppetry is one of the cardinal sins of Wikipedia,” according to William Beutler, the president of digital marketing firm Beutler Ink and a longtime personal and professional Wikipedia editor. “We do this legitimately every day. But our approach is different from what they do here,” Beutler said in an interview. Unlike Dwyer, “we disclose who our clients are at the starting point.”

Caputo denied that Dwyer had run afoul of any Wikipedia guidelines. “Sean has done nothing wrong except engage with Wikipedia according to their rules, which apparently put him in the sights of a wanker trolling me from his mommy’s basement,” he said.

It’s unclear if Caputo has had to deploy the MAGA Quick Reaction Force, as he didn’t respond to a request for comment. But his site does include this entertaining speech by Christopher Walken from the 2002 cult film Poolhall Junkies.

You got this lion. He’s the king of the jungle, huge mane out to here. He’s laying down under a tree, in the middle of Africa. He’s so big, he’s so hot. He doesn’t want to move. Now, the little lion cubs, they start messing with him, biting his tail, biting his ears. He doesn’t do anything. The lioness, she starts messing with him, coming over, making trouble. Still, nothing. Now, the other animals, they notice this, and they start to move in. The jackals, hyenas. They’re barking at him, laughing at him. They nip his toes, and eat the food that’s in his domain. They do this, and they get closer and closer, bolder and bolder. ‘Til one day, the lion gets up and tears the shit out of everybody. Runs like the wind, eats everything in his path. Cause every once in a while, the lion has to show the jackals who he is.

Fyre Festival Co-Founder Billy McFarland Paid Someone to Write His Wikipedia Bio

McFarland’s self-promotional Wikipedia bio now describes him as a “fraudster”

Billy McFarland, co-founder of the doomed Fyre Festival, paid a professional Wikipedia editor in 2014 to create his current bio as part of a promotional effort to raise his public profile.

According to Wikipedia editing records, McFarland paid a user with the handle Bernie44 an undisclosed amount to promote his involvement in two tech startups: the failed content-sharing site Spling; and the ultra-exclusive Magnises black card, which with Fyre went down in flames following McFarland’s conviction last year for defrauding investors.

Billy McFarland (source)

“McFarland founded Magnises in August 2013, and officially launched the card on March 1, 2014, aiming to create an exclusive black card that was community-oriented and technology-based, offering perks, guidance and cachet that would improve the everyday life of its members and appeal to the millennial generation,” reads Bernie44’s paid draft from September 8, 2014. “As of August 2014, Magnises has 3,000 members, including actress Rosario Dawson, former NBA player Baron Davis, and musicians French Montana, Wale and Gabe Saporta.”

Bernie44 disclosed having been paid by McFarland in accordance with Wikipedia’s June 16, 2014 update to its terms and services.

“[This] is to disclose that I am paid for some of the articles I create and/or edit, in most cases by the subject of the article,” Bernie44 wrote. “Whether paid or not, I always aim to contribute positively to Wikipedia and to edit within Wikipedia’s guidelines, with properly sourced, neutral, constructive edits. I hope my work is judged based on those standards.”

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McFarland found fame in 2017 when his attempt to organise the luxury Fyre music festival in the Bahamas fell apart in spectacular fashion. The $1,200 to $100,000 per ticket event promised two weekends of music, gourmet meals, luxury villas, and parties on yachts with supermodels. But after months of failed preparations, the event crashed and burned in real time, leaving attendees stranded on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma without food, water, or shelter.

Last year, McFarland pleaded guilty to “fraudulently induc[ing] investments into his companies Fyre Media, Inc., Fyre Festival LLC, and Magnises, Inc., including in connection with McFarland’s failed venture to host a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ music festival in the Bahamas.” He was later sentenced to six years in prison.

Adding to that growing list of failures, last week McFarland’s self-created bio, originally titled “Billy McFarland (entrepreneur),” was moved to a new page, “Billy McFarland (fraudster).”

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Daily Beast: Google Yanks Services From Sanctioned Russian Website

USAReally.com has been barred from using Google Analytics as the website’s American contributors reconsider their involvement

— The site’s parent company has postponed its lawsuit against Facebook while its attorneys apply for a sanctions exemption. Read my latest at The Daily Beast.

Via “Google Yanks Services From Russian Propaganda Site” by Lachlan Markay and Dean Sterling Jones, The Daily Beast, February 07, 2019:

Tech giant Google has cut off a sanctioned Russian propaganda website from popular tools that allowed the site to track and collect extensive data on the site’s readers.

The website, USA Really, has been barred from using Google Analytics, the company told The Daily Beast last week, depriving the site of reporting data on readers’ countries of origin, time of visit, pages visited, referring websites, IP addresses, and types of operating systems. The information is typically used for search engine optimization and marketing purposes.

It’s the latest setback for USA Really, which has seen multiple other tech firms cut ties with the site after its parent company, Russia’s Federal News Agency (FAN), was hit with U.S. sanctions in December. Federal authorities accuse FAN of complicity in a widespread, Kremlin-backed disinformation campaign dubbed “Project Lakhta…”

The sanctions have also thrown a wrench into a FAN lawsuit against another tech giant, Facebook, over its closure of USA Really’s pages on that platform, part of a long-running effort to rid Facebook of malicious foreign propaganda efforts…

Both parties agreed on Tuesday to postpone a conference later this month to update a federal judge on the status of the lawsuit. Treasury’s sanctions against FAN require its attorneys—with the U.S. law firms Diamond McCarthy and Whiteford, Taylor & Preston—to obtain a specific license from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to continue their representation…

Sanctions against FAN also have USA Really’s American contributors reconsidering their own involvement, given the possibility that any payments for their writing might run afoul of prohibitions on business dealings with the site.

“Our authors continue to cooperate with us,” Malkevich told The Daily Beast. “They write about their thoughts, about the problems of American society.”

Click here to read the full story.

And here’s a response from USA Really author Jeffrey Silverman, who was quoted in the article:

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A couple of days back The Daily Beast published an article on USA Really titled “Google Yanks Services from Russian Propaganda Site.” The foregone conclusion upon reading the title would be that USA Really is “Guilty as Charged!”

However, I must admit that barring the click-bait like title the article was more balanced than expected.

Since I have been a regular contributor to USA Really, the authors of the Daily Beast article while working on the article contacted me and other writers with their many questions. I was a bit skeptical to communicate with them at first, as my experience communicating with the American mainstream media in the past had not been very productive.

My previous comments to the media were construed to present views that were contrary to mine—taken out of context.  More often than not, to distort what I actually said, with few exceptions.

However, I decided to discuss the matters with them thinking that this might be a chance to tell the true story, the story of how USA Really, just because of its Russian roots, is being harassed.  At least to be able to demonstrate that neither I personally nor USA Really had anything to hide… we were both being upfront and transparent.

My trust in The Daily Beast has paid up, albeit not entirely, but certainly more than I had honestly expected. And I am not the only one who felt this. A colleague of mine during an informal discussion shared:

“Fairly balanced article, I would say. Other than the fact that in the title of the article as well as in the very first sentence they mention USA Really to be a propaganda website; they would have done better by saying ‘alleged propaganda website.”

Surprisingly the article mentioned my true credentials stating, and put all my comments correctly without twisting them, unlike some other previous publications that described me as being an eccentric American with an ax to grind against the US government.

“Jeffrey K. Silverman, a Tbilisi, Georgia-based U.S. Army veteran who previously worked for Radio Free Europe, has written over 30 articles for USA Really on topics as varied as the BDS movement and the tobacco industry. In an e-mail, Silverman said that he continues to write for the site on a paid basis despite the sanctions.

I don’t know how they could legally apply to a US citizen, as the 1st Amendment still applies …”I continue to cooperate, and with greater enthusiasm. I don’t like being told as a US citizen that I am subject to 1984 and USSR-styled censorship.”

With Dean Sterling Jones—the article’s author—I shared my dilemma of not getting an answer from responsible American authorities (Treasury Department and American Citizen Services) about my legal plight and whether I can legally contribute to USA Really, even after asking them multiple times.

Consequently, Dean tried contacting the concerned departments to get their side of the story too. And unsurprisingly, as with my requests, Dean’s too were met by a wall of silence. I know many would say that we did not receive any response was because of the government shutdown, but deep down my heart I know that it is a device of subterfuge—on the part of the US government.

Or maybe they are waiting to ambush me on my next trip to the US, as they have done in the past, [at the airport] or are just not willing or capable of putting anything of substance in writing.

Or, maybe these sanctions are but a Red Herring because there must be some serious reason for picking on a fringe alternative media site, and based on my experience they are testing the waters to understand as to who they can block next?

Click here to read Silverman’s full article.