The film credits election-meddling Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin as copyright holder. Yet the film’s co-financier, Alexander Malkevich, claims he was “not aware Prigozhin took any part in the creation of the film.”
As Libya’s U.N.-backed Government of National Accord wrests back control of Tripoli from Khalifa Haftar, the renegade leader of the Libyan National Army, a bizarre new propaganda-feature film is claiming to tell “the harrowing yet true story” of two Russian prisoners said to be at the center of it all.
[Maxim Shugalei and Samer Hassan Ali Seifan’s] Libyan misadventure began in March last year with what their Russian employer described as a “research project,” which quickly landed them in a notorious jail on charges of visa violations and meddling in Libyan politics. [Note: A third Russian, Alexander Prokofiev, accompanied the two men to Libya, but managed to return home unscathed.]
As part of a campaign to get the Russians freed, their employer, a shadowy private Russian foundation [the Foundation for National Values Protection] helped finance a feature-length movie [titled Shugalei] that premiered on Russian state television last month.
The Times’ story notes that “Shugalei’s trip appeared to be part of a push for influence by a St. Petersburg businessman, Yevgeny Prigozhin,” who spearheaded Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and has been sending mercenaries from his private militia in Russia, the Wagner Group, to support Haftar in his failed campaign to gain control of Tripoli.
What the story doesn’t mention is that the copyright to the film belongs to Aurum LLC, a film company founded by Prigozhin in 2017. There is little information available about Aurum online, and the company’s business address leads to a random apartment building in St. Petersburg.
Aurum’s involvement appears to contradict statements given to the Times by “Shugalei’s employer, [Alexander Malkevich, who] said his foundation had no ties to Mr. Prigozhin.”
Malkevich rose to prominence in mid-2018, when he attempted to organize a flash mob at the White House to celebrate the launch of USA Really, a clumsy Russian propaganda site aimed at an American audience. That December, he was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for “attempted election interference” in connection with Prigozhin’s infamous troll farm.
Last week, I e-mailed Malkevich to ask him about his involvement in the film and whether he’d met with Prigozhin. He told me that despite consulting with the film’s writers and director, he was “not aware that Yevgeny Prigozhin took any part in the creation of the film.”
I also asked him about allegations by Libyan prosecutors that his employees helped plan the election campaign of Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, the fugitive son of the deposed dictator Muammar Gadhafi, as part of a Kremlin-backed plot that included helping Russia to secure a military base in Libya, as Bloomberg reports.
Here’s what he sent me:
I have not seen the official charges. As far as I know, no one at all has seen them. All the charges are still only in words and have not been converted into a legal document 13 months after. All the so-called charges are replicated in the press, appearing primarily in the US, but maybe they know better. In answer to your question, Seifan was hired as a translator on the eve of the trip by the Foundation for National Values Protection. Shugaley was also approved for the project. So they both worked for the Foundation. About Gaddafi: what kind of election campaign could we be talking about if no election was scheduled, there is no Constitution and as a result, no electoral law?! And as you know, one of our sociologists left a few days before the kidnapping of Maxim and Samer who were supposed to leave 2 hours after him. No long-term work of any kind was planned.
GUARD A MILITARY BASE??? The two of us? Does Russia have a military base in Libya? and I want to remind you that Samer is diabetic, and Maxim has suffered a stroke. What kind of security of a military base are you talking about? are they hobbits from Middle-earth? Have the eagles flown Prokofiev out of Libya yet? Let’s have a serious conversation. Election campaign without the election, protection of a military base without the military base (!!!) by people with health problems.
We conducted a sociological study, a complete one, not hiding from anyone. It had questionnaires, focus groups and expert interviews. Nothing more was planned or discussed.
* * *
The film’s storyline corresponds closely with Malkevich’s version of events, depicting Shugalei and Seifan as intrepid sociologists who uncover “explosive evidence” that threatens to undermine Libya’s “puppet” government, for which they are imprisoned and sadistically tortured.
Throughout it all, the devil-may-care film version of Shugalei, played by 51-year-old Russian character actor Kiril Polukhin (doing his best Bruce Willis impersonation), spouts witty dialogue, drinks whiskey straight from the bottle, and, above all, “[does] not lose a sense of humor despite the challenging times.”
Although not the main focus of the film, Haftar plays a key role, mounting a daring but entirely fictional rescue that undermines the film’s claim of documentary-level accuracy. Meanwhile, Prigozhin, a central figure of the real story, is never mentioned.
The film is “a very powerful propaganda tool,” said Khadeja Ramali, a Libyan disinformation expert. She said that in addition to whitewashing the allegations against Shugalei and Seifan, the film feeds into an already existing narrative that most Libyans preferred living under Gadhafi’s dictatorial regime and view the 2011 revolution as a curse.
“The movie pushes a lot of points I’ve seen online in Arab media — that revolutions lead to chaos, that terrorism and violence follow,” Ramali told me. “It tries to paint Tripoli as this place overrun by militias (which it is) but in a way that fits in with [Haftar’s] narrative.”
It’s not the first time Malkevich has sought to manipulate the narrative around Libya’s civil conflict to his own advantage. In January, he placed an advertorial on The Washington Post’s site — seemingly in violation of U.S. government sanctions — pleading his employees’ innocence and calling on Libyan prime minister Fayez al-Sarraj to set them free.
Asked if he feels any guilt over his employees’ current situation, Malkevich said he is “certainly concerned for both of our colleagues, Maxim and Samer” but that “it is not my fault” and that “all the blame lies with the so-called Government of National Accord, as well as with Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj personally.”
al-Sarraj’s office did not return a request for comment.
Shugalei is currently available to watch on two separate YouTube channels run by Russian state-funded news network, Russia Today. As of publication, the film has been viewed nearly 700,000 times.
In 2012, the Hollywood Reporter published a glowing obituary for Patricia Disney, the first wife of former Walt Disney executive Roy Disney. In tribute to her philanthropic work, the obituary included a link to WeLovePatty.com, a memorial site where readers could donate to charities in her honor. But if you click on the link to that memorial site today, you’ll be taken to blaze4days.com, a cannabis blog offering content such as “Videos to Watch When High (Best of 2019).”
At some point, her family took down WeLovePatty.com and stopped paying for the domain name. That enabled it to be hijacked by parasitic digital marketers who trick readers into visiting sites that sometimes sell sketchy products and services. Search engine optimization consultants buy expired URLs that have been linked to by prominent news websites and redirect these domains to their clients’ sites in a bid to game search results.
Russian trolls and stealth political campaigns. Revisiting my scoopiest stories of 2018
2018 was undoubtedly my most successful year since I started writing at Shooting the Messenger almost five years ago.
Once described as an “amateur sleuth” by Politico and unceremoniously trashed by a surrogate for U.S. president Donald Trump on Fox News (something I’ve always worn as a badge of pride, thank you), in 2018 I was delighted to land a freelance gig at The Daily Beast, from which I served a few decent-sized scoops.
Huge thanks to the Beast’s Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman for generously inviting me to write for him, and Beast reporters Asawin Suebsaeng, Lachlan Markay, and Lachlan Cartwright (count ’em, two Lachlans) for their help and encouragement.
Big thanks to everyone else who provided me with invaluable help and encouragement in 2018, including (but not limited to!): Zen Master Blogger Peter M. Heimlich and his wife Karen Shulman, Techdirt reporter Tim Cushing, nutrition journalist/author Nina Teicholz, FoodMed.net publisher and editor Marika Sboros, journalist/fact-checker extraordinaire Brooke Binkowski, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, and BuzzFeed Canada’s Craig Silverman and Jane Lytvynenko.
The year started strong when a story I wrote in late 2017, about the HuffPost’s retraction of a pay-to-play puff piece on former Trump business partner Felix Sater, was picked up by the Beast in January.
An unknown client paid a Pakistani national to place an article at the HuffPost defending a controversial associate of President Donald Trump.
HuffPost scrubbed the article, written in December, from its website after a blogger in Northern Ireland, Dean Sterling Jones, inquired about the piece, which hailed the dismissal last year of a $250 million tax fraud case against Felix Sater, a Russian-born former Trump Organization executive.
The article’s author, listed on HuffPost’s website under the name Waqas KH, runs a Pakistani company called Steve SEO Services. That company offers to ghostwrite articles and organize internet commenting campaigns for paying clients. On the freelancer website Fiverr, Waqas goes by the username “nico_seo” and offers to place articles on HuffPost for an $80 fee. For an extra $50, he will write the article himself.
Following that article, the HuffPost announced that it was permanently closing its flagship contributor platform, which allowed readers to self-publish articles on the HuffPost website, and which the author of the Sater piece had been exploiting for financial gain.
In an interview with The New York Times, which cited my story, the HuffPost’s Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen said that the decision to close the platform was due to the proliferation of fake news.
Since its founding nearly 13 years ago, The Huffington Post has relied heavily on unpaid contributors, whose ranks included aspiring writers, citizen journalists and celebrities from the Rolodex of the site’s co-founder Arianna Huffington.
…On Thursday, it said it was immediately dissolving its self-publishing contributors platform — which has mushroomed to include 100,000 writers — in what is perhaps the most significant break from the past under its editor in chief, Lydia Polgreen…
[Recently] a contributor with the byline Waqas KH published an article about Felix Sater, an associate of President Trump, that he had been paid to post. The site has since deleted the article.
In July, I co-authored a follow-up story—my first for the Beast—about a much larger campaign to whitewash Trump’s Russian business ties by manipulating Google’s search rankings.
A mystery client has been paying bloggers in India and Indonesia to write articles distancing President Donald Trump from the legal travails of a mob-linked former business associate.
Spokespeople for online reputation management companies in the two countries confirmed that they had been paid to write articles attempting to whitewash Trump’s ties to Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who, with former Russian trade minister Tevfik Arif, collaborated with the Trump Organization on numerous real estate deals from New York to the former Soviet Union.
The campaign appears designed to influence Google search results pertaining to Trump’s relationship with Sater, Arif, and the Bayrock Group, a New York real estate firm that collaborated with Trump on a series of real estate deals, and recruited Russian investors for potential Trump deals in Moscow.
The story was covered by The Washington Post, Politico, and ABC News, among others.
Perhaps my biggest story of 2018, about Russian government media adviser Alexander Malkevich’s attempts to launch a troll factory-linked disinformation website from an office near the White House in Washington, D.C., was my second to make it to The New York Times.
The website, the conspicuously titled USA Really, was in fact created by Moscow’s Federal News Agency (FAN), one of a number of Russian entities U.S. prosecutors claim “employed hundreds of individuals in support” of Project Lakhta, a multi-million dollar social media influence operation that aimed “to sow division and discord in the U.S. political system.”
I first started writing about USA Really in April, following FAN’s attempts to recruit “English-speaking journalists” to write for the website. That early reporting was picked up by The Daily Beast, Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, and Press Pool with Julie Mason. But USA Really only really caught the attention of mainstream news outlets in June, after a story I wrote about Malkevich’s ties to the Russian government, his involvement in the USA Really website, and disastrous attempts to stage a flash mob event at the White House to celebrate Trump’s 72nd birthday, was picked up by—who else?—The Daily Beast.
A Russian government adviser who aims to wage an “information war” in the U.S. and Europe is running a new media venture a block from the White House that cybersecurity experts say has ties to the country’s infamous disinformation apparatus.
In April, Russia’s Federal News Agency (FAN) announced the creation of an American outlet called “USA Really.” Its website and accompanying social media pages sprang up in May and quickly began promoting a mid-June rally to be held in front of the White House in protest of “growing political censorship…aimed at discrediting the Russian Federation.”
At the helm of the project is Alexander Malkevich, a Russian media executive and a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, a body created by President Vladimir Putin in 2005 to advise government policymaking…
USA Really’s “flash mob” protest was initially scheduled for June 14, in what it says was a recognition of Flag Day and President Donald Trump’s birthday. But rather than applying for a rally protest with D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), which oversees such events, it asked the city’s film and television office for a film permit, the type that movie studios obtain before taping scenes on D.C. streets.
The FAN posted a copy of an email from the film office, which referred USA Really to the MPD. “Your permit application is denied,” the email read, “since we’ve determined that this is a rally more so than a filming.”
The FAN claimed on its website that it subsequently spoke with the MPD, which also denied them a permit and warned that they had alerted the CIA, which does not operate on U.S. soil, of USA Really’s activities. MPD told Dean Sterling Jones, a Belfast-based investigative writer who’s followed the USA Really case for weeks and first reported Malkevich’s involvement, that it had received no requests for a rally permit from the group.
Included in that article was reporting about an unsuccessful attempt by someone at USA Really named Michael to suppress my story:
For all its talk of combating misinformation, USA Really appears to be as invested in vendettas as it is in truth-telling. On Saturday, Jones received a diatribe from someone named Michael using a USA Really email address in response to a post he’d written on the group.
“Are you a semicrazy person?” Michael asked, according to a copy of the message provided to The Daily Beast. “WFT is wrong with you? How can you suck so much with fact interpretation?”
Asked about that exchange, Michael, who said he was emailing from Moscow, struck a conciliatory tone. “Actually, I appreciate Dean’s work a lot so I offered her to write to us too,” he wrote, apparently unclear of Jones’ gender. “So I cannot tell you what I objected in her beautiful articles.”
Following that article, the story quickly made its way to The Washington Post and Politico, then on to NBC News, NPR, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times.
To an untrained eye, USAReally might look like any other fledgling news organization vying for attention in a crowded media landscape. Its website publishes a steady stream of stories on hot-button political issues like race, immigration and income inequality. It has reader polls, a video section and a daily podcast.
But this is no ordinary media start-up. USAReally is based in Moscow and has received funding from the Federal News Agency, a Russian media conglomerate with ties to the Internet Research Agency, the “troll farm” whose employees were indicted by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for interfering in the 2016 presidential election…
Its founder, Alexander Malkevich, is a Russian journalist with little previous experience in American media. Its domain was registered through a Russian company, and its formation was announced in a news release on the Federal News Agency’s website. The project, originally known as “USAReally, Wake Up Americans,” was intended to promote “information and problems that are hushed up by major American publications controlled by the political elite of the United States,” according to the release…
Mr. Malkevich’s fumbling misadventures in American media have, at times, made him seem more like a Sacha Baron Cohen character than a sinister propagandist. In June, he planned a rally outside the White House, but canceled the event, he said, after failing to obtain the proper permit. He scheduled a round-table discussion about fake news inside a WeWork office in Washington, but his membership was abruptly terminated. An NBC News story about Mr. Malkevich carried the headline, “This man is running Russia’s newest propaganda effort in the U.S. — or at least he’s trying to.”
As I reported in an article I co-authored with Lachlan for the Beast, by September FAN and USA Really had become ensnared in the F.B.I.’s probe into Russian election interference.
When federal authorities allege a massive, foreign-government-backed campaign to undermine America’s democratic institutions, the expected reaction from those accused of complicity is to put some distance between themselves and the culprits.
But when Elena Khusyaynova, the alleged financier of a sprawling Russian disinformation effort, was indicted last week, one Russian media outlet rushed to associate itself with the St. Petersburg accountant. USA Really, a conspiratorial website run by a Russian media executive and Kremlin policy adviser, quickly boasted on its website that Khusyaynova was the company’s chief financial officer.
It’s not clear what USA Really hoped to gain through the admission. The site is quick to deny that Russia had any involvement in the 2016 election. But its gleeful association with Khusyaynova suggests that USA Really is not the independent, inquisitive news organization that it claims to be, but rather an adjunct of a deep-pocketed propaganda apparatus that federal prosecutors say amounts to a criminal conspiracy against the United States.
Last month, half a year after my first post, Malkevich and USA Really were officially sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for “attempted election interference.”
Today, [the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control] designated several entities and individuals related to Project Lakhta, a broad Russian effort that includes the IRA, designated previously under E.O. 13694, as amended, which has sought to interfere in political and electoral systems worldwide…
Within weeks after the designation of the IRA, the Federal News Agency LLC — an entity utilized by Project Lakhta to obscure its activities that was also designated today — announced that it was creating a new Russian-funded, English-language website called USA Really. USA Really, which is operated by Alexander Aleksandrovich Malkevich (Malkevich), engaged in efforts to post content focused on divisive political issues but is generally ridden with inaccuracies. In June 2018, USA Really attempted to hold a political rally in the United States, though its efforts were unsuccessful. As of June 2018, Malkevich was a member of Russia’s Civic Chamber commission on mass media, which serves in a consultative role to the Russian government. Based on this activity, USA Really was designated pursuant to E.O. 13694, as amended, for being owned or controlled by the Federal News Agency LLC, while Malkevich was designated pursuant to E.O. 13694, as amended, for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, USA Really.
Another article I co-authored with Lachlan that made national news told the story of an anonymous editing campaign to whitewash the Wikipedia page of Russian spy Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty last month to engaging in a Kremlin-backed conspiracy to infiltrate prominent conservative groups in America. As we reported in our story, the edits traced back to Butina’s D.C. alma mater.
Anonymous Wikipedia users engaged in a lengthy campaign this year to alter and whitewash the online biographies of two people at the center of an alleged Russian plot to infiltrate prominent conservative groups in America.
Starting in early spring 2018, the users, one of which maintained an account on Wikipedia’s Russian-language site, made a series of edits to bios for Maria Butina, a Russian national accused of conspiracy and illegal foreign influence, and Paul Erickson, a Republican political activist whom Butina allegedly roped into her espionage campaign and with whom she allegedly traded sex for political access as a “necessary aspect of her activities.”
The edits sought to discredit reporting on the FBI investigation into one of Butina’s alleged co-conspirators, and to scrub details of Erickson’s and Butina’s business history. It also downplayed attempts by Erickson to arrange a meeting between Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, allegations of fraud against Erickson, and Butina’s ties to a Russian political figure instrumental in her efforts to ingratiate herself with prominent political groups including the National Rifle Association (NRA)…
Details gleaned through a review of Wikipedia’s edit logs link two of the accounts to the Washington D.C. university where Butina studied before she was arrested last week. The edits suggest that months before her life blew up, someone close to, or allied with, Butina knew what investigations into her and her associates might uncover and launched a clandestine campaign to expunge the record or at least downplay it.
The story was subsequently covered on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show:
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My last big story for the Beast in 2018 was a collaborative effort with Lachlan and the Beast’s White House reporter Asawin Suebsaeng, about a conscious effort by National Enquirer boss David Pecker to distance himself and his tabloid from Trump, with an assist from Hollywood’s leading talent agency. Take a guess at which part of the story I contributed.
Shortly after the feds raided the office of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s now estranged personal attorney and longtime enforcer, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker went into a state of calculated retreat.
For years, Pecker’s tabloid had promoted and puffed up Trump’s political rise and his presidency. But once a regular fixture on the cover of the National Enquirer, Trump hasn’t appeared on it since an issue dated early May. That appearance was for a cover story on the various scandals swirling around Cohen…
According to multiple sources familiar with the situation, Pecker and the Enquirer’s top brass made a conscious decision to pull back on their pro-Trump coverage, just as Pecker’s media empire found itself increasingly embroiled in Trumpworld’s legal and public-relations woes.
A month after the Enquirer’s last Trump cover, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal authorities had subpoenaed Pecker and other executives at American Media Inc. (AMI), which publishes the tabloid. They sought records related to allegations that the company purchased the rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story of an affair with Trump, then killed the story for Trump’s benefit, a practice known as “catch and kill.” Prosecutors are exploring whether such an agreement may have constituted an illegal in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign by AMI…
As Pecker and his team were distancing themselves from Trump publicly, a more surreptitious effort was underway to cleanse the public record of details of Pecker’s involvement in the McDougal scandal and the AMI boss’s relationship with the president.
Over the course of a week last month, an anonymous Wikipedia user repeatedly tried to scrub Pecker’s page of damaging information regarding his alleged links to the McDougal hush-money scandal, removing huge blocks of text describing Pecker’s and AMI’s roles in paying the model for her story. The edits also removed references to Pecker as “a close friend of Donald Trump” and a supporter of his 2016 presidential campaign in addition to scrubbing mention of a federal investigation of the payment that stemmed from the raid of Cohen’s office (In a recently-leaked tape, Trump told Cohen to make the payment “in cash” to “our friend David,” assumed to be Pecker.)
The origin of the edits was even more interesting. They were made by someone using an I.P. address associated with the high-powered Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor, according to publicly-available web database information. The same I.P. address has been used to edit pages for WME itself, the head of the agency’s literary division, and a number of WME clients.
Click here for a clip of Asawin discussing the story with MSNBC news anchor Katy Tur.
Finally, here’s a quick story I blogged in February about how the Robert Mueller-indicted Internet Research Agency (IRA), better known as the Russian troll factory, used online job ads to recruit its army of election-meddling “Kremlebots,” then allegedly expected successful applicants to work for free.
The Internet Research Agency, now commonly known as the Russian troll factory, has gained international fame for its work during the 2016 US election, and the resulting indictments of 13 people announced by the Department of Justice last week.
Job ads from the IRA posted before the election give a sense of the kind of person the agency was looking for and how it helped weed out candidates. The ads were posted on Russian employment websites in 2014 and 2015 and the address listed in them matches the known location of the IRA’s headquarters. The blog Shooting the Messenger first posted some of the job ads.
One ad posting was for a social media specialist, offering a monthly salary of 40,000 rubles, or about $700.
The responsibilities included preparing “thematic posts,” publishing content, growing social audiences, and monitoring social media, blogs, and groups.
When it came to skills, the IRA wanted candidates he knew how to write “informational texts” and create an online community. It also asked for applicants with a sense of responsibility, initiative, and an “active life position”…
One uniting factor for all of these ads is a desire for energetic applicants. The ads also sought out people with “active life position,” “vigor,” “perseverance,” “ambition,” and the “ability to clearly and structurally express their thoughts.”
But with job postings come job reviews, and one reviewed by BuzzFeed News was not positive about work at the troll factory.
The review, from 2014, complained about being asked to do unpaid work for two days before being hired.
“The company invites you for the content manager for a vacancy, they give you a test task, when you do it, they invite you to an internship, 2 days for 8 hours. When you try to hint that it’s already full-time work and it would be nice to negotiate the terms of the employment contract, you hear ‘I’m sorry, you’re not a good fit’ in return,” the reviewer wrote said.
Job postings for the Russian troll factory that allegedly meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election sought prospective employees with coding and social media skills and promised work on “interesting projects.”
The job listings for the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency were placed on Russian employment websites in 2014 and 2015, BuzzFeed News reported Thursday. Some of the listings first surfaced on a blog Wednesday.
One listing for a social media specialist position advertised a monthly salary of 40,000 rubles – about $700 – and said the job would require composing “thematic posts,” monitoring social media and growing social followings, according to BuzzFeed.
Another listing for a web programmer job offered prospective employees 60,000 rubles per month, or about $1,060, and advertised that the successful candidate would be part of a “friendly team” and work on “interesting projects.”
A Russian troll factory-linked media campaign headed by a Putin-approved government consultant claims to have an office facing the White House.
For the past month, I’ve been closely following “Wake up, America!”—a mysterious “Russian ops” campaign that recently made headlines after it attempted to organise a flash mob event at the White House to celebrate Donald Trump’s upcoming 72nd birthday.
The event was advertised via USAReally.com, an English-language Russian disinformation website that called on “every patriot” to “come up to the White House on June 14th at 2:00 p.m. to congratulate America.”
According to a press release published in April, USA Really was created by the Federal News Agency (FAN), a pro-Kremlin Russian media company that says it has an office “in the White House business center opposite the US president’s residence.”
Organisers appeared to cancel the event—which would have included a symphony orchestra—after mistakenly applying for a film permit instead of the proper rally permit, although an article published earlier this week on the FAN website claims the cancellation came as a result of a conspiracy by US authorities to censor its free speech rights (banners advertising the rally are still up on the USA Really website).
FAN has been digitally traced to the Robert Mueller-indicted Internet Research Agency (IRA)—better known as the Russian troll factory—by US cyber-security firm FireEye and open-source researcher Lawrence Alexander, among others. In 2015, Adrian Chen of The New York Times visited the IRA’s offices in St. Petersburg and found that FAN was operating out of the same building.
Now for the latest twist in the story: According to a now-deleted video published Tuesday on FAN’s YouTube channel, the “Wake up, America!” campaign is being headed by the deputy chairman of the Russian government’s Commission on Mass Media and Mass Communications, Alexander Malkevich.
The video appears to have been filmed from inside USA Really’s Russian office, which is adorned by US and Confederate flags, a colour-coded map of the US, and a framed picture of Donald Trump.
The Commission on Mass Media is a branch of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation (OPRF), which was created by Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2004 to facilitate “interaction between the federal government, the local governments, and the people of Russia in order to ensure that their interests are taken into account, and that their rights and freedoms are protected when creating and implementing government policy.”
Despite OPRF’s claim that it helps “strengthen civil society institutions as democracy institutions,” the chamber has been described by Russian critics as a “smokescreen” intended to “distract the public’s attention from what is a real diminishment of democracy,” and “a calculated move to diminish the power of parliament and strengthen the Kremlin’s centralization of power.”
Yesterday, Malkevich used the OPRF website to publish an anti-US screed complaining about the negative attention “Wake up, America!” has received in the US, and demanding that the Russian government take legislative action against US news and social media platforms.
Our Commission has talked a lot about the discriminatory approach that applies to the Russian media in Europe and the United States. And we have repeatedly made proposals on this topic that Russia needs more mass media in order to fight back in the world information war.
In May, in a test mode, a group of enthusiasts launched the information resource “USA Really”. Objective media, young, sincere media. It was honestly and officially announced that he would work in the English-speaking zone, no media outlets violated any laws, only official information, proven materials, no fictions, open real journalism was published. And what happened?
After the site worked for several days in a test mode (ie without advertising campaigns and mass mailings about the opening of the resource, it was simply debugging work processes), the Facebook account was completely destroyed, Twitter introduced a number of restrictions: in fact, journalists can not He publish publications with direct links to his site.
But there was a blog in LiveJournal (I want to emphasize that this social network is run by a Russian company), which began to develop, Twitter missed direct links to LJ posts, but it did not last long, for a maximum of 24 hours, after which this blog was also blocked.
It is clear that this is illegal and this is arbitrary, since the administrators of the blog received no warning messages from the management of the social network. And this makes you ask a whole series of questions.
First, there is no vaunted democracy and freedom of speech in the US. The American authorities, without ceremony, without giving any reasons, clean out the information field from everything they disagree with and from all those who do not cuddle or crouch before them.
But, once again, why does the Russian company support US sanctions? A law on counter-sentences has been introduced, at the highest level, the introduction of criminal responsibility for those who are ready to support these sanctions on the territory of our country is being discussed.
Does this mean that the leadership of SUP media should go to jail for supporting the policy that the US authorities are leading against Russia?
With the so-called “freedom of the media” in America everything is clear, because it simply does not exist. But it is fully present in Russia – only in some perverted forms. On the territory of our country, not only the American media that regularly publish libel, but also their subsidiaries, who tell us very coolly and with a spark that Siberia should secede from Russia, that the Crimea is not Russian land and so on. They work in the Russian legal field, they quietly conduct their groups in Russian social networks, they are not blocked, although there is a violation on violation and violation drives.
It turns out that Americans can work for us quietly, but we do not. There is discrimination, and with this you need to do something at the highest governmental level. We, both as a journalistic community and as public figures, are certainly outraged by this imbalance – and we are asking the State Duma, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, the Government to support the interests of the media, which are insolently flouted by American companies, and the US authorities, which dictate to them, and to all of us, thus, our will.
In a separate post, FAN’s editor-in-chief Yevgeny Zubarev called on Russia’s state media regulator Roskomnadzor to censor “foreign social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.”
Although Zubarev refused to tell Chen the names of FAN’s investors, a 2017 investigation by Russian media group RBK found evidence that FAN might be funded by “Putin’s chef” Yevgeny Prigozhin, one of 13 Russian nationals indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in February for allegedly attempting to interfere in the 2016 US election.
Update, June 10, 2018: USA Really is holding an event hosted by Alexander Malkevich at WeWork White House on June 15. The event is titled “’Fake News’ in the ‘Digital Technology Age.’” WeWork White House is located one block from the White House.
HuffPost ends its platform for unpaid bloggers after “puff piece” about Donald Trump’s criminal ex-business partner
Last month, I blogged about the HuffPost’s retraction of a paid article published via its contributor platform that was intended to burnish the reputation of former Trump advisor Felix Sater.
HuffPost scrubbed the article, written in December, from its website after a blogger in Northern Ireland, Dean Sterling Jones, inquired about the piece,* which hailed the dismissal last year of a $250 million tax fraud case against Felix Sater, a Russian-born former Trump Organization executive.
The article’s author, listed on HuffPost’s website under the name Waqas KH, runs a Pakistani company called Steve SEO Services. That company offers to ghostwrite articles and organize internet commenting campaigns for paying clients. On the freelancer website Fiverr, Waqas goes by the username “nico_seo” and offers to place articles on HuffPost for an $80 fee. For an extra $50, he will write the article himself.
Waqas confirmed to The Daily Beast that he placed the article hailing the dismissal of tax charges against Sater, and said that his client had written the actual text. He said Sater himself did not pay to place the article, but would not say who had compensated him for it.
Citing the above story, today The New York Times reported that the HuffPost is ending its contributor platform in order to “minimize unvetted stories at a time when there is so much misinformation online.”
Since its founding nearly 13 years ago, The Huffington Post has relied heavily on unpaid contributors, whose ranks included aspiring writers, citizen journalists and celebrities from the Rolodex of the site’s co-founder Arianna Huffington.
An early example of the unfiltered amateur journalism that propagated on the internet, the contributor pages were a mix of reported pieces and personal essays, and even generated national news. In 2008, Mayhill Fowler, a woman who said she had sold her car to fund travel on the campaign trail, set off a firestorm when she quoted Barack Obama at a fund-raiser saying that working-class voters “cling to guns or religion.”
But the site’s days of encouraging everyday citizens to report on the news are over. On Thursday, it said it was immediately dissolving its self-publishing contributors platform — which has mushroomed to include 100,000 writers — in what is perhaps the most significant break from the past under its editor in chief, Lydia Polgreen, who joined the news site, which is now called HuffPost, a year ago.
The decision was rooted as much in a move to declutter the site as in Ms. Polgreen’s desire to focus on quality reporting and minimize unvetted stories at a time when there is so much misinformation online.
The site’s everyone-is-welcome ethos was once seen as a democratizing force in news. But Ms. Polgreen said in an interview that unfiltered platforms had devolved into “cacophonous, messy, hard-to-hear places where voices get drowned out and where the loudest shouting voice prevails.”
“Certainly the environment where fake news is flourishing is one where it gets harder and harder to support the idea of a ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ kind of publishing platform,” Ms. Polgreen said.
Recently, for instance, a contributor with the byline Waqas KH published an article about Felix Sater, an associate of President Trump, that he had been paid to post. The site has since deleted the article.
In place of the unpaid contributors platform, the site introduced new opinion and personal sections that will include paid contributors who will work with HuffPost editors.
Trump-affiliated lawyer Jordan Sekulow’s rambling on-air response to news that former Trump adviser Michael Flynn had been charged with lying to the FBI
Amid the American carnage of yesterday’s news that former national security adviser Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, you might have missed this gem via Trump-affiliated lawyer Jordan Sekulow, of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ).
Sekulow is the son of ACLJ’s chief counsel Jay Sekulow, who is part of the legal team charged with advising Trump during the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into allegations that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with the Russian government.
Yesterday, the younger Sekulow went on Fox News to give his opinion on an unrelated story about Bill Clinton.
During that segment, Fox host Bill Hemmer interrupted Sekulow to break the news about Flynn.
Here’s Sekulow’s unscripted response:
Hemmer: The charge is about making false statements, so that could be what he is going to address at 10:30 a.m. eastern time, the charge of lying.
Sekulow: Yeah, and I think that that could still work with the plea deal itself, it depends on who is taking him to court, whether it is the special counsel or another matter. But if it is the special counsel – it should be under that jurisdiction – then those false statements, it could be that he is being with them, that could then lead to, if it is correct, and we don’t know if he actually does have a plea deal or not, but if it’s correct that could be the catalyst against the actual plea deal.
For the characteristically cocksure Sekulow, his response here is quite the turnaround.
In August, Sekulow went on Fox’s America’s Newsroom to dismiss the Mueller investigation and to personally attack me and other independent researchers including Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of fact-checking website Snopes, for having published critical statements and unflattering news stories about Trump, claiming our efforts served to underscore “just how much hatred there is out there for this President of the United States, who was elected so overwhelmingly by the American people.”
You can read more about our efforts via this article by Politico’s Darren Samuelsohn, which includes these three Shooting the Messenger scoops:
1. That former Trump business partner Tevfik Arif tried to scrub online details about his 2010 arrest aboard Turkey’s presidential yacht during a private party attended by illegally trafficked prostitutes;
3. And that I’d identified dozens of posts written under Trump’s name on his now-defunct Trump University blog that appeared to plagiarise content from mainstream news outlets including USA Today, CNN, and The New York Times.
The two victims, Ernest and Judit Gottdiener, who emigrated to the U.S. after the war, died before they could reclaim their stolen millions.
In 2013, Judit’s brother, an Israeli rabbi named Ervin Tausky, filed a $100 million civil case against Sater and his co-conspirator, Salvatore Lauria, on behalf of the Gottdieners.
In retaliation, Sater sent a letter through multi-national Israeli law firm, Zell, Aron & Co., threatening to sue Tausky for 4,000,000 shekels (approximately $1 million) unless Tausky agreed to withdraw all legal action against Sater in the U.S.
The firm claimed that Tausky had damaged “the good name of Sater and his family,” and put “Sater and his family in jeopardy, and in danger of being killed.”
This week, The Washington Post and The New York Times leaked a series of e-mails showing how during Trump’s 2016 election campaign, Sater tried to help the Trump Organization to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Former FBI director Robert Mueller is currently investigating Trump for evidence of possible collusion between the campaign and the Russian government.
After Politico profile about “amateur sleuths” highlights—count `em—three Shooting the Messenger Trump scoops, Donald J. Trump-affiliated lawyer Jordan Sekulow tells Fox News that I and other independent researchers are “wasting all of their time”
This week I was featured in a Politico profile about “self-assigned Bob Muellers” who are doing independent research into Donald Trump’s Russia and business connections.
The article, by Darren Samuelsohn, highlighted three stories first published on this blog. One of them, that Donald J. Trump’s former business partner Tevfik Arif tried to scrub details of his arrest (and later acquittal) for human trafficking from the Internet, was picked up by The Daily Beast last month.
The article also mentioned that I’d “documented Wikipedia editing records that show how Felix Sater, a Russian-born real estate developer and Trump business partner, may have used a pseudonym to delete information about his criminal history from Trump’s Wikipedia page,” and that I’d “identified about a dozen posts written under Trump’s name on his now-defunct Trump University blog that appeared to plagiarize content from news outlets including CNN, USA Today and The New York Times.”
Sekulow: I think it’s wonderful that these people who are – who want to bring down the president – are wasting all of their time and money to do so. I don’t even think the special counsel is going to be able to find anything on the president, so good luck to these sleuths who are, again, spending all they’ve got to try and bring this president down. It does underscore, though, just how much hatred there is out there for this President of the United States, who was elected so overwhelmingly by the American people.
To which I say: If a part-time blogger like me with zero resources can locate and publish the kind of damning info I have on Trump, I can only imagine what the Mueller investigation is turning up!
For the record—savvy cat that I am—I found my scoops without spending a single penny.
Four criminal convictions, one suicide, and one satisfied customer: Unravelling Donald Trump’s “complicated” 1993 Palm Beach real estate purchase from convicted fraudster Leslie Greyling
The article left some nagging questions. For instance, why would Greyling – a professional con man – sell the property apparently at a substantial loss to himself?
Jeffrey A. Paine, a now-disbarred West Palm Beach attorney who helped arrange the deal and who in 2001 was handed a five-year sentence and fined $80 million for conspiring to commit mail fraud, speculated that Trump might have had other deals with Greyling.
Trump’s local realtor at the time, Robert Weiner, who committed suicide in 2012 after Florida state regulators launched a probe into the disappearance of over $250,000 from his real estate Escrow accounts, also suggested that other deals had taken place, but didn’t say what they were.
After digging around online, I found this February 3, 1994 New York Times report, which states that Trump “had purchased an option to buy a St. Charles, Mo., casino site from the Members Service Corporation,” a failed Winter Park holding company involved in gambling and real estate:
Although he didn’t say how much he paid for the option, Trump told the Times it would be good for a “fairly long term.”
Here’s the scoop: Members Service was headed by none other than – you guessed it – Leslie Greyling, who along with two other executives, Arthur S. Feher Jr. and Daniel M. Boyar, was indicted in March 1996 for charges including conspiracy, stock fraud, and money laundering.
Although 2016 was by most accounts the worst year in living memory, for me it was also a lot of fun. There were yuge cultural and political upsets – right (or should I say “alt-right”?) – but there were also a couple of inspiring victories for the good guys.
Rounding off the year, the BMJ nixed a flagrantly censorious retraction demand of an article by New York Times best-selling author/journalist Nina Teicholz, who had dared to challenge the science underpinning the US dietary guidelines. More about that later.
On the blogging front, I made some winning changes in the tone and form of my writing, transforming from snarky opinionator to part-time sleuth. My efforts in this direction were not in vain, and I turned up a number of original news stories, some of which served as the basis for articles in Techdirt, FoodMed.net, FOODStuff SA, Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI), and the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund (CBLDF).
Blogging became an exercise in minimalism, even as I explored often strange new terrain running the gamut from issues of censorship to alternative medicine, at times bridging the nexus between free speech principles and the scientific method.
There was the Scottish police inspector who apologised for an Orwellian tweet, the British celebs who abused UK privacy laws to censor critical news stories about their open marriage, the LA-based integrative medicine organisation whose owner ‘fessed up about patient deaths, plus much more.
Special thanks to my pals in Atlanta, Peter M. Heimlich and his wife Karen, whose joint example certainly helped inspire this citizen journalist. On that note, I strongly recommend paying a visit to Peter’s website, MedFraud.info, about their “improbable odyssey” into the fraudulent world of Peter’s famous father, Dr. Henry Heimlich, of the maneuver.
And lastly thanks to my incredible girlfriend Kelsi M. White, who listens patiently to every draft of every article I write – without complaint!
Without further ado, here’s a collection of my personal favourite posts of the year in blog.
‘Advising against a potentially life-saving procedure is absolutely irresponsible’ – Meta-Medicine founder Johannes Fisslinger opens up about patient deaths in Norway
For the uninitiated, IMMA – via its online university, Meta-Health University (MHU) – claims to have trained over 1,000 practitioners in the “art and science of self-healing,” an elaborate philosophy of preventive health based on the discredited theories of Ryke Geerd Hamer, a ghoulish German doctor who lost his medical licence in 1986 after a number of patients in his care died.
During the course of a month-long e-mail exchange, I asked Fisslinger about IMMA’s relationship to Hamer, and his opinion of Hamer’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Fisslinger credited Hamer with providing the basic framework for IMMA’s philosophy of preventive health, but made clear he does not endorse Hamer’s racial views or his “do-nothing” approach to treating patients.
“I agree that Dr. Hamer’s method and therapy is ineffective or dangerous,” said Fisslinger, alluding to a 2001 Swiss study of Hamer’s cancer theories.
“[Hamer] basically did not use any therapy at all, telling people to just allow the body to heal without doing anything. This is 100% opposite to what we are doing.”
Fisslinger insists IMMA closely monitors its practitioners to ensure that they adhere to the company’s lengthy code of practice.
I asked Fisslinger if he was aware of these reports; if he had spoken with and/or reprimanded Kolås and Madsen; and if he had carried out an investigation to ensure that other practitioners aren’t advising patients to refuse potentially life-saving treatment.
“Our code of ethics and policy is very clear about this,” said Fisslinger. “A client needs to make the decision together with their doctor and the Meta-Health professional. [Advising] not to use a potentially life-saving procedure is absolutely irresponsible.”
Fisslinger said Kolås’ and Madsen’s conduct was “absolutely unacceptable” and confirmed there had been an investigation into the deaths in Norway.
IMMA practitioners Dagfrid Kolås and Bent Madsen (source)
He also denied that Kolås and Madsen were ever on IMMA’s Advisory Council.
Furthermore, Kolås – who according to Fisslinger retired “several years ago” – gave a talk (on the subject of “healing breast cancer naturally”) at the 2014 International Meta-Health Conference.
When I asked Fisslinger to clarify, I didn’t receive a response (more alt-med madness in the next article below!).
Based on Hamer’s widely discredited theories, HBCF believes that cancer can be prevented and even cured via a “biopsychosocial and holistic understanding of the body, mind, spirit and environment connection.”
Dr. Ornish’s other connections to pseudo-science have been criticised by anti-quack medicine experts, still it was surprising to see him featured alongside Quackwatch regular Dr. Bernie S. Siegel, who claims that“happy people generally don’t get sick,” and Gary Craig, inventor of Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), sometimes described as “emotional acupuncture.”
When I asked about Dr. Ornish teaching at MHU, Fisslinger replied that he had invited Dr. Ornish to teach, but had “not confirmed anything.”
When I asked Dr. Ornish, he initially replied that he has “no relationship” with MHU. He subsequently clarified that he in fact had been invited to speak, but had “not yet confirmed anything.”
Dr. Ornish did not respond to questions about his participation in the 2007 gala and 2013 summit.
When asked about his relationship with IMMA or MHU, Dr. Katz replied that he has never endorsed any of the company’s programmes or products.
“I once gave a talk, via Skype, on my model of integrative medicine for something called the Meta Health Summit [but] that is the extent of my involvement,” said Dr. Katz.
I also asked him about his correspondence with German journalist Aribert Deckers.
A few weeks before the 2010 “Integrative Medicine Congress”– an IMMA event held in Munich, at which Dr. Katz was scheduled to appear – Deckers wrote an open letter to Dr. Katz informing him about IMMA’s ties to the notorious Hamer.
Here is Dr. Katz’s June 17, 2010 reply to Deckers:
Thank you for these precautions, Aribert.
The speech was canceled roughly a week ago; I would hope the website would promptly be updated to reflect that.
After having sent my email (Date: Thu, June 17, 2010) to Prof. David Katz, and having spoken with his office I thought that he would stop from making further contacts with the “meta-mediciners”. But that is not the case: Prof. David Katz AGAIN is on the list of speakers at a “meta-mediciner” “symposium”. But this time he can not claim to have known nothing.
Responding to Deckers’ accusations, Dr. Katz said he doesn’t recall the exchange, but reiterated that he “did not support anything,” stating: “I gave a talk, and permission to promote only that.”
As of publication, Dr. Katz is still listed as a “Guest Faculty Speaker” at MHU.
I asked Dr. Katz if he had signed-off on the sale of these videos.
Dr. Katz then referred me to his attorney, Alan Neigher, who didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. When I again asked Dr. Katz, here’s what he sent me:
Sterling/Dean/Cartoon Character-
You have asked me the same questions several times, and I have answered them. My office has done the same. At this point, you are harassing us. Kindly state your agenda.
Best,
—
David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center
Griffin Hospital
This is an overview of a story I blogged throughout 2016 about a censorious retraction demand by the Center for Science in the Public Interest of New York Times best-selling author/journalist Nina Teicholz’s BMJ US dietary guidelines critique
In December, the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) announced it would not retract a “controversial” 2015 article by investigative journalist Nina Teicholz, author of NYT best-seller The Big Fat Surprise.
As reported on this blog and The Sidebar (Peter M. Heimlich’s investigative journalism blog), Washington, DC-based lobby group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) – in bed with prominent members of the DGAC – aggressively campaigned to get the article retracted.
The DGAC’s advice is consistent with dietary advice from virtually every major health authority [but] Teicholz would have us believe that only she, not the dozens of experts who systematically reviewed the evidence for these health authorities, has the smarts to accurately interpret this evidence.
One month later, a letter organised by Liebman was sent to the BMJ highlighting what it claimed were a number of factual errors with Teicholz’s article.
The letter, which was signed by over 180 credentialed professionals including a number of prominent faculty members at major universities, plus all 14 members of the 2015 DGAC, urged the BMJ to retract the article on the basis that it harmed the journal’s credibility.
However, the credibility of the letter was itself soon called into question.
As reported by the Guardian in April, none of the signatories interviewed for Ian Leslie’s acclaimed article, “The Sugar Conspiracy” – including Dr. Meir Stampfer, an influential Harvard epidemiologist – were able to name any of the “trivial” errors with Teicholz’s article, with one even admitting he had not read it.
But the most explosive revelation came in May, when Peter – with help from my sweetie Kelsi White and I – exposed efforts by another Harvard epidemiologist, DGAC member Dr. Frank Hu, to solicit European signatories to Liebman’s retraction demand which resulted in a chain e-mail exchanged by European medical professionals and university faculty.
You can read more about that, and other related items, via Peter’s blog here, here and here.
Accompanying December’s announcement, the BMJ has issued four corrections (plus three clarifications) of the 11 purported errors highlighted by the CSPI, but Editor in Chief Fiona Godlee said the journal is standing by Teicholz’s article:
We stand by Teicholz’s article with its important critique of the advisory committee’s processes for reviewing the evidence, and we echo her conclusion: ‘Given the ever increasing toll of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, and the failure of existing strategies to make inroads in fighting these diseases, there is an urgent need to provide nutritional advice based on sound science.’
Via the BMJ’s press release, Teicholz thanked the journal for its support:
I am very grateful to The BMJ editors for their profound commitment to verifying the facts of my article and for their professionalism and integrity throughout this process. I am also grateful that they are providing a space for rigorous scientific debate, especially on a subject so important to public health. I hope the original intention of that article can now be fulfilled—to help improve nutritional advice, so that it is based on rigorous science. This will help us to better combat nutrition-related diseases that have caused so much human suffering around the world.
In a separate statement, Liebman doubled down on her position, claiming that the BMJ has “stained its reputation”:
The BMJ has stained its reputation by circling the wagons around Nina Teicholz’s discredited and opinionated attack on the science underpinning the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The BMJ corrected or “clarified” 7 of the 11 errors cited by the letter from more than 180 scientists requesting a retraction, and failed to respond to the remaining four. (The clarifications are thinly veiled corrections.) It’s startling that despite this long list of corrections and clarifications—including several that undergirded the article’s attack on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report–the journal nevertheless stands by the article’s conclusions.
I’ll leave it to the experts to debate the scientific merits of Teicholz’s arguments. My opinion, from a free speech perspective, is that the CSPI’s retraction demand was not about merit, but about a powerful lobby group wielding its influence to try to suppress a voice of dissent.
As Ian Leslie remarked in his April 7 Guardian long-read: “Publishing a rejoinder to an article is one thing; requesting its erasure is another, conventionally reserved for cases involving fraudulent data.”
20 years ago, Teicholz might have gone the way of the beleaguered British scientist John Yudkin, and others who have dared question the conventional wisdom on nutrition. As it stands, Teicholz has survived the ordeal, in no small part thanks to the support of a committed, widespread and ever-growing group of LCHF enthusiasts.
Spreading the News – July 29, 2016
In July, leading South African health and nutrition journalist Marika Sborosreported about a dubious Harvard nutrition study into saturated fats. Sboros’ article also detailed a story first reported on this blog and The Sidebar about DGAC member and Harvard Chan professor Frank Hu’s efforts to solicit signatories to CSPI’s censorious retraction demand of Nina Teicholz’s 2015 BMJ article.
A study senior author is Dr Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard Chan School and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. On Harvard’s website, Hu says the study shows “the importance of eliminating trans fat and replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fats, including both omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids”.
He says in practice, “replacing animal fats with a variety of liquid vegetable oils” achieves this.
Hu also says in a New York Times blog the study shows that low-fat, high-carb diet doesn’t benefit health and longevity”. He says fats from fish and avocados are better than animal fats.
…Seen from another angle, Hu’s involvement can look suspiciously like another salvo in what Irish investigative journalist Dean Sterling Jones calls“Silencing Science – The War on Nina Teicholz”. In the murky politics of nutrition science, that’s not hyperbole. Jones reveals the unedifying behaviour of those opposed to Teicholz’s research.
That war began in earnest after Teicholz published The Big Fat Surprise (Simon and Schuster, 2014). In a review on the BMJ titled Are some diets mass murder?, former BMJ editor Dr Richard Smith is fulsome in its praise. He says all scientists should read it.
The war intensified after Teicholz wrote a commissioned feature highlighting the shortcomings of the DGAC report which the BMJ published in 2015. Titled The scientific report guiding the US dietary guidelines: is it scientific?, Teicholz concludes that the DGAC report “fails to reflect much relevant scientific literature in its reviews of crucial topics and therefore risks giving a misleading picture”.
…The DGAC report’s authors published a response in the BMJ calling Teicholz’s claims “misleading and unsubstantiated”. They say all their procedures were “expansive, transparent, and thoughtful, with multiple opportunities for public input through open commentary, public meetings, and hearings”.
They see nothing wrong in having a chair from industry, not medicine, science or academia: Barbara Millen. Millen has a doctorate and an academic background in nutrition. However, she is currently founder and president of the US-based start-up Millennium Prevention. The company develops web-based platforms and mobile applications to encourage better lifestyle behaviours, and for corporate, academic, and community wellness initiatives.
The DGAC refers positively to the kind of products her company sells. Millen dismisses criticisms that this constitutes a conflict of interest.
None of the DGAC report authors appears to see anything wrong in the extraordinary lengths to which Hu and Millen have gone to muzzle Teicholz. Just how extraordinary shows up in an intricate cross-posting collaboration between Jones and US investigative journalist Peter Heimlich.
Heimlich writes The Side Bar, an annex to his MedFraud website. He accessed damning emails via public record requests under the US Freedom of Information Act. These document just how far both Hu and Millen went to get the BMJ to retract Teicholz’s feature. Hu lobbied colleagues and professionals, eventually getting around 180 academics at top universities, in the US and Europe to sign a letter to the BMJ requesting retraction of Teicholz’s feature. (Other reports put the number lower at just over 170. Millen signed.)
The complaint, in the form of a court order, requested that WordPress restrict access to a Turkish blog page featuring satirical cartoons depicting Erdoğan as a tyrannical dictator, claiming they constitute“an attack on personality rights” and do not “reflect reality.”
Erdoğan’s October 9, 2016 complaint, via the Lumen Database (source)
Earlier this year, WordPress (via transparency.automattic.com) stated that, absent a US court order, it refuses to take action in response to takedown demands from Turkey.
However, it appears the offending blog page is currently geo-blocked in Turkey, and when you enter the URL into a Turkish proxy, you get this message…
When I asked WordPress if it had taken action against the Turkish blog, I received the following response from Community Guardian Janet J:
From: Janet J WordPress.com <tosreports@wordpress.com> To: **** <****@aol.com> Subject: [#2927379]: [automattic] Geoblocking Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2016 11:11
Hi there Dean,
Yes, that is correct. We are forced to geo-block the specific sites mentioned in the Turkish court orders or face a whole WordPress.com site block in the country. Instead, we direct users to a message explaining why the site is unavailable, and point them to this site:
When I then asked about WordPress’ policy of refusing to take action against bloggers, per the above mentioned Automattic statement, this was her response:
From: Janet J WordPress.com <tosreports@wordpress.com> To: **** <****@aol.com> Subject: [#2927379]: [automattic] Geoblocking Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2016 15:40
Hi there,
Thanks for the follow up.
That blog post was correct at the time of writing, but our process has since changed, in order to find the best possible compromise to allow us to continue to ensure access to the bulk of WordPress.com for users in Turkey. Rather than have sites blocked by ISPs with no explanation, we have decided to implement blocks ourselves so that we can provide alternative messaging, and an explanation for visitors to the sites in question.
There is no good solution to the issue of political censorship, and we are constantly reviewing the processes to find ways to combat it, including taking legal action in Turkey where appropriate. Going forward, we’ll look into making the current process clearer in our next transparency report.
All the best,
—
Janet J | Community Guardian | WordPress.com
I also spoke with Jaume Capdevila aka KAP, an award-winning Spanish cartoonist whose 2013 cartoon of Erdoğan features prominently on the censored blog.
“[Freedom of expression] is a basic right of people, it is a basic freedom,” said Capdevila. “The debate of ideas is fundamental, and it enriches all. Censorship is the first step towards ignorance and fear.”
He went on to explain how satire “erodes the image of power.”
“To laugh means to lose fear, and fear is what keeps the totalitarians in power. It is therefore natural to react against cartoons, against journalists, and against the Internet, which is a means by which the population can inform and organise to recover lost democracy.”
Capdevila said he felt honoured to know his cartoon had succeeded in riling the Turkish despot, whom he described as “an authoritarian politician” seeking to maintain power through fear and repression.
“As a cartoonist it is an honour to know that an intolerant prohibits one of your drawings, of course! In recent years, the satirical cartoonist is a trade with more risk… we are not heroes and do not want to be, but things like this give some sense to our trade.”
He added: “One of the best things in our job is to know that there was someone in Turkey who thought that this drawing could be useful for his struggle for freedom and used it on his blog, or wherever. The ultimate meaning of satirical drawings is to reach the maximum of people and awaken in them something…”
Spanish cartoonist Jaume Capdevila aka KAP (source)
The censored blog also features work by renowned American cartoonist Daryl Cagle, and Patrick Chappatte, editorial cartoonist for The New York Times.
In Cagle’s cartoon, the Turkish leader brazenly denies that his pants are on fire (literally), labelling his accusers “drunkard, extremist Twitterheads.”
In Chappatte’s cartoon, Erdoğan is building a huge statue of himself in Taksim Square as an “urban development project,” while angry protesters are gathered outside.
In August 2016, top Turkish cartoonist Dogan Güzel spent two days in detention following a raid on İstanbul-based newspaper Özgür Gündem (Turkish for “Free Agenda”).
In December, another top Turkish cartoonist, Musa Kart, was jailed as part of a roundup of journalists from the country’s opposition newspaper, Cumhuriyet.
Obama’s former Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe weighs in on the above post about Erdoğan’s WordPress takedown demand – after which the story gets picked up by various cartoonists’ rights publications including the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
After I blogged about Erdoğan’s takedown demand of a Turkish political blog featuring satirical cartoons depicting the Turkish leader as a tyrannical dictator, the story made the rounds on Twitter, even being re-tweeted by Harvard law prof Laurence Tribe, whose former students include President Barack Obama and Senator Ted Cruz.
Shortly after, the story was picked up by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), a New York-based advocacy non-profit that actively defends the First Amendment (ie. free speech) rights of comics creators and publishers, including paying their legal costs.
Satirical Cartoon Blog Post Blocked in Turkey December 9, 2016
By Maren Williams
A blog post featuring satirical cartoons of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is currently blocked by court order inside Turkey but freely available elsewhere, highlighting the delicate balance between intellectual freedom and local laws that online hosting platforms must maintain if they wish to operate internationally.
The post on a Turkish blog hosted by U.S.-based company (and CBLDF.org host) WordPress was originally made in November 2013, but only blocked this October after an Istanbul lawyer representing Erdoğan filed a court order alleging that the cartoons were libellous and untrue. According to independent U.K. journalist Dean Sterling Jones on his own blog, WordPress had announced earlier this year that it would ignore any potential takedown requests from the Turkish government. The reality of an actual court order may have forced it to reconsider, however: as a representative told Jones via email, the company was “forced to geo-block the specific sites mentioned in the Turkish court orders or face a whole WordPress.com site block in the country,” meaning that all blogs and other sites hosted on the platform would be unavailable there.
Faced with no ideal options, WordPress chose to geo-block the specific site requested within Turkey but direct users to a multilingual site with directions for circumventing online censorship via services such as VPNs and Tor. It also reported the takedown to the Lumen database, and the WordPress rep identified as Janet J told Jones that the company is brainstorming ways to maximize intellectual freedom and transparency for its users:
“There is no good solution to the issue of political censorship, and we are constantly reviewing the processes to find ways to combat it, including taking legal action in Turkey where appropriate. Going forward, we’ll look into making the current process clearer in our next transparency report.”
Jones also spoke with Spanish cartoonist Jaume Capdevila, whose work was among the panels featured on the blocked page and also reproduced above. He expressed pride that a Turkish blogger found his cartoon “useful for his struggle for freedom,” and highlighted the importance of laughing at authoritarian leaders through satire:
“To laugh means to lose fear, and fear is what keeps the totalitarians in power. It is therefore natural to react against cartoons, against journalists, and against the Internet, which is a means by which the population can inform and organise to recover lost democracy.”
The takedown order also comes at a time when Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart has been imprisoned for over a month along with several journalist colleagues from Cumhuriyet newspaper. Erdoğan has used a failed coup attempt in July as an excuse to crack down on journalists, academics, judges, and government workers who do not toe the line. Kart and his colleagues are now facing charges of colluding with the Gulenist movement which Erdoğan blames for the coup, as well as with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The story was also reported by Catalan-based cartoonist J.R. Mora on his website, available to read by clicking here; by Jerusalem-based civil rights activist Steve Amsel on his website, available here; by Pittsburgh, PA-based website Comics Workbook, available here; and by the Cartoonists Rights Network International, available here.
One of the most bizarre stories to feature on this blog last year involved a fake lawyer who falsely claimed to represent a US police department in a failed attempt to have mugshots scrubbed from Google’s search engine – here’s what happened
In November, I blogged about a DMCA complaint by so-called ‘legal agent’ Mike Ferrell who claimed to represent the Burlington, Massachusetts Police Department, demanding that Google remove news stories because it violated the copyright the police department held on certain mugshots.
Mike Ferrell’s incomprehensible November 8, 2016 DMCA complaint to Google (source)
When I passed the story on to TechDirt, I was awaiting a response from the Burlington PD to my request for comment. The following week, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, who coined the term “The Streisand Effect,” reported that the department had contacted him putting the record straight.
Mike Kent, the Chief of Police in Burlington reached out to us over the weekend to let us know that whoever sent the notices, it was not his department. He says they have no one working for them by the name of Mike Ferrell, and that the Burlington PD “has no issues whatsoever with these mugshots being used.”
So… that leaves open the question of just who is impersonating the Burlington Police Department, and filing completely bogus DMCA notices in an attempt to censor news stories. It would seem that the most obvious options are those who were featured in those stories about arrests in Burlington. The very first notice that Ferrell sent, focused on stories about a particular prostitution sting, and named the nine men who were arrested, along with mugshots. It would seem that perhaps one (or more!) of those nine men would have pretty strong incentives to seek to have those stories deleted from Google.
Either way, we’ve been pointing out for years that copyright is an easy tool for censorship — and here’s yet another example. If you want something censored, just try to work out a copyright connection of some sort. In this case, it appears to have failed, but mostly because whoever filed it wasn’t very good at pretending to work for the police.
As I later discovered via a public records request to the Burlington PD, Kent had drafted a clarifying e-mail which he had intended to send me prior to TechDirt publishing the story. For whatever reason, he did not send that e-mail.
To reiterate: the Burlington PD did not use Google’s DMCA takedown system to attempt to censor journalists reporting about arrests made by the department. Luckily for me, Kent is a right-on dude and didn’t hold it against me for incorrectly reporting about his department.
Carter-Ruck Lawyers passes the baton to Schillings solicitors in Elton John three-way tabloid scandal, but where does that leave Internet users threatened with legal action?
The juiciest celebrity news story of 2016 went unreported by the British press thanks to strong-arm legal tactics by David Furnish, husband of pop singer Elton John.
As you didn’t read in the newspapers, Furnish was allegedly given permission from his famous hubby to participate in a three-way sexscapade with British businessman Daniel Laurence and his husband Pieter Van den Bergh in a paddling pool of olive oil.
The story as reported by the National Enquirer in April (source)
When Laurence and Van den Bergh decided to go public with the story, Furnish took out an injunction – dubbed the “cheater’s charter” – preventing papers in England and Wales from revealing the names of those involved.
But efforts to squash the story didn’t end there.
Earlier this year, non-UK Twitter users began tweeting e-mails they received from Twitter’s legal department demanding that they delete tweets outing John and Furnish as the celebrity couple first identified in court documents as “YMA” and “PJS.”
As an experiment, I set up a pseudonymous Twitter profile and tweeted about the story.
Sure enough, within a few days I received the following e-mail.
Twitter didn’t respond to multiple requests for information about the complainant and the nature of their complaint, so I took my enquiry to Carter-Ruck Lawyers, a British law firm known for using aggressive legal tactics to squash negative news stories about its celebrity clientele.
According to court documents, Carter-Ruck represented Furnish when the National Enquirer broke the story in April. However, when I asked Carter-Ruck’s Managing Partner Nigel Tait about his firm’s legal shenanigans, he forwarded my questions to defamation lawyer Jenny Afia of Schillings partners, another British firm specialising in reputation and privacy.
Unfortunately, Afia declined to comment on whether Schillings represents Furnish, or if it intends to pursue offending Twitter users.
Although Google ultimately didn’t enforce the request, Winnifrith said his web hosting provider took down his website following a legal threat from Web Sheriff.
“WS [Web Sheriff] contacted our hosting company and bullied it into taking our site down and only putting it back up if we pulled the article,” said Winnifrith. “That hoster cravenly did this even though WS had no power to threaten.”
He continued: “I asked WS on whose authority it was demanding we pull content since that authority was actually vested with the UK Courts not a US law firm. I asked if it was acting for Mr. John. It refused to reply.”
When I asked Web Sheriff similar questions, I received no reply.
Self-proclaimed “Web Sheriff” John Giacobbi (source)
It isn’t the only time an article about the scandal was pulled following legal threats.
In May, an article by Irish political activist and blogger Paddy J. Manning was pulled from MercatorNet, an Australian opinion-based news website.
According to Manning, MercatorNet was forced to take down the article after the website’s web hosting provider was threatened with legal action.
Irish electoral candidate Paddy J. Manning (source)
“MercatorNet warned me that the website was run on ‘the smell of an oily rag’ so that if they were sued in Australian courts they would capitulate,” said Manning. “They received several warnings but no effective legal correspondence outside of threatening e-mails.”
He continued: “It was their hosting company who were threatened successfully with a court action against their mirror/backup in Florida. No legal action was taken against the host; the threat was enough.
“This was a perfect lesson in the brittleness of the web, how weak some constituent parts are and how quickly they snap.”
– Redressing an unfurnished press
Thanks to the Internet, unflattering details about celebrities’ personal lives are accessible to anyone who wants to know. Ironically, there appears to be little public interest in Furnish’s affair, as demonstrated by the scanty coverage it initially received in the US.
It’s perhaps an indication of the futility of Furnish’s efforts that, since April, Google has removed just two of the 447 offending URLs flagged by Web Sheriff. Nevertheless, the residual chill from the injunction can be felt as far as the US and Canada.
Via a US proxy, the National Post’s April 11, 2016 article (source)
However, when I asked Hopper about Web Sheriff, he said the Post geo-blocked his article after being contacted by Fasken Martineau, an internationally renowned Canadian business law and mitigation firm with offices in London and Toronto.
“Web Sheriff did not contact us, but we did hear from a lawyer hired by Mr. Furnish,” said Hopper, referring to the Canadian firm.
He added: “It might be Furnish or Elton John’s regular Canadian lawyer. At a certain level of fame, I imagine you’ve got a lawyer on speed dial for every major country, whether it be for copyright issues or signing contracts or the like.”
About the Post’s decision to geo-block his article in the UK, Hopper said: “[The] legality is murky, but I do believe it was done on the belief that we become subject to UK law once we enter UK web space.”
Unfortunately, Fasken Martineau did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“[We] would have done well to follow the THINK advice ourselves” – Police Scotland apologises for “Orwellian” tweet
On April 1 – also known as April Fool’s Day – the Greater Glasgow Police force issued the following, rather cryptic warning via Twitter urging Internet users to “think before you post or you mayreceive a visit from us this weekend.”
Unsure whether or not the above tribute to George Orwell was intended as an April Fool’s joke, I e-mailed Police Scotland asking what precautions social media users should take to avoid receiving a visit from Glasgow coppers.
Shortly after, I received this thoughtful, informative and – dare I say it, yes – good-humoured response from Inspector Kenny Quigley of Police Scotland’s Safer Communities Department, Greater Glasgow Division:
Dear Mr Jones
Thank you for taking the trouble to contact us regarding the recent ‘tweet’ from our Greater Glasgow Police Twitter account. Firstly, may I apologise for the concerns this has caused you personally as it undoubtedly has for others judging from the reaction on social media, both positive and negative, over the past few days.
This message and acronym ‘THINK’ came from a third party account and was originally ‘re-tweeted’ by a community police team in Lanarkshire and then subsequently re-tweeted by other police teams. Likewise, our Safer Communities team in Glasgow saw these re-tweets (we all follow each other’s accounts for key messages to promote) and thought it was a simple enough message to encourage people to avoid hateful comment on social media which is often reported to the police as bullying, trolling etc.. This message seemed to us particularly pertinent following the dreadful events in Shawlands which had led to some people ‘trolling’ messages of support for the Shah family and wider community. Occasionally, such trolling crosses the boundaries from being merely distasteful into criminality under various hate crime legislation or indeed domestic abuse or threats.
To answer specifically your question, there is no test applied by my officers as to what passes the THINK criteria. Clearly, that is not the Police Service’s role and we are concerned with investigating reports of behaviour on social media that is suspected to be illegal. We are certainly not the ‘good taste’ police nor are we in any way seeking to stifle free speech – indeed, we regularly police public events where opposing groups do not agree with alternate political standpoints but we ensure that Articles 9, 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights are protected.
As such, the colloquial phrase, “receive a visit from the police” which appears in this controversial tweet is misspoken and misleading. Such police action may only be applied when a crime or offence is reported to us by another member of the public – we do not routinely monitor social media as frankly, we are far too busy answering calls from the public for assistance, investigating reported and detected crimes and undertaking a myriad of other duties than to find time to police the internet as some pressure groups would rather have us doing. Of course we do investigate cybercrime but that is a new and rapidly developing area of law enforcement not concerned with name-calling or offensive remarks on social media. I am sorry this phrase “receive a visit” was used in the tweet and rest assured, the officer who tweeted this message is sorry too – it was certainly not their intention to cause a furore or any confusion in this regard.
Thank you again for taking the time to write to Police Scotland. It is through practical criticism and challenge that we learn how better to police our communities with the public’s consent and support. Social media is undoubtedly a great opportunity for the Police to quickly and effectively communicate with the public but it also carries the risk of getting our messages wrong on occasion. I hope I have reassured you that we do not apply a THINK test when assessing complaints about social media and that on this occasion, we would have done well to follow the THINK advice ourselves before tweeting that message.
Yours sincerely.
Kenny Quigley
Inspector Kenny Quigley G2436
Greater Glasgow Division
Safer Communities Department
Glasgow City Centre Police Office
With reservations as to whether Police Scotland should have any jurisdiction over social media, Inspector Quigley’s answer helps settle the dystopian impulse to invoke 1984.
After Scottish police arrested North Lanarkshire man for extremely silly Nazi dog video I asked authorities to advise dog owners on how to behave their pooches online
In May, Scottish police reportedly arrested a 28-year-old man from North Lanarkshire on hate crime charges because he posted a video online of his dog gesturing a Nazi salute.
The video/apology, via SWNS TV (trigger warning – fascist pug):
In an e-mail, I asked Police Scotland to further advise on what precautions dog owners can take to avoid causing offence online, stating my concern that police interference could have a ‘chilling effect’ among people who wish to upload videos of their dog to the Internet, “but who are worried that the canine’s natural proclivity to raise its paw on command might be misinterpreted as offensive.”
BBC Newsbeat says it aimed “to provoke conversation” with tweet about Ukrainian serial prankster Vitalii Sediuk’s alleged sexual assault of reality TV star Kim Kardashian
Newsbeat was roundly criticized for using “clickbait rhetorical questions as headlines” and “legitimizing an indefensible POV,” as award-winning English author Joanne Harris (MBE) charged in a series of tweets.
I put Harris’ questions to Newsbeat, along with my own question asking if the BBC believes there’s any ambiguity about whether it’s “OK to grab a woman on the street” – prank or not.
Here is the BBC’s October 5, 2016 reply:
Hi Dean,
Thanks for contacting us about the Kim Kardashian tweet.
We accept it could have been worded more carefully.
We swiftly followed it up with a second tweet, headed “obviously not”.
Broadly our tone is more informal than the rest of BBC News but we do aim to provoke conversation around topical issues like this one.
We were not in any way legitimising the “prank” carried out by Vitalii Sediuk.
The target of Roura’s ire was an October 5 tweet in which Crowley, pictured standing next to a segment of the Berlin Wall, joked: “At the Berlin Wall last week. Walls work”.
Salon’s article as it appeared on October 5, 2016
Hawk-eyed readers will notice from the above screenshot that Crowley’s tweet is dated October 5, 2015 – not 2016, as Roura stated in her article.
That day, shortly after making a corrections request pointing out the mistake, I received the following reply from Salon’s senior art director Benjamin Wheelock:
Thank you for bringing this error to our attention, it has been corrected.
Salon’s (unintentionally?) hilarious correction states that “due to a reporting error” Crowley was “incorrectly labeled the Bullsh**ter of the Day” and includes an obvious misspelling of her name:
Let this be a lesson to aspiring writers: waste time writing snarky nonsense, and one day you could end up having to shovel your own bullsh*t.
Busted: Purported Guardian article hoax by prankster Godfrey Elfwick was itself a hoax – but the true author remains anonymous
In November, the Guardian newspaper ran an anonymous article about how its author was almost turned into a racist after being exposed to right-wing views online.
Shortly after the article was published, social media prankster Godfrey Elfwick – who had already duped the BBC World Service into allowing him to disparage Star Wars as “racist and homophobic” during a live radio broadcast – claimed authorship of the article.
In support of his claim, Elfwick shared an image of a Microsoft Word document on his computer with a similar title but with an earlier date than the Guardian article.
Perhaps owing to his success at hoodwinking the BBC, many on Twitter – including award-winning US writer and leading New Atheist Sam Harris, whose views on Islam are cited in the article as having helped lead the author to almost becoming a racist – seemed to accept Elfwick’s claim of authorship at face value.
This led to a high-profile Twitter spat between Harris and eminent US journalist Glenn Greenwald, who accused Harris of engaging in “hatermongering against Muslims.”
When I asked the Guardian to comment on whether Elfwick authored the article, I received the following response from Readers’ Editor Paul Chadwick:
From: Readers’ editor (Guardian) <guardian.readers@theguardian.com> To: **** <****@aol.com> Subject: Re: Question about Anonymous Guardian article re: possible hoax Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2016 15:45
Dear Dean Jones,
Thank you for your email.
The Guardian has stated in response to specific media enquiries that it is confident about the authorship of the article.
I have separately looked into the matter and can assure you that the claim of authorship made on Twitter is not supported by the evidence offered on Twitter by the person claiming authorship.
In its original format the material submitted to the Guardian for the article is markedly different in several ways from what was claimed on Twitter to be a print out of the article as submitted by its author.
I can understand why the Guardian has taken the approach that it has taken to this matter. You would agree, I’m sure, that there is no point encouraging trolls by paying them attention.
Thanks again for making contact.
Paul Chadwick Readers’ editor
Guardian Readers’ editor’s office
Guardian News & Media
In a follow-up e-mail, I asked Chadwick about his paper’s vetting processes for anonymous contributors, stating my concern that “without being able to provide demonstrable evidence that an article is genuine, you open the doors to false claims of authorship.”
Here is his January 3, 2017 response:
From: Readers’ editor (Guardian) <guardian.readers@theguardian.com> To: **** <****@aol.com> Subject: Re: Question about Anonymous Guardian article re: possible hoax Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2017 19:20
Dear Dean Jones,
Yes, there are processes for vetting contributors, but I am sure you will understand that if they are to maintain their effectiveness it is counterproductive to detail them.
Yours sincerely,
Paul Chadwick
Readers’ editor
Guardian Readers’ editor’s office
Guardian News & Media
While Elfwick didn’t quite manage to pull the wool over our eyes, this episode raises an interesting question: without being able to verify the identity of the author, how can we know the article isn’t a hoax?
After the Crown Prosecution Service fudged the rape conviction rate I asked The Daily Telegraph and the Independent to correct their articles – here’s what happened
In September, I reported that the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had seemingly exaggerated the 2015-16 rape conviction rate.
Via a press release, the CPS claimed it was “convicting more cases of rape…than ever before,” with “a rise in the rape conviction rate [from 56.9] to 57.9 per cent.”
These figures were widely reported in the British press, including the Independent…
Snapshot of the Independent’s Sept. 6 article, via the Wayback Machine (source)
…and the Daily Telegraph.
Snapshot of The Daily Telegraph’s Sept. 6 article (source)
However, a close look at the CPS’ 2015-16 Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) crime report reveals that the rape conviction rate “includes cases initially flagged as rape [but] where a conviction was obtained for an alternative or lesser offence” and “where a rape charge is subsequently amended.”
Shortly after, I received notification from the Independent’s readers’ liaison assistant Jane Campbell that the article has been updated.
Dear Mr Jones,
Thank you for contacting us via our online complaints form. We are always glad to hear from our readers, whether or not feedback is positive, and I am grateful to you for taking the time to get in touch about ‘Revenge porn prosecutions number ‘more than 200′ just 18 months after law change’ (6 September).
Your point is well taken and the article has now been changed to reflect that rape conviction figures also include cases where a conviction was obtained for an alternative or lesser offence.
I hope that, in spite of your concerns on this occasion, you will continue to read and enjoy The Independent. And please do not hesitate to contact me again in the future should cause arise.
With best regards
Jane Campbell
Readers’ liaison assistant
The statistics cited in the article come from the CPS report you identify and were relayed to our journalist via a CPS press release; as an official authoritative source, it was one on which she was entitled to rely, and the information was published in good faith.
Regarding the disparity between CPS and MoJ figures that you highlight, the VAWG report makes clear that whereas the CPS rape figures are compiled over the financial year, the MoJ collects its figures for the calendar year. Moreover the latter represent cases charged and convicted for rape only; as you say, CPS figures include not only cases resulting in conviction for rape, but also those “initially flagged as rape where a conviction was obtained for an alternative or lesser offence.”
This is clarified by the VAWG report on p49:
“From CPS data 2015-16, 4,518 (98.6%) of cases initially flagged as rape were finally prosecuted for the principal offence categories of ‘sexual offences, including rape’ or more serious principal offences of ‘homicides’ or ‘offences against the person’. Of these, 3,972 were for sexual offences including rape; three for homicide and 543 for offences against the person’. Only 1.4% were for offences less than ‘sexual offences, including rape’ ”.
Where most rape cases under the CPS definition were indeed finally prosecuted as ‘sexual offences, including rape’, it does not appear that the CPS conviction statistics cited in our article are likely to be significantly misleading. Neither are they clearly irreconcilable with MoJ figures, as you suggest. Following your complaint, we asked the CPS how many convictions in the category ‘sexual offences, including rape’ were ‘pure’ rape convictions. They told us that this information is not available.
We are content to clarify this, and we will publish the following in our Corrections and Clarifications spot in a forthcoming issue of the Daily Telegraph. A version appropriate for context has already been added to the foot of the online article:
Rape conviction rate
An article on Sep 6 reported on CPS figures showing that the conviction rate for rape rose in the year 2015-16 to 57.9 per cent of prosecutions brought. We wish to clarify that though these cases were initially flagged as rape, CPS data show that the majority were eventually prosecuted in the principal offence category of ‘sexual offences including rape’. A breakdown of outcomes in this category is not available.
I trust that this is satisfactory.
Yours sincerely
Jess McAree | Head of Editorial Compliance
telegraphmediagroup | 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT
The following month, a clarification was also published in “Corrections and Clarifications,” Page 2 of the print edition of the Telegraph.
Concluding the search for “Special Notice 11/02,” the Met Police’s never-before-seen document overturning the presumption of innocence
In May, I blogged about my enquiry to the UK’s Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) requesting a copy of “Special Notice 11/02,” an official police document issued in 2002 which – according to a controversial Feb. 10 Guardian article by former Met commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe – said that officers should “accept allegations made by the victim in the first instance as being truthful.”
Bernard Hogan-Howe’s February 10, 2016 article (source)
Shortly after, I received a copy of “Special Notice 11/02” from the Met’s Information Rights Unit. As far as I’m aware, this marked the first time the document has been made available to a member of the public, thus answering questions raised by legal expert Susanne Cameron-Blackie aka blogger Anna Raccoon (you can read her post on the subject by clicking here).
Special Notice from 2002 (11/02) has never been made public. I have had to work from excerpts which appeared in a 2013 hearing regarding compensation for victims of John Warboys, and an old Observer article; it might appear to be the Holy Grail for those like myself seeking the origins of the dramatic change in policy that #Ibelieveher represented – but I confess, I am no nearer to discovering who wrote that Special Notice nor why – if you can throw any light on this I would be grateful.
First, Special Notice 11/02 does indeed appear to reverse the presumption of innocence for suspected sex offenders (however, the wording is slightly different to that used by Hogan-Howe in the Guardian). Here’s what it says:
Second, the document appears to have been authored – or at least approved – by the Assistant Commissioner of Territorial Policing.
In 2002, this position was held by Michael J. Todd QPM (deceased), who was appointed chief constable of the Manchester Police Service later that year.
Click here to read a copy of “Special Notice 11/02.”
Downing Street used misleading data from “right-wing think tank” to “name and shame” universities that host “extremist” speakers, newly released e-mails show
Late 2015, Downing Street unveiled its updated Prevent strategy requiring universities and colleges to “stop extremists radicalising students on campuses.”
Citing work by Whitehall’s Extremism Analysis Unit (EAU), Downing Street claimed that in 2014 there were “70 events involving speakers who are known to have promoted rhetoric that aimed to undermine core British values of democracy.”
Honouring the former PM David Cameron’s pledge to “name and shame” institutions that host “hate speakers,” four universities were singled out: King’s College London, Kingston University, Queen Mary, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
Downing Street’s September 17, 2015 press release (source)
However, e-mails recently obtained via a public records request show that much of the data attributed to the EAU in the above press release – including information used to “name and shame” universities – was taken from a misleading July 2015 report by Student Rights, an arm of “right-wing think tank” the Henry Jackson Society.
For instance, the Student Rights report “lists the four London universities mentioned by Downing Street in its own table of most-visited universities. It also includes a list of former students later convicted of terrorism-related offences – of whom eight are also mentioned in the press release.”
Top: The Student Rights report (source) / Bottom: Downing Street’s press release (source)
The appropriated data was used to put a favourable spin on the government’s controversial counter-terrorism measures in a supporting statement by David Cameron, who prefaced his comments about “making sure that radical views and ideas are not given the oxygen they need to flourish” with a caveat about not “oppressing free speech.”
But efforts to assuage concerns about the possible chilling effect on free speech failed to convince, and the PM’s arguments in favour of limiting speech faltered under scrutiny.
Via the Independent, two of the four universities “named and shamed” by Downing Street denied hosting any of the so-called “hate speakers” listed in the press release, calling into question the premise that British universities are “hotbeds” of terrorist activity.
There were also questions about the list of convicted former students, two of whom were supposedly radicalised during their studies.
“Both reports cite the example of the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who attempted to set off a bomb on a Detroit-bound plane in 2009, even though an inquiry by University College London found no evidence to suggest that he was radicalised while a student there.”
Top: The Student Rights report / Bottom: Downing Street’s press release
“Roshonara Choudhry, who was jailed for life for stabbing Labour MP Stephen Timms in 2010 shortly after dropping out of King’s College London, also appears in both documents. She admitted to having been radicalised by watching over a hundred hours of speeches on YouTube, and said she dropped out of King’s because she felt it to be ‘anti-Islamic.’”
– So how did Downing Street get it so wrong?
As this “URGENT” September 16, 2015 e-mail shows, Downing Street’s press office was still in the process of collecting data the morning prior to publication.
Per this quick response to the above request to fact-check an early draft of the press release, the office was then urged to “amend the figures for numbers of events in 2014.”
It was suggested using the dubious Student Rights report in response to the office’s request for “case studies on extremists speaking on campuses.”
Downing Street has yet to substantiate its claim that in 2014 “at least 70 events featuring hate speakers were held on campuses” – the only figure in the press release to have come from the EAU – with the Home Office refusing to provide a more detailed breakdown.
Assuming this figure is accurate, why did one of Downing Street’s internal fact-checkers request a correction? It seems that Downing Street was determined to find facts to fit its agenda, even ignoring calls to amend figures later used to smear British universities.
In doing so, it betrayed the supposedly “British values” of open debate, free speech and political dissent it originally claimed to protect.
– To ban or not to ban?
Also contained in the e-mails is a “trial script” of the press release, plus an early draft of a scolding letter from Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson to former president of the National Union of Students (NUS) Megan Dunn.
As stated in the published version of the press release, the updated Prevent guidance requires universities to “ensure those espousing extremist views do not go unchallenged.”
This means that when a university suspects an external speaker of holding “extremist” views, they must not be allowed to speak unless the “risk” of allowing them to do so is“mitigated by challenging the speaker…with someone holding opposing opinions.”
However, as this “trial script” of the press release shows, Downing Street was still toying with the idea of a ban on “extremist” speakers right up until September 16, 2015, just five days before the updated guidance came into force.
In the published version of the Jo Johnson letter, the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) minister urged the NUS to end its “overt opposition” to Prevent, citing the “legal duty that will be placed on universities and colleges.”
However, per this early draft of the letter, Johnson chastised the NUS for its supposedly “inaccurate, outdated” and “misguided opinions,” which he claimed left no space for “balanced debate.”
Responding to the revised letter, Megan Dunn said that she was confused about why the government was so focused on the NUS, as “students’ unions are not public bodies and therefore not subject to the act.”
She added: “The NUS is a campaigning organisation, so our opposition to this agenda, based on both principled and practical concerns…is both valid and appropriate.”
– Preventing Prevent
Since the updated strategy was brought into force, the Guardian has reported that the British government’s “loose definition of extremism” is being used by other countries to crackdown on “non-violent” dissent.
In September, prisoner advocacy group CAGE published a startling report on the “junk science” underpinning the Prevent strategy’s assessment criteria for identifying “at-risk” individuals at the so-called “pre-criminal” stage of radicalisation.
The report prompted more than 140 academics and experts, including the renowned linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, to sign an open letter voicing concern over the lack of “proper scientific scrutiny or public critique.”
The report highlights “multiple, mutually reinforcing structural flaws, the foreseeable consequence of which is a serious risk of human rights violations” including “the right against discrimination, as well the right to freedom of expression, among other rights.”
Shooting the Messenger 