Federal authorities have charged Robert Gieswein as one of the rioters who stormed the Capitol in support of a pro-Trump insurrection on January 6. The Woodland Park, Colorado, resident was seen in photos wearing distinctive patches and military-style equipment on Jan. 5 and on Jan. 6 as he pushed through police barriers at the Capitol and confronted officers in the building alongside a number of rioters […]
Adam Rawnsley
19 posts
Google booted the MAGA-friendly Twitter clone, Parler, from the Google Play store Friday as tech companies crack down on pro-Trump social media accounts pushing conspiracy theories and threatening violence. In a statement, Google said that it removed Parler from the Play Store because the company’s “longstanding policies require that apps displaying user-generated content have moderation policies and enforcement that removes egregious content like posts that incite […]
The feds say the Treasury and Commerce departments have been breached by hackers from leveraging a backdoor planted in a popular network monitoring app. The U.S. is pointing at Moscow as the likely culprit behind the break-ins. But they’re not pointing at the loud, aggressive, and troll-happy military hackers we’ve come to know in the years since they meddled in the 2016 election. Instead, U.S. officials […]
The Treasury Department says it knows the Iranian intelligence officers who kidnapped the former FBI agent Robert Levinson who died in their custody. U.S. officials announced on Monday that two members of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) would be sanctioned for their alleged role in Levinson’s kidnapping and detention. “Senior Iranian officials authorized Levinson’s abduction and detention and launched a disinformation campaign to deflect […]
The claim was far fetched: that the Philly mob delivered thousands of votes for Joe Biden. The person claiming it was even less believable: a known misinformation merchant. A Buffalo blog notorious for peddling election misinformation has captured the attention of top Trump supporters with a bizarre tale of the Philly mob swinging the election for Biden. Matthew Ricchiazzi runs the Buffalo Chronicle, a fake news […]
The Iranians trolls who disguised themselves as Proud Boys fans in an attempt to intimidate voters were linked to a disinformation campaign that targeted Israel and Saudi Arabia, according to Facebook. In a press conference on Tuesday, Facebook announced that it took down a handful of accounts on Facebook and Instagram after a tip from the FBI about Iranian election-related meddling. The tip followed an announcement […]
President Trump dying of coronavirus and handing over power to Mike Pence. Black Lives Matter protesters surrounding the Clintons’ house in New York and firing gunshots. These are a few of the fake scandals that an Israeli news outlet’s hacked Twitter account tried to fool readers into believing for a few brief moments earlier this month. Twitter says the trolls amplifying them are linked to Iran. […]
A coalition of human rights groups have filed a criminal complaint against Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons henchmen for their alleged role in two attacks against civilians in 2013 and 2017 that reportedly killed almost 900 people. Researchers for the groups say they’ve collected enough evidence to identify those responsible for the attacks and that it’s time for officials to act. The three groups—the Justice Initiative, the […]
Facebook booted three troll networks linked to Russian intelligence and the St. Petersburg-based troll farm involved in meddling in the 2016 election. Nathan Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security, told reporters in a press conference that the three networks mainly focused on audiences and issues outside of the U.S. presidential election but that the company had suspended them now out of an abundance of caution because they […]
For a time, it seemed like a great gig. Jacinda Chan’s job working for the website Peace Data was everything she’d been looking for. It was paid work writing about her favorite subject—human rights and Latin America—and her editors paid on time. Chan, who was born with spinal muscular atrophy and is a quadriplegic, hadn’t been able to get many good jobs in journalism. “I have […]
Four years ago, Rudy Giuliani took to the stage at the Republican National Convention to deliver a shouty monologue about how his friend Donald Trump would usher in a new era of law and order and end the racial strife prompted by police killings of Black men. Four years later, Giuliani is back at the RNC. He’s still shouty. And this time he’s monologuing about how […]
Facebook has tried its hardest to avoid taking action against posts from President Trump that broke its own rules. But on Wednesday, that long-running effort finally ran aground against a rambling diatribe from the president about children and the coronavirus. It’s a shift that could have an enormous impact on Trump’s re-election effort. While political spending is a small fraction of Facebook’s overall revenue, political ads […]
A Russian hacking group that played a role in breaking into Democratic networks during the 2016 election is now trying to steal coronavirus research, according to officials in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. In a joint cybersecurity advisory released by the three countries, intelligence agencies warned that a Russian hacking ground referred to as “APT29” had “targeted various organisations involved in COVID-19 vaccine development in Canada, […]
If you want a hot take about the Middle East, Raphael Badani is your man. As a Newsmax “Insider” columnist, he has thoughts about how Iraq needs to rid itself of Iranian influence to attract investment and why Dubai is an oasis of stability in a turbulent region. His career as a “geopolitical risk consultant and interactive simulation designer” and an “international relations senior analyst” for […]
Search for “LAPD scanner” on Twitter right now and you’ll see it—a video showing radio traffic in which two vile racists laugh and joke about killing protesters. “We gotta start shooting to kill, man. Mr Trump said so, shoot to kill,” one voice says. “Come one, come all. $100 a head. Every [n-word] you kill, $100. $50 for a Mexican,” the other responds. On Tiktok, Facebook, […]
They’re leaked communications from the Democratic presidential frontrunner and conservatives are already sharing them all over social media in hopes they’ll help Trump’s re-election campaign. It sounds like the final months of the 2016 election—or the height of 2019’s Burisma madness—but the tapes released on Tuesday are from a new breach. Andriy Derkach—a Ukrainian politician with a KGB background, a penchant for conspiracy theories, and a […]
When Paul Manafort walked out of Loretto Federal Correctional Institution on Wednesday, he had about four years left on his sentence. He left behind a number of inmates who weren’t as lucky as he was. David Barren, a fellow inmate at Loretto, isn’t Paul Manafort. He’s African-American. He never worked as a powerful Republican lobbyist or the president’s former campaign manager. And he didn’t commit millions […]
It’s the supposedly rapid test that President Trump claimed was “lightning-fast” and about to usher in “a whole new ballgame” in COVID-19 detection. But since then, the fine print has started to creep into the Trump administration’s rhetoric about Abbott Labs’ diagnostic coronavirus tests and where they can be useful. When asked by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) about the possibility of rapid testing for meatpackers during […]
Marissa Guale is like all too many Americans right now. Her husband and father of her two children, Raul, is on a ventilator in a hospital on Long Island, fighting for his life while sick with COVID-19. Raul, a 34-year-old nurse, likely caught the disease while working in a nursing home. When the National Institutes of Health announced an emergency use authorization for the experimental antiviral […]