Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Fake News

The troll known as @Umpire43 is fake in every possible way.
Umpire43’s now-infamous allegation that “A family friend in Alabama just told my wife that a WAPO reporter named Beth offered her 1000$ to accuse Roy Moore,” posted last week, was deleted with the rest of his Twitter account Tuesday morning.

[...]

Umpire43, also known as Doug Lewis or DJ Lewis, has repeatedly invented stories in the past—particularly about his own background. Lewis said he was a 22-year veteran of the Navy, a pollster at Ipsos/Reuters, an expert on rigging voting machines, a source who was feet away from Reince Preibus, a man who speaks six languages, a beleaguered soul who needed time off after the 9/11 attacks when he saw Muslims “dancing on rooftops,” the owner of a polling company who claimed Trump had a sustained lead in California, and an actual baseball umpire with 50 years experience. Oh, and he worked at the American consulate in Calgary, where he claimed to obtain proof of a forged birth certificate for Ted Cruz’s father.

[...]

Umpire43's claims found a welcome audience in Trump Tower. Dan Scavino—the social media director for the Trump campaign, now a member of the White House Staff—passed along Umpire43's bogus assertion in November of 2015.

  Daily Beast
And I believe it was The Most Notable Loser who claimed that Muslims were dancing on rooftops after the 9/11 attack.

Of course The Most Notable Loser's excuse for not having to be held accountable for what he says is, "That's what I heard."
“I will likely be fired for this but I do not give a damn. Thomson/Reuters has accepted payment from DNC for false polls taken from 75% Dems,” Lewis wrote in June of last year.

The tweet, which made the rounds on 4chan and Reddit knockoff Voat, received over 2,000 retweets.

After his fabricated stint at Reuters, Lewis pushed made-up poll numbers under the name of a nonexistent polling company, Vets for Honest Polls.
Sounds like this guy single-handedly accounts for a huge portion of actual "fake news".
At the start of 2016, Lewis only had a couple thousand followers. By the time The Gateway Pundit picked up his claim against the Washington Post and Moore’s accusers, he had catapulted to around 18,000.
If in fact those were all real people and not bots or accounts made up by Lewis - if that is his real name -  himself.
[Gateway Pundit's owner Jim] Hoft is a notorious disinformation peddler on the far-right. The Gateway Pundit has framed three separate people for terror attacks in 2017 alone, frequently citing a single tweet by deleted Twitter accounts to blame uninvolved far-left groups.

Hoft claimed the Charlottesville car attack on a Michigan man who was attending a wedding thousands of miles away, and labeled him an “anti-Trump protester.”

In January, Hoft posted a photo of an entirely different person with the name Esteban Santiago after someone with the same name shot 13 people and left five dead Ft. Lauderdale’s airport.

[...]

Hoft also misidentified the Las Vegas shooter hours after the terror attack, citing an anonymous 4chan post. Gateway Pundit identified the man as a Democrat, then deleted the post entirely.

[...]

In this way, Hoft and Umpire43 are alike.
And how do we know they aren't the same person?

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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