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Whose vision was correct? Orwell's or Huxley's? Artist Stuart McMillen illustrates the argument for Aldous Huxley.

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Stuart McMillen's webcomic adapts (and updates) Postman's famous book-length essay, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues that Aldous Huxley's vision of the future in Brave New World was ultimately more accurate than the one proposed by George Orwell in 1984. ( Via).

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Stuart McMillen's webcomic adapts (and updates) Postman's famous book-length essay, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues that Aldous Huxley's vision of the future in Brave New World was ultimately more accurate than the one proposed by George Orwell in 1984. (Via).

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2 Video: News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak

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2 Video: News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak

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Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal argues that the liberal limitations on language are creating censorship in the media.

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daniel henninger mark  kelly ronald reagan james bennet george floyd tom cotton andrew cuomo silence is violence black lives matter protests protest media censorship censorship digital media media social media white shaming coercion freedom of speech free speech new york times tom bennet philadelphia inquirer george orwell animal farm stasi secret police the lives of others liberal media facebook twitter send in the troops buildings matter too getty images twitter inc. facebook inc. cl a snap inc.

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Wonder Land: The pre-liberal idea of settling issues with coercion has made a comeback in the U.S. Image: Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images

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3 Article: Trump's Inauguration Crowd; Claims vs. Evidence

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3 Article: Trump's Inauguration Crowd; Claims vs. Evidence

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Photographs of the National Mall in Washington DC and public transport figures for the city flatly contradict Sean Spicer's angry insistence that Donald Trump drew "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe".

In his blistering debut as White House press secretary on Saturday, Spicer accused journalists of reporting inaccurate crowd numbers and using misrepresentative photographs "to minimise the enormous support" that he claimed the new president enjoyed at his swearing-in.

Women's March on Washington overshadows Trump's first full day in office
"No one had numbers because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out," he said, before going ahead anyway to declare that Trump had attracted "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration" in person and in the world.

"These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm for the inauguration are shameful and wrong."

Crowd estimates can be fraught with difficulty and there is indeed no official figure. But images of the National Mall on Friday contradicted Spicer's assertions - particularly when compared with pictures from Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 and the turnout for the Women's March on Saturday.

A timelapse video produced by PBS indicates that the National Mall was never full at any stage on Friday:

Meanwhile, photographs show the National Mall packed with crowds just before Obama's inauguration in 2009 - but much more sparsely covered with people just before Trump's ceremony.

Interactive slider showing Obama's inauguration crowd with Trump's. By: David Constable for the Guardian

The New York Times estimated that Trump had drawn a crowd of about one-third the size of Obama's, which was thought to be a record turnout of 1.8 million.

According to figures shared by the Metro Washington subway system on Twitter, 193,000 trips had been taken by 11am on Donald Trump's inauguration day, compared with 513,000 during the same period on 20 January 2009 when Barack Obama took office.

"Ridership" as of 11am on Saturday stood at 275,000: more than eight times a normal Saturday and "even busier than most weekdays", the Metro tweeted.

Metro (@wmata)
Metro Ridership: As of 11am, 193k trips taken so far today. (11am 1/20/13 = 317k, 11am 1/20/09 = 513k, 11am 1/20/05 = 197k) #wmata
January 20, 2017

Spicer attempted to bolster his argument by giving whole-day ridership figures for the Metro of 420,000 on Trump's inaugural day. However, for comparison he used a figure of 317,000 which was the ridership figure only up to 11am on the inaugural day of 2013 - when Barack Obama had already been in office four years and attendance was, perhaps unsurprisingly, lower than for his first inauguration.

Before the inauguration itself, a video posted to Twitter by NBC's Katy Tur showed "entire stands empty" along the parade route.

Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC)
Parade route from Capital to WH. Entire stands empty. Crowd thin. pic.twitter.com/7AcpJkBO8O
January 20, 2017

Photos of the vice-president, Mike Pence, making the trip from the Capitol to the White House also suggested sparse crowds.

shauna (@goldengateblond)
when camera angles matter pic.twitter.com/PaHFyKPGyE
January 21, 2017

It is worth noting that Trump drew just 4.1% of the vote in Washington DC and lost the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia.

His inauguration also occurred on a Friday - a fact that does not go any way towards mitigating the comparisons with Obama's 2009 inauguration, which fell on a Tuesday, but does contextualise the strong turnout for the Women's March on Saturday.

CNN tweeted a photograph of the National Mall taken from the National Park Service's EarthCam on the Washington Monument when the swearing-in began, just after noon ET on Friday. Compared with the same view at the same time on Saturday during the Women's March, there is a clear difference in crowds.

CNN (@CNN)
Photos taken at 12:15 p.m. ET each day show Trump's inauguration crowd vs. the #WomensMarch https://t.co/syj3kEAr2t pic.twitter.com/OG61rjQdqd
January 21, 2017

The Associated Press reported that at least 500,000 women had turned out for the Women's March on National Mall at 9.40am - more than double the initial predictions. There were also sizeable protests against Trump in other cities around the world.

Judd Legum (@JuddLegum)
Oh wow. pic.twitter.com/S9HHT0UBlG
January 21, 2017

It is uncertain if there are more concrete figures to come: according to the Associated Press, the National Park Service stopped releasing official estimates for events at the National Mall following a dispute over the Million Man March in 1995.

The US Armed Forces Joint Task Force-National Capital Region and the Joint Congressional Committee, which organise inaugural proceedings, would not be releasing estimates either.

Politifact reported that crowds at inaugurations varied widely, with Obama raising an estimated 1 million in 2013, down from 1.8 million in 2009; George W Bush drawing 400,000 in 2005 after 300,000 in 2001; and Bill Clinton 800,000 in 1993 then 250,000 in 1997.

Before Spicer's briefing room tirade on Saturday, Trump had told an audience at CIA headquarters that he had given his inauguration address to a "massive field of people ... packed", he estimated, with between 1 million and 1.5 million people.

To his eye, Trump said, the crowd stretched "the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument" - but a television network he didn't name had broadcast a shot of "an empty field" and put the crowd at 250,000.

He went on to say that God had stopped rain from falling during his speech, before adding that he had "caught" the news network in a lie: "We caught them in a beauty.

"And I think they're going to pay a big price."

But the evidence certainly seems to challenge Trump's assertion that he had drawn a crowd of as many as 1.5 million people.

Topics

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Trump's inauguration crowd: Sean Spicer's claims versus the evidence

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Photographs of the National Mall in Washington DC and public transport figures for the city flatly contradict Sean Spicer's angry insistence that Donald Trump drew "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe".

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4 Webpage: AARP Guide to Asking Questions

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4 Webpage: AARP Guide to Asking Questions

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The American Association for Retired Persons created this interactive teaching tool for elderly folks to help teach them how to spot fake news.

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You are leaving AARP.org and going to the website of our trusted provider. The provider's terms, conditions and policies apply. Please return to AARP.org to learn more about other benefits.

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Be sure to read the first few paragraphs and last few paragraphs of this article (you don't have to read the whole thing).

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Essentially, Trump has backed himself into a corner. His moves against TikTok are part of a broader tough-on-China push he has made a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, an outlet to deflect blame for mishandling the coronavirus. But each time he has chosen to face off with China - over trade, 5G technology or Hong Kong - he has ended up at a critical moment when he has to find his way out of a jam.

This time around, Trump's way out isn't clear. If China delays a TikTok sale - or scuttles the deal altogether - Trump will be forced either to relent with Beijing or to ban the viral video app outright from U.S. soil. If Trump blinks, he risks looking like he caved to Beijing weeks before the election. If Trump follows through with his threats, he risks Chinese retaliation against the U.S. business community, not to mention angering millions of TikTok-loving Americans.

And a deadline looms - Trump asked for a deal to be completed by the week of Sept. 20, and he said on Thursday that he wouldn't extend the deadline.

"This is an escalatory move," said Jude Blanchette, a China expert at the foreign policy think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, referring to China's recent moves. "If China blocks the deal, then that puts the Trump administration in the position of having to actually follow through with the ban it put on place on TikTok."

Trump's August announcement of restrictions on the popular video app, downloaded by over a billion people, marked a new phase in the president's anti-China crusade, which has become central to his reelection message. Previously, Trump has focused on placing tariffs on China and sanctioning Chinese tech manufacturers. But the campaign against TikTok shows the Trump administration is also willing to target Chinese social media platforms. Officials have also made pledges to go after WeChat, the uber-popular Chinese messaging and payment app.

The pledges have raised concerns in the U.S. business community, with industry leaders saying a crackdown could restrict their business interests in China, the world's second-largest economy. Barring American companies from working with WeChat, for instance, could major firms of access to a critical commercial platform.

But administration officials insist the national security threats posed by these platforms are too grave to let them operate in the U.S. economic ecosystem without heavy restrictions. The Trump administration claims companies like TikTok and WeChat are simply a vehicle for Chinese government espionage of Americans - though it has offered no proof of these accusations. On TikTok, specifically, the Trump administration has pointed to the application's ability to "build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage," according to the administration's executive order on TikTok. The company has denied those claims, and the administration has not specifically shown evidence that TikTok improperly used or shared data.

A recent from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an Australian government-funded think tank, found a history of TikTok and WeChat censoring topics considered sensitive in China - a typical feature for content platforms operating in the country. It also noted the Chinese government has leverage over both companies, given the country's national security laws.

"TikTok has a documented history of censoring free speech to conform to [Chinese Community Party] propaganda," said a senior administration official. "This administration will not allow the CCP to exploit the private information of U.S. citizens."

The Commerce Department has not yet clarified the scope of the administration's orders on TikTok and WeChat, or when potential bans could go into place. And ByteDance is currently negotiating to sell its U.S. TikTok operations with Oracle, and with Microsoft, which is partnering with Walmart on its bid. Microsoft is seen as the top bidder, according to one person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The person, however, raised concerns about what China's new export restrictions might mean for a deal. The rule requires companies to get a special license from the Chinese government for the transfer of artificial intelligence technologies, such as algorithms, text analysis and content recommendation - all aspects central to TikTok.

So while TikTok could be a moneymaking prize for any winning bidder, there is unease about the potential political headaches that would come with navigating the deal with the Chinese government. ByteDance is currently trying to get a license from the Chinese government for the sale to either Oracle or Microsoft, complicating the timeline for the deal, the person said.

If the new requirement scuttles a deal, it could force Trump to follow through with an outright ban on TikTok. A person close to discussions, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the U.S. government will be ready with other options for the president if a deal is not reached by his deadline, without offering specifics. The Wall Street Journal's report said even if there is not a full sale, the U.S. is exploring a potential restructuring of TikTok. If Trump chooses to ban TikTok outright, the process could be delayed by the lawsuit the company has filed.

"The Trump administration may have overshot the landing here because it thinks leverage over the U.S. markets is so strong it can set the terms for decoupling actions, but China is trying to show they have significant leverage as well," Blanchette said.

"Now," he added, "the U.S. and China are facing an unpalatable situation. For China, the humiliation of having a company extorted from their control by the Trump administration. And now with China's involvement, the Trump administration may have to follow through on their course of actions."

The Trump administration has invested considerable energy in its tough-on-China campaign as election season ramps up. Since the beginning of the year, the administration has sanctioned some Chinese officials over Beijing's treatment of the Uighur minority group, its militarized building in the South China Sea and its crackdown on pro-democracy efforts in Hong Kong. More recently, Trump has been chiding Beijing over its handling of the coronavirus, which he derides as the "China virus," shuttered a Chinese consulate in Houston and restricted Chinese diplomats in America.

The crackdown has caused consternation in the business community. Industry leaders have expressed fears over losing access to China's rapidly growing market and large population, and are still smarting over Trump's trade war with China, during which involved he slapped steep tariffs on numerous products. A U.S.-China Business Council survey found 86 percent of its member companies said bilateral trade tensions have negatively affected business with China.

And while TikTok's high-profile American users are young liberals - including the group that requested thousands of tickets to a Trump rally, hoping to troll the campaign and drive down attendance - there are still many conservative users on the platform whom Trump may alienate with a full ban.

"The gains are all difficult to grasp right now and the loss is really obvious," said Derek Scissors, a China policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "As a result, China might think the president might change his mind, but I don't know how the president would get away with backing down here."

Technology news from Washington and Silicon Valley - weekday mornings, in your inbox.

Essentially, he said, China has "raised the odds of TikTok in the U.S. just dying."

Still, Trump's advisers insist hitting China over trade and national security is a winning issue.

"President Trump is the first one to hold China accountable for their cheating on trade, and has also pinpointed them as the source of the coronavirus outbreak which lied about it and put the entire world behind the curve on responding," Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement. "To this day, Joe Biden doesn't view China as an economic threat. Joe Biden has a China problem and it is a major issue in the campaign."

Biden, for his part, has knocked Trump for consistently downplaying China's human rights abuses, referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a "thug" and vowed to strengthen alliances so the U.S. can present a united front and counter Beijing.

The Trump administration has shown few signs it plans to back down on its efforts to ban TikTok if no American buyer is found. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and trade adviser Peter Navarro both even said the administration plans to crack down on more Chinese companies, though they did not state which might be targeted.

"It is critical that this country not use apps that are made in China, or that can take our data and go to servers in China. That data will be used to surveil, monitor and track you," Navarro said last week on Fox Business. "That's the policy position underlying why we have gone after TikTok and WeChat, and there will be others because China is basically going out around the world trying to acquire technology and influence."

A second senior administration official said the White House is committed to policing any tech platform that can be manipulated to suppress speech and abuse its users.

"Where we find efforts to harvest and surveil intimate data, and use that to intimidate and coerce people in our country or their relatives back in China, we are going to take step - in some cases aggressive steps like you saw against TikTok and WeChat - to protect freedom of thought as well as freedom of speech in the United States," the official said in a call with reporters Friday.

"At the end of the day," the official added, "the data we produce in this day and age is roughly equivalent to our thoughts. So what you have is a modern day crystallization of the thought police that George Orwell wrote about in his novel, '1984.'"

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Trump's first TikTok move: A China quagmire of his own making

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Essentially, Trump has backed himself into a corner. His moves against TikTok are part of a broader tough-on-China push he has made a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, an outlet to deflect blame for mishandling the coronavirus.

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Now you see him-now you don't. Compare a photo taken in the 1930s of five Communist Party officials in the USSR and you'll see Avel Enukidze, photographed next to Soviet premier Vyacheslav Molotov and others. But during Josef Stalin's Great Purge, the onetime member of the Communist party's highest governing body was deemed an enemy of the state and executed by firing squad.

Then, he disappeared from Soviet photographs, too, his existence blotted out by a retouched suit on another official from the original photo.

Enukidze's erasure was the product of a real conspiracy to change public perception in the USSR during Joseph Stalin's dictatorship. Stalin's commitment to censorship and photo doctoring was so strong that, at the height of the Soviet Union 's international power, he rewrote history using photo alteration. The stakes weren't just historical: Each erasure meant a swing of Stalin's loyalties, and most disappeared subjects also disappeared (or were killed) in real life, too.

After consolidating his power in 1929, Stalin declared war on Soviets he considered tainted by their connections to the political movements that had come before him. Beginning in 1934 he wiped out an ever-changing group of political "enemies." An estimated 750,000 people died during the Great Purge, as it is now known, and more than a million others were banished to remote areas to do hard labor in gulags.

During the purges, many of Stalin's enemies simply vanished from their homes. Others were executed in public after show trials. And since Stalin knew the value of photographs in both the historical record and his use of mass media to influence the Soviet Union, they often disappeared from photos, too.

Stalin used a large group of photo retouchers to cut his enemies out of supposedly documentary photographs. One such erasure was Nikola Yezhov, a secret police official who oversaw Stalin's purges. For a while Yezhov worked at Stalin's right hand, interrogating, falsely accusing and ordering the execution of thousands of Communist Party officials. But in 1938, Yezhov fell from Stalin's favor after being usurped by one of his own deputies. He was denounced, secretly arrested, tried in a secret court, and executed.

Stalin's censors then removed Yezhov from the photographic record, including cutting him from a photograph in which he smiled next to his former boss, Stalin, next to a waterway. The photo retouchers removed Yezhov from the photo and inserted new water to cover up the space where Yezhov would have been.

Stalin did the same with scores of party officials who had been photographed next to him at various events. Sometimes, official censors had to retouch photos over and over again as the list of political enemies grew longer. In one photograph, Stalin is shown with a group of three of his deputies. As each deputy fell out his favor, they were snipped out of the photo until only Stalin remained.

It's thought that Stalin's obsession with photo doctoring constituted a mini industry in the USSR. Publishers were contacted by Stalin's minions and told to eliminate the enemy du jour from upcoming photos-and they did. According to design historian David King, who uncovered thousands of doctored photos and their original versions, the work was not performed in one location or even through an official ministry.

Rather," King writes, "photographic manipulation worked very much on an ad hoc basis. Orders were followed, quietly. A word in an editor's ear or a discreet telephone conversation from a 'higher authority' was sufficient to eliminate all further reference-visual or literal-to a victim, no matter how famous she or he had been."

Sometimes, photo doctoring meant going back to the past to change the historical record, as when Stalin ordered Leon Trotsky, once a leading figure in the Communist Party, eliminated from all photos. After Trotsky was exiled by Stalin for mounting a failed opposition to his leadership, the revolutionary was snipped, airbrushed and covered up in countless photographs. Sometimes, Stalin inserted himself in photos at key moments in history, or had photo technicians make him look taller or more handsome.

Even citizens had to get in on the act. As Stalin's purges became more and more widespread, civilians who feared being branded as his political enemies began to realize that owning photos of Stalin's political enemies-even photos in books or magazines-was dangerous. They learned to deface their own materials with scissors or ink. "Such was the atmosphere of fear that families of those arrested and condemned were compelled to destroy even the image of their loved ones in their own personal records," writes biographer Helen Rappaport.

Stalin's obsession with image manipulation didn't stop with photos. As historian Jan Plamper notes, the omnipresent portraits of Stalin that were in every home and business were subject to maniacal oversight. The dictator commissioned an army of painters to create his official portraits, offering some artists massive amounts of money to paint him. Then, the official portrait was reproduced and retouched over and over until it met with Stalin's liking.

"The amount and detail of documentation on retouching (and the entire reproduction process) is astounding," writes Plamper. "This reflects a heightened concern to fix upon paper clear responsibilities-and tremendous anxiety, lest something go awry."

As photo doctoring became more and more common in the USSR's propaganda effort, it also became a way to evade Stalin's wrath. Take the famous photo of Soviet soldiers raising their flag over the bombed-out Reichstag during the Battle of Berlin at the end of World War II. This now iconic photo was staged (it was inspired by the flag-raising at Iwo Jima). It was also altered specifically to sidestep Stalin's anger: The photographer concealed the wrists of the soldiers, which were covered in stolen wristwatches they had looted from German citizens on their way to the Reichstag. Stalin had ordered his soldiers not to loot-so the watches would have caused the soldiers to be disciplined and, perhaps, killed.

Stalin wasn't the only dictator who loved to doctor photos. Adolf Hitler removed his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, from a photo of him and director Leni Riefenstahl in 1937, though his motivations for doing so are uncertain. Benito Mussolini circulated a famous photograph of himself riding victorious atop a horse-after cropping out the handler holding the horse. And Kim Jong-Un apparently uses Photoshop to make his ears look smaller.

But as Stalin shows, manipulating photos isn't always about the size of one's ears. It can be a way of literally erasing today's political enemies from tomorrow's picture of history-and making the future as unreliable as a present filled with propaganda and lies.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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How Photos Became a Weapon in Stalin's Great Purge | HISTORY

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Stalin didn't have Photoshop-but that didn't keep him from wiping the traces of his enemies from the history books. Even the famous photo of Soviet soldiers raising their flag after the Battle of Berlin was altered.

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9 Research Article: Fake News on Twitter

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9 Research Article: Fake News on Twitter

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Read JUST the summary and abstract to learn more about the spread of fake news on Twitter before the 2016 election.

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Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election

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There was a proliferation of fake news during the 2016 election cycle. Grinberg et al. analyzed Twitter data by matching Twitter accounts to specific voters to determine who was exposed to fake news, who spread fake news, and how fake news interacted with factual news (see the Perspective by Ruths).

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In this opinion article, Brazilian journalist Raphael Tsavkko Garcia argues that the Brazilian government is going too far in its attempts to curtail fake news.

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The bill also includes apparent safety measures that I consider Trojan horses because they would allow the government to surveil users. For example, it stipulates that social-media platforms must keep records of messages that are forwarded by at least five users to more than 1,000 users within 15 days. The problem here is that the data of any user who forwards such a message will be stored, even if that user didn't intend to misinform.

Another problem is that the bill risks turning Brazil into an island with its own rules that "freeze" technology. For example, it creates a standard based on WhatsApp for phone applications, forcing other developers to adapt to WhatsApp's model for limiting how messages may be forwarded or how many participants can join groups.

Perhaps the worst thing about the bill, though, is that it reverses one of the greatest advances brought about by the Marco Civil. According to that law, platforms are not responsible for content posted by users and must remove such content only if a court order specifies what crime or illegal act was committed. In contrast, the new bill makes social platforms responsible for everything published on them. This will lead them to aggressively remove content that might displease the government, and they will police users for improper posts.

I do think companies like YouTube, Facebook (and WhatsApp), and Twitter should recognize their responsibility for material published on their platforms and adopt clearer rules against disinformation. However, this bill would not stop the spread of disinformation. Instead, it would give tech companies a powerful incentive to limit Brazilians' freedom of speech at a time of political unrest.

Various organizations have already tried to reduce the scope of the new law, and some worrying provisions, though none mentioned here, have been removed. But the revised bill is still deeply problematic.

A better approach would be to investigate those who finance fake-news networks and hold them accountable, using legislation that already exists. Social-networking platforms should also change their metrics and design their algorithms to stop rewarding the spread of fringe content and to flag what is clearly false.

No matter how many fake accounts and bots there are, though, fake news tends to spread through real people, as when Donald Trump falsely claimed on Facebook that children are "almost immune" to covid-19, or when Bolsonaro touts the scientifically unproven benefits of chloroquine. That's why internet literacy is fundamental to any well-informed society. Teaching people how to identify what is false, providing tools to help users verify content, and offering ways to report false content should all be part of Brazil's solution.

Brazil's Civil Rights Framework was society's response to similar attempts by the government to censor the internet. In many respects, this new bill seems to seek not to combat fake news but, rather, to control users. Restricting civil liberties and freedom of expression is not an acceptable solution. It's impossible to combat this problem in a hurry-or by the force of law alone.

Raphael Tsavkko Garcia is a Brazilian journalist who holds a PhD in human rights from the University of Deusto in Spain.

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Brazil's "fake news" bill won't solve its misinformation problem

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Brazil is grappling with a crisis of misinformation. To solve it, the country should be investing in education and holding the financiers of fake-news networks accountable. Instead, Brazil's National Congress is considering legislation that would violate the privacy and freedom of expression of the country's 137 million internet users.

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The NY Post author Miranda Devine writes that she believes new Oscar guidelines are Orwellian (read just the first two sections).

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There go the Oscars.

Forget merit, now filmmakers will have to subject their art to Orwellian tests of identitarian purity if it is to be eligible for a Best Picture award.

In the latest act of craven capitulation to the BLM-Antifa mob, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decreed Tuesday that no movie can win the top award unless it satisfies a set of genetically and sexually diverse quotas.

For example, lead actors must be from an "underrepresented racial or ethnic group . . . Asian, Latinx, Black, Native American, Middle Eastern, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander."

At least 30 percent of the rest of the cast otherwise must be chosen from at least two of the following victim identities: women, underrepresented racial or ethnic group, "LGBTQ+" and the disabled.

Or the Academy gets to dictate the content of the movie so that the "main storyline, theme or narrative of the film" must satisfy the same intersectionality requirements on gender, race, sexuality and disability.

And that is just Standard A, one of four labyrinthine prescriptions for creating Academy-sanctioned art.

They all read like satire. You have to pinch yourself to make sure you're not having some dystopian dream.

Even to be considered for a Best Picture Oscar, a movie must satisfy two of the four required standards.

Standard B demands "at least two" creative leadership positions, such as director, producer, writer or cinematographer, must come from a designated victim-identity category, with at least one from a favored racial or ethnic group. Otherwise, at least 30 percent of the film crew must satisfy the same politically correct criteria.

Standard C requires "substantive" paid internships and apprenticeships in most departments solely for people from designated victim categories.

Standard D reaches its tentacles into marketing, publicity and distribution that also are required to be genetically and sexually diverse.

White, heterosexual cis-gendered (as in, haven't changed sex) males need not apply. Or, at least, not without the filmmaker paying hefty indulgences to the Church of Woke.

This is enforced self-censorship, as destructive of creativity and free thought as the Stalinist dictates of any communist dictatorship.

It's not surprising that it comes from industry insiders who mandated "unconscious bias" anti-racist training in June for all Academy governors and staff, a mass indoctrination that would rot even the most independent mind.

The press release summarizing the Academy's new strictures, to take effect beginning in 2024, required 1,000 words to explain. Not one word about artistic quality or, God forbid, ideological diversity.

Imagine layering these tyrannical dictates atop the already wickedly challenging task of finding and financing a worthwhile project that will find a sufficiently large audience to make a profit.

Moviemaking is fickle in the best of times. During the pandemic, revenues have collapsed and the logistics of getting back up and running are daunting. Now Hollywood is volunteering to shoot itself in the foot while it's on its knees.

Tellingly, there has been little complaint about the Academy edict from the embattled community of film artists who can't afford to be blacklisted if they object.

"Cheers" star Kirstie Alley was one of the few brave enough to tell the truth, tweeting that the new rules were "dictatorial [and] anti-artist."

"Can you imagine telling Picasso what had to be in his f-king paintings. You people have lost your minds. Control artists, control individual thought . . .

"OSCAR ORWELL"!

Of course, she immediately was labeled "racist" and caught so much abuse that she deleted the tweet and mouthed the required platitudes about "diversity inclusion & tolerance."

Artists are supposed to be subversive, not fall into line with a prescribed utopian fantasy dreamed up under pressure to appease radicals such as the Marxist, anti-nuclear family, Black Lives Matter organization that has been terrorizing the nation for more than three months.

BLM co-founder and self-described "trained Marxist" Patrisse Cullors last month demanded that Hollywood go on strike to in support of her anti-police agenda: "It's time for talent, writers, executives, the guild and SAG to show up for Black lives."

The Academy, Hollywood's prime mechanism for social conformity, recognized the threat. But appeasement never works. All that happens is the demands become more extreme. Just wait for the next round of "guidelines." How much pain can you take?

According to the "Get Woke, Go Broke" thesis, the movies that emerge from this new system will be stultifying awful and tank at the box office.

How many award-winning movies of the past would not pass muster: "1917," "The Godfather," "Casablanca," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Unforgiven," "Schindler's List," "Braveheart," "Gladiator," "American Sniper," "The Departed," "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," "The Sound of Music" . . . you name it. Definitely not "Gone With The Wind." We know that already.

Movies are America's primary cultural product, colonizing minds around the world for almost a century. Corrosive agitprop won't cut it.

In any case, no one takes Hollywood's moral posturing seriously, when it has sold its soul to the Chinese Communist Party, the most repressively racist regime on the planet.

What was with Disney's closing credits for Mulan last week, with its "special thanks" to a "public security bureau" in Xinjiang, where 1 million Uighurs are in concentration camps?

Really? As professor Jordan Peterson used to say, clean up your own room first.

An irrational 'Rage' at Don

The Washington Post has selectively weaponized Bob Woodward's new book, "Rage," against the president, to blame him for the pandemic, along Joe Biden-campaign attack lines.

The charge is that Trump told Woodward that he knew in early February, before the first American coronavirus death, that the disease was dangerous, but decided to "play it down." Cue the White House press corps demanding to know why Trump "lied" to the American people by saying the virus was "under control."

Trump's response is reasonable.

"The last thing you want to do is create panic in the country," he told reporters yesterday. "A terrible situation [was] foisted on us . . .The last thing we can show is panic or excitement or fear. We had to take care of the situation."

He was taking action at the time. Against the protests of the World Health Organization, and the advice of White House experts, he issued the crucial order Jan. 31 to close the border to "a very heavily infected China," and place US citizens returning from Hubei province into mandatory quarantine.

Biden accused Trump of "xenophobia."

It's easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback, but if Democrats insist on politicizing the pandemic, two can play that game.

For instance, instead of closing down the subway, Bill DeBlasio in March was still urging people to come into the city. "For the vast majority of New Yorkers, life is going on pretty normally right now," he said March 10, the day of the first confirmed coronavirus death. "We want to encourage that."

Nancy Pelosi did the same in San Francisco's Chinatown on Feb. 24, urging people to "Come . . . everything is fine here." It was performance art to spite Trump and portray Trump as a racist for the travel ban and use of the term "Chinese virus."

Gov. Cuomo was the worst. "Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers . . . we don't even think it's going to be as bad as it was in other countries," he said March 2.

Three weeks later, he issued his callous directive to force nursing homes to admit COVID-infected patients, resulting in the death of thousands. New York has the highest COVID death toll in America - more than 33,000 - as a result.

Now "granny killer" Cuomo is trying to blame Trump. But no one buys it.

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Oscars' Orwellian diversity quota throws out merit: Devine

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There go the Oscars. Forget merit, now filmmakers will have to subject their art to Orwellian tests of identitarian purity if it is to be eligible for a Best Picture award.

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University of Washington researchers were able to draw on public video footage of Barack Obama to create extremely convincing video fakes.

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Fake Obama created using AI video tool - BBC News

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14 Article: Russian Agency Created a Fake News Site in 2016

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14 Article: Russian Agency Created a Fake News Site in 2016

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The Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 US election created a fake leftwing news publication, staffed it with fake editors with AI-generated photos and hired real freelance reporters as part of a fresh influence operation detected and removed by Facebook, the company said on Tuesday.

The latest operation by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) was still in its early stages when it was detected thanks to a tip from the FBI, according to Facebook's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher. The network had 13 accounts and two pages, with about 14,000 total followers.

The Facebook accounts and pages were designed to bolster PeaceData.net, an English- and Arabic-language website that claims to be a "global news organization", but whose editorial staff are fictitious. Headshots of PeaceData's "staff" were created using Generative Adversarial Networks, a type of AI that can produce lifelike images of faces, according to Graphika, a social media analysis firm that produced a report on the IRA operation.

"They put substantial effort into creating elaborate fictitious personas, trying to make fake accounts look as real as possible," Gleicher said.

Many of the characters had profiles on Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter said on Tuesday that it had suspended five accounts associated with PeaceData for "platform manipulation that we can reliably attribute to Russian state actors". The company said tweets from the accounts were "low quality" and "spammy", and that it would block links to content from PeaceData. LinkedIn did not immediately respond to a query.
Praise for alleged Kenosha shooter proliferates on Facebook despite supposed ban
Much of PeaceData's content was copied from other websites, though some was produced by unwitting freelance reporters. Advertisements on Upwork and Guru.com offered a flat rate of $75 to entry-level writers. Major topics for the site included armed conflict, human rights abuses (especially by the US and UK), corruption, and the environment, as well as WikiLeaks, the coronavirus pandemic and the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory.

Four freelance journalists who wrote for PeaceData told the Guardian that they had been approached by one of PeaceData's "editors" on Twitter, LinkedIn or by email with an offer to write for the site. Two were early-career writers who had recently been laid off and were eager to establish themselves; two were more experienced writers. The Guardian agreed to let them speak anonymously because they were concerned for their careers.

The writers only learned of the deception from news reports or reporters' inquiries. One of the experienced journalists said that PeaceData had paid $250 up front, which was unusual, then "ghosted" her after publishing one piece. "I didn't imagine a scam would have paid me up front like that," she said.

Another writer said he was approached via direct message on Twitter and offered $200-$250 a piece, more than he was usually paid for writing.

"I was just trying to get more bylines and get paid to do what I want to do," he said. "I've interacted with editors who do far less than what they were doing, and they paid faster than some publications ... I'm a freelance writer - I'm used to being taken advantage of."

PeaceData's coverage of the US portrayed the country as "war-mongering and law-breaking abroad while being racked by racism, Covid-19, and cutthroat capitalism at home", according to the report. The outlet was negative toward Donald Trump, but Graphika found that its treatment of his Democratic rival Joe Biden and vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris was "noteworthy for its hostile tone".

The US-focused content of PeaceData appeared designed to "build a leftwing audience and steer it away from Biden's campaign", according to the Graphika analysis. UK-focused content similarly appeared to appeal to leftwing audiences with attacks on the Labour party leader, Keir Starmer, for being too centrist.

The operation targeted supporters of Bernie Sanders and democratic socialists in the US and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK by having one of the fake accounts, the fictitious "Alex Lacusta", post links to PeaceData articles in affiliated Facebook groups.

The IRA also used "unwitting users" to attempt to obtain authorization from Facebook to run political ads in the US, the company said. Facebook implemented the authorization process for political advertisers after the 2016 election, when the IRA was able to spend about $100,000 - some of it in rubles - on ads that targeted US voters with divisive messaging.

An unsigned statement posted on PeaceData's website said allegations the site was "a Russian propaganda tool" were "an ugly lie".

Both Facebook and Graphika concluded that the operation had been detected and taken down before causing significant damage.

"It follows a steady pattern where particularly Russian actors have gotten better at hiding who they are, but their impact is smaller and smaller and they are getting caught earlier," Gleicher said. "These actors are caught between a rock and hard place: run a large network that gets caught quickly or run a small network that has limited reach."

"The operation's greatest success - to the extent that it had any - lay in its ability to co-opt unwitting authors to write its content," the Graphika analysis concludes. "The IRA's 13 accounts managed to deceive that pinpoint audience; they do not appear to have reached a substantially larger one."

Twitter appealed to "governments around the world" to stop attempting to deceive users through similar operations.

"Regardless of the low-level impact in this case, governments around the world must stop these practices," the company said in a tweeted statement. "They're antidemocratic. Attempts to manipulate our service to undermine democracy - by both foreign and domestic actors - will be met with strict enforcement of our policies."
Agencies contributed reporting Topics

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Russian agency created fake leftwing news outlet with fictional editors, Facebook says

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The Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 US election created a fake leftwing news publication, staffed it with fake editors with AI-generated photos and hired real freelance reporters as part of a fresh influence operation detected and removed by Facebook, the company said on Tuesday.

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Our ability to create deceptive technology has greatly evolved since George Orwell wrote "1984" in 1949. Watch Bill Hader's face very closely in this video clip, as it has been altered almost seamlessly.

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Bill Hader channels Tom Cruise [DeepFake]

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This website was created by software engineer Phillip Wang of Uber. An algorithm draws on an enormous dataset of real images to create these fake images of imaginary people.

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'Hundreds dead' because of Covid-19 misinformation

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A study says at least 800 people may have died globally because of coronavirus-related misinformation.