#(misinformation)

[aqlstar]

So I’m by no means an expert in military law, but I know that if you simultaneously claim that Israel is violating the principal of proportionality, and that Israel is committing war crimes because there have been civilian deaths in Gaza and Lebanon, you are out here showing your ass.

Intrinsic to the concept of proportionality in warfare is the idea that every legitimate military target comes with a proportional number of collateral civilian deaths that is legally acceptable.

If you understand the concept of proportionality, you understand that knowingly killing civilians in a military operation is not per se a war crime.

[lazyturtlehottub]

i'm trying to find out if there's any truth to the Lou Ferrigno Jr., is a qanon and trump supporter.

a google search of "Lou Ferrigno Jr. qanon" turns up two pages of information that predominantly cross qanon out and puts up two or three links to Tumblr and Twitter posts that make this claim

i don't have Twitter so i can't see the alleged Likes LFJ has given right-wing tweets but if anyone has screenshots to provide evidence, drop it in my inbox

all i've really been able to find is this (and i'm not providing the handle because there's no need to put a name to it)

and if the only evidence is from Sam on Twitter then i have to question the authenticity of the claims about Lou because of the supposed source

if there is no direct evidence about what is being claimed then it should be noted that spreading misinformation (although an argument can be made this is disinformation) contributes to a deeply toxic environemnt

you're allowed not to like an actor but you're not allowed to spread lies about them to justify that dislike

[proshipper-plaza]

I’ve finally gathered my thoughts together.

This is my experience with antis.

For starters, I’ve been a huge Pokemon fan ever since I was a child and my first game was Pokemon Blue. I remembered watching the anime back when it was good imo

As the years passed, I completely dropped the anime entirely because the same duo of Ash and Pikachu annoyed me to no end, and I wanted a new protagonist. But the games I loved and played every one up to the ninth generation.

Anyway, when Pokemon Legends Arceus came out, I was enthralled— even though the game’s story has its faults, I still greatly enjoyed the experience over all.

One of the characters that stood out to me was Volo. I love him so much and decided to create my own AU for him as well as roleplay as him.

Now, I have a tendency to ship the MC with a popular character if they’re interesting enough to me, so obviously I was going to ship Akari ( who’s canonically fifteen) with him. I didn’t mind the age gap, because I enjoy the taboo nature of it.

(My first ever mlm ship was Pitch Black/Jack Frost from Rise of the Guardians. Overall, I do in fact ship adult/adult, so I’m not totally obsessed with adult x minor pairings, but I have no issue with them.)

Getting back on track, I decided to friend on Volo once I created the account on the roleplay site and there was this RPer who roleplayed as Koko, a character from one of the Pokemon movies, who’s thirteen years old. They have a habit of portraying young characters in an unsavory light. ( oh noes, the horror, antis amirite.) this was told to me by someone who was formerly from a toxic group. Let’s call her R.

So the breaking point was when it was made public and they were openly discussing dildos and whatnot in character with my version of Volo, so naturally it set off a huge stink bomb.

Koko made a couple friends uncomfortable and it just snowballed from there. At the time, R got fed up and admittedly ripped Koko a new asshole for even trying to integrate that kind of topic on their clearly underaged character. And since Koko said my name...I was ultimately assumed to have been engaging in something nefarious.

I have to put my foot down at someone who’s a writer/Rper being attacked for writing about underaged characters engaging in activities clearly unsuited for that age group. People act as if they have feelings and are alive, for goodness sake. They’re fictional, and it’s really no one’s business what anyone RPs/writes about.

Anyway, Koko got harassed off the site, and I was upset, but of course I didn’t want to say anything because people would look at me funny if I came to their defense.

So then, an Akari RPer shows up and I’m happy because hey, I can ship Volokari now. Our more, ahem, lewd roleplays were in private messages, but we kissed IC publicly and were affectionate with each other. Now this site’s layout is set up where whatever you post can be viewed by everyone, and I made the popular role players in the Pokémon verse uncomfortable, apparently. But I didn’t think anything of it, even when the Akari RPer was scared off.

One day I’m feeling good, and decide to friend a Dialga RP account, and then log off to go watch a movie online. When I return, and I wish I had the screenshots, but my original Discord got hacked, the writer had sent me a nasty message in which she called me a pedophile and all this other stuff as well as a rat.

I remember being stunned, then crying a lot because I didn’t know what I could do.

I tried so hard to defend myself, but my words didn’t have the effect I wanted. I felt hurt and confused and angry.

So after being harassed more by another user who masqueraded as someone normal, only to say they’d “hunt down every account I made in every verse and expose me for the pedo I am”, as well as a reply to my OOC post where I said, “I’m mentally drained”, and this other user said, “Good. Pedos don’t deserve rest.”

I was told I must be a freak in day to day life because I “portrayed an adult x minor ship in a healthy light.”

After removing all the pictures I uploaded and making my profile blank with a long message as to why I was inactive, I left. Couldn’t take it. Second time I tried to come back? I was friended by a Mewtwo who proceeded to greet me with, “I thought we established pedophiles weren’t allowed in this verse.” And I replied with, “I thought we established I wasn’t one?”

They responded that in characters interactions are a sign that I what I desire in roleplay, is what I desire in reality.

I replied with something along the lines of, in character interactions will always be baseless accusations.

Oooh, they didn’t like that at all. They called me a piece of shit for even saying that and how dare I make light of their trauma they went through when they were younger ( news flash, it’s not about YOUR TRAUMA, it’s about the ship dynamics. )

They ended up calling me a disease to humanity and that their opinion of me would never change. They blocked me.

So once again, I deleted, and my third and final attempt to come back unsurprisingly ended in failure.

This clique was warning people new to the verse to block/report me.

I’m not confused.

I’m not mentally ill.

I don’t need professional help.

I’m so sorry you all were lied to, and you believe their words at face value without asking for concrete evidence.

Why should I have to be treated with hostility and disdain simply over what I ship/how I chose to portray a character when there are actual predators who need to be exposed?

In closing

What I do is in fiction is no one’s business and I get it, the overwhelming majority is uncomfortable by underage ships, but the mature things to do are either ignore it, block, and move on.

It’s not reasonable to harass someone over fictional content and it’s very unreasonable to slander and water down the term pedophilia to something that it’s not, to the benefit of actual predators.

Don’t like me? Don’t like what I am? Then move on with your lives and never interact with my content.

So go ahead, waste your time on your little moral holier than art thou moral high grounds, I guess.

Nowadays, I’m in other verses and am keeping to myself just like what I did before. All in all this entire situation sucks and I strongly wish it never occurred in the first place. I wish people would mind their own business and leave me alone.

Thank you for reading. If you want my discord so we can talk more, ask.

[mandageban]

We are in an era of time where the flow of information is so fucked that we can never tell what's fucking real

It's kinda sad, but also reeeaaaalllly funny.

[wiki-but-made-them-up]

[curlicuecal]

playing science telephone

Hi folks. Let's play a fun game today called "unravelling bad science communication back to its source."

Journey with me.

Saw a comment going around on a tumblr thread that "sometimes the life expectancy of autism is cited in the 30s"

That number seemed..... strange. The commenter DID go on to say that that was "situational on people being awful and not… anything autism actually does", but you know what? Still a strange number. I feel compelled to fact check.

Quick Google "autism life expectancy" pulls up quite a few websites bandying around the number 39. Which is ~technically~ within the 30s, but already higher than the tumblr factoid would suggest. But, guess what. This number still sounds strange to me.

Most of the websites presenting this factoid present themselves as official autism resources and organizations (for parents, etc), and most of them vaguely wave towards "studies."

Ex: "Above And Beyond Therapy" has a whole article on "Does Autism Affect Life Expectancy" and states:

The link implies that it will take you to the "research studies" being referenced, but it in fact takes you to another random autism resource group called.... Songbird Care?

And on that website we find the factoid again:

Ooh, look. Now they've added the word "some". The average lifespan for SOME autistic people. Which the next group erased from the fact. The message shifts further.

And we have slightly more information about the study! (Which has also shifted from "studies" to a singular "study"). And we have another link!

Wonderfully, this link actually takes us to the actual peer-reviewed 2020 study being discussed. [x]

And here, just by reading the abstract, we find the most important information of all.

This study followed a cohort of adolescent and adult autistic people across a 20 year time period. Within that time period, 6.4% of the cohort died. Within that 6.4%, the average age of death was 39 years.

So this number is VERY MUCH not the average age of death for autistic people, or even the average age of death for the cohort of autistic people in that study. It is the average age of death IF you died young and within the 20 year period of the study (n=26), and also we don't even know the average starting age of participants without digging into earlier papers, except that it was 10 or older. (If you're curious, the researchers in the study suggested reduced self-sufficiency to be among the biggest risk factors for the early mortality group.)

But the number in the study has been removed from it's context, gradually modified and spread around the web, and modified some more, until it is pretty much a nonsense number that everyone is citing from everyone else.

There ARE two other numbers that pop up semi-frequently:

One cites the life expectancy at 58. I will leave finding the context for that number as an exercise for the audience, since none of the places I saw it gave a direct citation for where they were getting it.

And then, probably the best and most relevant number floating around out there (and the least frequently cited) draws from a 2023 study of over 17,000 UK people with an autism diagnosis, across 30 years. [x] This study estimated life expectancies between 70 and 77 years, varying with sex and presence/absence of a learning disability. (As compared to the UK 80-83 average for the population as a whole.)

This is a set of numbers that makes way more sense and is backed by way better data, but isn't quite as snappy a soundbite to pass around the internet. I'm gonna pass it around anyway, because I feel bad about how many scared internet people I stumbled across while doing this search.

People on quora like "I'm autistic, can I live past 38"-- honey, YES. omg.

---

tl;dr, when someone gives you a number out of context, consider that the context is probably important

also, make an amateur fact checker's life easier and CITE YOUR SOURCES

[auxryn]

I would like to add that the appalling state of our infosphere is not an accident. Various bad actors, particularly right-wing figures like Steve Bannon, have conspired to "flood the zone with shit."

The goal is less to convince people and more to overwhelm people with confusing and contradictory information.

Distrust of media and inability or unwillingness to discern reality are the goal.

I am becoming aware of the effect a lack of trust in the media has had on people, paired with a dearth of research skills.

[gizmotemusic]

You know how the word "feline" refers to cats, and "canine" refers to dogs? There are a whole bunch more animal adjectives, and here are some of them:

equine -> horses

bovine -> cows

murine -> mice/rats

porcupine -> porcupines

wolverine -> wolves

marine -> marmosets

saline -> salmonella

cosine -> cosmonauts

citrine -> citrus

combine -> combs

famine -> your fam

bromine -> your bros

palpatine -> your pals

alpine -> alps

christine -> christ

asinine -> asses

machine -> the speed of sound

landmine -> explosions

migraine -> migrants

trampoline -> tramps

dopamine -> dopes

medicine -> the Medici family

praline -> prey

masculine -> mascara

feminine -> femurs

latrine -> latissimus dorsi

fettuccine -> fetuses

poutine -> sadness

turbine -> turbans

engine -> england

supine -> soup

valentine -> valence electrons

Follow for more nature facts!

[rhinozzryan]

PSA: the guardian is not working on a hit piece on diy hrt, and claims they are are misinformation (see update)

UPDATE: the guardian has published an article referenced by the original 4chan post, which was legitimate. the email continues to be fake. the article appears not to have contacted trans people or under-18s. and the message remains the same: don't talk to journalists about your personal information or history. you can see a recap and response to this publishing here. tl;dr: claims that the guardian's Susanna Rustin is writing a piece on diy hrt and contacting trans people for comment is false.

on the 18th, this post appeared on 4chan's /lgbt/ (slurs in thread: link). a screenshot was posted to reddit, then to tumblr. you've probably seen it:

today, the 23rd, another screenshot popped up on various discord servers, then was reposted variously to twitter. it shows a supposed email from guardian journalist and notorious TERF Susanna Rustin, claiming as the original 4chan post does.

it's now been shared around, and it's with good intentions. the message is useful: don't share your personal information or medical data with journalists, especially ones that happen to be TERFs.

but the post does this through misinformation and fearmongering. i'm still waiting on my response by email from Rustin, but she's reiterated twice (once, twice) that she did not write the email and is not working on such a story. on the 19th, i talked to other guardian newsroom journalists, who said they also did not know of a story's existence.

the moral of the story: this is misinformation, and it's dangerous. it spreads a fine message here, but it does it through spreading anxiety and terror.

you can follow along with this post on my parallel thread on twitter. also calling on @wakewithgiggli to delete their original post!

[isitcorrect]

Something unremittingly bleak about a goddamn country starting "crisis actor" conspiracy theories to deny their crimes. A term invented to deny the deaths of children at Sandy Hook in 2012 is now used to deny the deaths of children in Gaza in 2023.

As the community note says, this isn't a crisis actor. This is a guy who posts on Instagram. A influencer who posts videos online of breaking events...is seen at a lot of breaking events. To Israel, this is a sign of a conspiracy. In fact, some of those images aren't even him, or aren't even related to Palestine at all; one image included in other posts targeting Saleh Aljafarawi is a Halloween costume from Thailand. That article says "pro-Israeli accounts" tweeted this, but it's the literal, official Twitter account of Israel posting this shit, next to their comedy sketches that somehow make trans people the punchline bc fascists only have one joke the whole world wide I guess

Like. It's not new for a government to deny the reality of its atrocities. It is new for that government to outright use a conspiracy theory term devised by Alex fucking Jones, or to, when called on doing so, defend it as a "meme" (also bizarre to see hardcore Zionists use a term crafted for especially antisemitic conspiracy theories). Everything rancid about the world in 2023 congealed into a single tweet, right here

[nando161mando]

Healthcare pls

[tungledotedu]

uh why the fuck would you say this

this post has 3000 notes and they get worse.

el-shab-hussein has already explained why he no longer shares how he vets individual fundraisers. scammers will use the information to be less obvious, making it more difficult to spot them.

and senatortedcruz's post has no actual proof of a widespread scam. that is a serious accusation to make, yet people are reblogging it and accepting it as true with no evidence. i won't deny that there are individual grifters on tumblr, but there are accounts like @/neechees, kyra45 and anonthescambuster that will help you avoid them. hussein even has a #scam alert tag for this purpose.

it's racist to spread misinformation about a supposed large-scale deception posing as fundraisers, not to mention dangerous because this makes it less likely for gazans to get what they need to survive and escape relentless airstrikes. we've already seen the consequences of this bias. some of these people are all too happy to be cops and harass or report gazans thinking they're bots or 'spamming' inboxes.

almost nobody on that post is encouraging others to donate to organisations or other vetted lists like those by operation olive branch, which has a faq sheet that explains how they verify fundraisers. i suspect this is an attempt to discourage people from helping palestinians altogether.

gazans are making fundraisers because they have no other choice. many of them cannot work and earn money as their workplaces have been destroyed. some have been disabled by injuries thanks to the iof's targeting of civilians. the fault is on israel for besieging them and on the egyptian government for exploiting their need to evacuate.

they're doing this for the same reason they have been posting photographs and videos of genocide so that people will pay attention to their suffering, so the world will not forget. is it such a leap in logic to understand they will also use social media to start fundraisers? do you just expect them to sit there and die in silence? so you can ignore them and your countries can keep arming israel as it commits atrocities?

[zalein]

As a gentle heads up, Snopes rates that story as Unfounded:

[cannibalchicken]