#i know there are some things with the main actor being like a qanon conspiracy guy but that's not the movie itself to my understanding

[cogentranting]

.

[rosetintmyworld84]

Criminal Minds Evolution

Honestly the best part about a streaming only sequel series is the cast can say fuck now, and that makes up for a lot. The main continuous mystery of Elias Voit was definitely helped by Zach Gilford being an amazing and charismatic actor. I am tentatively excited for the season long mystery of the new season, the possibility of a conspiracy theory inspiring multiple serial killers, like Qanon and incels do with mass shooters could be very interesting (and I hope it's more this than a single serial killer).

Personally, I do not think that they would kill Will off, or he and JJ would get divorced. Josh Stewart won't be in it anymore (and they are being mum whether it's his decision or the showrunners), because Will has been in it since season 2. I can't see him being removed off screen, that's too cowardly a thing to do. Instead I think JJs family just won't be a focus this season. It was big focus last season, and maybe they wanted to give that time to another team member's family and personal life. Also the kids are played by AJ Cooks actual children, and it's possible they wanted a break/didn't want to anymore. Basically I would be very disappointed if the show removes Will offscreen this season, because his character deserves more respect than that.

But seriously, I don't know what they're doing if they don't make Garvez fully canon. We may not know Penelope's true feelings about Luke, but Adam Rodriguez has played that character as being down BAD for Garcia since he met her. It's not remotely subtle. Some of it is for sure the dialogue written by the writers, but there is no bigger Garvez shipper than Adam Rodriguez.

[msclaritea]

"An insurrection of upper-middle class white people | Will Bunch Newsletter

They flew from their affluent suburbs to the U.S. Capitol, ready to die for the cause of white privilege

The stunning pro-President-Trump insurrection that occurred at the U.S. Capitol less than a week ago must have been a carnival for one’s olfactory bulb, as the stinging aroma of tear gas blended with the pungent odors of the occasional joint, or maybe the piles of dung that some of the cruder mob members left in the hallways once graced by icons like Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and LBJ. The only thing that wasn’t in the air on Wednesday was the smell of what so many have falsely tied to Trump’s authoritarian movement — any whiff of “economic anxiety.”

When fascism finally came to America in the form of an attempted coup to halt our presidential election, it came from lush-green suburbs all across this land, flying business class on Delta or United and staying in four-star hotels with three-martini lobby bars — the better to keep warm after a long day of taking selfies with friendly cops or pummeling the unfriendly ones, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and generally standing athwart democracy yelling “Halt!”

Long ridiculed as deplorables rising up from the muck of Rust Belt trailer parks, the Donald Trump counter-revolution has finally revealed itself as an upper-middle-class affair.

What else can one think after seeing the photo of Jenna Ryan, real-estate broker from the upscale Dallas exurb of Frisco (also a “conservative” radio talker) posing in front of the private jet that whisked her to the Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally and subsequent storming of the Capitol, where she smiled in front of a window broken by other rioters and tweeted that “if the news doesn’t stop lying about us we’re going to come after their studios next”?

Maybe Ryan is an extreme example, but her compatriots in rushing Capitol Hill on Wednesday included a father of three from another upscale Dallas suburb named Larry Rendall Brock Jr., whose 1989 degree in international relations from the Air Force Academy apparently never taught him that it’s a bad idea to be photographed leaving House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in a combat helmet, tactical gear, and holding zip-tie handcuffs.

One might also expect a criminal defense lawyer like McCall Calhoun of Americus, Ga., to know that it’s surely illegal to surge past a line of cops into the U.S. Capitol, even if, as you later told a newspaper, you believed your fellow rioters wer people who “don’t want to lose their democratic republic.” Or that it’s bad form to do this after tweeting about a looming civil war or the potential hanging of President-elect Joe Biden.

Political junkies like us remember 2000′s “Brooks Brothers riot” of well-heeled GOP activists and lobbyists that successfully halted Florida vote recounting in populous Dade County. Apparently what we witnessed Wednesday was the “Pottery Barn insurrection.” As key figures who invaded the Capitol have been steadily identified over the last five or six days, it’s remarkable how many alleged lawbreakers emerged from upscale zip codes.

The stay-at-home dad husband of a physician. The son of an elected judge in Brooklyn. The owners of numerous small businesses, as well as assorted state legislators. The New York Times spent four years looking for Trump voters in Ohio diners, but apparently that’s not where they would have found failed actor Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. Jake Angeli, the infamous shirtless rioter with the painted face and horns, who reportedly hasn’t eaten since his arrest because there’s no organic food in jail.

Yes, many of the 74 million citizens who voted for the guy who then incited an attempted coup do fit the stereotype of struggling or laid-off blue-collar worker in a rusted-out rural community. But those folks aren’t the ones who can take a Wednesday off and fly hundreds of miles, let alone plunk down hundreds of dollars, to get to the nation’s hub. While the Capitol mob was bulked up with other Trumpists — including an alarming number of off-duty police officers, as well as some neo-Nazi or KKK types who’ve been around forever — it was the 401(k) crowd that formed the front line of America’s first real putsch.

If that surprises you, then you weren’t really paying attention. For the last four years, political scientists have been trying to wrap their brains around Trump’s shocking 2016 victory in the Electoral College while trying to tell us that the 45th president’s true base is a lot of things — but it’s not poor. In fact, polling guru Nate Silver noted during 2016′s primaries that the average Trump voter had a median household income of $72,000, which was both higher than the national average and also higher than the numbers that year for supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Interestingly, Silver and other analysts have found that Trump performs particularly well with voters with high incomes yet often without college diplomas (although he also does better with degree holders than he gets credit for). A researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, the political scientist Diana Mutz, found that Trump voters generally weren’t struggling economically yet did feel great anxiety about their status — whether the threat was the rise of a foreign power like China or the idea that America, and its government, was becoming increasingly nonwhite.

That explains a lot. It explains why the Republican Party, arguably in a long downward moral spiral, lost its mind when America elected its first Black president in Barack Obama. It explains why so many people with the luxuries of a laptop and free time (things that actual poor folks have in short supply) look for conspiracies like QAnon to explain a society that no longer makes sense for them, or why so much of the hatred on the right is expended not at the CEOs who outsourced American jobs but at the cap-and-gown-wearing eggheads like journalists or scientists they find intellectually arrogant.

The main reason that so many reasonably well-off folks tried to shut down American democracy wasn’t because they feared losing their paycheck, but because they feared losing their white privilege. Donald Trump had promised that “I alone can fix it” — that he’d protect them from a society where Black and brown essential workers could expect help from their government during a pandemic or ask the police to stop killing them, a world that where just being white no longer guaranteed the status they were promised as kids. They truly believed that Biden, Kamala Harris, and the 82 million were going to end their white power, and they saw Jan. 6 as their last chance to save it. The Capitol still stands, but the rest of us are going to be spending decades cleaning up their mess.

History lesson

Philadelphia Police carry a protester away from a July 4, 1966 anti-Vietnam War protest held at Independence Hall. A new study proves police are twice as likely to break up a left-wing demonstration than a right-wing one, like Wednesday's storming of the U.S. Capitol.

In the end, as the FBI and other agencies step up their investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection, there will likely be hundreds of arrests. But the now-under-fire Capitol Police arrested only 13 rioters while the attack was underway, and only a few dozen more were busted by cops for violating the 6 p.m. curfew. No one must have been more shocked by this than the survivors of the May 1971 anti-Vietnam War protests in Washington, one of the largest demonstrations in American history. In marked contrast to last week’s light police presence, the heavy-handed tactics from the administration of Richard Nixon included secretly canceling a national-park permit for the protests and then sending in a whopping 12,000 military troops to augment an already sizable police and National Guard presence. Over three days, an astonishing 12,614 people — many who were protesting peacefully and not violating any laws — were rounded up in the largest mass arrest in U.S. history. Authorities detained thousands at RFK Stadium because there was nowhere else to put them.

The shameful 1971 incident proved a point that seemed clear last Wednesday and has now been established with research: Police who are aggressive with leftist social-justice protesters treat right-wing disturbances with kid gloves. Last year’s Black Lives Matter protests as well as anti-lockdown rallies on the far right inspired the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project to dig deeper. It found police were twice as likely to break up the left-wing protests, and when they did disperse a gathering, cops used force against leftists more often (51% of the time) than against right-wingers (34%.) This unequal treatment under the law is one more way that American policing is broken."

[newstechreviews]

In November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released fake advertisements found on Facebook in the walk up to the 2016 election. As politicians on each side argued over whether the ads changed the election results, the heart of the revelation was way more disturbing. The Russian ads targeted the American public to deepen wounds on divisive issues and spread false information. Facebook said the posts were “ what we saw from these actors was an insidious attempt to drive people apart,” according to Colin Stretch, the general counsel for the company.

In 2020, less than one month before the election, America seems even more divided and deeply fractured after a turbulent year with a deadly pandemic, economic pain, and a chaotic presidency. With many Americans on lockdown, social media has been a vital form of communication — but one that is also driving dangerous conspiracies. From the false QAnon conspiracy, which promotes Trump as the final defense against a “deep state” cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elite who traffic, rape, and cannibalize children, to fake claims that COVID-19 is a hoax, the spread of disinformation on social media is deepening divisions that some fear could lead to a further rise in civil unrest in the coming weeks.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSigns showing various conspiracy theories at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Convoluted messaging from the White House on these fake theories doesn’t help. During the Oct.15 NBC Town Hall President Donald Trump denied knowing what QAnon was, and then quickly contradicted himself, saying, “What I do know it is they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard but I know nothing about it.”

To combat the spread of false information, on Oct. 15 YouTube announced “efforts to curb hate and harassment by removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify real-world violence.” Facebook also recently said they would ramp up their fight against disinformation, particularly QAnon, by removing pages and groups from the app, but it may not be effective—or it may be too late.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, an LA-based photographer originally from England, spent more than a year covering America political rallies and protests he mostly found on Facebook. He began to see the conspiracies manifest themselves through the believers caught in the fervor of misinformation that show the social media platform’s darkest side as a divided reality.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester with a Pizzagate and QAnon sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Speaking via Zoom, he recalls how it all began.

When did you start noticing conspiracies in the political landscape?

I always had an interest in documenting people with fringe beliefs; it used to be a lot more difficult to find. I started seeing more of it in the real world in 2019, and there’s been a huge explosion of conspiratorial thinking both online and off since COVID started.

We’ve always lived with conspiracies — like the moon landing was fake, or conspiracies around who killed JFK. I think they’ve gotten worse this year because: A, social media makes it easy for people with the same beliefs to connect more easily, and B, everybody is stuck at home, spending all their time on the internet, which makes it easy to fall down these rabbit holes.

It’s also something you see when the world is in turmoil, and things are unstable. People don’t know what they can trust. I think it’s a lot easier for people to cling on to something like QAnon, which is an easily understood—if imaginary—battle between good and evil, than the complicated reality of the world.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteAnti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

Can you tell me about the process of finding conspiracies in the social media landscape?

I’m in a lot of Facebook groups. That’s the only thing I use Facebook for these days. I’ve joined various QAnon, far-right, Three Percenter, and militia Facebook groups. The ‘groups’ tab on Facebook shows a curated newsfeed from the groups you’re in. I use that and Facebook’s events pages to keep up on real world happenings.

Many of the pictures here are from anti-lockdown rallies. But the boundaries between these things have become incredibly blurred. The event might be a Trump Rally, but you’re still going to see a huge anti-lockdown presence and QAnon signs.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protestor’s sign at a rally calling for the reopening of California from coronavirus lockdown measures in Los Angeles, May 24, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA QAnon shirt at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA anti 5G sign at a pro-Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Aug. 8, 2020.

Do you find it hard to question supporters about Trump?

It can be hard to find common ground with people at these events, because many of them refuse to admit Trump is at fault, no matter how trivial the issue is.

Which is by design. I don’t think Trump cares if he’s seen by people as a liar. He just wants to bring reality into question as much as possible because that’s the most convenient thing for him, ultimately.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtester at a Save Our Children rally in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Sept.r 5, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at an anti-lockdown protest in Downtown Los Angeles, July 13, 2020.

I have a family member who started posting “Save the Children” messages about children being trafficked. They believe this is the biggest story that the media is not reporting. As a reporter, I’m like, human trafficking is an important issue, but this is not the same. It’s hard to have a conversation and not seem uncaring.

Yes, it very difficult to have a critical conversation that’s about a campaign to stop child abuse, because you sound like your pro-child abuse. But the type of human trafficking they’re talking about isn’t really happening in this country. Human trafficking exists and is bad, but the reality is more complex and is often linked to abuse, survival sex work, and homelessness. It’s not what you see in Taken and Rambo 5.

Can you tell me what they say is happening?

They think millions of children are being snatched in grocery stores and parks and sold on the internet for people to sexually abuse or cannibalize. Some believe thousands of children are being kept in underground lairs under Central Park and LA’s Getty Center. But the data does not back that up.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

In your work on Instagram, I’m shocked by someone holding up a sign about Tom Hanks being a pedophile. When you publish that work, I fear the photographs could be removed from the original context. What’s the best way to present this work?

It’s difficult but I sort of think the rules have gone out of the window a little bit. In the past I’d maybe lean toward not wanting to amplify toxic views or give people more attention, but the ‘Tom Hanks is a pedophile’ thing is a huge narrative in the QAnon world, so there are potentially hundreds of thousands of people who think Tom Hanks is murdering children to cannibalize them or has been executed or replaced by a body double. I think it’s important to look at the specifics of what these people believe, rather than speaking generally about “the QAnon conspiracy theory,” because it shows how ridiculous these things are.

I think a lot of media ignores some of the more out-there sides of these conspiracies because they’re worried about amplifying it. Or it’s difficult to use traditional reporting methods to report on them. Like, if you were to approach Tom Hanks for comment on a story about people accusing him of being a cannibal pedophile, he’s probably not going to respond. And that might lend legitimacy to the theory.

I’m hoping the context and the way I take the photos makes it clear that I think many of these things are absurd. I wouldn’t be posting these conspiracies if I felt there was a chance people were seeing my photos and thinking these things were real. I’m, hopefully, not going to post a sign that has some made-up facts about human trafficking that might seem real if you just stumbled across the picture.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester stands on Tom Hanks’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you talk to and engage with the people you’re photographing?

Yes. I posted a video recently of a woman I interviewed on Tom Hanks’ star on the Walk of Fame, where she explained that she believes Tom Hanks is killing babies to extract a chemical called adrenochrome, which he uses to keep himself young, and that he’s escaped to Greece to avoid prosecution.

I empathize somewhat. It’s easy to understand how people end up falling for these conspiracies about powerful people if you have Jeffery Epstein and Harvey Weinstein operating in full view of many powerful people, doing a lot of really F-ked up things for years, and that’s true. Is it that much of a stretch to believe that Tom Hanks is killing babies?

What are the other conspiracies that you think are harmful right now?

I’m seeing a lot of anti-Antifa and anti-BLM stuff in the Facebook groups I’m in. “Antifa/BLM riots” are the biggest story on my Facebook right now. If these groups were your main source of information, you would think that the ’94 LA riots have spread across the country and that people are being executed by BLM in the middle of the street. It’s making people extremely scared of these protests, and I think you’re seeing that in the violence that they’re being met with.

These are huge groups that have tens of thousands of members where it’s just a constant feed of those kinds of conspiracies that are met uncritically. A lot of people trust these groups more than they trust mainstream media outlets.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you notice Facebook cracking down on this at all?

I think Facebook is mostly dealing with it from a PR perspective. They’ve removed some QAnon groups, but that’s had very little impact on my toxic feed of Facebook groups. The “Save Our Children” groups are still there, “Against Human Trafficking” is still there, which is essentially just QAnon-lite.

I don’t think they have any real interest in stamping out misinformation. That would require a huge investment from them. I don’t think you can use an algorithm to block this stuff. People will find a way around it.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA man with an anti-antifa sign at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020,

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteThe group Justice 4 Prince protesting outside the Grammy’s in Downtown Los Angeles, Jan. 26, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSave Our Children protesters walk past an Arby’s restaurant in Los Angeles, Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA child with a QAnon sign at an anti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

[phooll123]

New top story from Time: A Photographer’s Journey Through the Dangerous New Age of Conspiracies in America

In November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released fake advertisements found on Facebook in the walk up to the 2016 election. As politicians on each side argued over whether the ads changed the election results, the heart of the revelation was way more disturbing. The Russian ads targeted the American public to deepen wounds on divisive issues and spread false information. Facebook said the posts were “ what we saw from these actors was an insidious attempt to drive people apart,” according to Colin Stretch, the general counsel for the company.

In 2020, less than one month before the election, America seems even more divided and deeply fractured after a turbulent year with a deadly pandemic, economic pain, and a chaotic presidency. With many Americans on lockdown, social media has been a vital form of communication — but one that is also driving dangerous conspiracies. From the false QAnon conspiracy, which promotes Trump as the final defense against a “deep state” cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elite who traffic, rape, and cannibalize children, to fake claims that COVID-19 is a hoax, the spread of disinformation on social media is deepening divisions that some fear could lead to a further rise in civil unrest in the coming weeks.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSigns showing various conspiracy theories at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Convoluted messaging from the White House on these fake theories doesn’t help. During the Oct.15 NBC Town Hall President Donald Trump denied knowing what QAnon was, and then quickly contradicted himself, saying, “What I do know it is they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard but I know nothing about it.”

To combat the spread of false information, on Oct. 15 YouTube announced “efforts to curb hate and harassment by removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify real-world violence.” Facebook also recently said they would ramp up their fight against disinformation, particularly QAnon, by removing pages and groups from the app, but it may not be effective—or it may be too late.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, an LA-based photographer originally from England, spent more than a year covering America political rallies and protests he mostly found on Facebook. He began to see the conspiracies manifest themselves through the believers caught in the fervor of misinformation that show the social media platform’s darkest side as a divided reality.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester with a Pizzagate and QAnon sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Speaking via Zoom, he recalls how it all began.

When did you start noticing conspiracies in the political landscape?

I always had an interest in documenting people with fringe beliefs; it used to be a lot more difficult to find. I started seeing more of it in the real world in 2019, and there’s been a huge explosion of conspiratorial thinking both online and off since COVID started.

We’ve always lived with conspiracies — like the moon landing was fake, or conspiracies around who killed JFK. I think they’ve gotten worse this year because: A, social media makes it easy for people with the same beliefs to connect more easily, and B, everybody is stuck at home, spending all their time on the internet, which makes it easy to fall down these rabbit holes.

It’s also something you see when the world is in turmoil, and things are unstable. People don’t know what they can trust. I think it’s a lot easier for people to cling on to something like QAnon, which is an easily understood—if imaginary—battle between good and evil, than the complicated reality of the world.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteAnti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

Can you tell me about the process of finding conspiracies in the social media landscape?

I’m in a lot of Facebook groups. That’s the only thing I use Facebook for these days. I’ve joined various QAnon, far-right, Three Percenter, and militia Facebook groups. The ‘groups’ tab on Facebook shows a curated newsfeed from the groups you’re in. I use that and Facebook’s events pages to keep up on real world happenings.

Many of the pictures here are from anti-lockdown rallies. But the boundaries between these things have become incredibly blurred. The event might be a Trump Rally, but you’re still going to see a huge anti-lockdown presence and QAnon signs.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protestor’s sign at a rally calling for the reopening of California from coronavirus lockdown measures in Los Angeles, May 24, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA QAnon shirt at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA anti 5G sign at a pro-Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Aug. 8, 2020.

Do you find it hard to question supporters about Trump?

It can be hard to find common ground with people at these events, because many of them refuse to admit Trump is at fault, no matter how trivial the issue is.

Which is by design. I don’t think Trump cares if he’s seen by people as a liar. He just wants to bring reality into question as much as possible because that’s the most convenient thing for him, ultimately.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtester at a Save Our Children rally in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Sept.r 5, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at an anti-lockdown protest in Downtown Los Angeles, July 13, 2020.

I have a family member who started posting “Save the Children” messages about children being trafficked. They believe this is the biggest story that the media is not reporting. As a reporter, I’m like, human trafficking is an important issue, but this is not the same. It’s hard to have a conversation and not seem uncaring.

Yes, it very difficult to have a critical conversation that’s about a campaign to stop child abuse, because you sound like your pro-child abuse. But the type of human trafficking they’re talking about isn’t really happening in this country. Human trafficking exists and is bad, but the reality is more complex and is often linked to abuse, survival sex work, and homelessness. It’s not what you see in Taken and Rambo 5.

Can you tell me what they say is happening?

They think millions of children are being snatched in grocery stores and parks and sold on the internet for people to sexually abuse or cannibalize. Some believe thousands of children are being kept in underground lairs under Central Park and LA’s Getty Center. But the data does not back that up.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

In your work on Instagram, I’m shocked by someone holding up a sign about Tom Hanks being a pedophile. When you publish that work, I fear the photographs could be removed from the original context. What’s the best way to present this work?

It’s difficult but I sort of think the rules have gone out of the window a little bit. In the past I’d maybe lean toward not wanting to amplify toxic views or give people more attention, but the ‘Tom Hanks is a pedophile’ thing is a huge narrative in the QAnon world, so there are potentially hundreds of thousands of people who think Tom Hanks is murdering children to cannibalize them or has been executed or replaced by a body double. I think it’s important to look at the specifics of what these people believe, rather than speaking generally about “the QAnon conspiracy theory,” because it shows how ridiculous these things are.

I think a lot of media ignores some of the more out-there sides of these conspiracies because they’re worried about amplifying it. Or it’s difficult to use traditional reporting methods to report on them. Like, if you were to approach Tom Hanks for comment on a story about people accusing him of being a cannibal pedophile, he’s probably not going to respond. And that might lend legitimacy to the theory.

I’m hoping the context and the way I take the photos makes it clear that I think many of these things are absurd. I wouldn’t be posting these conspiracies if I felt there was a chance people were seeing my photos and thinking these things were real. I’m, hopefully, not going to post a sign that has some made-up facts about human trafficking that might seem real if you just stumbled across the picture.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester stands on Tom Hanks’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you talk to and engage with the people you’re photographing?

Yes. I posted a video recently of a woman I interviewed on Tom Hanks’ star on the Walk of Fame, where she explained that she believes Tom Hanks is killing babies to extract a chemical called adrenochrome, which he uses to keep himself young, and that he’s escaped to Greece to avoid prosecution.

I empathize somewhat. It’s easy to understand how people end up falling for these conspiracies about powerful people if you have Jeffery Epstein and Harvey Weinstein operating in full view of many powerful people, doing a lot of really F-ked up things for years, and that’s true. Is it that much of a stretch to believe that Tom Hanks is killing babies?

What are the other conspiracies that you think are harmful right now?

I’m seeing a lot of anti-Antifa and anti-BLM stuff in the Facebook groups I’m in. “Antifa/BLM riots” are the biggest story on my Facebook right now. If these groups were your main source of information, you would think that the ’94 LA riots have spread across the country and that people are being executed by BLM in the middle of the street. It’s making people extremely scared of these protests, and I think you’re seeing that in the violence that they’re being met with.

These are huge groups that have tens of thousands of members where it’s just a constant feed of those kinds of conspiracies that are met uncritically. A lot of people trust these groups more than they trust mainstream media outlets.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you notice Facebook cracking down on this at all?

I think Facebook is mostly dealing with it from a PR perspective. They’ve removed some QAnon groups, but that’s had very little impact on my toxic feed of Facebook groups. The “Save Our Children” groups are still there, “Against Human Trafficking” is still there, which is essentially just QAnon-lite.

I don’t think they have any real interest in stamping out misinformation. That would require a huge investment from them. I don’t think you can use an algorithm to block this stuff. People will find a way around it.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA man with an anti-antifa sign at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020,

[/diptyche]

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteThe group Justice 4 Prince protesting outside the Grammy’s in Downtown Los Angeles, Jan. 26, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSave Our Children protesters walk past an Arby’s restaurant in Los Angeles, Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA child with a QAnon sign at an anti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

  via Blogger https://ift.tt/355cvlw

[viralnewstime]

In November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released fake advertisements found on Facebook in the walk up to the 2016 election. As politicians on each side argued over whether the ads changed the election results, the heart of the revelation was way more disturbing. The Russian ads targeted the American public to deepen wounds on divisive issues and spread false information. Facebook said the posts were “ what we saw from these actors was an insidious attempt to drive people apart,” according to Colin Stretch, the general counsel for the company.

In 2020, less than one month before the election, America seems even more divided and deeply fractured after a turbulent year with a deadly pandemic, economic pain, and a chaotic presidency. With many Americans on lockdown, social media has been a vital form of communication — but one that is also driving dangerous conspiracies. From the false QAnon conspiracy, which promotes Trump as the final defense against a “deep state” cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elite who traffic, rape, and cannibalize children, to fake claims that COVID-19 is a hoax, the spread of disinformation on social media is deepening divisions that some fear could lead to a further rise in civil unrest in the coming weeks.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSigns showing various conspiracy theories at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Convoluted messaging from the White House on these fake theories doesn’t help. During the Oct.15 NBC Town Hall President Donald Trump denied knowing what QAnon was, and then quickly contradicted himself, saying, “What I do know it is they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard but I know nothing about it.”

To combat the spread of false information, on Oct. 15 YouTube announced “efforts to curb hate and harassment by removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify real-world violence.” Facebook also recently said they would ramp up their fight against disinformation, particularly QAnon, by removing pages and groups from the app, but it may not be effective—or it may be too late.

Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, an LA-based photographer originally from England, spent more than a year covering America political rallies and protests he mostly found on Facebook. He began to see the conspiracies manifest themselves through the believers caught in the fervor of misinformation that show the social media platform’s darkest side as a divided reality.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester with a Pizzagate and QAnon sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Speaking via Zoom, he recalls how it all began.

When did you start noticing conspiracies in the political landscape?

I always had an interest in documenting people with fringe beliefs; it used to be a lot more difficult to find. I started seeing more of it in the real world in 2019, and there’s been a huge explosion of conspiratorial thinking both online and off since COVID started.

We’ve always lived with conspiracies — like the moon landing was fake, or conspiracies around who killed JFK. I think they’ve gotten worse this year because: A, social media makes it easy for people with the same beliefs to connect more easily, and B, everybody is stuck at home, spending all their time on the internet, which makes it easy to fall down these rabbit holes.

It’s also something you see when the world is in turmoil, and things are unstable. People don’t know what they can trust. I think it’s a lot easier for people to cling on to something like QAnon, which is an easily understood—if imaginary—battle between good and evil, than the complicated reality of the world.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteAnti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.

Can you tell me about the process of finding conspiracies in the social media landscape?

I’m in a lot of Facebook groups. That’s the only thing I use Facebook for these days. I’ve joined various QAnon, far-right, Three Percenter, and militia Facebook groups. The ‘groups’ tab on Facebook shows a curated newsfeed from the groups you’re in. I use that and Facebook’s events pages to keep up on real world happenings.

Many of the pictures here are from anti-lockdown rallies. But the boundaries between these things have become incredibly blurred. The event might be a Trump Rally, but you’re still going to see a huge anti-lockdown presence and QAnon signs.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protestor’s sign at a rally calling for the reopening of California from coronavirus lockdown measures in Los Angeles, May 24, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA QAnon shirt at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA anti 5G sign at a pro-Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Aug. 8, 2020.

Do you find it hard to question supporters about Trump?

It can be hard to find common ground with people at these events, because many of them refuse to admit Trump is at fault, no matter how trivial the issue is.

Which is by design. I don’t think Trump cares if he’s seen by people as a liar. He just wants to bring reality into question as much as possible because that’s the most convenient thing for him, ultimately.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtester at a Save Our Children rally in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Sept.r 5, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at an anti-lockdown protest in Downtown Los Angeles, July 13, 2020.

I have a family member who started posting “Save the Children” messages about children being trafficked. They believe this is the biggest story that the media is not reporting. As a reporter, I’m like, human trafficking is an important issue, but this is not the same. It’s hard to have a conversation and not seem uncaring.

Yes, it very difficult to have a critical conversation that’s about a campaign to stop child abuse, because you sound like your pro-child abuse. But the type of human trafficking they’re talking about isn’t really happening in this country. Human trafficking exists and is bad, but the reality is more complex and is often linked to abuse, survival sex work, and homelessness. It’s not what you see in Taken and Rambo 5.

Can you tell me what they say is happening?

They think millions of children are being snatched in grocery stores and parks and sold on the internet for people to sexually abuse or cannibalize. Some believe thousands of children are being kept in underground lairs under Central Park and LA’s Getty Center. But the data does not back that up.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

In your work on Instagram, I’m shocked by someone holding up a sign about Tom Hanks being a pedophile. When you publish that work, I fear the photographs could be removed from the original context. What’s the best way to present this work?

It’s difficult but I sort of think the rules have gone out of the window a little bit. In the past I’d maybe lean toward not wanting to amplify toxic views or give people more attention, but the ‘Tom Hanks is a pedophile’ thing is a huge narrative in the QAnon world, so there are potentially hundreds of thousands of people who think Tom Hanks is murdering children to cannibalize them or has been executed or replaced by a body double. I think it’s important to look at the specifics of what these people believe, rather than speaking generally about “the QAnon conspiracy theory,” because it shows how ridiculous these things are.

I think a lot of media ignores some of the more out-there sides of these conspiracies because they’re worried about amplifying it. Or it’s difficult to use traditional reporting methods to report on them. Like, if you were to approach Tom Hanks for comment on a story about people accusing him of being a cannibal pedophile, he’s probably not going to respond. And that might lend legitimacy to the theory.

I’m hoping the context and the way I take the photos makes it clear that I think many of these things are absurd. I wouldn’t be posting these conspiracies if I felt there was a chance people were seeing my photos and thinking these things were real. I’m, hopefully, not going to post a sign that has some made-up facts about human trafficking that might seem real if you just stumbled across the picture.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA protester stands on Tom Hanks’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you talk to and engage with the people you’re photographing?

Yes. I posted a video recently of a woman I interviewed on Tom Hanks’ star on the Walk of Fame, where she explained that she believes Tom Hanks is killing babies to extract a chemical called adrenochrome, which he uses to keep himself young, and that he’s escaped to Greece to avoid prosecution.

I empathize somewhat. It’s easy to understand how people end up falling for these conspiracies about powerful people if you have Jeffery Epstein and Harvey Weinstein operating in full view of many powerful people, doing a lot of really F-ked up things for years, and that’s true. Is it that much of a stretch to believe that Tom Hanks is killing babies?

What are the other conspiracies that you think are harmful right now?

I’m seeing a lot of anti-Antifa and anti-BLM stuff in the Facebook groups I’m in. “Antifa/BLM riots” are the biggest story on my Facebook right now. If these groups were your main source of information, you would think that the ’94 LA riots have spread across the country and that people are being executed by BLM in the middle of the street. It’s making people extremely scared of these protests, and I think you’re seeing that in the violence that they’re being met with.

These are huge groups that have tens of thousands of members where it’s just a constant feed of those kinds of conspiracies that are met uncritically. A lot of people trust these groups more than they trust mainstream media outlets.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA sign at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Do you notice Facebook cracking down on this at all?

I think Facebook is mostly dealing with it from a PR perspective. They’ve removed some QAnon groups, but that’s had very little impact on my toxic feed of Facebook groups. The “Save Our Children” groups are still there, “Against Human Trafficking” is still there, which is essentially just QAnon-lite.

I don’t think they have any real interest in stamping out misinformation. That would require a huge investment from them. I don’t think you can use an algorithm to block this stuff. People will find a way around it.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteProtesters at a Save Our Children rally in Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2020.

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Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA man with an anti-antifa sign at a Trump rally in Beverly Hills, Calif., Oct. 10, 2020,

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Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteThe group Justice 4 Prince protesting outside the Grammy’s in Downtown Los Angeles, Jan. 26, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteSave Our Children protesters walk past an Arby’s restaurant in Los Angeles, Oct. 10, 2020.

Jamie Lee Curtis TaeteA child with a QAnon sign at an anti-lockdown rally in Huntington Beach, Calif., May 1, 2020.