#OpKKK *** Pastebin Leaks vs. Modern Journalism

[L. Coyote]

Pastebin Leaks vs. Modern Journalism
by Matthew Egan (emphasis mine)

Yesterday was very amusing, a hacker named SgtBilko420 hijacked the upcoming leak of Ku Klux Klan member names by releasing a list of names that pretty much had nothing to do with the KKK. That isn’t the amusing part, stay with me.

Anonymous... a large group that is loosely organized ... Someone from the main Anonymous Twitter account shared the Pastebin links by SgtBilko420 and by doing so gave credibility to those links.

....... the accusations by SgtBilko420 that were given credibility by the main Anonymous account, were completely false.

... the main Anonymous account tweeted to brag about how the leak was “dominating on pastebin”. The top five most viewed Pastebin entries ... contained various parts of the leaked content with a combined hit count of over 1.3 Million. .....

.... journalists began to print stories claiming that these various politicians were “outted as members of the KKK”...

.... more .....

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Not so amusing to all those who were so easily duped yesterday, or caught in the shockwave.
However, I enjoyed seeing Joe Wilson in the racist hotseat of a Wikipedia KKK membership edit war.



So, what really happened? Who got punked by whom and why? Was this really just someone trolling #OpKKK or was someone punking a lot of people at once? Is the Nixonian term, rat-effing, more appropriate? Who are the players in this cyber-space?



No doubt, the disinformation now dominates the hashtag image search #OpKKK and impacts other releases.



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How Anonymous’s big KKK dump got muddled before it even began

Reports: Hacktivist group Anonymous publishes names of alleged Ku Klux Klan members #OpKKK

[gratuitous]

1. Well, under the latest media rules promulgated by the Center for Medical Progress

It's up to the target of the smear or the slur to answer any and all charges, no matter how specious, poorly sourced, or outright bogus. It's up to Planned Parenthood to prove it doesn't traffic in baby parts, not for the Center for Medical Progress to provide any of that fancy-pants "evidence" aside from their heavily-edited, spliced and diced footage. On the thin reed of CMP's video, we've had state legislature after state legislature all across the country investigate Planned Parenthood's practices. Shockingly, none of them have turned up any evidence to support CMP's allegations, but our plucky Inspector Clouseaus will not concede that the absence of evidence indicates evidence of absence. And so Congress gets involved, Fox News billboards its coverage, and Planned Parenthood has to waste a lot of time and money trying to chase down these will-o-the-wisp rumors.

Now it's Joe Wilson and John Cornyn's turns in the barrel, and they don't appear to appreciate the new media rules when they're turned against their august personages. Color me surprised.

[L. Coyote]

2. You raise a good point. Who has been doing this sort of nefarious disinformation ops?

We don't have to look far down the timeline to come up with possibilities, do we?.

[Blue_Tires]

3. Joe Wilson aside,

I didn't enjoy seeing liberal dems under constant attack on twitter, even as they issued official denials...

[L. Coyote]

4. This is why it seems like a right-wing operation.

Who else would want to impact those individuals? Of course, the pastebin dump's author may just be overzealous about being the one to put names to data, consequences as underconsidered as the inferences drawn.