Justin Bieber launched an aggressive promotional push for his latest album but don't count the city of San Francisco among the Beliebers.
Officials demanded Monday that companies linked to the Canadian singer's campaign clean up ads spray-painted on sidewalks to publicize his album "Purpose."
Graffiti that appeared in busy areas of San Francisco and other cities including New York gave the title and sometimes the album's November 13 release date.
Yet after more than a month that included rain, the ads remain visible, with Bieber's entourage apparently using real spray-paint rather than chalk.
Dennis Herrera, who holds the elected position of city attorney, said that the guerrilla marketing campaign "illegally exploits" San Francisco streets and could cause dangerous distractions to pedestrians.
Herrera posted pictures of the persistent graffiti on his official website with a line taken from one of the album's songs: "It's too late now to say sorry."
The graffiti "irresponsibly tells our youth that like-minded lawlessness and contempt for public property are condoned and encouraged by its beneficiaries -- including Mr. Bieber and the record labels that produce and promote him," he said in a letter to Bieber's Def Jam label and its distributor, conglomerate Universal.
Mohammed Nuru, the city's public works director, said that San Francisco sidewalks were "not canvasses for corporate advertising."
"Yet these guerrilla marketers believe they are above the law when it comes to blighting our city, and we will take a strong stand against them," he said in a statement.
San Francisco authorities asked for cooperation to clean up the graffiti, threatening if this were not the case to pursue legal action that could cost Bieber's label and distributor up to $2,500 per graffiti site.
The famously left-leaning city has previously forced other corporations including IBM and NBC Universal to pay the costs of clean-up, according to Herrera's office.
There was no immediate response from Bieber, Def Jam or Universal.
"Purpose" is the first album in three years for Bieber, after a period in which he became better known for off-stage legal issues, including a vandalism charge for throwing eggs at a neighbor's house in an upscale part of the Los Angeles area.
With the aggressive advertising and Bieber's new tropical house sound, "Purpose" opened at number one in the United States and numerous other countries, but was quickly eclipsed on the top of the charts by Adele's blockbuster "25."
CNN abruptly cut to commercial on Monday after host Poppy Harlow passed out.
While reading poll numbers about how Americans viewed the Obama administration's war on terrorism, Harlow began to slur her words. Eventually, she became impossible to understand and then let out a quiet gasp before going completely silent.
Two seconds later, CNN cut to commercial. The network returned with pre-taped segment on the top news story of 2015.
But within ten minutes, Harlow was back on the air.
"For all of you on Twitter who are asking if I'm okay, thank you so much," she said. "I got a little hot and I passed out for a moment. I am fine."
Watch the video below from CNN, broadcast Dec. 28, 2015.
British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and his wife are donating $1 million (900,000 euros) to help Syrian refugees, the charities receiving the money announced Sunday.
The "Borat" star and actress wife Isla Fisher are giving $500,000 to Save the Children to pay for measles vaccinations for children in northern Syria.
They are also donating the same amount to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to help refugees in Syria and neighbouring countries, particularly women and children, with health care, shelter and sanitation.
More than four million refugees have fled conflict in Syria for the relative safety of the neighbouring countries, according to the United Nations.
Millions more have been forced to leave their homes for other parts of the country.
Justin Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children, said the money would "save many thousands of lives and protect some of the most vulnerable children".
"By allowing us to make their generous donation to Syrian children public, Sacha and Isla are helping highlight the tragedy of the issue today," he added.
David Miliband, the ex-British foreign secretary who is president of the IRC, called their gift a "great expression of humanity."
The horror genre was anything but dead this year. Whether we saw genre filmmakers flip convention on its bloody head or screened modern-day thrillers with a classic horror vibe, there were enough freaky flicks to haunt everyone's best of list. So grab your killer kids, malevolent mommies, and Craigslist creeps. Here are the 10 scariest movies of 2015.
10. UNFRIENDED
This SXSW festival hit about a group of teens who spend way too much time online was a welcome surprise. True, its synopsis is laughable: A group chat’s members are offed by a supernatural cyber intruder (aka Internet ghost). But thanks to some pretty imaginative kills, courtesy of Nelson Greave’s script, and the authentic split-screen production from director Levan Gabriadze, the film actually works. And keeps you plugged in until its final SYL.
9. WE ARE STILL HERE
Ted Geoghegan’s award-winning directorial debut about a house that gets cranky every 30 years and demands a sacrificial soul or two satisfies both gore and supernatural tastes. When a grieving couple move to the snowy New England countryside, they become prey for a houseful of vengeful spirits and charred zombies. A slow burner with a few really good scares at first, the film escalates in gore and screams as the reel rolls on to its final bloody raucous.
8. CREEP
It doesn’t take but a couple of minutes with starring actor Mark Duplass and his weird wolf mask to know where the title of this found-footage-inspired film came from. Duplass and co-writer/director Patrick Brice carry this little gem about a Craigslist gig gone bad. Entirely a two-man show, "Creep" isn’t your typical no-guts-no-glory horror film, but rather a thriller that sneaks up on you and then just watches you. As you sleep.
7. BONE TOMAHAWK
Filmmakers have been flipping genre conventions to wonderful effect over the past few years–think "A Girl Who Walks Home Alone at Night", "The Cabin in the Woods", and anything by director Ben Wheatley. Well, we reckon we have S. Craig Zahler to thank for the latest genre-bender to enter the canon of great horror: a grisly, cannibalistic western horror comedy. Starring Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, and David Arquette, Zahler’s film follows a crew of cowboys who set off across the Wild West’s scorching desert. Their mission: to rescue some innocents from cave-dwelling cannibals.
6. THE HALLOW
For those who can hardly wait for "The Crow" reboot to spread its wings, allow this woodland chiller to hold you over. It comes from director Corin Hardy, the man who’s attached to the aforementioned remake, and its storyline is simple enough–family moves to cursed land–but the visual flair for which Hardy is known gives the indie a rich complexity and depth that’ll make you truly believe the sinister forest has come alive.
5. SON OF SAUL
Hungarian director László Nemes rewrites the formula for a Holocaust thriller and ends up with a multi-award-winning nail-biter that just so happens to be his first film. With tight-cropped shots that don’t sugarcoat the horrors going on around his protagonist, Nemes takes viewers into an Auschwitz work camp for a profoundly intense survival tale about a man named Saul who’s sent to clean up a gas chamber’s mess, only to find a child is still alive. A child he believes to be his son. At once gruesome, harrowing, and hopeful, Nemes directorial debut just may be headed to the 2016 Oscars.
4. THE BOY
You’ve seen ‘em leather cad and wielding a chainsaw, dressed in Mother’s best and swinging a knife, and even dapperly dressed in Valentino Couture and brandishing a bloody ax. Well, go ahead and add shirtless and 9 years old to the list of American psychos who have imprinted many a horror fiend’s psyche. In Craig William Macneill’s chilling slow-burn debut feature, we are introduced to Ted Henley, the pint-size sociopath whose morbid fascinations culminate in ramifications that are deadly for Henley’s victims and bone-chilling for the rest of us.
3. IT FOLLOWS
Who would have thought a horror film that uses the almost-cliché death-by-sex horror trope as its gimmick would have not just audiences raving but critics as well? That’s just what writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s first foray into the genre does. About a girl trying to outrun the curse she’s contracted post-coitus, "It Follows" definitely delivers on the scares, but it’s the underlying moral that really gives us the willies.
2. THE WITCH
Not only is newcomer Robert Eggers’s haunting period piece one of the best films out of Sundance 2015, it’s one of the best–not to mention most frightening–films to grace the screen this year. Set in 1630s New England, the potent story unravels as Thomasin and her family slowly begin turning on each other after her infant sibling goes missing, leaving them vulnerable to the evil forces that lurk in the woods beyond their homestead. The film is still making its way through the festival circuit, but look for it to reach wide release come February.
1. GOODNIGHT MOMMY
Hello, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz. The pair of Austrian directors popped onto the scene with their debut feature film, and it’s an art-house stunner that’s heavy on the funny games and light on dialogue. Their film "Goodnight Mommy", about a pair of twin boys who are trying to figure out if the woman behind the bandages is actually their mum, everything you want in a scary movie: creepy crawlies, spooky masks, torture gore, camera tricks, and a plotline that keeps you guessing ‘til the very end.
This story was originally featured on The-Line-Up.com. The Lineup is the premier digital destination for fans of true crime, horror, the mysterious, and the paranormal.
“The end of television” is a headline that’s been liberally thrown around for the past 15 years.
Indeed, the past year saw audiences becoming more and more amenable to adopting new ways to watch TV shows, with live audiences for broadcast and cable programs declining sharply.
Even entities like ESPN – which many thought immune to these changes in audience behavior – acknowledged subscriber losses this year. In response, Wall Street engaged in a mass sell-off of media stocks. Most rebounded by year’s end, but the volatility is indicative of the uncertainty in a sector that finds its core business model being disrupted.
But viewers are actually watching more TV than ever before. They’re simply shifting to on-demand options from cable operators and broadband services.
Over the last five years, an influx of new broadband-delivered offerings has driven changes in audience behavior that challenge the businesses of traditional broadcast and cable television channels. Likewise, cable providers find themselves scrambling to adapt to new competition from leaner channel packages that offer flexible pricing options.
Contrary to what the headlines often suggest, the internet – or rather, broadband distribution – hasn’t come to kill television. Instead, it’s radically improving it.
A tenuous peace
In the 1990s, many assumed the ascendance of what was dubbed “new media” (anything digital or delivered via the internet) would bring about the demise of “old media” including television.
But media don’t die. Rather, their distribution technologies are frequently replaced. So while new media assassins still haven’t killed – or even maimed – television, a revolutionary transition did begin for the medium in 2015.
The most disruptive form of “new media” for television is broadband distribution (what most casually think of as internet streaming). Companies that deliver video over broadband – Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube – use a new (and in many ways, better) technology for delivering traditional television shows.
Since 2010, broadband-delivered video services and “legacy television” (a more generous name for broadcast and cable TV than “old media”) actually enjoyed an unexpected symbiosis. Rather than battle to the death, the two quietly became neighboring options for viewers, and to some extent, partners.
Broadband television distributors (Netflix, in particular) provided a much-needed new revenue stream to traditional networks by paying them high fees to use their shows. In exchange, Netflix was able to disseminate the high-quality television content needed to woo viewers. As a result, Netflix slowly reacculturated expectations of how television should be experienced: that it needn’t be watched at a specific time, with a week between episodes, and interrupted every 10 minutes with commercials.
But this past year, the tenuous détente fell apart when some of the biggest players in the legacy television industry decided to launch their own broadband-distributed services.
The biggest developments were HBO’s launch of HBO Now and CBS’s debut of CBS All Access. Like Netflix, both services require a subscription payment (though All Access has ads too) that allows customers to access a deep library of content they can watch according to their own schedules.
Several other services also launched, including Nickelodeon’s Noggin, which has hundreds of episodes geared toward preschoolers. And NBC and Disney jumped in with the comedy portal SeeSo and DisneyLife, respectively.
It’s broadcast technology that’s in peril
Traditional broadcast technologies allowed for the transmission of only a single stream of programming at a time. This gave rise to almost all of the TV conventions that viewers have come to know: a schedule, channels, fixed program lengths and intermittent advertising.
If you think about it, these aren’t conventions specific to the television medium. Rather, they’re responses to broadcasting’s technological limitations.
Sometimes the arrival of new distribution technologies introduces only moderate change, like when the music industry shifted from records to cassettes. Other times, new distribution technologies require a radical reconfiguration of business models and completely change the user experience of a medium.
This is what’s now happening for television.
And just as streaming makes for a very different viewing experience, it is also changing the nature of the shows that are made. Streaming services produce content targeted to narrower niches and sensibilities. They’ve also allowed for much greater experimentation and diversity in the ways stories are told and structured.
A post-network era
These recent developments illustrate how profoundly norms of making and watching television will continue to shift in coming years.
When announcing the new version of Apple TV in September, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the “future of TV is apps.” That’s one way to characterize the new services. They also could be thought of as the “channels” of the post-network era of broadband distribution. At their core, they’re portals to content; most require a monthly fee, but many are also ad-free and can be easily viewed on a number of devices, from smartphones to traditional television sets.
As portals have introduced new ways to view content, traditional cable bundles also appear to be at a crossroads. The cable bundle is the package of over 100 channels required in even the “basic” digital package. Since most viewers watch fewer than 20 channels, many feel that they’re overpaying for content.
Dubbed “skinny bundles,” Sling TV, Sony Vue and Verizon’s Fios Custom TV all began offering packages of channels that can be experienced as a typical channel with scheduled programming, in addition to some on-demand content. Like the portals, these skinny bundles are delivered via broadband and add to the competition by providing a cheaper alternative (though also far fewer channel options) for consumers who want to reduce their cable bill.
Despite the added competition, cable providers still find themselves in an enviable position. The portals and the skinny bundles both require high-speed internet service, which most receive from those very same cable companies. And in 2015, internet subscribers surpassed cable subscribers at Comcast, the nation’s largest “cable” company.
In response to the growing reliance on high-speed internet, several broadband providers are moving forward with plans to shift to usage-based billing, similar to data-use pricing from mobile phone companies.
History suggests that fewer than half of the portals or broadband distributed bundles announced this year will exist once business models catch up with technology and the experimenting of the past year gives way to consolidation. It’s not clear who will eventually dominate the post-network era of broadband distribution. But based on the scope of new broadband delivered entries, it’s obvious that legacy companies have been preparing to pivot to broadband distribution. The embrace of broadband technology makes clear that television’s future innovation won’t be confined to a linear schedule.
Whether the portals are the chicken or the egg, a vision for the future of television is flickering into focus.
The band’s back catalogue will be available from 12.01am on Christmas Eve on nine services: Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, Google Play, Amazon Prime, Slacker, Microsoft’s Groove and Rhapsody.
“Just as with downloads the Beatles are fashionably late to the streaming party. Late enough not to stand around awkwardly waiting for stuff to happen, but in time for the real action,” said music industry consultant Mark Mulligan, of Midia Research.
“Streaming is just getting going and the Beatles catalogue will be there during what will likely prove to be streaming’s coming of age year.”
The Beatles may be new to the world of streaming, but it has been a different story for the individual band members.
Spotify’s public statistics will provide the first indication of how popular the Beatles are with streaming users. The company publishes a chart of its most popular tracks , currently topped by Justin Bieber’s Sorry with 3.8m daily streams.
Nearly 1.1 million people are already following the official Beatles profile on Spotify, and due to a smattering of compilation tracks, the band already has nearly 350,000 monthly listeners. One song, Ain’t She Sweet, has been streamed 5.7m times so far.
The Beatles back catalogue proved popular in 2010 as iTunes downloads, selling more than 450k albums and 2m singles in the first week after going live. In the streaming world, their main competition will be younger pop acts. Bieber is currently the most popular artist on Spotify with 31.7 million monthly listeners.
“There is a keen understanding that there are a number of largely separate music consumer audiences. A large share of those Beatles fans that are prospective album buyers are not yet streaming and probably won’t be for at least a couple of years,” said Mulligan.
“This is the dynamic that Adele illustrated by simultaneously smashing records for audio streams, video streams, downloads and radio plays.”
Responding to complaints from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R), the editorial page editor of the Washington Post pulled down an online cartoon depicting the GOP presidential candidate's children as organ grinder's monkeys.
The animated cartoon by longtime Washington Post artist Ann Telnaes was online for several hours on Wednesday and was immediately the subject of ire by conservatives, with Cruz sarcastically tweeting "classy" at the paper for allowing it to be published.
"Classy," Carson tweeted. " @washingtonpost makes fun of my girls. Stick w/ attacking me--Caroline & Catherine are out of your league."
The cartoon by Telnaes was in response to an ad the candidate ran during the Democratic debate on Saturday, featuring a wholesome Cruz family reading Christmas stories critical of Democrats and front running candidate Hillary Clinton, In the ad, both of Cruz's daughter join in the mockery, which Telnaes claims made them "fair game."
Writing at the Post, Tenaes said, "There is an unspoken rule in editorial cartooning that a politician’s children are off-limits.”
"But when a politician uses his children as political props, as Ted Cruz recently did in his Christmas parody video in which his eldest daughter read (with her father’s dramatic flourish) a passage of an edited Christmas classic, then I figure they are fair game," she added.
Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt disagreed, writing that he never would have approved on the cartoon in the first place.
"It’s generally been the policy of our editorial section to leave children out of it. I failed to look at this cartoon before it was published," Hiatt said in a note at the link where the cartoon formerly resided. "I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, but I do not agree."
Telanes had telegraphed earlier Tuesday morning that a cartoon featuring the Cruz kids would be forthcoming, tweeting: "Ted Cruz has put his children in a political ad- don't start screaming when editorial cartoonists draw them as well," and including a link to the Cruz commercial.
A Montana man has been arrested on suspicion of threatening to shoot a student for divulging a plot line from the newly released Star Wars epic, court documents showed on Tuesday.
Police say Arthur Roy, of Helena, got "angry" with a student he had befriended on Facebook after the boy gave up a subplot to "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" during an online conversation last week.
During the online fight that ensued, Roy is alleged to have posted a photo of himself in which he appears to brandish a gun, which he indicates is a Colt 1911 with a "hair trigger," according to a probable cause affidavit.
The affidavit also says the boy was fearful Roy was going to come to "shoot him."
Roy also said he was "coming to find" the boy, whose school was placed on security "lock down" after officials saw the exchange, according to the affidavit.
"The victim was afraid it was a legitimate threat," said Melissa Broch, a deputy attorney for Lewis & Clark County. "The victim believed that the defendant might come to his school and harm him."
"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" opened with a record-breaking $248 million at the U.S. and Canadian box office, and $529 million globally over its opening weekend, Walt Disney Co said on Monday.
The film marks the seventh installment in a newly rebooted "Star Wars" franchise.
Roy was arrested on Friday on suspicion of assault with a weapon, a felony. He made an initial appearance in Lewis & Clark County Justice Court on Monday, after which he was ordered held on $10,000 bail, Broch said.
It was unclear whether Roy was still in custody, Broch said. He is likely to be arraigned in a state district court at some point in January, she said.
(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Sara Catania)
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, perhaps more than any other religion, has embraced "Star Wars" -- and many Mormons are convinced that the Jedi Master Yoda is based on a former church leader.
A rumor has circulated since the 1980 release of "The Empire Strikes Back," the movie franchise's second film but fifth installment, that Yoda was modeled after Spencer Kimball, who led the church from 1974 to 1985, reported the Washington Post.
Some Mormons thought Kimball resembled the tiny Jedi Master who trained Luke Skywalker -- albeit without green skin -- and made similar wise but cryptic pronouncements.
Kimball, for example, was known for urging Mormons to not just believe in their faith, but to "do it," while Yoda advised Luke to "do, or do not."
Yoda's designer, Stuart Freeborn, never mentioned Kimball as an inspiration, but instead seems to have modeled the character after Albert Einstein.
Utah led the nation in "Star Wars"-related Google searches from Dec. 10-17, with its highly Mormon residents being about 25 percent more likely to seek out information online about the movie franchise than Californians, the next closest competitor.
The state also placed two movie theaters in the top 10 nationally -- South Jordan at No. 7 and Jordan Commons at No. 10 -- on the opening weekend for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."
The church has always been open to science fiction -- and even Mormons agree their theology displays some elements of speculative fiction.
"Mormons believe a lot of things that are pretty fantastic — we believe in miracles and angels and ancient prophets and rediscovered Scripture — so maybe it is almost natural for us to dive into these other stories," said Mormon sci-fi author Shannon Hale.
Author and singer Henry Rollins admitted to being amused with some of Donald Trump's antics, but otherwise derided his presidential campaign in an interview published by the Daily Beast on Monday.
" Trump, one day he held up his cellphone and said, 'Here's Lindsey Graham's number!' I could not not laugh," Rollins was quoted as saying. "That was FUNNY. He would be a disastrous president, but at the same time I don't think he wants to be president. I think he's a bored rich guy just being crass."
Rollins argued that Trump's appeal stems from Americans being "sick of war" and sick of poverty still being an issue given the richness of the country's economy.
"This country, our heels are dug in in the past, we're prehistoric. And that's where Trump is getting off," he said. "There are people who do think the president is coming for their guns. They are afraid of Muslims. They are afraid of Latinos. 'They're taking our jobs!' Dude, you don't want to sell oranges under the 101 ... Donald Trump says those are the bad ones. Really? I think they're the salt of the Earth. You should shut up."
Rollins has expressed support for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), calling him a "true statesman." but said he would most likely lose the Democratic Party's presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton, who he said would be "astonishingly mediocre" despite being brilliant.
"Obviously you can't sell him to the Midwest or the South," Rollins said of Sanders. "But I just think he's the best guy running. His concepts are way too radical for America in terms of health care and all that, but I don't think any of his ideas are threatening. I don't think any of them would be bad. I don't think he wants the next war."
"Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" is an all-new adventure returning us to the wizarding world created by J.K. Rowling. Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne ("The Theory of Everything") stars as a magizoologist in this Harry Potter spin-off directed by David Yates, who also helmed the last four Hogworts blockbusters. The story is set in…
CBS News partnered with right-wing pollster Frank Luntz to conduct a focus group of Muslim Americans. The story was sold as a response to Donald Trump, though the focus group focused on wider issues.For CBS, this was a normal, everyday news story that they spun as emphasizing the American in Muslim-American. But now it seems that CBS strategically edited out all of the negative commentary from the focus group participants.
Some are accusing CBS of strategically editing out comments that painted the US in a negative light. According to The Intercept, two people who took part in the focus group said that discussions were removed that dealt with critiques of US militarism, surveillance and entrapment. When the participants began to raise concerns about discriminatory practices in government policies, they were quickly silenced by Luntz. Video of that exchange also didn't make it into CBS's final cut.
Luntz evidently asked the attendees what they do when there are attacks like the recent one in San Bernardino. Amelia Noor-Oshiro said that she asked Luntz why he doesn't ask that to White Americans who commit a majority of the domestic acts of terror. Needless to say, that didn't make its way into the video as well.
Another attendee in the group was New York City journalist Sarah Harvard who detailed the entire experience on her Facebook page calling it disastrous and saying that she was embarrassed by the video. "Frank Luntz, the moderator, asked us the most demeaning questions like 'Are you an American or a Muslim first?'" Harvard wrote. "To which I found insulting and shouted back, 'Well, are you an American or Jewish first?' ... He also decided to stop letting me speak when I started talking about how Muslims should start focusing on combatting government policies rather than rushing to condemn terrorism or Islamophobia exclusively."
Amusingly enough, Harvard said that CBS also cut the portions of participants discussing media accountability when discussing Islam.
“He kept saying how he felt bad that no one listens to Muslims and how he wanted to give us an opportunity to talk to the general population," Harvard wrote. Maybe because people like Frank Luntz and CBS News don't listen to Muslims even when asked to join focus groups. "How can that happen when we’re manipulatively edited to have us fit their own narrative and agenda?” she asked rhetorically.
The final edited video, below, is just under seven minutes long. There is a nine-minute video available on the CBS website, but it also lacks these responses from the participants.
We've seen a few candidates give up their bid for the presidency already in this election cycle, but we haven't seen folks in the media throw up their hands. Until now. This weekend, the Washington Post, the institution of Woodward and Bernstein and Ben Bradlee, simply can't take the overwhelming amount of lies that plague the Internet.
Mark Twain once wrote, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." In contemporary society, those look a little bit more like lies, damned lies and memes.
Post writer Caitlin Dewey has spent the last 82 weeks scouring the web through insane ideas from famous quotes that people never said to absurd medical claims for her column "What Was Fake." She's over it.
"We launched “What was Fake” in May 2014 in response to what seemed, at the time, like an epidemic of urban legends and Internet pranks ... Since then, those sorts of rumors and pranks haven’t slowed down, exactly, but the pace and tenor of fake news has changed. Where debunking an Internet fake once involved some research, it’s now often as simple as clicking around for an “about” or “disclaimer” page. And where a willingness to believe hoaxes once seemed to come from a place of honest ignorance or misunderstanding, that’s frequently no longer the case"
She's spot on about the nature of the Internet. Think about the way that news has become a race for the best click-bait headline. Then there's the business of the Internet hoax. There are advertisement laden websites with terrifying headlines telling you that you could be dying or something common could kill you or claiming to cure anything that ails you. Weight loss claims on websites alone are overwhelming for anyone actually looking for true medical information.
Cures and catch-alls aren't the only sites out there. There's an entire industry geared toward trolling with "hate clicks." That's right, websites troll the left from the right with inflammatory headlines about whatever beloved official or candidate. Then a clever network of Facebook pages and fake twitter accounts troll hashtags used by liberals to send these stories across the Internet. Other sites are outright fake news. These sites are literally invented news that is an outright lie, not satire, not parody, not The Onion, but an intentional lie. Dewey actually met someone that runs one of them as well:
"Paul Horner, the proprietor of Nbc.com.co and a string of other very profitable fake-news sites, once told me he specifically tries to invent stories that will provoke strong reactions in middle-aged conservatives. They share a lot on Facebook, he explained; they’re the ideal audience."
Another site she mentions is Now8News which is a website that uses stolen mugshots of people of color with insane crime stories to troll. World News Daily Report has hate stories about Muslims having sex with or killing animals.
This is the real "dark web" and Dewey is its latest victim.
