Last week, the news reported speculated that “fears of an economic recession could derail the holiday season”. This week, that speculation is already old news as Black Friday broke shopping records.
FakeSpot thinks about 1/3d of online reviews are fake although major online vendors dispute that allegation. However, there are numerous ways that vendors have manipulated the online review process to add good reviews for their products and bad reviews for competitors.
Accessing everyone’s detailed health data is not enough for Google. Now they want to offer a checking account service so they can monitor your financial records.
How did dark chocolate become a health food in the United States? Industry funded studies finding obscure benefits were then touted by press release, then rewritten into health food stories by news reporters. It’s been a highly successful propaganda campaign that turned high fat, high sugar foods into health foods (contrary to the earlier meme that high fat and sugar foods are bad for us).
Perennial fictional news reporter CNBC tops them all in an article about the shortage of epinephrine auto-injectors (also known by the brand name Epi-Pen).
They illustrate the article with a photo of a child being injected with insulin in the arm – but falsely label it as a child receiving an EpiPen injection. Epinephrine auto injectors are used on the thigh muscle, not the arm.
CNBC made a reckless and dangerous error that could be life threatening by training the public to misuse an EpiPen. The original photo they used was clearly labeled as an insulin injection but CNBC intentionally and false changed it to say it is an EpiPen injection.
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Survey finds that people who are being constantly told that a recession is near, start to believe that a recession is near:) Numerous predictions of a near term recession, or some that proclaimed us to already be in a recession this past year, have proven wrong. In fact, no one has demonstrated any ability to accurately forecast future recessions. But constant fear mongering may actually create a recession! Fear mongering causes a reduction in spending, causing a reduction in economic activity and a slow down in business activity, leading to cut backs and layoffs.
Ex head of Facebook’s election integrity program says Facebook is just an information warfare tool. Which is true and has been since the beginning as their sole business is to sell influence via their ad network.
TWTR’s share price falls over 20%. And study finds that 6% of Twitter’s adult users account for 73% of all political tweets, which tend towards hostile negativity.
A majority of online influencer accounts on Instagram appear to use fraud to inflate their number of followers, says a survey firm.
“US retail sales fall in a sign that consumer economy could be cracking”, says the report about September retail sales being down 0.3%. Monthly fluctuations in retail sales are common. In fact, retails sales are up 4.1% year over year and monthly fluctuations have successfully predicted zero of the recessions during the last five years. Just look at the chart. What is being done here is journalism’s modus operandi of turning all reports into negative news stories.