Google Alerts is my poor-man’s LexisNexis. It’s Google’s free alerting service (via email) for news and other web content. I use it, for instance, to alert me daily to new news related to selected search terms such as “voter registration,”“early voting,” and “gerrymander” that include a mention of my home state, North Carolina.
Google Alerts is (at least marginally) useful – and you can’t beat the price – but it does come with very severe drawbacks. First, it’s far from comprehensive: studies have found that it often fails to report 40% to 50% of prominent news items relevant to a particular search term (so don’t count on it to keep you informed). But, more importantly, it is indiscriminate: oddly, it lacks Google’s own signature ability to prioritize the content of more highly regarded sites’ over content from the bottom-feeders. In Google Alerts, crazy Uncle Joe’s latest conspiracy theory rant blog can be found side-by-side with New York Times front page stories, both equally cherished by Mother Google.
That flaw, which makes Google Alerts a pretty lousy current awareness tool, nevertheless makes it something its creators probably never intended: an interesting way to track the ‘message of the day’ on the political propaganda fringes of the cybersphere. To do so, just create some Google alerts using politically freighted search terms like ‘Donald Trump,’ ‘voter fraud,’‘antifa,’ or ‘scandal AND congress.’ You’ll soon begin receiving a faceful of propaganda headlines in your inbox every morning (lucky you!). Many of these links will take you to pop-up disinformation sites…what I call dis-bots: born-yesterday disinformation web sites, dishing out divisive inflammatory propaganda disguised as ‘news.’
The pop-up dis-bots’ editorial standards (such as they are) are plain to see. Witness, for instance, the link to a Stock Daily Dish article dated November 21, 2019 that turned up in my Google alerts this morning, which breathlessly reports “North Carolina‘s 9th Congressional District race has dissolved into scandal and may have to be done over. State election officials are serving subpoenas and opening multiple investigations….”
It is, despite its current dateline, a year-old story, lifted in its entirety from a December 7, 2018 Los Angeles Times article (without attribution or, apparently, permission), reporting the first hints of the absentee ballot-harvesting scandal in NC09’s November 2018 election. Resurrecting this year-old news today, without any mention of all that came after – a successful investigation identifying GOP-funded election fraud, Republican Mark Harris’s withdrawal in disgrace from the race, and the indictment and arrest of the GOP operative who perpetrated the fraud’s ground operations – can only reflect Stock Daily Dish’s intent to inflame uninformed readers and sow discord.
Stock Daily Dish is a classic pop-up dis-bot: born yesterday (well, April of this year to be precise, according to DNS registration records) and cloaked in a ‘cover story’ (it pretends to offer investment advice). This month alone it has also treated its readers to such journalistic gems as Exposed! Antifa‘s intent for Americans, Journalists run interference for leftist thugs, and Coast to coast RIOTS planned TODAY as Antifa anarchists hijack anti-Trump protests. The links I’ve included here are safe to visit; they’ll take you to the Internet Archive’s stored copies of those articles, not to Stock Daily Dish itself. SDD has a habit of ‘disappearing’ its most inflammatory articles after just a day or two online, but the internet – here in the form of Internet Archive’s invaluable Wayback Machine – never forgets.
Also in today’s Google Alerts I received a link to yet another offering of Things You Didn’t Know (because they’re nonsense): “Pro-Chinese Communists Illegally Helped Flip Virginia to Democrat Control,” appearing at The New American website. But unlike the pop-up dis-bots, The New American is no johnny-come-lately to extreme right-wing agitprop. Born in 1999, TNA is published by “a wholly owned subsidiary of The John Birch Society.” It’s actually one of the great-granddaddies of online xenophobic disinformation.
Last but not least in my daily Google Alerts feed on the topic of ‘voter registration’ is this fleck of detritus from the World Tribune:“NBC touts Soros-backed Brennan Center as 'nonpartisan' news source.” The linked article’s opening sentence blasts the respected New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice as “a radical activist legal organization that received over $1 million in funding from progressive globalist billionaire George Soros in 2018 alone”and, lest the reader somehow miss that key point, ends by calling it “a hardcore leftist legal center awash in Soros cash.”
The New Yorker has profiled World Tribune and its biggest-ever scoop: its 2003 blockbuster report that U.S. intelligence had located Iraq’s legendary weapons of mass destruction. That World News fantasy was subsequently picked up and loudly trumpeted across America by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the entire neo-conservative war machine.
When surveying this alternative universe of fringe agitprop dispensers like Stock Daily Dish, The New American, and World Tribune, it can be challenging to decide which comes first in the hearts of its purveyors – a profound appreciation for inflammatory clickbait’s potential as a profit-generating scheme, or a deep commitment to undermining our democracy. But a profile in today’s New York Times of agitprop dispenser Ken LaCorte, the former Fox News executive who nowadays publishes the extreme right- and left-wing outlets, Conservative Edition News and Liberal Edition News, makes clear that these aren’t really mutually exclusive alternatives. Both sites’ content, the Times reveals, is produced by a network of young Macedonian rent-a-trolls, part of “a cottage industry of small sites happy to stoke passions on both sides of the political aisle and cash in on that anger.”
OK, Google. It’s time to stop promoting cynical agitprop in my inbox.