Reporters fooled by fake blog, owned forever part 493,877

[Cain]

This is lolzy as hell.

The student behind a hoax blog which claimed to be written by a gay woman in Syria has defended his actions.

Tom MacMaster, a US student at the University of Edinburgh, said the blog had been a fiction - but that the facts it contained were true.

The 40-year-old married man's blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, described life in the Syrian city amid the current political unrest.

It gained a worldwide readership and was closely followed by news reporters.

The blog, dating back to February this year, claimed to document the life of 25-year-old Amina Abdallah Arraf al-Omari, a half-Syrian, half-American lesbian living in Damascus.

Entries covered her social life and relationships, but "Amina" also criticised President Bashar al-Assad and spoke about her role in the growing anti-government protests.
'Real facts and opinions'

Last Monday a post which was said to be written by Amina's cousin said she had been seized by armed men believed to be members of President Assad's Baath party.

The news was widely reported, including by the BBC, and bloggers and activists launched an online campaign to secure her release.

On Sunday, an "apology to readers" appeared on the blog signed by Tom MacMaster - a 40-year-old American Middle East activist studying at Edinburgh University - who said he was "the sole author of all posts on this blog".

Mr MacMaster, who is on holiday in Istanbul, told BBC Scotland: "I really felt a number of years ago, in discussions on Middle East issues in the US, often when I presented real facts and opinions, the immediate reaction to someone with my name was: 'Why are you anti-American? Why are you anti-Jewish?'

"So I invented a name to talk under that would keep the focus on the actual issue."

Mr MacMaster said he had wanted people to listen to the facts without paying attention to "the man behind the curtain".

The success of the blog took him by surprise.

He said: "From the beginning I never expected it to get anywhere near the attention it has.

"I thought when I was starting I would be read by four, five, maybe as many as 10 people."

Mr MacMaster accepted the concerns that he may have made it harder for bloggers within Syria, and that he had backed up government claims there were no problems in the country and that it was all "foreign lies".

He said: "However, the reality is that I have been in contact with a lot of people inside Syria and I have been following things very closely."

He said the most important thing was to "get the information out".

Mr MacMaster added: "People should stop focusing on the hoaxer and really be focusing on the most important people, the real people who are suffering in Syria."

Hah, that'll never happen.  You anti-American anti-Jewish hoaxer lesbian in a man's body.

[Triple Zero]

Obviously the blog was real, they did capture her, and tortured her for the password, then pretended to have been a hoax all along to discredit the Truth!!!

Also, reptiles.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Is it really so hard to make sure your source actually exists?

[Triple Zero]

Well, if the source is supposed to be in Syria and supposed to have been "seized by armed men believed to be members of President Assad's Baath party", you'll get a negative answer to that whether it's true or not, right?

[Jenne]

I'd like to think this helps the mainstream media rethink its current policy of taking bloggers at their word for news...which they in turn report as if it's "facts"...instead of just someone's blah-blah-blah'ing opinion.

...but I know better.

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

I'd like to think this helps the mainstream media rethink its current policy of taking bloggers at their word for news...which they in turn report as if it's "facts"...instead of just someone's blah-blah-blah'ing opinion.

...but I know better.

Facts?  We don't need no stinking facts..... 

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

I'd like to think this helps the mainstream media rethink its current policy of taking bloggers at their word for news...which they in turn report as if it's "facts"...instead of just someone's blah-blah-blah'ing opinion.

...but I know better.

Mainstream media thinks that if it finds a way to somehow relate current events to Web 2.0 stupidity it will somehow retain relevence. Usually this takes the form of adding uselss buzzwords like "blogosphere" and "twittershpere" to complicated political events.

Remember when twitter "caused" the Egyptian revolution?

[Jenne]

They knuckled under.  They should have stood their ground--Reuters, AP, they are the last bastion of journalism that Americans can still read and respect to any degree (and even they are failing fast).  Instead, they are buckling to pressure because the internet is so heavy with opinion.  And people LURV opinion. 

So now news is more than ever what someone THINKS it is.  It sucks.  I actually took a small journalism class in the 90's, and we went through the history of reporting news...people were killed with regularity for not just reporting it but reporting it "wrong."  As they now are in Pakistan, India, Syria, Russia, etc.

Now, Americans just don't give a fuck.  As long as it's pithy and fills that insatiable need for gossip, they're down.  Screw that boring prosy shit that actually TEACHES you something.  Naw.  Give it to us in yellow.  BRIGHT FUCKING YELLOW.

[Cain]

LOLZ CUBED

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/14/second-lesbian-blogger-exposed-paula-brooks

A second supposedly leading lesbian blogger was exposed as a man masquerading as a gay woman, a day after the Gay Girl in Damascus blog was revealed to be the fictional creation of a married male student from Edinburgh.

Paula Brooks, who claimed to be the executive editor of a US-based lesbian site LezGetReal.com, told the Washington Post that "she", too, was a man – in this case, a 58-year-old retired construction worker from Ohio called Bill Graber...

Challenged on Monday by the Washington Post, Graber said he had started the blog after witnessing the mistreatment of close lesbian friends.

"I didn't start this with my name because ... I thought people wouldn't take it seriously, me being a straight man," he said. He said his interaction with Amina was purely coincidental, "a major sock-puppet hoax crash[ing] into a major sock-puppet hoax."

Amina often "flirted" with Brooks, the paper said – with neither man apparently realising that the other was also a man pretending to be a lesbian.

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

It seems that the mainstream media is finally catching up with the rest of the internet.



The internet:

Where men are men,
Women are men,
and children are the FBI.