you should know that, contra this anon, garfimbo did not in fact find the original oppa homeless style post indexed in g search.
first, consider that when one searches the same excerpt garfimbo had chosen, with the “before:” operator set to 2013, the relevant results are as follows:
we find that two tags show up: the dancing homeless (tdh) and shrieky. however, we are able to go back further than 2013. with the before: operator set to 2012, we obtain:
shrieky disappears, but tdh remains. we can go back still further:
indeed, we can do this until we reach the year 1997 and still obtain the tdh result!
the significance of this is not quite that google’s system for dating its search results is faulty—anyone working in seo knows that already—, so much as it is that we are now able to make some kind of determination about what it is we’re receiving. think of it as quote-unquote “metadata”. carnival-phantasm’s post, which appears in both the tdh and shrieky tags’ cached pages, is a response to an anon ask. the ask is the following text: “what’s the history behind this url?”. when we search for that text with the site:tumblr operator and various dates, here is what we find:
namely, we discover that, when we intentionally target carnival-phantasm’s post, both tdh and shrieky expire at years corresponding to the ones we found when we were looking for homeless oppa style. the rather obvious conclusion is that we have only ever been receiving carnival-phantasm’s post this entire time; the original post is not, in fact, indexed.
as for the XMP data (not all image file metadata is “EXIF data”) on the original imgur post indicating that the image was edited in photoshop, that is likely due to r/thathappened’s policy compelling users to censor usernames when submitting screenshots. hence, the image is edited so as to be censored. in the original post, a user from 2014 remarks that they cannot find the original:
let’s take a look at u/MechaMew2's submission history around the time he first posted the image. here are some examples of tumblr screenshots he posted to r/thathappened and similar subreddits mocking social media posts around that time:
the first thing i’d note is the sheer volume of these. he has posted a lot, and most have similar formats. they are also, in my opinion, written in a rather similar style. i mean that both the prose styles and ‘posting styles’ are similar. for example, excluding the tags, sentences are always capitalized. moreover, i cannot find a single post here, even the ones that are shown to have gone viral! (i may be wrong about that.)
u/MechaMew2 said that he lifted the oppa homeless style screenshot from 4chan. i am unable to find any imageboard post (that precedes the reddit post) with an image whose dimensions match mm2’s post, 554x1151, in any imageboard archive. most of /b/ pre-2016 is not covered by an archive, unfortunately. nor can i find any reference to “oppa homeless style”, “homeless tumblr”, “sjw homeless”, or other keywords in any imageboard archive that yields useful results. if oppa homeless style had an existence prior to mm2’s reddit post, it has been annihilated from the internet.
hello everyone!! if you have time, please consider watching rick astley’s “never gonna give you up”. i don’t want to inconvenience anybody but i’m trying to troll you. thank you very much! please pass this along to help me troll your friends if you can!!
i’ve included the video in this post so you can easily watch it
The Walter Reed Army Medical Center neglect scandal refers to a series of allegations of unsatisfactory conditions, treatment of patients, and management at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) in Washington, D.C. culminating in two articles published by The Washington Post in February 2007. Several cases of patient neglect and shoddy living conditions were reported as early as 2004. “Soldiers suffering from traumatic brain injuries or stress disorders, others with amputated limbs, have languished for weeks and months on end in vermin-infested quarters waiting for a decision on their military status and a ruling on the level of benefits they will receive if they are discharged and transferred to the civilian-run Veterans Administration (VA) healthcare system.” When the scandal broke, soldiers were pressured to keep quiet and punished with daily inspections for speaking to the press. Significant public and media attention was generated, which in turn prompted a number of congressional and executive actions, including resignations of several high-ranking officers.
imagine being anti-squatter’s rights. imagine hating homeless people that much. imagine sitting around getting mad that people would sleep in an abandoned building
Imagine thinking that sleeping in buildings the owner doesn’t want is theft. Imagine thinking that entering through a window that hasn’t been locked in a decade is trespassing. Imagine hating the homeless in such an ass backward, self perpetuating way that you’ll prevent them LITERALLY GETTING A HOUSE.
-more empty homes than homeless ppl
-conservatives want them to make thousands of dollars on the street to earn the right to move in to a shitty apartment
-conservatives want to imprison everyone who makes their money on the street
-american prisoners get put to work making kevlar vests and shit
hhmmmm…. hold on i think im figureing it out fellas…..
“don’t speak ill of the dead” don’t be a piece of shit before you die.
once again, dont speak ill of the dead is for your uncle who had an alcohol problem, not the politician who upheld the oppression of millions of people
Part two of my article on social media political interference campaigns in Latin America is out now! This time, instead of providing an overview of the problem like I did in part one, I do a deep dive into one disturbing example: CLS Strategies, a DC-based public relations firm, has been running major disinformation campaigns on Facebook to support the political right in Bolivia, Mexico, and Venezuela. Over these years, CLS oversaw at least 24 times as much spending on Facebook ads to influence politics in Latin America as Russian operatives did to influence US elections in 2016.
There is a long history of “crisis public relations (PR)” firms taking contracts with foreign governments or opposition movements, lobbying on their behalf or otherwise helping them “improve their image” in Washington. But on September 1st, Facebook announced its removal of “55 Facebook accounts, 42 Pages and 36 Instagram accounts” which were linked to the DC-based CLS Strategies, the first time that such action has been taken against a US PR firm.
According to Facebook, CLS Strategies oversaw coordinated social media campaigns in which sockpuppet accounts, often pretending to be locals, “posted content in support of the political opposition in Venezuela and the interim government in Bolivia, and criticism of Morena,” the party of Mexico’s current President. Their pages, which violated Facebook’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign entity,” had been followed by roughly 509,000 Facebook accounts and 43,000 Instagram accounts. $3.6 million was spent on Facebook ads for the campaigns, far more than the roughly $150,000 reportedly spent by Russian operatives on ads on the same platform.
In Bolivia particularly, the impact of this campaign may have been severe. CLS received a contract to “provide strategic counsel to the government of Bolivia” just one month after former President Evo Morales was ousted in a coup. Allegations of electoral fraud levied by the Organization of American States have provided a political justification for the ouster but have been repeatedly shown to be baseless. In the time between the coup and CLS accepting the contract, the de facto government of Jeanine Áñez repeatedly opened fire on protesters, resulting in numerous deaths. During the length of the contract, the far right Áñez government engaged in a stunning array of human rights violations.
While the government’s political repression of those associated with Morales intensified, the firm oversaw 11 fake Bolivian Facebook pages which promoted inflammatory content, such as ads alluding to Morales as a “mobster” and “coward.” One now-locked page sought to spread confusion in Bolivia by selling itself as a fact-checking page while actually just posting content in support of Bolivia’s de facto government; in fact, it once even shared fact-checks from legitimate organizations and contradicted them, labelled their findings “fake news.” CLS Strategies’ official slogan is “Unexpected Solutions.”
During a time of high tension which frequently broke out into violence on the streets of Bolivia, CLS intentionally sought to further stoke these tensions from their downtown DC offices. The firm has refused to answer most questions from journalists, but did say that they have “a long tradition of doing international work, including on social media, to promote free and open elections and to oppose oppressive regimes…” In a statement, CLS added that they “take very seriously the issues raised by Facebook and others,” have hired a law firm for an internal investigation, and have placed the “head of [their] Latin American practice” on leave.
According to research by Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, among the accounts that Facebook identified in the operation were 6-8 profiles which appear to be the personal accounts of CLS staff. Around this same time, CLS Strategies removed seven staff profiles from the “Our Team” section of their website. There is no confirmation that all seven were involved in the various campaigns across Latin America, but both public reporting and lobbyingdisclosures tell us that two of these seven— Juan Cortiñas and William Moore— were registered to lobby on behalf of the de facto Bolivian government.
