Incident I00083: Fake Think Tanks Fuel Fake News—And the President's Tweets

Summary: ““FAKE NEWS ISN'T just Macedonian teenagers or internet trolls. A longstanding network of bogus "think tanks" raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies' pull quotes and flashy stats become the "evidence" driving viral, fact-free stories. Not to mention President Trump's tweets.

“These organizations have always existed: They're old-school propagandists with new-school, tech-savvy reach. They've been ginning up so-called research for everyone from shady corporations to anti-LGBTQ groups to white supremacists for decades---they're practiced, and their faux-academic veneer is thick and glossy. Which makes them harder to brush off than your garden-variety liar. "Fake think tanks use a mix of selected truths, half-truths, and downright fabricated stuff in order to manipulate people," says Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City College of New York and author of Nonsense on Stilts: How To Tell Science from Bunk. "We don't live in the age of post-truth. We live in the age of internet-enabled bullshit.”

“So phony think tanks are hard to spot, let alone discredit and combat. Their mix of pseudoscientific camouflage, long-held political connections, and social media gets them influence—and a whole lot of clicks.””
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Reference	Pub Date	Authors	Org	Archive
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/fake-think-tanks-fuel-fake-news-presidents-tweets/	2017/01/24	Emma Grey Ellis	Wired	https://web.archive.org/web/20240705093231/https://www.wired.com/2017/01/fake-think-tanks-fuel-fake-news-presidents-tweets/

Technique	Description given for this incident
T0097.204 Think Tank Persona	IT00000293 “[This article discusses a] longstanding network of bogus "think tanks" raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies' pull quotes and flashy stats become the "evidence" driving viral, fact-free stories [...] “[These inauthentic Think Tanks] tend toward hate: There's the white supremacist National Policy Institute and Jared Taylor's New Century Foundation; the anti-LGBTQ work of the Family Research Council and American College of Pediatricians; and a whole slew of groups fixated on immigration. Three of the biggest---Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA---are intertwined, all connected in their origins to white nationalist John Tanton. “The Southern Poverty Law Center designates most of these organizations as bona fide hate groups. And yet most---FRC, CIS and FAIR in particular---enjoy relationships with some powerful politicians. Trump himself has met with leaders of the anti-immigration groups, hired people from FAIR and the Family Research Council, and cited the anti-immigration groups' erroneous figures. “That's because phony think tanks are professional mimics, from the innocuous-sounding names---the Employment Policies Institute practically steals its name from the Economic Policy Institute---to their online presences. "It used to be you could trust a dot-edu or a dot-org," says Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. "Now some of the main hate sites are dot-orgs.”” In this example an organisation designated as a hate group is presenting itself as a think tank (T0097.204: Think Tank Persona) in order to boost the perceived legitimacy of narratives.

Technique

Description given for this incident

T0097.204 Think Tank Persona

IT00000293 “[This article discusses a] longstanding network of bogus "think tanks" raise disinformation to a pseudoscience, and their studies' pull quotes and flashy stats become the "evidence" driving viral, fact-free stories

[...]

“[These inauthentic Think Tanks] tend toward hate: There's the white supremacist National Policy Institute and Jared Taylor's New Century Foundation; the anti-LGBTQ work of the Family Research Council and American College of Pediatricians; and a whole slew of groups fixated on immigration. Three of the biggest---Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and NumbersUSA---are intertwined, all connected in their origins to white nationalist John Tanton.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center designates most of these organizations as bona fide hate groups. And yet most---FRC, CIS and FAIR in particular---enjoy relationships with some powerful politicians. Trump himself has met with leaders of the anti-immigration groups, hired people from FAIR and the Family Research Council, and cited the anti-immigration groups' erroneous figures.

“That's because phony think tanks are professional mimics, from the innocuous-sounding names---the Employment Policies Institute practically steals its name from the Economic Policy Institute---to their online presences. "It used to be you could trust a dot-edu or a dot-org," says Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. "Now some of the main hate sites are dot-orgs.””

In this example an organisation designated as a hate group is presenting itself as a think tank (T0097.204: Think Tank Persona) in order to boost the perceived legitimacy of narratives.

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4.0 KiB Raw Blame History

Incident I00083: Fake Think Tanks Fuel Fake News—And the President's Tweets

4.0 KiB

Raw Blame History