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I don't know anything about this group, but I lost all faith in fact checkers some time ago. I see this too often: Fact checkers take a valid claim add some f

by 99_00 4y ago

I don't know anything about this group, but I lost all faith in fact checkers some time ago. I see this too often: Fact checkers take a valid claim add some false exaggeration to it, debunk the false exaggeration and pretend that the kernel of truth was also debunked. They also do a lot worse. We lack neutral observers. The best we can do is have both biased sides fight it out in a neutral arena and allow the public to judge. But we don't even have that.

pessimizer 4y ago
It's spooks all the way down, you can tell by their annoying insistence of referring to run-of-the-mill thinktanks with blogs with the codename-styled "OSINT." They piggyback off of the media obsession of "crowdsourcing" from a decade back, and abuse the software term "open source" to refer to these weird private groups. The question is the same as it always was: who benefits from maintaining 12 educated full-time professionals and an office in order to claim (and publicize) that they have the most accurate view of the degree and character of protests against the Sri Lankan government? Somebody is spending a million dollars a year minimum on it; it is the opposite of the crowd/public. Groups like this have two functions: 1) To launder false information. "Legitimate" outlets can spread information pushed by these thinktanks, but disguise it as reporting on the thinktanks themselves. If the funder of the thinktank is the state, they can then use that secondary reporting to justify the action it wants to take. 2) To launder illegitimately obtained information i.e. parallel construction. Come up with another theoretical way that some information that was actually discovered in an illegal or immoral way could have been discovered. Create fake artifacts of that discovery, and have one of these thinktanks release it. Now you can act on the information that you shouldn't have had. I agree (as far as I understand) that the Sri Lankan government is awful, and maybe I agree with spook goals in this case, but their funders aren't doing this for moral reasons. They surely just want to get rid of these despots to put a friendlier set of decisionmakers in.
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  > Watchdog raised $340,000 from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which let it hire full-time staffers ... Edit: > The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is a 501(C)(3) organization. We are incredibly grateful to the following institutional donors that make our work possible. • The Bay and Paul Foundations • Catharine Hawkins Foundation • European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights • Ford Foundation • Fritt Ord Foundation • Luminate • Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark • National Endowment for Democracy • Open Society Foundations • Rockefeller Brothers Fund • Sigrid Rausing Trust • Skoll Foundation • The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency • United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office • University of Missouri School of Journalism • U.S. Agency for International Development • U.S. Department of State • Vital Strategies • Oak Foundation • Slovak Agency for International Development Cooperation Support us OCCRP's work is made possible through public and private funding from a range of institutions and the generosity of individual supporters. For more information on the guidelines governing our acceptance of and management of donations, please see our Gift and Donation Acceptance Policy.
  - oblak 4y ago
    Thanks but how does this impressive list of sponsors contradict what pessimizer said?

by 99_00 4y ago

pessimizer 4y ago

It's spooks all the way down, you can tell by their annoying insistence of referring to run-of-the-mill thinktanks with blogs with the codename-styled "OSINT." They piggyback off of the media obsession of "crowdsourcing" from a decade back, and abuse the software term "open source" to refer to these weird private groups. The question is the same as it always was: who benefits from maintaining 12 educated full-time professionals and an office in order to claim (and publicize) that they have the most accurate view of the degree and character of protests against the Sri Lankan government? Somebody is spending a million dollars a year minimum on it; it is the opposite of the crowd/public. Groups like this have two functions: 1) To launder false information. "Legitimate" outlets can spread information pushed by these thinktanks, but disguise it as reporting on the thinktanks themselves. If the funder of the thinktank is the state, they can then use that secondary reporting to justify the action it wants to take. 2) To launder illegitimately obtained information i.e. parallel construction. Come up with another theoretical way that some information that was actually discovered in an illegal or immoral way could have been discovered. Create fake artifacts of that discovery, and have one of these thinktanks release it. Now you can act on the information that you shouldn't have had. I agree (as far as I understand) that the Sri Lankan government is awful, and maybe I agree with spook goals in this case, but their funders aren't doing this for moral reasons. They surely just want to get rid of these despots to put a friendlier set of decisionmakers in.

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
> Watchdog raised $340,000 from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which let it hire full-time staffers ... Edit: > The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is a 501(C)(3) organization. We are incredibly grateful to the following institutional donors that make our work possible. • The Bay and Paul Foundations • Catharine Hawkins Foundation • European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights • Ford Foundation • Fritt Ord Foundation • Luminate • Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark • National Endowment for Democracy • Open Society Foundations • Rockefeller Brothers Fund • Sigrid Rausing Trust • Skoll Foundation • The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency • United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office • University of Missouri School of Journalism • U.S. Agency for International Development • U.S. Department of State • Vital Strategies • Oak Foundation • Slovak Agency for International Development Cooperation Support us OCCRP's work is made possible through public and private funding from a range of institutions and the generosity of individual supporters. For more information on the guidelines governing our acceptance of and management of donations, please see our Gift and Donation Acceptance Policy.
- oblak 4y ago
  Thanks but how does this impressive list of sponsors contradict what pessimizer said?