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Anatomy of a smear

Alleged Hunter Biden Emails Circulated in Ukraine: Exclusive | Time

This piece by NBC investigative reporters Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny about the genesis of the “Hunter Biden” scandal is hugely important. This isn’t about Donald Trump. It’s about the grotesque underbelly of the Republican Party that’s been operating for many decades. They are always present. And they are awful:

Some of the same people who pushed a false conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton that first emerged in 2016 are now targeting Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, with similar falsehoods. Their online posts are garnering astronomical numbers of shares on social media.

The fantastical rumors, which NBC News is declining to repeat verbatim, echo specific plot points central to “pizzagate,” a viral disinformation campaign that predates QAnon but also falsely alleges a vast conspiracy of child abuse.

There is an important difference, however. The pizzagate-style rumors in 2016 were largely confined to far-right message boards like 4chan and parts of Reddit. But the Hunter Biden iteration of the same conspiracy theory took off last weekend with the help of speculation from conservative TV hosts and members of Congress. Their theorizing can be traced back to a new website that has been promoted by President Donald Trump and his surrogates.

The path of the conspiracy theory highlights how once-obscure and fringe claims are now able to reach mainstream conservative media and even elected officials in the run-up to the 2020 election.

The disinformation campaign appears to have been successful in its goal of generating a smear against the former vice president’s son. According to Google Trends, “human trafficking” is now the third-most common related search term for “Hunter Biden” in the last year, after “laptop” and “New York Post,” which point to search interest around the unconfirmed allegations that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden contained evidence of crimes.

The New York Post published an article on Oct. 14 that it said was based on leaked private photos from Hunter Biden’s personal hard drive, including photos that appeared to show the younger Biden sleeping and screenshots of unverified emails claiming that he had used his position on the board of an energy company to set up a meeting with his father, then the vice president. Both Bidens have denied any wrongdoing, with Joe Biden recently calling the allegations a “last-ditch effort in this desperate campaign to smear me and my family.”

NBC News requested a copy of the hard drive, but Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, who had possession of the hard drive, has yet to respond. The New York Post article did not include any of the child abuse rumors.

But the child abuse conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden that emerged from the fringes of the internet began swirling before the New York Post article and can be traced to associates of former White House aide Steve Bannon. They are now reaching a fever pitch less than two weeks before the election, in which Trump trails Biden in most national and many battleground state polls.

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communications and rhetoric at Syracuse University, said that pro-Trump trolls are “playing the hits from 2016” and hoping they stick with voters who didn’t hear the first iteration of the rumor four years ago.

She noted that pushing child abuse conspiracy theories echoes what Bannon has publicly advocated in an effort to alter how voters feel.

“This is gaslighting of the highest order,” Phillips said. “This has been the Steve Bannon playbook this entire time. He has celebrated the strategy of ‘flooding the zone with s—‘ — when you confuse people, when you make them angry, when you just sort of throw too many things at them for them to process.”

The re-run of an identical conspiracy theory from 2016, this time with Hunter Biden as the new target, gathered momentum in part because of a new disinformation pipeline promoted by high-profile conservative figures — including the president.

Before the Post

The earliest mentions of Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced in late September, weeks before the New York Post article was published, according to Zignal Labs, a media intelligence platform that analyzed the social media conversation around recent Hunter Biden rumors for NBC News.

First Draft, a nonprofit that tracks misinformation and provides research and training for journalists, said the child abuse rumors originated from a nexus of pro-Trump figures. The organization is also a training partner of NBC News.

Keenan Chen, a First Draft researcher who has been monitoring the spread of the Hunter Biden rumors, said that they appeared to have originated from Dinggang Wang, an anti-Chinese government YouTube personality known for spreading misinformation about Covid-19.

Wang is connected to Bannon, the 2016 Trump campaign CEO, and Giuliani through Guo Wengui, a billionaire who fled China amid accusations of bribery and other crimes. The three men are board members of the Rule of Law Society, a nonprofit with a mission to “expose corruption, obstruction, illegality, brutality, false imprisonment, excessive sentencing, harassment and inhumanity” in China.

Wang did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Guo, who is a member of Trump’s country club Mar-A-Lago and was once the world’s 67th-wealthiest individual, befriended Bannon, a former Trump campaign and White House aide, in 2017, according to The Washington Post. Bannon was arrested by federal agents on Guo’s yacht in September and charged with fraud, tied to an alleged scheme to defraud donors to a social media campaign called We Build the Wall. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to face trial next May.

The most prominent spread of the child abuse rumors involving Hunter Biden before the New York Post article came from Wang, whose Twitter thread of videos has been retweeted 20,000 times.

Twitter and Facebook have both instituted a series of new policies aimed at limiting election misinformation, though Wang’s videos do not necessarily violate those rules.

Wang’s videos picked up more momentum a month later, as conspiracy theorists speculated about what else could be on the hard drives after the New York Post article.

While Delaware authorities have said the hard drive is now in the hands of the FBI, its emergence triggered a wave of conspiratorial thinking that has reached mainstream conservative outlets. But vague rumors about Hunter Biden’s hard drive had already been spreading for a full month.

“Shortly after the New York Post story went online, some members of the QAnon conspiracy theory noticed Wang and his YouTube show, and started amplifying the unfounded pizzagate narrative and making it more visible in English on social media,” Chen said.

According to analysis by the nonpartisan nonprofit Advance Democracy, more than 1 in 10 shares of a tweet from Giuliani about the New York Post article came from accounts that identify with the QAnon conspiracy theory in their Twitter bio.

Just one day after the New York Post article, allegations of wrongdoing against the Bidens involving Ukraine were seemingly abandoned by many Trump allies and conservative media, which turned the focus to claims of China-related corruption, according to Zignal’s analysis. These conversations were dominated by Donald Trump Jr., the president and the actor James Woods.

But the most significant boost for the child abuse conspiracy theories would come from a website founded in May that has been embraced by Trump surrogates: Revolver News.

Please read this whole thing if you have the time. It’s vitally important to understand how this works and keep it in mind as they crank up the smear machine if Biden wins. It’s designed to defeat Democrats at the polls of course, but it’s greater purpose is to cripple them once in office and make Democrats disengage from the political process. Right now that may seem unlikely. Trump has turned the tables on them with his rampant corruption and betrayal. But they have obviously not been deterred.

read on

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