I have experienced this myself, when I had the temerity to launch #UNRIG and say that America First means not Israel First. My team has documented over 247 coordinated trolls at YouTube and another 65 or so at Facebook, of which I estimate fully two thirds are deep fakes that can be traced back to two organizations that are now on my short list of treasonous elements that the President must eradicate.<\/p>\n
In my experience, the Zionists are both very aggressive about defaming anyone that dares to criticize them \u2014 and they do so with malice and in conspiracy \u2014 organizing hundreds of sayonim to make unfounded malicious defamatory calls, emails, and comments via forms \u2014 and also very aggressive about bribing and blackmailing the Members of Congress, judges, prosecutors, and \u201cleaders\u201d of the FBI as well as local chiefs of police and sheriffs who might otherwise challenge them.<\/p>\n
The social media \u2014 #GoogleGestapo (Amazon, Facebook, Google, MeetUp, Twitter, YouTube) \u2014 are under the control of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Zionist funders. This means that the censorship and search and other manipulation that are applied against conservatives and supporters of our President are occuring at the direct behest, in my view, of Zionist Israel and its Christian Zionist and neo-conservative allies in the USA.<\/p>\n
To achieve peace and prosperity for all we need to get the truth on the table about everything. To do that we need to eradicate the Zionist parasite across all elements of our economy, government, and society. They are the manifestation of the Deep State at the tactical level.<\/p>\n
\n
Deepfake used to attack activist couple shows new disinformation frontier<\/h1>\n
Raphael Satter
\nREUTERS<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Oliver Taylor, a student at England\u2019s University of Birmingham, is a twenty-something with brown eyes, light stubble, and a slightly stiff smile.<\/p>\n
Online profiles describe him as a coffee lover and politics junkie who was raised in a traditional Jewish home. His half dozen freelance editorials and blog posts reveal an active interest in anti-Semitism and Jewish affairs, with bylines in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel.<\/p>\n
The catch? Oliver Taylor seems to be an elaborate fiction.<\/p>\n
His university says it has no record of him. He has no obvious online footprint beyond an account on the question-and-answer site Quora, where he was active for two days in March. Two newspapers that published his work say they have tried and failed to confirm his identity. And experts in deceptive imagery used state-of-the-art forensic analysis programs to determine that Taylor\u2019s profile photo is a hyper-realistic forgery – a \u201cdeepfake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Who is behind Taylor isn\u2019t known to Reuters. Calls to the U.K. phone number he supplied to editors drew an automated error message and he didn\u2019t respond to messages left at the Gmail address he used for correspondence.<\/p>\n
Reuters was alerted to Taylor by London academic Mazen Masri, who drew international attention in late 2018 when he helped launch an Israeli lawsuit against the surveillance company NSO on behalf of alleged Mexican victims of the company\u2019s phone hacking technology.<\/p>\n
In an article in U.S. Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner, Taylor had accused Masri and his wife, Palestinian rights campaigner Ryvka Barnard, of being \u201cknown terrorist sympathizers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Masri and Barnard were taken aback by the allegation, which they deny. But they were also baffled as to why a university student would single them out. Masri said he pulled up Taylor\u2019s profile photo. He couldn\u2019t put his finger on it, he said, but something about the young man\u2019s face \u201cseemed off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Six experts interviewed by Reuters say the image has the characteristics of a deepfake.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe distortion and inconsistencies in the background are a tell-tale sign of a synthesized image, as are a few glitches around his neck and collar,\u201d said digital image forensics pioneer Hany Farid, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n
Artist Mario Klingemann, who regularly uses deepfakes in his work, said the photo \u201chas all the hallmarks.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m 100 percent sure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/graphics.reuters.com\/CYBER-DEEPFAKE\/ACTIVIST\/nmovajgnxpa\/img\/olivertaylor.jpg\")
<\/div>\n\u2018A VENTRILOQUIST\u2019S DUMMY\u2019<\/h3>\n
The Taylor persona is a rare in-the-wild example of a phenomenon that has emerged as a key anxiety of the digital age: The marriage of deepfakes and disinformation.<\/p>\n
The threat is drawing increasing concern in Washington and Silicon Valley. Last year House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff warned that computer-generated video could \u201cturn a world leader into a ventriloquist\u2019s dummy.\u201d Last month Facebook announced the conclusion of its Deepfake Detection Challenge – a competition intended to help researchers automatically identify falsified footage. Last week online publication The Daily Beast revealed a network of deepfake journalists – part of a larger group of bogus personas seeding propaganda online.<\/p>\n
Deepfakes like Taylor are dangerous because they can help build \u201ca totally untraceable identity,\u201d said Dan Brahmy, whose Israel-based startup Cyabra specializes in detecting such images.<\/p>\n
Brahmy said investigators chasing the origin of such photos are left \u201csearching for a needle in a haystack \u2013 except the needle doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taylor appears to have had no online presence until he started writing articles in late December. The University of Birmingham said in a statement it could not find \u201cany record of this individual using these details.\u201d Editors at the Jerusalem Post and The Algemeiner say they published Taylor after he pitched them stories cold over email. He didn\u2019t ask for payment, they said, and they didn\u2019t take aggressive steps to vet his identity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not a counterintelligence operation,\u201d Algemeiner Editor-in-chief Dovid Efune said, although he noted that the paper had introduced new safeguards since.<\/p>\n
After Reuters began asking about Taylor, The Algemeiner and the Times of Israel deleted his work. Taylor emailed both papers protesting the removal, but Times of Israel Opinion Editor Miriam Herschlag said she rebuffed him after he failed to prove his identity. Efune said he didn\u2019t respond to Taylor\u2019s messages.<\/p>\n
The Jerusalem Post and Arutz Sheva have kept Taylor\u2019s articles online, although the latter removed the \u201cterrorist sympathizers\u201d reference following a complaint from Masri and Barnard. The Post\u2019s editor-in-chief, Yaakov Katz, didn\u2019t respond when asked whether Taylor\u2019s work would stay up. Arutz Sheva editor Yoni Kempinski said only that \u201cin many cases\u201d news outlets \u201cuse pseudonyms to byline opinion articles.\u201d Kempinski declined to elaborate or say whether he considered Taylor a pseudonym.<\/p>\n
Oliver Taylor\u2019s articles drew minimal engagement on social media, but the Times of Israel\u2019s Herschlag said they were still dangerous – not only because they could distort the public discourse but also because they risked making people in her position less willing to take chances on unknown writers.<\/p>\n
\u201cAbsolutely we need to screen out impostors and up our defenses,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I don\u2019t want to set up these barriers that prevent new voices from being heard.\u201d<\/p>\n