On Saturday, thousands of counter-protesters took to the streets in Boston in response to a small right-wing rally. Anyone who’s read or watched the news in the past few days has probably learned as much. Trickling out along with a of deluge of news about the rally and counter-protest, though, were a handful of fishy reports from right-wing websites that drew heavily or entirely on a Twitter account with the handle AntifaBoston and its attendant Facebook page.
The articles at Gateway Pundit, Independent Journal Review, Townhall, and a couple of other sites detailed posts encouraging violence, censorship, and, uh, thanking Hillary Clinton voters for their support. They did so without realizing or noting an important detail: the Twitter and Facebook accounts are fakes, run with the aim of mocking and discrediting anti-fascist groups. (Update: Townhall has since retracted the original article.) That didn’t stop IJR’s Benny Johnson from declaring the following:
Fake antifa accounts are pretty well-documented and relatively easy to spot: they tend to retweet and quote the same clutch of other fake accounts, and often comment on events antifa groups aren’t really concerned with, like the death of Jerry Lewis. Another Twitter account called Antifa Checker even maintains a blocklist of fake accounts. The AntifaBoston account is a particularly obvious fake. Bostonians who are involved with anti-fascist organizing warned about fake accounts several months ago and the people behind the fake Boston accounts gave an interview to walking avatar of bad ideas Gavin McInnes in April.
That these outlets are being duped by fake accounts is unsurprising. The IJR article was written by Johnson, a serial plagiarist who remains on at the outlet despite allegedly spouting verbal abuse at staffers and continuing to plagiarize while working at IJR. Gateway Pundit is a conspiratorially-minded blog that has a history of helping push stories that are hoaxes. Townhall has also been loose with how it frames stories in the past.
How they’ve reacted since isn’t particularly surprising easier, but it is an object lesson in trying to avoid retracting a story or accepting any responsibility for publishing bullshit. After people started tweeting about how Johnson had fallen for the fake account, a note was added to his post:
Neither IJR nor Johnson have replied to a request for comment, and the article still hasn’t been updated, so it seems they’re taking the “automated response” as truth despite all evidence to the contrary. Jim Hoft, who runs Gateway Pundit, said via email that he would pass along the information to the article’s author, Joshua Caplan. Asked whether any changes would be made to the article or action taken, Hoft pointed to a note added to the article after I emailed:
The note appears only at the bottom of the crowded article, which is otherwise unchanged. While it should go without saying, the views expressed by the account aren’t in line with the views of anti-fascists, who are diffuse and hold a pretty wide range of beliefs to begin with. But by getting tricked, and then not really taking responsibility and correct themselves, conservative outlets are helping spread the misinformation, first unwittingly, and then actively.