WeSearchr Links – June 4 2016

Ben Garrison’s WeSearchr launch cartoon. I love this.

I’m going to start blogging some of the links and press that WeSearchr gets, I need to compile them and why not do it here?

We launched ten days ago and it’s going amazingly well despite no press coverage… But one cannot expect the dinosaur to welcome the arrival of his comet.

Social Matter was the first blog to welcome us with a significant piece: WeSearchr And The Coming Information Wars by Mark Yuray. If you don’t understand what WeSearchr is yet and why it’s important, just go read this.

Briefly summarized, WeSearchr is an online information marketplace that crowdsources funds for desired information bounties. First, someone puts up a bounty for some information — say, evidence of wrongdoing by a politician. Then, the bounty gets funded according to how much money people are willing to pay to hear it. Someone else – a researcher, whistleblower or journalist – then has a serious and obvious incentive to acquire the information. If they do, they get paid and the desired information is released. Somebody out there hiding something gets skewered. The gory details can be read here.

There are a lot of start-ups with snappy slogans and big, pie-in-the-sky dreams, but WeSearchr is one that is, at best, understating its significance. The home page proclaims: “WeSearchr crowdfunds the truth.” That sounds innocuous enough to an honest man. Liars might take notice, however. There are a lot of them out there, and in a late-stage democracy such as ours, lying is something between a national pastime and the structural basis of society. Such a society ought to watch the truth warily.

To such a society, the truth might be positively explosive.

 

The other link I have is a short but highly interesting video segment. Top First Amendment lawyer Mark W. Bennett discussed WeSearchr during an appearance on the legal affairs show Reasonable Doubt. (WeSearchr is discussed at the 43 minute mark.)

That’s all for now but I know of some more press coverage coming and I’ll link them here.

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WeSearchr’s Nick Denton Criminal Acts bounty is over $50,000!

You could take down a $10,000 bounty for discovering significant Gawker plagiarism.

We have the original draft of Barack Obama’s first book. Questions have swirled around this since his first Presidential campaign. We need to raise the $7,500 it cost us to acquire and then we’ll publish it.

WeSearchr is Live

Last night we went live with WeSearchr.com, the internet’s first crowdfunding marketplace for news.

Please have a look, I think you’ll enjoy it.

WeSearchr

Twitter Accused of Harassment

Can a social media company survive this kind of mistrust on the part of its user base? I thought complaining about being harassed by @Twitter would be a delicious but forgettable bit of satire but I seem to have struck a nerve:

Twitter is facing a problem of low level tribal warfare in their kingdom and seems to be choosing the regrettably common response of genociding the unpopular tribe.

Where are our UN blue helmets? Can a brother get a humanitarian airstrike up in here?

I decided that @Twitter‘s ongoing harassment might make me some easy victim dollars, but my Patreon doesn’t seem to be collecting any sympathy bucks. I have my suspicions why.

I Told You So: Twitter’s Crackdown on Free Speech

Twitter is cracking down on the dissident right. They banned-for-life my co-founder Charles Johnson in May 2015, and in the latter part of the year were caught preventing anti-feminist as well as pro-Trump hashtags from autocompleting.

Now  Twitter has formed the “Trust And Safety Council”, a name which is so feminist Orwellian they might as well have just named it Big Sister. It’s a who’s who of leftist, feminist anti-speech organizations, with nary even a pro-speech libertarian group among them, much less anything actually resembling a conservative right winger..

It’s not a how-to manual, @Jack

The new Council quickly jumped into action. They removed the verified check mark of Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, to great uproar, but Twitter refused to back down. Later the verified mark was also briefly removed from Jonah Goldberg and other prominent GOP hacks, but was reinstated mysteriously.

They suspended popular conservative and anti-feminist blogger R.S. McCain last week, and doubled down this week by suspending his promotional book account as well.

Twitter has never actually declared WHY they suspended any of these people, despite repeated rhetoric about Twitter’s dedication to free expression and unfettered speech.

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I hate to say I told you so, but I fuckin told you so. I knew this was going to happen and I tried to draw attention to it weeks ago.

I was The Duck. I was @Jokeocracy.

I saw this crackdown was coming, and I didn’t want to be disappeared in the night like some common communist. I wanted to go out in style. So I tweeted at dozens of journalists and left wing activists telling them how President Trump would have them executed during a French-Revolution-style Reign of Terror.

I rode to Valhalla, shiny and chrome, on the Fury Road. I lived, I died, and now I live again.

RIP In Memoriam

Please don’t ever ask me to apologize for The Duck.

It was performance art, and if you find it offensive, that’s often the point of performance art. Ask any Trump-supporting flyover country real American how they feel when they hear about some fat tattooed queer on stage in the East Village taking a messy dump on the American flag before a rapt audience. Uh oh, a glimmer of enlightenment, best stamp it out quickly.

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I gave an interview to Radix Journal after The Duck’s epic self-immolation, go read it if you’re interested in what I have to say about Twitter and the future of free speech.

Performance art

Follow me on Twitter and maybe I can equal The Duck’s over 9000 followers before they suspend me after a brief no-show no-trial.

Most importantly, Charles Johnson and I are soon going to be launching an information marketplace called Wesearchr.  I’m really excited about this company, it is absolutely unlike any other existing media business and it’s been great fun to develop something truly unique.

We plan to release more information about Wesearchr and how it actually works next week, so sign up to our email list to find out more about what we’re building and why we think it’s going to change the journalism industry forever.

Introducing Wesearchr, An Information Marketplace

Today on Twitter I announced that my new project is a company called Wesearchr. Wesearchr is an information marketplace that will launch this spring, and my partner and CEO is the infamous Charles C. Johnson of GotNews, the once-and-future holder of the title “Most Hated Man on The Internet.” 

Please follow @wesearchr on Twitter, like our Facebook page, and join our mailing list for updates. In a few weeks we’ll announce more details about what we’re building, and once we do I know it’s going to have people talking.

2016 is going to be an interesting year. If you have a seat belt, you might want to fasten it for this ride.

Short Book Review: SJWs Always Lie

Vox Day’s short new book “SJWs Always Lie” is essential reading for anyone interested in modern online moral panics triggered by Social Justice Warriors. Vox explains what these people are, how they function, and what to do if you’re attacked. As someone who has personally lived through his own political correctness lynching I agree wholeheartedly with his recommendations.

The book includes chapters that comprise the best short summaries I’ve read of Gamergate and the Sad Puppies movements to date, and having just been released it includes even the most recent developments. These chapters are nothing new for those who have followed the movements from the beginning but they can serve as great introductions to people otherwise unacquainted.

The book also describes some excellent strategies for combatting the SJW moral police, derived from Sun Tzu.  I found Vox’s recommendations on rules for organizations that wish to resist infiltration from SJW entryists particularly valuable and enlightening.

At 200 pages the book is quickly digestible. The stories it tells are clear and the style is very readable. One closing chapter on the proper use of rhetoric is more challenging but has content well worth making the effort to understand.

Recommended. Get it at Amazon.

The Social Media Shaming of Pax Dickinson

The wonderful Cathy Young, who wrote the terrific article telling Paul Nungesser’s story about his Columbia University witch hunt, has written a Reason article about yours truly:

But before Hunt, before Sacco, before the ouster of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich over his opposition to same-sex marriage, there was another drama of career-killing Internet outrage: the undoing of Business Insider Chief Technology Officer Pax Dickinson. It is a story that raises troubling questions about speech and consequences.

Go there and read the whole thing. I consider this the current definitive retelling of my experience.

Cathy interviewed me way back in January, so a few minor unimportant details are out of date. The blacklisting prevented me from getting any work outside of odd gigs for friends here and there, but I’m working on an exciting secret project right now that I hope to be able to discuss publicly soon. Stay tuned, this isn’t the end of the story.

ExposeCorruption.Org Campaign Post-Mortem

The deadline for the ExposeCorruption.Org crowd funding campaign ended without reaching the goal. All contributors should have gotten their money back by now. (Let me know if this is not the case.)

I thank you all for your donations. I’m sorry we didn’t reach success but I believe we raised awareness of the frustration regular people in America feel towards unelected morally scolding media elites and as such there can be no real failure.

I still believe that my original proposal is an excellent idea, and that’s been confirmed to me by seeing it happen. Charles C. Johnson is doing excellent work at GotNews.com, and other honest members of the media, such as Chuck Ross and Hannah Rosin participated in exposing the Rolling Stone UVA rape story as hysteria. Journalists are being questioned as never before, and I’m proud that we have contributed some shouting towards that trend.

I believe that particularly excellent work investigating and documenting journalists is being done by Charles Johnson at GotNews and I’ll seek to help him in his efforts in the future in whatever ways I can. Those who contributed to this campaign and received refunds are encouraged to consider making a donation to GotNews.com.

This project is not dead. I will pivot ExposeCorruption.Org to collecting the publicly available information gleaned by investigations performed by Mr. Johnson and others like him. We’ll organize that information into a wiki that will rank highly in SEO and we will become a one-click place to find all available details on journalists and other social justice activists.

ExposeCorruption.Org will not pursue raising money to investigate journalists on our own but instead will act as a repository and construct an encyclopedia of those who engage in journalistic malpractice.  Other for-profit entities like GotNews are well equipped to pursue breaking stories but there is a niche for a site that aggregates and organizes the information gathered by those groups so that it ranks highly in SEO and presents all information about specific corrupt activist journalists in an easily searchable form.

I’ll release more information about this new direction in the coming weeks. Special thanks to everyone who contributed financially but also thanks all those who retweeted or otherwise supported this campaign even if you couldn’t donate.

Update on ExposeCorruption.Org

Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far! I want to take this opportunity to answer a few questions we’ve received since the launch.

Who will be doing the actual investigating?

Are you asking for work? Email me atinfo@exposecorruption.org and let’s talk.

In fact, it won’t matter who is doing it. Our evidence will speak for itself. It doesn’t take any special skills to investigate someone online, just some experience Googling. We will hire professional investigators to follow up on high value leads as required.

What kind of information do you expect to discover?

There are many personal and career connections and scandals amongst journalists that are “public” but not widely known to the general population.

A number of political journalists are married to former or current government officials. Journalists have colluded with each other to spin coverage in private agenda-driven groups like JournoList,Gamechanger, and GameJournoPros.

We will publish pages that summarize the available information about each subject in an easy-to-find centralized location. Our site will be authoritative and we’ll work to ensure those results will rank highly in search engines.

We’ll dig beyond what’s publicly available as necessary with our own original research as well. There have been repeated sex scandals in politics, sports, and entertainment and there can be no doubt that journalism has its own skeletons waiting to be uncovered.

Why do you need $25,000 to investigate people online?

I want to spend significant time and energy on this project, but I want to gauge the interest that people have in my goal. If I can’t meet this relatively small amount, then that probably means I’m wrong about how strongly people feel about the issue.

Raising $25,000 would demonstrate the strength of the disgust we collectively have and would be a great start at founding a successful organization that has staying power.

What makes you credible?

We aren’t journalists. We won’t raise revenue via advertising. We will pursue only our stated goal and we will only be beholden to the people who support us.

Trust can only be earned. We hope you’ll give us a chance to earn your trust.

How are you different from other media watchdog groups such as Poynter and Nieman Lab?

Those organizations are themselves part of Big Journalism. We are expressly not.

They are respectable media insiders. We are reviled media outsiders.

They maintain a highbrow academic style. We will behave more in the tradition of tabloid-style attack dogs.

If you haven’t contributed yet, please consider it. It’s going to make the right people furious.

Announcing ExposeCorruption.Org

I’ve launched a crowd funding effort on IndieGogo to raise money towards founding a non-profit dedicated to doing adversarial investigative journalism against the media industry as a whole.

What if an organization existed, funded by regular concerned Americans, that turned a cynical questioning eye at those corrupt journalists? What if we held them to account for their hypocrisies? What if the tables were turned and the New Clerisy faced an inquisition from us aimed at them?

Towards that goal, we are starting a new non-profit organization called ExposeCorruption.Org which will fund investigative research into prominent agenda-driven media figures and publish a hyperlinked database of their ideological biases and secret skeletons.

One thing that all three of the grassroots rebellions of the Internet era share is a feeling that the media misrepresented them and set a narrative that opposed their goals. An apolitical Grey Tribe anti-journalist organization is one way for our media marginalized voices to start holding someone accountable.

It’s time we started watching the watchers. Contribute today to start fighting back.

Please visit the IndieGogo campaign to read the entire pitch, and please consider contributing if you share my goals of holding media more accountable.