Month: August 2018

Disinformation agents attack NC Women’s March

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As soon as I RSVP’ed to a Facebook event for the 2019 Women’s March in Raleigh, I knew something didn’t smell right. The page owners were posting weird, partisan memes that seemed totally out of character, and no-one would reply to my messages asking who was in charge. This week I decided to get to the bottom of it, and by way of friends of friends I found that the page is in fact a scam!

This is exactly how the Russians/Republicans have been manipulating our communication, politics, and elections for over 2 years now. The fake “Women’s March Raleigh NC 2019” page on Facebook has a fake event that has thousands of RSVPs for the wrong march date! And by spreading questionable memes they may be manipulating sentiment in ways we can’t even predict or understand until after the fact.

One of the real Women’s March organizers replied to me about this on Facebook:

we’ve reported the page as spam several times. It’s 100% not managed or set up by the WMOR organizers, they’re at Women’s March On Raleigh. Last year we had a similar problem when a vendor set up a FB page posing as the WMOR group to sell t-shirts. This page and it’s event aren’t legit

Read my Facebook post with all of the receipts in the comments:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10160753082835321
presentation title slide

Diverse communities are strong communities

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Last week I was proud to represent Drupal Diversity and Inclusion at DrupalGovCon. Along with Dori Kelner, I co-presented a session to help people understand the challenges we face as a community and what DDI is doing about it.

You can see our slides overlayed with the audio of our talk here:

White woman fainting

White feminism can’t save us (and neither can removing Trump)

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Amy Siskind’s heinous White Feminism was on full display this week when she responded to some very valid criticism about her oblivious White privilege and about her Republican-friendly past by attacking very intelligent and well-respected Black women like Imani Gandy instead of owning up to her mistakes.

Siskind said and did some patently horrible stuff in the past, including supporting Sarah Palin and collaborating with Alex Jones. Seems like she should take responsibility for herself and acknowledge where she was wrong. If she’s changed, she could just say so. If she hasn’t, people should know where she stands.

My friend Max raised another important issue about Siskind’s very problematic “All we have to do is get rid of the Orange Menace, and we can go back to having brunch” attitude.

I’ve seen a lot of this from Democrats and “never Trump” Republicans, and it makes me a little queasy when they talk about impeachment. It’s not like Trump is the only problem. He’s just a festering symptom of the greedy, nihilist Republican cancer. Of course Trump is a criminal and deserves to be impeached, but Congress will never do that (not even if corporate Dems make midterm gains) and more importantly, it won’t solve the problem of being ruled by a party that lies and cheats to enrich and empower themselves with no care for democracy or the future.