McClatchy has published an interesting essay on the lack of courage displayed by many right wing websites. Oh, they have strong opinions based on false reporting. They have influence. They just don’t want their readers to know who is behind the websites.

Search the website of American Gun News, and you’ll find no clue of who posts the content. Same goes for Patriotic Viral News, Liberty Video News, Conservative Zone and 21 other websites, many with strong right-wing views.

Together, the 25 websites get a combined average of 2 million views a day, maybe more, so they have clout, especially in election season.

For a period, all were hosted by a Tampa-based data center.

Big social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are under pressure from Congress to scrub their pages of disinformation and anonymous influence campaigns. But still under the radar are a profusion of websites, often with no hint of ownership, that traffic on the hyper-partisan sentiments rippling through the country. They dwell in an unregulated area, enjoying freedom of speech protections and liberty to divulge nothing about themselves.

Of course, intellectual curiosity is not a hallmark of conservative thought. As long as they are getting their preconceived notions fed back to them and substantiated, most conservatives could not care less about where these websites come from, who is behind them, or what their motives might be.

The lack of transparency about who runs such websites is important given the history of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Special Counsel Robert Mueller this year has brought indictments against more than two dozen Russians on a variety of charges related to internet influence campaigns.

The writer seems to conclude that the anonymous nature of these websites probably has less to do with foreign interference than it does with domestic cowardice.

Bret Schafer, a digital propaganda expert at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan group seeking to counter efforts by Russia to undermine democracy in the United States and Europe, said he didn’t see evidence that the sites were a foreign operation.

“I don’t see anything here that suggests a foreign hand, so my guess is that this would fall more in the realm of a domestic influence campaign rather than a foreign one,” Schafer said. “That said, efforts to cover foreign fingerprints have gotten more sophisticated over the past year, so it’s possible that they’ve just done a really good job of hiding any foreign ties.”

All of this goes to show how important it is to question EVERYTHING. Be curious. Use more than just one source. Be informed.

Most of all, be alert.

By The Portly Pundit

After four months in the belly of the right wing media beast, and after a full four days of hot showering, everyone's favorite Portly Pundit is once again weaving tales of progressive pulchritude on Breitbart Unmasked.

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