Stuart A. Thompson
@stuartathompson
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reporter at the @nytimes
40°45'21.4"N 73°59'23.0"W
Joined August 2009
I don’t see how this is anything but an economic disaster. We’ve given homeowners billions for doing literally nothing, while condemning future generations to astronomical debt or plummeting quality of life, while cementing housing as an investment asset
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News! I'm joining the @nytimes newsroom as a disinformation reporter, where I'll be writing about misinformation and disinformation in all its forms. 🧵.
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it's going to be a very exhausting cycle for disinformation as far-right influencers pull out all the old favorites – "pallets of bricks" and "Antifa" and "paid protesters" and "riots." videos posted years ago will get resurfaced. photos out of context. disinformation is incoming.
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Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and conspiracy theorist, lost her race tonight for Florida's 11th District against incumbent Daniel Webster. her supporters aren't taking it well. at all.
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If housing fell 20-30% it would be only described as one of the biggest economic disasters on record. But when we ask future generations to save up 20-30% more, or take on 20-30% more debt, or slash their quality of life expectations, it’s generally seen as a fine thing.
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Q world is very excited about Elon buying Twitter. they think they will be unbanned and can reach normies again with their theories. Elon's latest tweet about sinks didn't help things because "let that sink in" is part of a Q drop
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”There had been an accommodation reached where Zuckerberg said that he was going to continue this policy of not fact-checking and would take a light hand against conservative media and the Trump administration, in turn, would go easy on Facebook.”
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I hope everyone is ready for a generation of this. "the only way my candidate can lose is because of voter fraud." after just a few years, this already feels like a permanent part of US elections, a POV shared by literally millions of very vocal and active Americans.
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From an economist’s perspective: haven’t we just rewarded risk and leverage, and shifted wealth creation from productive labor to nonproductive debt? ie we’re telling workers, you don’t get ahead through work anymore, leverage yourself into multiple properties asap?.
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On the flip side, a home price drop of even 5% would be described as a crisis, w/ politicians/banks working to prevent a bigger fall. Homeowners would get mortgage deferrals, politicians would warn of “overbuilding.” Prices are resilient in part bc they’re aggressively protected.
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From a social science perspective: haven’t we rapidly changed the fortunes for a generation of non-wealthy people in a very short amount of time? when we permanently unravel someone’s future, don’t we pay a gigantic political cost in the form of populism and extremism?.
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i was Zillow Browsing like a good geriatric millennial and saw a house that got me genuinely excited for the first time in like six months. a bit of research revealed the water is not only undrinkable, but actually carcinogenic, due to unfixable leaks from the nearby garbage dump.
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From a central bank perspective: haven’t we just spent $4 trillion and slashed rates to prevent workers from falling behind, while stoking massive asset bubbles that will find a median buyer falling behind by hundreds of thousands of dollars in some markets?.
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you have to wonder why the Deep State — now painfully aware of MAGA efforts to spot fraud — still do nothing more sophisticated than dropping thousands of "fake" ballots at the last minute? wouldn't they try something that's harder to spot?.
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tbf she isn't taking it well either
“I’M NOT CONCEDING!” Laura Loomer attacks the Republican Party and alleges voter fraud after losing GOP primary to incumbent Florida congressman Daniel Webster. #news6
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Ron Watkins is currently in last place with 1,437 votes and 43% reporting.
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I'm watching Ron Watkins' election night party and it captures his campaign pretty well. It isn't at a bar, it's on a livestream with a couple friends/campaign people. “I just hope I’m not in last place. That would be terrible,” he says, before adding, "I ideally, I win, ideally"
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conspiracy influencers should never again point to these charts and say the jumps are "vote injections" or "the algorithm." this jump is for Kari Lake! yet the streamers have totally ignored it. meanwhile they point to identical spikes in Minnesota and Michigan as "clear fraud."
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@BadVaccineTakes I find it more offensive that someone's only income is an investment property.
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this is a long quote, but there is nothing I've read or heard recently on disinformation that puts it so eloquently. it's exactly what's going on and shows how we're not equipped or even that interested in solving it. from @_BGoldberg here
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once again the claims of voter fraud go like this: look at a chart, point at a change and call it fraud. it's that easy. here they look at a batch of votes that mostly go against their candidate and simply call it fraud.
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can confirm that if you lose your H1B job you have to leave the country in 60 DAYS, making your entire life tied to your employer. getting a new job requires an entirely new visa which in many cases is basically impossible in 60 days.
Elon is exploiting H1B visa workers—who know they can’t quit because they’ll be deported— so he holds them hostage until 1AM in the morning to stroke his ego. Sad to say I just unfollowed Vala after years because it’s now clear his values are utterly toxic.
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Here is a great example of bias against millennials. “Young adults” didn’t suddenly appear and surprise everyone when they needed a home. This should say “a complete failure by cities and states to plan for subsequent generations”
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life achievement unlocked! I made it to the front page of the NYT for the first time today 🥺🥺🥺 thanks @stevenleemyers for bringing me on the journey for this one
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right on cue, pallets enter the stage
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i reported on privacy before coming to disinfo, so that meant using DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine loved by privacy activists. so it was odd when I entered disinfo spaces and found that they, too, seemed to use DuckDuckGo. here's what's up:
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I’ve been watching election deniers actively try to deny the sec of state results in Colorado, and the way they do it is: they look at a chart of results and then point to changes on the chart and go “this is fraud.” That’s how easy it is and how dumb it is.
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can probably count on "Jane's Revenge," an anonymous abortion rights group/blog, to become a new scapegoat for bad things that happen. "Antifa" was a really effective bogeyman for the far-right, used to transform individual acts of violence into orchestrated plots.
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aw my 1st story in print as a reporter here how swell
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Last year I started following Denzel Washington on Telegram. He pushed conspiracy theories and also ads for this weird Trump coin. The account wasn't real and neither was the coin. Here is my investigation in this very weird internet mystery.
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Stunning. On Laura Ingraham last night, Trump thought the US sent troops into Ukraine. he criticized US intelligence for letting that leak. You have to have almost no understanding of the situation to think the US would have sent troops into Ukraine.
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i listen to a lot of right-wing podcasts now and i can't emphasize this enough: it is nearly 100% grievance. if you did a content analysis you would find almost no new information or reporting, and instead it's just getting angry at this or that thing on the left.
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Just a quick thanks to WaPo for leaving me a sliver of space in which to read your articles bless you 🙏
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thinking of this great @jaredlholt quote from my last tory: "Every once in a while, somebody on the conspiracy-brain right wing gets a bunch of attention online and they think that means they’re popular. So they try to run for office . and it’s just a miserable crash and burn.”.
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Election denier Tina Peters lost in a big way last night. Her supporters are claiming voter fraud in the GOP primary. People reply that nothing will change until they take up arms.
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Jan. 6 committee addresses the conspiracy theory that this guy Ray was an FBI plant pushing Trump supporters to raid the Capitol. The conspiracy was outlined in a lengthy article and was eventually pushed by Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene on the Jan. 6 anniversary.
The Select Committee is aware of unsupported claims that Ray Epps was an FBI informant based on the fact that he was on the FBI Wanted list and then was removed from that list without being charged.
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predicting 47 offers over asking. this is also a good test for my realtor, since i haven't shared any of this with her, and i wonder if she'll uncover these details. (probably not).
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Mark Finchem, the election denier and Republican candidate for Arizona's Secretary of State, who is trailing by nearly 100k votes, is now claiming there are "election anomalies."
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Gregg Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht, the voices behind True the Vote, were ordered to be arrested today after refusing to release the name of someone who apparently "hacked" poll worker data. This caps a whirlwind few days in which they also claimed to be FBI informants.
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also <3 to the idea that there's algorithm so sophisticated that it controls American elections, so secret that there's literally no trace of it anywhere, yet no one thought to spread out the votes so you couldn't just point to a chart on the internet and spot it in action.
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we need a term for information that is not technically wrong but is misleading or framed so terribly that it leaves someone angry and with a very bad impression of what actually happened. my wife came up with pissinformation (as in piss-poor and pissed off) and I think it's swell.
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The algorithmic recommendations seem to undermine the argument that this is just a search engine.
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I'll be joining the magnificent @daveyalba and others on the Tech team, while collaborating with the rest of the newsroom on a hugely important area of coverage for the Times right now.
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clicked on Mitch McConnell's tweet about Uvalde and here are the first tweets suggested by Twitter's algorithm, under "More Tweets." echo chamber by design.
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Ron Watkins is losing to Steven Krystofiak by 1,440 votes right now. Krystofiak is a relatively unknown farmer who said his main reason for running was wildfire prevention after his community was evacuated in 2021's Backbone Fire.
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I'm also joining a big pool of ridiculously talented reporters, journalists, podcasters, watchdogs and others across the world who have focused on disinfo for a long time. I am humbled by their skill and hope to learn and participate as best I can!.
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in a news story, a man living there was making use of the city-provided free drinking water jugs. but he was still showering in the cancer-water, which he said still concerned him. .
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Ultimately this was the right time for me to dive into a new role with a narrower focus, covering a topic that I am increasingly obsessed with. The chance to focus on beat reporting and writing, while also deploying the other tools in my toolkit, was an attractive proposal.
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a great honor to have my feature on the cover of Sunday Business today, plus a full page inside!
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Ron's complaining about lack of exposure for his campaign. but when I was in AZ, he skipped out on a GOP talk where he was expected to speak. he made no press availability. supporters were complaining online that he hadn't been seen publicly for weeks.
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tldr: a lot of people believe disinformation because it offers a simpler answer for legitimate societal problems and instead of having empathy for this observable phenomenon, or seeing it as a signal for larger societal change, we label their beliefs wrong and move along.
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the "POTUS Trump NFT Collection" is . objectively hideous, a spinning 3d plaque with spinning stars, a 3d flag, protruding text, and on the reverse, a 45 set atop a background of 45s, some of them upside-down, plus a tiny photo that's probably Trump but can you really tell?
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after a tasteful scandi renovation, the house was listed 112% higher than the last time it sold in 2015. that's still about 7% lower than the Zestimate, so it's basically a bargain.
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they told a wild story about getting approached by a strategy firm, who told Ron not to raise money directly because it hurts his image. the company said they'd raise $100ks but, in the end, the company didn't raise anything. Ron called it "demoralizing" and "dirty politics.".
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just came across this infographic on conspiracies 😵💫
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between two posts from Trump on Truth Social was this ad: a man shoves his head into his groin in the name of prostate health. Truth is trying to monetize its user base with ads, but it's not going that well. here's my story:
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right in the middle of the all important Angula section.
Fox News cuts away from Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential announcement. That’s when you know.
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some crushing stories here. after Ron was apparently misled by that consulting firm, he got advice from a local strategist who gave him a 25% chance of winning and said: "if you were my son, I would recommend you not to put any more money into the race".
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@nickmartin that comes directly from the buffalo shooter's manifesto under the title "2.5: Infographics, pictures, memes, antisemitism".
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Been thinking a lot about a Q chat I heard today where a woman sobbed uncontrollably due to problems in her life and moderators told her to stop so they could change the topic to something more positive.
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This also means leaving Opinion, which has been my home for over four years, and the team I built here. It is SUPER SAD, I can't come to terms with leaving Gus, Yaryna, Nat and Duy, along with everyone else. They are superstars and I wish I could do both gigs.
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right on cue, Ron's people are suspecting foul play after seeing Ron's votes apparently fall. not sure if they did (corrections do happen in a live feed). more likely, I think another candidate got more votes than Ron and he fell to last place.
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there is a mind-numbing contraction among the Disinfo Right here: they like Putin, and HATE China, but China backs Putin. this seems to bother no one?.
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here is a flavor of what's going on in far-right telegram groups as they prepare for what they believe will be a "night of rage"
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Conspiracy theorist Mark Finchem, the presumptive winner in the Secretary of State GOP race, raises several election fraud theories in an interview with RSBN. “We’ve got irregularities all over the state.”.
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Canada is a wild country right now. Wages have been flat for a long time, the job market is still garbage, yet housing is still climbing and affordability is at a 31 year low. Politicians are doing precisely nothing. How long until something snaps?.
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my piece from last year looks at the crowds around the Capitol and considers whether using cellphone tracking data is a good idea.
Using a trove of leaked smartphone location data, @cwarzel and @stuartathompson identified some of the Capitol rioters. In this time-lapse animation, smartphones moved from Trump’s rally to the Capitol.
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Ron cites two polls from his competitors. Walt Blackman's poll put Ron at 1%. Eli Crane's poll also put Ron at 1%. But he suggests they're cooked. Ron said he focused his campaign in rural areas where they don't even get cellphone service.
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@patriottakes is "key bump" a term for doing cocaine that's common among non-cocaine users? never heard of this personally.
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if you grab a paper today you’ll see not one but two stories by me on the biz cover! thank you eds and page designers for such a nice front
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@undertheteacup we noticed a water jug in the background 🚩 and then another realtor who lives in the area (not my main one but one of my many backups) said he remembered something about a water problem 🚩🚩 so we just googled the area + water and found an article about it 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩.
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added a timeline breakdown to my story today, with Jack and Neil, on Arizona's election machine issues and how the narrative spread online, using data on Twitter from @EI_Partnership
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there is a super weird subset of wellness disinformation that focuses on sexually transmitted infections. probably the wildest thing i've heard is this doctor on a podcast explaining herpes:
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@Shayan86 @kennardmatt yep, we wrote a whole story in NYT about Ukraine myth making including the Ghost of Kyiv
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hey, the best job in visual journalism just opened up: mine! come lead visual journalism at @nytopinion. amazing colleagues, infinite possibilities. happy to answer Qs.
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on a livestream right now, streamers are pointing to a spike in Georgia, calling it "the blue bump," which they call "impossible." "How are we supposed to believe this?" they ask. But when it comes to lake, they do!
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someone is bombing me with email subscriptions to spam websites and this feels like the perfect welcome to the beat, bless you stranger.
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we are entering the phase of the night where they just start looking at charts and saying "fraud" because the numbers change
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i was shocked when the admin for one of the Trucker Convoy groups I follow came out strongly against Putin. "This time we are in agreement with the mainstream media," he wrote. people got very mad and started unfollowing, saying the channel had become "controlled opposition.".
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Shawnna Bolick, a Republican in the Arizona House, shared these misleading instructions to her 8k followers. No one really noticed. Then Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, copied them word for word, and now it's spreading like crazy.
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my favorite is probably this chart, which shows vote totals getting totally swapped. this might seem like the clearest evidence yet of fraud but since it put their candidate in first, it was instead an example of fraud getting corrected…??????
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economists: why aren't people happy with this economy? it's a real head-scratcher!. the people:
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to his credit, Ron is mostly focusing on fundraising trouble for his defeat. his opponents raised millions. Ron gave a personal loan of $95,000 to his campaign and seemed to mostly rely on asking his online followers for money.
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@MikeNelson @nytimes @RusEmbUSA @FoxNews @OANN @IOpartnership it's definitely a focus! part of the effort here is expanding the beat off social media/tech platforms and into other spaces where this stuff is festering. so the suggestion is noted and I hope we can deliver on that!.
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Reminder that internet people can be perfectly skeptical about what they read online as long as it doesn’t fit their existing worldview
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Ron is now claiming I'm some troll in his internet comments. I'm not! Also, hi Orlando! Hope you're doing well and getting some rest.
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Those damn Millennials and their unrelenting demand to live somewhere!!.
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If home prices start slumping, it would be really great if economists and financial writers understood that a decline of about 20% hurts basically no regular homeowners in any way. That’s equity they didn’t have two years ago. It only really hurts investors and speculators.
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terrific quote at the start of @annamerlan’s book “republic of lies,” which is an even more terrific read
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@cwjohnson23 @chrislhayes I think to grok this POV you have to step into someone else’s shoes, which history shows is apparently pathologically impossible for homeowners to do.
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