this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation

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Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.

Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.

What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.

By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.


Community rules

Same as instance rules, plus:

  1. No disinformation
  2. Posts must be relevant to the topic of astroturfing, propaganda and/or disinformation

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[–] ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world 48 points 5 months ago (16 children)

A gold bar weighs 400 troy ounces.

Right now gold is at $2,948.85 per troy ounce.

That's about 1,695 and a half gold bars.

A gold bar weighs 27.4286 lbs, so that is 46,507lbs of gold.

The standard armored car can carry up to 3,000 lbs, so it would take at least 16 armored cars to move that many bars.

I guess my point is that is a fuck load of gold. Where the hell do they think Biden was hiding it? In his guest bathroom?

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 18 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Trump and Elon found a place for it all, don't worry.

Yuuuuge bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago

[–] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 5 months ago

Trump and Elon want to "check" Fort Knox to "see if" the gold "is there", but "oh no" it's "all gone".

[–] jonne 6 points 5 months ago

And while the title mentions gold, the body of the article seems to indicate it's just money in a bank account? I don't see the gold thing repeated again.

[–] GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Standard wood joist floors are usually only rated for 30-40 lbs/sqft. That is going to be one hell of a big bathroom.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

30-40 lbs/sqft.

..isn't that less weight/sqft than most adult people put on it?

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[–] glitch1985@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

I heard it was in the trunk of the car in his garage.

[–] RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Biden clearly hides it in his LOCKED garage along with his national secrets and classic cars.

[–] glitch1985@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

Should have put it in the bathroom. The most secure room in a mansion.

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[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 23 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Anyone have a link to the real story this is based on? This page is practically unintelligible. Are the gold bars metaphorical? What the fuck are they talking about?

[–] RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world 29 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Anyone have a link to the real story this is based on? This page is practically unintelligible. Are the gold bars metaphorical? What the fuck are they talking about?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/20/fort-knox-gold-donald-trump-elon-musk/79314407007/

They're talking about the gold at Fort Knox.

"We're going to go to Fort Knox, the fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there. If the gold isn't there, we're going to be very upset," Trump said, per a C-SPAN recording.

Now today's update is that "gold is missing" (I use quotes because it's so obviously untrue). And according to Trump it's the Democrats that took it. Always the democrats. Black female ones too.

As if politicians need to steal gold bars. They receive that as a gift from Egypt as a bribe maybe, but they don't steal from Fort Knox. Makes zero sense. They can just trade stocks with insider info like everyone in congress.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 29 points 5 months ago (2 children)

they're gonna rob fort knox.

sadly, i did not have that on this month's bingo card. (there wasn't room for it!)

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

According to the projection, they've already robbed it of $2 billion.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

And not even in a cool way with lasers and henchmen in silver jumpsuits.

What a stupid world.

[–] kn0wmad1c@programming.dev 19 points 5 months ago (2 children)

If gold really is missing, the first two places I'd check are Trump's pockets and the Mar-a-Lago bathrooms next to the classified documents.

[–] jonne 3 points 5 months ago

He hid the gold by melting it and turning it into commodes.

[–] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

He stole the gold during his first term and Ivana’s coffin doesn’t contain her.

[–] WHARRGARBL@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago

Let’s not forget that all their accusations are confessions.

[–] takeheart@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The Washington Examiner:

In the Wednesday video, Zeldin accused the Biden administration of rushing out these funds and said they should remain under the control of the government.

He referred to the funds several times as “gold bars,” referencing a December 2024 video put out by the conservative group Project Veritas in which a former EPA employee told an undercover member of the group that the administration was attempting to distribute as much of the promised funds as possible before President Joe Biden left office.

So it's just someone using a metaphor. And shoddy journalism. Wrapping gold bars in quotes does not exculpate anyone from shoddy journalism.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So literally just normal government operations that they are trying to spin into some kind of scandal, same as all the other bullshit coming out each day.

[–] GorGor@startrek.website 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

One could make the argument that they didn't do their due diligence and rushed out funds without proper oversight. Honestly it doesn't sound great rushing out that amount of money (IF true), but with the backdrop of what was coming, it is obvious WHY they rushed.

Really, the accusation of corruption is comical given this administration's actions.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Simply moving something along faster isn’t malfeasance though, it’s efficiency. Unless there was some issue with what they did, but so far no one has pointed to anything that I can find. They just executed the grant programs as directed by congress.

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[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 9 points 5 months ago

There's a link early on to a separate, earlier page on epa.gov, which is also insane, which makes it clear that the "gold bars" are metaphorical. Someone allegedly said something about "throwing gold bars off the Titanic," some sort of nugget of theoretical truth I guess being that a lot of people were trying to get as much money out the door as possible before Trump came in and destroyed everything, and then Newsmax and Breitbart seized on the opportunity to deliberately misunderstand the metaphor as something literal, and also make up a whole bunch of total bullshit out of the whole cloth.

I didn't look too deep into it because it's clearly all gibberish. What I just typed is as far as I went. But there are links on the page, if you have some mental fortitude and want to go adventuring. I honestly don't think it's worth much time to look into.

[–] frustrated_phagocytosis@fedia.io 9 points 5 months ago

Looks like a grant based program to electrify housing etc. was included in the inflation reduction act, and a fund to distribute funds to grant recipients was created. I'm guessing the total funding was $20 billion, to be distributed over several years. One of the manager/admins previously worked at a group that was one of those receiving the initial set of grant funds. Claims conflict of interest without citing evidence. Another group appears to involve Stacy Abrams, and looks to have been created from other groups to carry out the kind of work the fund was designed to address. Thus, it's new and has only 1 year of tax reporting available with little revenue.

What I'm getting out of this is that non-profit volunteers or admins who go into the federal government aren't allowed to work in their area of expertise, even with sufficient conflict of interest reporting, and that private citizens who support their preferred candidate for president aren't allowed to work with groups that recieve any federal grants, ever.

[–] danc4498@lemmy.world 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Meanwhile we need to ask what Trump is doing with $2 billion worth of gold bars.

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[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

already trying to smear a potential (she has not declared her intent to run yet) democrat candidate for georgia's open governor's race (kemp is term-limited).

[–] jonne 2 points 5 months ago

Yep, you're never going to hear the end of 'Gold Bars' or whatever from conservative media, to the point that it becomes shorthand and they just have to repeat those 2 words to get the Pavlov reaction from the base who won't even know the actual story it's based on.

It's like the Seth Rich thing they did to Hillary.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

It's obviously fabricated because everyone knows Joe Biden deals in copper

[–] RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago

Wow. It's a list of his enemies and saying they stole gold bars.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago
[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

this is nuts. how can I trust any government communication with his people at the helm.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 months ago

it's "opposite day". today, tomorrow, and every day until this nightmare ends. pretty much everything that spews out of the anuses of this administration is a lie.

[–] forrgott@lemm.ee 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)

So all that's actually happened is a $20 billion contract was officially disbursed - as in, transferred to a private installation. So the contract is closed.

Just to be clear, I don't believe there's enough gold bullion in existence to represent 20 billion; besides, is gold did go missing from fort Knox, we all know trump stole it.

Final note: there's no way in hell 20 billion isn't just a made up amount. Maybe 20 million? But they been caught just straight up lying about total monetary amounts.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 months ago

Well, there's certainly enough gold bars to cover that amount, gold is stupid expensive. You're right about the rest though.

There's about $290 billion in bullion in fort Knox, which is something like 4.5 metric tons.

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[–] forrgott@lemm.ee 3 points 5 months ago

Color me surprised. I guess I drastically underestimated the current monetary value of gold, mainly on account of how long ago we went off the "gold standard".

But still, it's like they fed their grievance through a stupid LLM. Very painful read.

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