But for the record, here is how, at least, a rumor spread from the bottom dredges of the internet to the peak of the news cycle.
-10:05 a.m. Tuesday
Two days after announcing that he represented "a woman with credible information regarding Judge Kavanaugh" and began teasing sensational details of her allegations on Twitter, Avenatti abruptly set his Twitter account to private late Tuesday morning, Eastern time, explaining that "I was just forced to make my account private because the bots and Trump trolls are out in full force due to my representation re Kavanaugh. I will change this back as soon as I am able."
Many people had been skeptical of the famously self-promotional lawyer's claims about his client - in large part because Avenatti had not yet named her, even though he promised that she would soon become the third woman this month to go public with sexual allegations against Kavanaugh. Even some Democrats were suspicious, the Daily Beast reported.
But on 4chan's uncensored /pol/ forum - a haven for far-right trolls - the attitude toward Avenatti was less suspicious than downright paranoid.
-10:54 a.m.
The 4chan site, if you're not familiar with it, is essentially the bathroom wall of the internet. It's an anonymous message board where anyone can claim to be anyone, or write anything about anyone. Many want their message to be widely read - to go viral. A small fraction of them are insightful. Most are gross and weird.
By the forum's standards, there was nothing particularly remarkable about what a user identified only as "d6yucTxx" wrote an hour after Kavanaugh locked his Twitter account. It was just another post full of obscenities, typos, exclamation points and outlandish claims.
The crux of d6yucTxx's story was that some days earlier, he and his "stripper GF" had called "Avanatti" on their "Burner Cell" phones as a prank to pass the time.
The girlfriend supposedly convinced "Avanatti" that she had gone to the same school as Christine Blasey Ford - who accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault earlier this month, derailing the Supreme Court nominee's confirmation hearing - and that she had a similar story to share. d6yucTxx wrote that he had pretended to be "a Classmate of Judge Kavaugh" who confirmed the bogus story, and that together he and his girlfriend had tricked "Avanatti" into offering $75,000 if she would tell the story on CNN.
The pair eventually tired of the prank and destroyed their burner phones, d6yucTxx wrote, which explained why "Avanatti" had just locked his Twitter account after days of hype that he had found a new accuser.
It should be noted that not even 4chan readers believed this at first.
"You've been watching too much Breaking Bad," wrote one of the first people to reply. "Recording or it didn't happen," wrote another.
Not everyone would be so discerning.
-10:55 a.m. to 3:42 p.m.
Like scribblings on the proverbial toilet stall, most posts on 4chan are doomed to obscurity. They pop up on the forum's front page, get buried under newer posts seconds later, and usually disappear to the bottom of the pile before more than a handful of people see them.
d6yucTxx's post was headed for the same trash bin - except someone took a screenshot and shared it on Twitter, where the claim mated with speculative threads obsessing over who Avenatti's mystery accuser could be. And lo, a viral hoax was born.
The post trended upward through increasingly popular Twitter accounts, mostly on the far right, reaching Fox News contributor Stephen Miller and blogger Erick Erickson in the early afternoon. Those tweets, in turn, became the bases for blog posts on conservative sites such as RedState and Townhall, which in turn were noticed by reporters.
Inundated with questions, Avenatti explicitly denied the rumor on Twitter shortly before 4 p.m.:
"There is a rumor being floated that I was 'duped' or 'pranked' by a 4Chan user re Kavanaugh. I have received multiple inquiries about it. This is completely false. It never happened; it is a total fabrication. None of it is true. The right must be very worried. They should be."
This, of course, only made the situation exponentially worse.
-4 p.m. to Fox News @ Night
In case Avenatti's blanket statement was not a sufficient denial of a ludicrous theory, CNN's Jake Tapper reported 20 minutes later that he had spoken to the attorney, who was sticking by his claim that his client was a real person:
"Asked @MichaelAvenatti about the rumor his new client is a hoax," Tapper tweeted at 4:05 p.m. " 'It never happened. None of it. No truth to it. This is a fabrication of the right because they are worried and they should be.' "
"Michael Avenatti on Tuesday lashed out at reports that a client who was preparing to level allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was a fake and part of a ruse by an outside group targeting Avenatti," Politico reported in the early evening, and solicited yet another comment from the lawyer: "Like we don't vet clients. Give me a break."
No break was given. It was CBS News's turn next to quote Avenatti. "There's nothing wrong!" he told the outlet. "I had to go online to look, and I read this post, and I'm laughing. None of that happened. It's a complete fabrication. There's zero truth to it. When I say zero truth, I mean zero truth. Not a single thing in that is true."
Before the clock had finished with the day, Fox News' chief national correspondent Ed Henry reported on the controversy during his nightly roundup. Henry managed to mix up the timeline, misreporting that Avenatti had locked his Twitter account after the 4chan post went up - "though he insists that was because of online threats from Trump supporters, and says it's completely false that he was duped."
That may have marked peak 4chan in the United States, but it wasn't the end of the rumor's life cycle. It appeared in Canadian headlines in the small hours of Wednesday morning. Come daybreak, Brian Kilmeade incorrectly told the viewers of Fox & Friends that "Avenatti says he might have been duped, he might have been punked," before correcting himself a few minutes later.
-Wednesday to the end of time
"The manipulators have found ways to hijack the norms of journalism," hoax expert Phillips said Wednesday morning, recounting the spectacle.
She recently wrote a paper about how reporters unintentionally spread fake news even when they try to debunk it, as many had Tuesday. She thinks trolls such as d6yucTxx - for all their poorly written prose and ridiculous claims - probably know this, and count on it. And as hoaxes and conspiracy theories increasingly show up not just in the news but sometimes in the White House, she thinks the trolls are winning.
"There are coordinated efforts to sow ridiculous narratives on 4chan, basically for the reporters to show up holding a microphone," Phillips said. "Even if you're leading with the denial, it still puts the story out into the atmosphere . . . It delegitimizes everything around it. Whoever the survivor is, there's going to be a shadow cast on them from now."
At 10:42 a.m. Wednesday, Avenatti released the name of his client: Julie Swetnick, who said she was present during a "gang rape" at a party in the early 1980s at which Kavanaugh was present. Kavanaugh denied the allegation, as he has the other accusations.
d6yucTxx's stripper-scam story has since disappeared from the news cycle, now being obviously impossible. But back on 4chan, they're already digging through Swetnick's online history, trying hard to start the next one.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by dannno
Connect With Us