health ranger
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see mike adams</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">report 48 pp</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">exec sum</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the US has grappled with the emergence of
massive social justice mobilisation around the killing
of George Floyd and the simultaneous impact of the
Coronavirus pandemic, disinformation has proven
a constant hazard. Social media platforms like
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube played central roles
in the hosting and amplifying disinformation and
conspiracy theories surrounding both phenomena,
with extremist groups, conspiracy movements,
political entities and foreign states all playing their
part to exploit the health crisis and political turmoil.1
Amid this swell of <b>disinformation, the Institute for
Strategic Dialogue (ISD) </b>has explored a complex
web of social media and website infrastructure
used to create, promote, and target health and
political disinformation. ISD’s research analyses
the nature and scale of the NaturalNews empire
built by Mike Adams, a businessman connected
to extremist figures including Alex Jones and the
anti-government militia group known as the Oath
Keepers. NaturalNews is widely acknowledged to be
a prolific source of disinformation relating to both
health and politics.2
ISD’s report examines its recent
activities in relation to COVID-19 and the protests
associated with the George Floyd killing, as well as its
historic promotion of extremist material, conspiracy
theories and health disinformation.
The complex web of infrastructure surrounding
NaturalNews is vast. Its activities remain largely
unchecked on social media sites, where it finds
platforms to proselytise. Despite being banned from
Facebook in 2019 and again in 2020, NaturalNews
has continued to post on branded Facebook groups
and appears linked to a network of over 400+
affiliated domains, including domains promoting
extremist and violent material.3
In May 2020,
Facebook banned posts with links to NaturalNews.
com, NewsTarget.com, and Brighteon.com, all of
which appear to be owned and run by NaturalNews
and its founders.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These sites were banned from the platform after
using content from troll farms in Macedonia and
the Philippines. But existing efforts from Twitter
and Facebook to limit the presence of NaturalNews,
and recent attempts to stem the spread of some
of its affiliated sites, have failed to halt the ride of
disinformation from the empire established by
Adams over the last decade.
ISD’s analysis identified over 18,000 links to
NaturalNews affiliated websites that were shared
in public Facebook groups and pages over a nearly
three-month period at the start of 2020. These links
engendered nearly 100,000 likes, over 327,000
shares, and over 33,000 comments.4
The vast
majority of the network’s sites continue to spread
unchecked on Facebook pages and groups, despite
the efforts of companies to rein in NaturalNews.
ISD’s research demonstrates the significant
infrastructure and perseverance of disinformation
purveyors who seek to spread harmful and false
information. It also shows the as yet unmet
challenge that has been placed at the foot of
social media companies to stop their platforms
from providing these actors with a loudspeaker
to reach hundreds of thousands of people. The
reactive game of cat and mouse that companies
currently rely upon to reduce the potency of such
networks has proven inherently limited when
dealing with vast networks of interconnected and
long-established domains like NaturalNews. While
the accounts, pages and groups used to host and
promote the NaturalNews network have begun
to disappear as researchers and companies have
started to understand the scale of the NaturalNews
operation online, the policies and actions of
companies dealing with outbound links to known
disinformation and extremist domains remain
opaque and inadequate in stemming the tide. There
are challenging but urgent decisions that companies
must take on how to confront disinformation
empires that stretch across but also far beyond their
own platform borders.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200620-ISDG-NaturalNews-Briefing-V4.pdf">https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/20200620-ISDG-NaturalNews-Briefing-V4.pdf</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/quackery/mike-adams-building-alternate-reality-online">https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/quackery/mike-adams-building-alternate-reality-online</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">there is a Wonderland filled with health scares, monsters, and miraculous concoctions, Mike Adams is building it. And its looking-glass is the Internet.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Much has been written recently about online “echo chambers”: the idea that we are catered to on the Internet with sites and recommendations that reinforce our preexisting beliefs. If you watch a lot of science videos on YouTube, follow many scientists on Twitter, and regularly search for scientific questions on Google, your online experience will shift away from neutrality, as search results, post sorting, and recommendations will be tailored to your pro-science stance. This is an echo chamber because, in due time, you only hear your beliefs repeated back at you and stop seeing what’s happening on the other side.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Echo chambers for the pseudoscience crowd exist as well, though Mike Adams’ online bubble is so vast and self-sufficient, it warrants the term “ecosystem”.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mike Adams, also known as The Health Ranger, is a fierce advocate of alternative medicine. He is anti-vaccination, anti-GMO, anti-medicine.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">You may know him as the owner of<a href="http://naturalnews.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> NaturalNews.com</a>.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> According to</span><a href="https://www.naturalnews.com/About.html" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: inherit;"> the website</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, its 20 writers and researchers produce up to 15 articles a day. If this massive undertaking already sounds impressive, you may want to know that</span><a href="http://naturalnews.com/" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: inherit;"> NaturalNews.com</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> is only the prominent tip of a very large iceberg.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A bit of online sleuthing revealed that Mike Adams owns over 50 websites. The topics they cover go beyond alternative medicine and help shape an entire worldview: fear of medicine and science (<a href="http://www.gmo.news/" style="font-weight: inherit;">gmo.news</a>,<a href="http://www.medicine.news/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> medicine.news</a>,<a href="http://www.vaccine.news/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> vaccines.news</a>), anti-Left and pro-freedom hype </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">(<a href="http://campusinsanity.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;">campusinsanity.com</a>,<a href="http://www.libtards.news/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> libtards.news</a>,<a href="http://www.freedom.news/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> freedom.news</a>), and doomsday prep advice (<a href="http://www.survival.news/" style="font-weight: inherit;">survival.news</a>,<a href="http://www.collapse.news/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> collapse.news</a>).</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><img height="901" width="1602" class="file-original " src="https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/files/oss/mike_adams_infographic_2.png" alt="" style="border: 0px; vertical-align: middle; margin: 0px 4px 4px; width: 680px; height: 382px;" /></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On<a href="http://biodefense.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> biodefense.com</a>, you will be able to listen to a 45-minute audio clip of Mike Adams instructing you on building an emergency Ebola isolation room at home “after the hospitals are overrun</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">” (never mind that Ebola does not spread easily and that few cases ever made it to North America).</span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On<a href="http://www.chlorellafactor.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> chlorellafactor.com</a>—a webpage dedicated to an algae sold as a superfood—you will be scared into thinking every seller of chlorella wants to kill you… except for Adams who, of course, wants you to know that his store offers Clean Chlorella “even if it means less profit than retailing cheaper, lower-quality chlorella”. While Adams trots out this food source as a<a href="https://www.naturalnews.com/008527.html" style="font-weight: inherit;"> defence against cancer</a>, the evidence isn’t there.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On<a href="http://consumerwellness.org/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> consumerwellness.org</a>, you will find a legit-looking portal for a nonprofit that funds educational programs. Press releases on the website claim the Center annually hands out educational grants to aid schoolchildren, expectant mothers, school nutritional programs, and low-income families. Under “Board of Directors”, a single person is named: Mike Adams. There is an invitation to “join our advisory board” but no members are listed. <b>The website was last updated in 2016, though the organization was<a href="https://www.guidestar.org/profile/84-1129375" style=""> granted tax-exempt status</a> in 1995.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To help bring you back within the confines of this online ecosystem, Mike Adams offers you a<a href="https://www.naturalnews.com/Natural-News-Toolbar.html" style="font-weight: inherit;"> toolbar</a> for web browsers so that, regardless of which website you visit,<a href="http://naturalnews.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> NaturalNews.com</a> is never more than a click away. If you were thinking of searching Wikipedia for a particular food or nutrient, stop. Mike Adams owns<a href="https://www.naturalpedia.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> NaturalPedia</a>, which offers biased health information such as<a href="https://www.naturalpedia.com/naturopathy-sources-health-benefits-at-naturalpedia-com.html" style="font-weight: inherit;"> his page on naturopathy</a>. On it, you will “learn” that it can treat irritable bowel syndrome and ulcers. At the bottom of the page, you will see ads for iodine, magnesium, and colloidal silver because, like the denouement you predict halfway through watching a bad movie, you will have inferred by now that Adams has a<a href="https://www.healthrangerstore.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> store</a>.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Digging a bit deeper reveals a weirder complexity to Adams’ ecosystem.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Mike Adams has a search engine.</b> If you’re looking for a replacement to Google that “filters out corporate propaganda and government disinformation”, Adams suggests you use<a href="https://www.goodgopher.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> </a><b><a href="https://www.goodgopher.com/" style="">Good Gopher</a>. Searching for “Washington Post”, for example, I was not shown the actual website of the Washington Post; instead, I was sent to TruthWiki, RealInvestigations.News, Disinfo.news,</b> and a whole alternate reality in which the newspaper churns out fake news and is </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">beholden to Monsanto</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. Some of the “independent news websites” that Good Gopher sticks to and that aren’t owned by Mike Adams include far-right website<a href="http://breitbart.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> </a><b><a href="http://breitbart.com/" style="">Breitbart.com</a> and Alex Jones’ conspiracy epicentre<a href="http://infowars.com/" style=""> Infowars.com</a>.</b></span></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like Google, Adams’ Good Gopher—whose animal mascot, seen holding a magnifying glass, is rendered in reassuring cartoon form—is not just a search engine. It is tied to Gopher Mail, an email service that promises to be “100% uncensored”, whatever that means. Paralleling Facebook, Adams trots out his own social network at<a href="https://share.naturalnews.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> https://share.naturalnews.com</a>, hosted by Diaspora (a social network platform created by people who are wary of online service providers accumulating and selling your personal information to advertisers). I joined Natural News’ “online social world where you are in control” using a pseudonym and was instantly met with an article telling me to eat more olives to ward off cancer. Also, ginger is “monumentally superior” to chemotherapy, I was told.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps the most puzzling space of this alternate ecosystem is Adams’<a href="http://science.naturalnews.com/" style="font-weight: inherit;"> portal</a> to search health topics in the scientific literature. You are invited to enter a disease name, a symptom, a food, herb, nutrient, or therapy of any kind, and you are then shown a list of scientific articles on this topic. The search results, however, belong to PubMed, the search engine maintained by the National Institutes of Health of the United States and widely used by biomedical researchers everywhere. The URL for these search results even includes the PubMed ID number given to every paper it lists. So why not simply provide a link to PubMed for people to search the literature this way? Suspecting a biased, filtering-out of results, a friend searched for the last 300 additions to PubMed on Adams’ portal: they were all there. No evidence of foul play makes this addition to his ecosystem an open-ended question.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Raising awareness of this “alternate reality” online is important since the world of alternative medicine can seem, to the casual observer, quite benign. Behind the curtain of empathy and so-called holistic care, however, often lies a darker notion: that modern medicine cannot be trusted. Few alternative medicine proponents reach the near-operatic heights of Mike Adams, but his empire of misinformation has major ramifications. In the age of the digital echo chamber, his voice can be heard even if you don’t go searching for it.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>His<a href="https://twitter.com/HealthRanger" style=""> Twitter account</a> boasts 124,000 followers. </b>On the day I write this, he has tweeted about reducing your risk of stroke by drinking full-fat milk; about the chemical bisphenol-A causing gender confusion; and about a woman who cured her cancer with cannabis oil. These tweets lead to his websites, which can be searched via his Good Gopher engine and accessed through his social media platform.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mike Adams’ dark, conspiratorial Wonderland is vast and the rabbit hole is frightening in depth. “Down, down down. Would the fall never come to an end?”</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Thanks to Geoff Brown for the investigative legwork.]</font></p><hr style="border-right: 0px; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(151, 151, 151); border-image: initial; height: 1px; clear: both; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" /><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1em; font-family: McGillSerif-Regular, MinionPro-Medium, " minion="Minion" pro="Pro" medium="Medium" century="Century" georgia="Georgia" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><a href="https://twitter.com/crackedscience" style="font-weight: inherit;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">@CrackedScience</font></a></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div></div>