Media Equalizer
An article on the right-wing blog Media Equalizer about Andrew Kaczynski.
Several far-right personalities online have fueled conspiracy theories about CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski, who profiled the Reddit user "HanAssholeSolo" whose WWE meme was tweeted by President Donald Trump.- Critics of CNN have shared the stories, which have numerous factual inaccuracies about Kaczynski's reporting and social media activity.
- CNN has pushed back against some of the reports.
The far right is escalating its war on the CNN reporter whose profile of a pro-Trump Reddit user sparked swift backlash.
A number of fake or misleading stories about Andrew Kaczynski, who has been accused of blackmailing the Reddit user he profiled, have surfaced on far-right blogs and social media in the last week.
Kaczynski's July 4 about Reddit user "HanAssholeSolo" described the user's history, including his sharing of anti-Semitic memes. The story said CNN would withhold publishing his name and that the user was "not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again."
"In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same," Kaczynski's story said. "CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change."
BuzzFeed and Gizmodo both reported that the line was not written by Kaczynski, but rather added in later by a member of CNN's standards division.
Nonetheless, Kaczynski has become a prime target of vitriol. Activists have threatened to protest outside his house, and have revealed some of his family members' personal information.
Last Wednesday, far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos published a story claiming that Kaczynski "once drove a man to suicide," saying that Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, who was mistakenly identified as a potential suspect of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing, committed suicide because he was mistakenly identified as a suspect, in part because of Kacynzki's social media activity.
In the days after the bombing, Reddit users mistakenly identified Tripathi - who was missing at the time - as a suspect in the bombing. This led to a cascading series of events: Following a post on Reddit identifying Tripathi, a Twitter user said a Boston Police Department scanner identified Tripathi as a suspect.
This was shared by a local television reporter, which Kaczynski picked up, tweeting: "Wow Reddit was right about the missing Brown student per the police scanner. Suspect identified as Sunil Tripathi."
Timelines of the incident consider Kaczynski's tweet, which went out to his then-over 80,000 followers, to be one of the first of a series that momentarily seemed to legitimize the theory, which was disproven by the FBI shortly thereafter.
But Yiannopoulos' story makes no mention of the fact that Tripathi, who suffered from depression, had died a month before the bombing. Thus while Kaczynski was one of the higher-profile journalists who ran with false information, his error didn't lead to Tripathi's death. (Kaczynski deleted the tweets shortly after the incident.)
That story wasn't the only misinformation proliferated by the far right that gained traction last week.
On Friday, Media Equalizer, a blog that aspires to be a conservative response to Media Matters, accused Kaczynski of using "a phishing tactic to gather private information" of people who received his emails.
The blog claimed that because Kaczynski used MailTrack, a Google Chrome extension that informs users whether an email has been opened and read, he was attempting to "plant foreign web bugs into personal emails, a common phishing tactic used to determine IP address, location, and other identifying information."
"At one point, he attempts to sneak a web bug into the conversation, with the apparent goal of luring the recipient into clicking the link. Doing so would give Kaczynski the IP address, location, and other metadata included in the email recipient's account," author Jeff Reynolds wrote.
Far-right provocateurs Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec picked up the thread.
Though email tracking is a common tool used by email sales and marketing services, some critics feel that the practice raises email privacy questions. Politico's media columnist Jack Shafer ruminated on Twitter on Friday about whether it's ethical for people to track emails.
But according to MailTrack's support page, since the end of 2013, "MailTrack does not disclose the information of device and geographical localization for Gmail's recipients."
"MailTrack's user interface does not show the location or IP address of the recipient," MailTrack co-founder Eduardo Manchon said in an email. "There is no way you can use MailTrack for phishing attacks or to find out the identity of the recipient of an email, or the recipient's IP address."
Further, the "web bug" Reynolds refers to is a MailTrack feature that is a simple alert as to whether the user has clicked a hyperlink that Kaczynski included in his email. According to MailTrack's support page, this does not actually track the IP address, location, and other metadata Media Equalizer claimed the service collected.
The post provoked broad condemnation from CNN.
CNN's vice president of communications, Matt Dornic, threatened possible legal action against the site and criticized Posobiec, who then argued without evidence that the website's support page did not contain "unbiased facts."
Media Equalizer cofounder Brian Maloney defended the article, saying that some Twitter users claimed that they could in fact reveal users IP addresses, but that the argument was "beside the point now" and the interpretation of the article was "left up to the reader to decide if he's up to no good or not."
"He has enough tools at his disposal to get this information, and he's a pro at this," Maloney said. "But to us, it's about CNN's response to a story that would've faded into the weekend. It's about their heavy-handedness."
In a series of emails posted by the site itself, Kaczynski asked Media Equalizer to correct the story, saying that MailTrack does not share identifying information.
"What you wrote is not true and is inflaming people who are threatening me and my family," Kaczynski said. "Mailtrack.io does not tell ip address or location. You need to correct this as soon as possible."
But this just bred more conspiracy theories about Kaczynski.
When a user on Medium said the service has not recorded any location services since 2013, Media Equalizer cofounder Melanie Morgan, a right-wing radio host who claims she is a close friend of Fox News' Sean Hannity, proposed a broader conspiracy.
Confronted with facts in the Medium post, Morgan proposed that the post wasn't written by author Ali Fleih, but instead was written by Kaczynski himself.
CNN @KFile used MailTrack which embeds code in images and then sends a metadata readout when opened. One of the most common phishing attacks https://t.co/OlboOTdg8n
- Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 7, 2017Does CNN send spyware to people? Very creepy. https://t.co/lhGXmbwu2A
- Mike Cernovich 🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) July 8, 2017Waiting for this "exclusive" to be retracted. Very simple search of the site disproves this story. https://t.co/9girqDRKOQ https://t.co/r2oa3h3Axu
- Matt Dornic (@mdornic) July 7, 2017Keep it up. I hope you and your boss have good lawyers.
- Matt Dornic (@mdornic) July 9, 2017Not a threat. Just a thought. When you're knowingly defaming someone.
- Matt Dornic (@mdornic) July 9, 2017Suggesting it could be a legal issue, yes.
- Matt Dornic (@mdornic) July 9, 2017His writing style VERY similar to AK. Profile says freshman at Duke or Wayne, I don't buy it.
- Melanie Morgan (@MelMorgan1350) July 9, 2017