OK so here is a super basic tutorial for people. We keep hearing about fake news and misinformation but not always about how to identify it. Well, here’s one very simple way.
Not everything is so blatant as to look like obvious sensationalist clickbait. Here’s a quick example: https://daplpipelinefacts.com/
looks legit, right? If you go to the site, there is no direct suggestion as to who owns, endorses, subsidizes this website’s content. No ‘contact me,’ no disclaimer or ‘about’ page that’s easily accessible from the frontpage at all. Critical readers might notice that the content is not balanced, that it advocates primarily for the building of the pipeline and its content is critical of DAPL water protectors and protesters. But that’s still not concrete proof as to who can be held accountable for the information, presented as news or articles for public knowledge.
The grey face icons mean this domain is registered– that’s the website you are checking. Click this little button with 3 dots to look up the registration information.
You will get a lot of info. You can search yourself to get the text version of this sample, but here’s a diagram of what you want to look for:
Registrant name, their organization, their email. You can also find phone numbers and address. (Please don’t use this simple dox for evil.)
Now, so what’s Energy Transfer and energytransfer.com?
“Energy Transfer is a Texas-based company that began in 1995 as a small intrastate natural gas pipeline operator and is now one of the largest and most diversified investment grade master limited partnerships in the United States.”
yeah, uh, they build the pipelines.
https://daplpipelinefacts.com is their corporate marketing effort, boosted by SEO to confuse people who search google about the facts surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline. They don’t have to list it directly on the website.
There is a link, “landowners site” on the top bar, that leads to an energytransfer.com address, framing it as if the people who created the information portal are somehow not the same as these “landowners.”
This approach won’t always work. Sometimes corporations or other entities are clever and will register their domains through a proxy or another company. But with clever investigation you can find the information you need to make an informed decision about media sources and their integrity.
theclumsiestninja 