The account that made this viral post uses a AI-generated stock photo as their profile picture, and the main claim that Big Balls "was harassing and trying to pick up the 15-year-old girl" is not in the article. We are not immune from disinformation.
Appreciate that greatly, that one had definitely lodged in my brain as "true"
Well their are enough facts about the guy! But I will bet he was the instigator! Plus you believe the Cops? Lol
For starters, please use his actual name rather than his nickname. i am sure he prefers the macho he-man reference.
i am. i'm immune to all information. i don't believe anything ever even if it's true
Ty for the heads up
@radiofreetom.bsky.social doesn't this showcase one of the dangers of paywalls? The paywall meant people had a difficult time noticing the summary was fake. I get journalism needs funding but there are dangers on a practical level to paywalls.
Yeah, paywalls are a HUGE factor in the spread of misinformation.
When I ran into the paywall on the original post I just went to an archive site. If someone hasn't already archived it, you can archive it yourself. This usually gets around most paywalls. archive.ph/h6vyR
having also reposted it and kept it up for nine full minutes i feel kind of obligated to keep it all goin'
When I saw this last night, it was clear most of the commenters hadn't read the linked article. Not a single word supported the OP's claim. The DOGE guy is already documented to be shitty. We don't have to believe made up nonsense to know that.
That's for sure. The left is not immune from disinformation. Maybe my mom's advice will help... When a little girl, standing behind my mom at the grocery checkout line, if she saw me looking at the cover of the National Inquirer, she'd always say, "JoAnn, you can't believe everything you read."
It's funny because 20 minutes ago I sent this as I talk to my friends in discord and said I shit you not "Eh I'll look into it later but it would be par for the course" I was planning on reading through the information now 20 minutes later and your post is top of my feed
So the stopgap on me misinforming two friends was able to be handled immediately, because we were still sitting there, but it begs the question of people who just send and never follow up and re-inform people when the truth becomes apparent.
Since Bluesky now tells you if someone liked or reposted your reposts, I know that one person I follow reposted it in the time before I removed it. So I know exactly who I spread disinformation to.
I'm glad I was able to catch my friends because we were in voice. It's a great lesson in making sure to vet stuff and also shows like you said how "we who are aware aren't immune", because like I mentioned I was in the process of fact checking but there was a 20 minute delay
Its got me thinking of the fake bloomberg account on twitter that cause that stock market spike
I still don’t care for Squishy Scrotum..
I also found the exact text in this post was a comment on Reddit a day before it was posted on Bluesky. Maybe not a sure fire sign of misinfo/inauthentic behavior on its own, but further reasons to question it along with the other signs noted here. www.reddit.com/r/politics/c...
The photos being posted are also coming from Reddit, it seems—can find them via a few different accounts. For ex, the bsky account posted this same photo (username on this post is uhhh): www.reddit.com/r/Colorado/s...
And this one the bsky account posted a few days ago www.reddit.com/r/Colorado/s...
lol omg both are evocative usernames!
It's either a person or a bot just taking posts from /r/news and /r/politics and reposting it with top comments. Everything they say is just someone else's reddit post.
Excellent sleuthing! But also depressing find… And I’m also kind of laughing that using the term “cankles” is helping tank this account as a scam.
I’m seeing stuff like this here and there too
oh what the hell
Ich denke, du bist ein bisschen zu skeptisch, @notnamedjames. Glaubst du, dass niemand jemals die Wahrheit sagen kann, oder ist es nur, dass du die Polizei nicht vertraust?
"the boy jumped in to defend her" was suspect from the beginning, as most of the accounts i've seen previously said that mister coristine got his ass beat by the girl, rather than anyone else
P.S. This kid right here has all your personal information. He has every bit of it.
Hey people are asking, there’s lots of questions lmao
It sounds like an excuse a young adult would make to justify why he got his ass beat so I really didn't even question it. I don't think many people did. Which is typically the worst kind of disinfo, one that distorts a lie just enough to be believable by most people.
Tangent but it's also interesting how absolutely little AI portraits actually do to be seen as "Believable." This doesn't really reform the dudes character cause he's still an asshole that got lots of people harmed and killed, but they still tried. Thank goodness for labelers, even imperfect ones
Yeah, I'm not convinced by any reports that this was anything more or less than a minor criminal incident that had nothing to do with his political affiliations. Certainly not some national crisis that would warrant a military invasion.
Noted and deleted
How do we know that's really you?
Oh i'm not the guy lol. I just QTed it and deleted my QT
Hmm. Would the real David Atkins say it in precisely that way?
Lolol
Thomas Payne as in Thomas Paine who wrote Common Sense?
I know this is neither here nor there but man big balls has the biggest goddamn upper head
Interesting...
Honestly we don’t even need a reason to beat up big balls. Any grown man who thinks that’s a cool nickname should get beaten up every day. He should be hung from the lockers by his underpants. We should steal his lunch money and dunk his head in the toilet.
Nor was it in the articles citing the police report (which he said included that info)
I totally didn't see this until your post, thank goodness.
Ah man
Yup. Always source-check before popping off.
Thank you so much for this I definitely fell for it and hope to learn a lesson from that.
Thank you. I could have easily fallen for this.
Thanks for the heads up.
It’s not beyond the possibility that the topic and content were also generated by AI.
No one is immune. Nobel prize winners can get scammed. Guard your grille
so Big Balls is also a pedo?
The common denominator of the pedo party.
Thx.
yea I feel a little crazy after that, like am I the only one who reads the article? It kept racking up shares and likes for days with no one pointing that out bsky.app/profile/did:...
And they blocked me for asking about the claims. Wow, I guess that explains why nobody else was questioning it on the post. They had all been blocked. Definite stench of disinformation here.
If you go through their recent (last 30m) blocks on clearsky.app/thomaspayne...., every single one of them just posted a comment pointing out that this is false.
They're still at it. They've now blocked about 1500 people calling their claims into question in the past hour. Basically their entire block list. The account's whole purpose is for this op. Careful out there.
And in some cases adds to a list you can't get off of beforehand Bluesky has a list Abuse issue @kassandraseven.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/r5-t...
bsky.app/profile/kass...
That sucks. If he'd added me to a list I'd be pissed too. I reported him to Bluesky as a malicious actor and tried to describe some of this. But I don't know if his misbehavior is actually against the ToS
I'm not a fan of mod lists. Theoretically the community could solve this by adding people like him to a mod list and subscribing to it. But those lists are susceptible to being gamed, e.g. in this exact instance. They aren't a real solution.
I think mods should have the power to go outside of ToS to ban people they feel it's important to ban for community safety. But that wouldn't solve it either because they can make a new account. Personally I try and be critical and media literate, e.g. I called out this guy for making up the story
Ditto As did many others and he lashes out and posted the thought police were after him He blocked over 7000 accounts after he posted the false story (but never deleted the misinformation) Thanks for reporting, I did the same
I just think you shouldn't be able to add someone to a public lists without appeal by accounts that immediately block you
So you're saying she was younger?
Blocked him. Followed you.
I too briefly reposted it, then I read the article and didn't see that claim mentioned, so I removed my repost.
RIP young adult man
What a ❄️ bsky.app/profile/r5-t...
That account has blocked almost 70 people in the past 40 minutes clearsky.app/thomaspayne....
Noteworthy that they are blocking people instead of defending themselves. Reported it
😹😹😹 I'm one.
Including me. I didn't know accounts I had already blocked could subsequently see me to block me, but apparently that's the case.
Lotta folks using @listifications.app now to track blocks and reciprocate
Interesting. That's seems a pretty high level of committment to float this particular turd. But maybe that's what its habit is?
Seems more like a reaction. He claimed the trolls were after him. Like someone that’s been stuck in fight or flight mode for far too long and now lacks the patience to develop his own thoughts. Just endless vague thoughts with no idea that his thoughts are vague.
The blocking described to protect an unsourced BS claim looks professional, pathological, or both.
Everything about that account seems impulsive. His replies have themes of conflict, righteousness, and few people willing or ready to fight. Would look for something more than someone telling a lie then blocking everyone before being confident they're someone trying to muddy the waters.
Look, if you are blocking 70 people an hour and 3 a minute to defend an unsourced claim that you created or borrowed without attribution, as has happened here, I don't actually care whether you are intentionally or unintentionally pushing garbage into the info stream. I don't want you in my pool.
No problems with that, controlling who's in your pool is healthy. I was pointing out that there are other explanations for that behavior and that doubling down on thoughts or actions not well formed is actually super common.
I do care about someone's welfare in this situation, but I am still going to block them because of this behavior. As to other explanations ... I see the argument; I don't find it especially persuasive.
People do suffer breakdowns. Times are the worst and they are the worst in the dumbest ways. A lot of people might suffer them & it's probably healthier to not assume those people are intentionally messing things up or at least be cautious with labeling.
Don't mean to get on your case. Sorry, if it comes off that way. New to communicating the idea that sometimes people do confusing things and that it may seem intentional on social media with no other cues for context.
Other people with a pic of themselves as a profile pic have made posts on other platforms with the same claim. No clue if it’s coordinated or not but don’t you think it possible they’re just people reacting from some trauma? Constantly looking for & spreading info believing it will bring them peace.
Might just be some increasingly isolated person that is growing desperate. Painting him as AI profile pic guy and using what people assume about that as evidence of his wrongdoing seems cruel.
I don't know, systematically reposting Reddit comments as BSky posts (which this is an example of) seems more like bot-like engagement farming than the manifestation of deep-seated psychological pathologies bsky.app/profile/orph...
Yeah, I would expect they have zero personal stake in US politics and have ten more accounts just like this with different proclivities that they're fattening for sale. They just happened to hit a comment that was fake news instead of pithy remark.
Fake news doesn't even feel like the right word tbh, just someone larping/wishcasting in the reddit comments.
Yes, it can be assumed what he is doing is an example of something but it can also be explained as some desperate person working with technology they are unfamiliar with, getting into a habit of spreading info they find in other places while being unsure how to credit the comments they found.
The person on Threads spreading the same information tried to write it off as finding the information from some other article they were trying to find again. This guy didn't make any claims like that, I think. He just assumed the scary troll networks were after him.
Bottom line is that most misinformation is goofy. That behavior in a community may be common. People desperate in this moment may find community in the resistor people constantly doing what he is doing. That labeling people cause "seems right" can be misattribution which is also misinformation.
Tracked em down to block and lmao. Like 20 minutes ago, post basically calling you a troll, a loser, and apart of a "Trump disinformation network" with a South Park gif of Randy saying loser in an Obama 08 shirt. Cherry on top was the unironic use of "#Trollalert"
Yeah, I try not to trust screenshots, and usually push back when someone announces something significant that way, e.g. "If you have a link, please post it." But it's very easy to forget.
It wasn't a screenshot, it was the link to the article.
arg. the part that got me is that this story makes more sense than two 15 year olds, one male and one female, randomly beating up a guy named big balls in the streets of DC... sigh.
I 100% believe it was him talking shit, getting hit, but I can't prove that, and it's just my opinion.
Who am I supposed to believe, you or this other person telling me what I want to believe?
you have to ask yourself: 1. is it true? 2. is it funny? 3. will you go to jail for spreading it?
Can anyone else tell AI generated photos just like we used to be able to tell if something is photoshopped by just looking at the pixels? I have this curse now. I’m seeing the AI smile everywhere. 😂
Yes, they look airbrushed to perfection.
use Common Sense before reposting something from Thomas Payne [sic]
I feel like we just went through something similar with a different Thomas Payne account a few weeks ago…
Hayes, maybe? I’m surprised that account is still up. bsky.app/profile/jaun...
He's blocking everyone who questions it, too. 🚩🚩🚩
TY, blocked that account. Grifters are a scourge.
Thank you. Thought there was something not quite right there.
Thank you. I have blocked that
The left and most the liberals have been completely duped by pro palestine propaganda. Democrats never knew the extent of Biden's cognitive impairment. Democrats seem at least just as likely as republicans to get fooled by propaganda
Let’s hope big balls learned a big lesson
Thank you.
Since Big Balls is an adult, his trying to pick up a 15 year old girl makes him a child molester.
sorry but lmao "young adult man hiking" what does the AI think "young" is? that's DADDY
I've called out multiple clickbait accounts on their bad info. Most don't care. One argued with me, claiming their incorrect fact was a difference of opinion. I honestly couldn't tell if it was a bot or a human idiot.
Ecstatic Truth.
... trying at all to verify this on google and wondering if searching "big balls teens" is gonna get me put on a list or something
Here’s a link to the article. Tristan is correct, that claim is not in the article. www.yahoo.com/news/article...
No i mean, trying to verify what the teens said on the police report
List of nominees for cabinet secretary maybe!
Yeah that's what I figured. When I found the account linking the same daily beast article and called out, it was just botswarm of bs. Bsky has a bot problem to the point of not wanting to use any of the "topic" features. It's all just content farming shit
And now he’s blocking those who blocked him. 😂
Saw this on my timeline. Read both the attached article and the WaPo article it linked to, couldn't find it. Assumed it was mentioned in police reports and whatever, and that the defendant's plea didn't make it into media reports for whatever reason. Really sobering to see it's just made up
And now it's seemingly been deleted from what I can tell!
It has not been deleted. Still on his feed. He's blocked everyone who asked for sources and disabled quote posts.
Still rooting for those kids!
We need to make media literacy a mandatory part of public education curriculums. It seems like 95% of misinformation can be defeated by either a) reading the referenced article or b) performing a relatively simple Google search. It’s all about educating people to verify *everything*.
I didn’t see this or engage with it or fall for it or have any doubt it’s AI trash... all that being said, I bet it’s true.
yeah might be true, might be wrong, so we gonna see. i mean he was connected to / hosted a cybercriminal group that really liked csam n shit
Look, I just block or ignore all the “Thomas Payne”, “Thomas Pain”, “Alex Hamilton”, “Jon Lock”, etc accounts that pop up on here. If that’s a legitimate person, I apologize in advance. But they are almost always malicious accounts spreading disinformation.
I only make an exception for James Maddison, a brilliant midfielder for Tottenham Hotspur.
At this point, they are the enemy and disinformation and malign lies about them are a good thing
Great example. How many 1000s of innocent gotham city citizens have died because Batman refuses to kill super villains that have escaped prison a hundred times?
In real life, mass murderers don't escape prison countless times, so it's not worth comparing. Back to the main issue though, there's no such thing as "good" misinformation. Lying is lying, and all it does is contribute to the kind of gullible and easily manipulated public like the GOP has now.
We used misinformation and propaganda to great effect in WW2 and many other times. Stop being naive. You don’t fight maga filth with a limiting moral code that only you play by. You fucking obliterate them.
There's an obvious difference between feeding enemy combatants bad intel and encouraging our own people to be as gullible as the people we're fighting. Crazy concept, but you can still fucking obliterate MAGA without sacrificing the knowledge of your own team. No need to support liars and grifters.
That account isn't aiming lies at the enemy, it's aiming lies at you.
If you think that saying things like “got beaten up by a kid” or “was harassing teenage girls” doesn’t get under these people’s skin, or that MAGA idiots aren’t easily fed lies, I can’t help you. If you think there is any negative outcome from believing bad things about terrible people, you’re wrong
MAGA idiots clearly aren't the only ones easily fed lies.
WHAT IS THE NEGATIVE OUTCOME OF PEOPLE BELIEVING A SALACIOUS ACCUSATION AGAINST A TERRIBLE FASCIST SCUMBAG
DISTRACTING FROM THE REAL ACCUSATIONS AGAINST A TERRIBLE FASCIST SCUMBAG. OBVIOUS LIES GIVE BAD ACTORS AMMUNITION TO CASE DOUBT ON THE TRUTH.
*CAST. OOPS.
You are so clearly not meant for a fight like this.
Keep believing those lies.
I got tricked by an AI slop article last month. Didn’t feel great about myself afterward.
It’s a bit exhausting to be hyperaware all the time.
Happens to us all
He blocked me for calling it out.
All I know is that I'm disappointed the story the girl beat the stuffing out of him may not be true.
Just as if not more at risk. I mean, uh, buy my alt-gov resistance sheetirts! please!
Thanks. Blocked the account. Don’t need liars lying about
How did you confirm that with the photo? Nice find
Can use reverse image tools like tineye to do that.
Yep, used Tineye, only one result
Blueanon is real
The prompt being "*young* adult man hiking" and this is the result is more proof that AI hasn't quite got it yet.
REALLY!? We’re having a stroke that someone posted highly amusing “misinformation “ about a member of the DOGE team that has lied about people and programs online, forced access to highly confidential personal info, and abused the data he accessed. I think it’s funny and, frankly, richly deserved.
The only other place I had seen that claim was a random reddit post comment section
I get the concern about misinformation. I reported it. But is it against community guidelines to use an AI-generated stock image for your profile photo?
against bluesky TOS, no, against community norms, yes farting in a bus is not against the rules either
It's a yellow flag more than a red flag. It reflects poorly on an account but not a big deal until the account in question starts showing other bad behavior or other reasons to suspect it's either a bot or a troll.
Thanks for explaining. 🙂
It’s just another data point folks use to determine the reliability of a post
And they blocked me when I told them they were lying and needed to remove it.
I think Big Balls said something to the couple walking by and got punched in the nose. Was he emboldened by the police standing close by? Why in the pictures was his shirt off? You can't see blood on a black shirt? We haven't heard the 15 yo olds side. Tell me about disinformation.
Maybe I’m missing it, but the right never seems to correct this slop. Sometimes you get a clarification, but mostly it’s a delete and move on thing, leaving their followers That does noting to limit people believe fake news. Thanks for flagging it.
I wasted like 5 minutes googling and AI searching for the source of this story.
@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social
IMO - One of the biggest weaknesses in the BlueSky App is that when the poster blocks a responder, no one can see the responder's post. Sounds like many people responded in that thread, pointing out it was a lie, and he just blocked them & made them disappear. This causes misinformation to persist.
Thanks for the heads up. I didn't read the article because it was paywalled so I believed it until I saw your post.
'Course it isn't!
