The Man Behind The Seth Rich Private Investigation Has A White House Connection

Facebook

Ed Butowsky, the Dallas wealth manager and Fox News contributor who facilitated a private investigation into the murder of Seth Rich, is friends with and serves on the board of an organization started by White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

"I consider him a friend and a very nice man," Butowsky told BuzzFeed News of Bannon.

According to his website, Butowsky "serves as a Board Member for Reclaim New York, a non-partisan, non-profit think tank dedicated to advancing a grassroots conversation about the future of New York." Per tax filings, Bannon is Reclaim's vice chairman. (The group's secretary and treasurer are Jennifer and Rebekah Mercer, the powerful daughters of right-wing moneyman and Trump champion Robert Mercer.)

In addition to Reclaim, Butowsky and Bannon know each other through Breitbart News, of which Bannon was executive chairman and to which Butowsky has contributed articles. In 2015, Bannon interviewed Butowsky for a Breitbart radio program.

Both Butowsky and a White House official deny speaking about Seth Rich.

Over the past week the Rich story has captivated conservative media, following a Fox News report that linked the murder of the 27-year-old Democratic National Committee Staff member with email hacks of the DNC that may have helped then-candidate Trump in his campaign against Hillary Clinton. Such a finding would contradict the view, widely held in the intelligence community, that Russian intelligence was behind the theft — a key point for those who believe there was an improper relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Fox's report — a conspiracy theory with no corroborating evidence — was based on an interview with a private investigator, Rod Wheeler, who Butowsky introduced to the Rich family and offered to pay for. (Fox News yesterday retracted its story.) The Rich-as-leaker narrative's rise is the clearest example yet of the way an insurgent pro-Trump media has been able to push dubious stories beneficial to the administration into the limelight.

And the news that their benefactor has ties to a key figure in the administration — and the godfather of the pro-Trump media — has left the Rich family stunned.

“The family is in shock to learn that Ed Butowsky is both friends with and served on a board with Steve Bannon," Brad Bauman, a spokesman for the Rich family, told BuzzFeed News Wednesday. "We are very much trying not to rush to judgment in order to allow this story to develop.”

Bannon declined to comment for the story.

Butowsky has long said that he heard about the Rich case from a friend, though he can't remember whom, and that he was motivated to connect the Rich family with Wheeler because he was moved by their story.

In an interview Tuesday outside Del Frisco's Steakhouse in Manhattan, where he was feeding pigeons, Butowsky told BuzzFeed News that he had never discussed the Rich case with Bannon, and qualified their friendship as warm but not close.

"It's not like I have a Steve Bannon teddy bear," he said. "I've never eaten a meal with the guy."

A photograph on Butowsky's Facebook page shows him in the White House briefing room on March 22. Butowsky did not comment on the record why he was at the White House, but did clarify that he had not met with any White House officials.

Butowsky added that his association with Reclaim was distant and purely based on his wealth management expertise.

"Am I really on the board?" Butowsky asked when informed that his website claimed he was on the board. "I've never been to a board meeting."

Prior to his career as a wealth manager — his clients include a number of athletes and celebrities — Butowsky worked for nearly two decades at Morgan Stanley, where, according to his LinkedIn, he ran one of the highest earning teams at the firm.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2qc4wRP
via IFTTT

U.S. International Tourism Market Share Is Falling Under Trump, Foursquare Data Shows

Foursquare

The United States’ slice of the international tourism pie is declining, according to a new report from Foursquare that looks at data from millions of phones worldwide.

The US share of international tourism dropped 16% in March 2017 compared the previous year. And it declined an average of 11% year over year in months spanning October 2016 to March 2017, according to the report.

The drop coincides with the final month of the US election, the Trump transition, and the early months of the Trump presidency, which notably imposed a travel ban on people from several majority Muslim countries in January 2017 that was eventually halted in court but is currently under appeal. Declines in tourism market share from people originating in the Middle East were more pronounced than the rest of the world, down 25% this January, along with a smaller decrease in South America, Foursquare found.

The data accounts for the percentage of international tourism coming to the US and not the absolute number of tourists, but Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck told BuzzFeed News that it’s unlikely tourist visits to the US increased while share declined. “I don’t think you’d see a 16% decline in international market share and absolute numbers being up, I don’t think that’s compatible,” he said. “The volume of tourism doesn’t change that fast.”

Foursquare’s data comes from approximately 13 million users who opted to share their locations with the company, much like the data collection methods it used to accurately predict iPhone sales in 2015 and a massive decline in Chipotle sales in 2016. Foursquare tracks where the people holding these devices go at all times, allowing it to identify types behavior — including leisure and business travel — based on where they go and how often they visit these places. The data is anonymized. “We understand where phones sleep, generally over time where ‘home’ is,” Glueck said. “We’re able to see not just that someone traveled from Switzerland to Miami, but things like, did they walk into a mall, a museum, a restaurant; did they stay at a hotel?”

Foursquare

Other research seems to support Foursquare’s conclusions about a slowdown in international tourism to the US. While the US Travel Association, for instance, reported a small increase in absolute international travel to the US in its Travel Trends Index in March, it warned that “the modest pace of international inbound travel growth represents a dramatic slowdown, and portends a potential decline in the months to come.” The report noted that an increasingly valuable dollar contributed to the slowdown, along with “negative perceptions of Trump administration rhetoric and policies related to travel restrictions, immigration, and international relations.”

There are other indications that international tourism to the US may be tailing off. Marriott International chief executive Arne Sorenson said in April that his company has experienced a decline in bookings from Mexico and the Middle East during the Trump presidency. And travel app Hopper said searches for flights to the US were down 17% the day the travel ban was announced, compared to the Obama presidency's final two weeks.

While Foursquare’s report showed a declining US share of international tourism, it did find an increase in business travel of approximately 3%.

The decline in international tourism share could have a broader impact on the the US economy, Foursquare contends, and with good reason. International travelers spent $247 billion in the US last year, according to the US National Travel and Tourism Office. “The entire retail sector fell about 3% last year, and that led to almost 100,000 workers losing their jobs,” Guleck said. “A 16% drop in America’s tourism market share is a punch in the gut to a restaurant and shopping world that’s already under pressure.”

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2qVdD8M
via IFTTT

Two New Facebook Live Features Just Launched To Use With Friends

Add in a friend to do a split-screen live video with, and make private chats on public videos.

And today, the company is adding two new features to make live videos better for both filming and watching.

Now you can make a private chat with just friends on a public Live video.

This means that on a popular live video, you can talk to just your friends without having all your comments swamped by hundreds of randos. Or, let's say that you're part of a niche community of veterinarians specializing in giraffe birth, and you want to be able to discuss the pregnancy of April the giraffe without all the riff-raff (this could happen, right?) This new feature would be perfect for that.

The next feature lets you do a joint live broadcast with a friend in a different location. It's basically like letting other people watch your Skype or Facetime with your BFF.

Facebook offered this feature to verified users last summer, but now everyone can do it. This solves a big problem with doing a live video yourself, which is like... doing it alone is kind of boring? And you might not have anything to say. Now, you can share the awkwardness of a live video and make it like your own mini talk show, even if your friend lives on the other side of the country.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2qLy9Im
via IFTTT

Instagram Is Introducing Algorithmically Curated Stories

Instagram

Instagram is at it again, reaching into Snapchat’s bag of features and pulling out yet another for use in its own product.

Today, the Facebook-owned app is introducing Location Stories and Hashtag Stories, its version of the algorithmically curated stories you can find via Snapchat’s search feature. These new features consist of images and videos gathered from public stories, and stitched together based on hashtag and location. They’ll be watchable as cohesive, curated videos in Instagram’s Explore tab and on location pages — much like Snapchat, which does this with keywords.

With Instagram’s stories, the algorithm is the editor; it scans all public images and videos posted using hashtags and locations, decides which images and videos to highlight for each specific hashtag and location, and picks the order they play in.

“There will be no human editing,” Blake Barnes, the director of product leading Instagram’s Explore tab told BuzzFeed News.

A look at Snapchat’s keyword-based Stories shows the divergent and sometimes discomfiting direction algorithmically curated stories can take. Searching the keyword “Syria” this weekend, for instance, revealed a number of users trivializing the brutal civil war in that country. One Snap played footage of Grand Theft Auto with a caption that read “Live footage of a USA soldier bombing Syria.” Another showed a man in a Trump jersey with the caption “YASSSS FU Syria.” Yet another showed a person in Ohio wearing a gas mask with the caption “Waking up in Syria like.”

Instagram will likely also be home to a mix of fun stories and complicated and potentially disturbing ones. The fun stories won’t be difficult to find. As an example, Barnes played a few, including a Hashtag Story for #ootd, or “outfit of the day,” — a compilation of people posting well, the outfit they wore that day. He also showed Location Stories from Tokyo and Paris — compelling peeks into cafes and city life. But when BuzzFeed News asked him to show Location Stories from Tehran and Kabul, Barnes demurred. “Maybe you can try it when you get it,” he said.

Instagram, which has more than 700 million monthly active users, is much larger than Snapchat, and simply by the nature of that scale, it’s likely its stories will contain violent, graphic, and upsetting images. This means that through Location and Hashtag Stories, Instagram will likely have to wrestle with the murders and gruesome violence that are now a major problem on Facebook proper. And with algorithms making the calls, there will be little safeguard against them. Asked about this, Barnes said users can report concerning content and the platform will review it. “Our focus will be to make sure the content that the content we show and pull together into these stories conforms to our policy guidelines,” he said.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2rwW1Rf
via IFTTT

There's Now A New Kind Of Snapchat Story

Snapchat just introduced a new feature, custom Snapchat Stories, which allows you to create stories with friends rather than by yourself.

Like with regular Stories, videos and photos in a custom story will display for 24 hours, and a custom Story will stay active until no one has contributed to it for 24 hours.

It's like a collaborative, ephemeral vacation slideshow, wedding album, or baby book.

To create a custom story, you click "Create Story" in the Stories screen on Snapchat, name the Story, designate who can add to it, and then add images or videos.

The designated contributors will then be able to add to it. Custom stories will appear the My Story section.

You can be a contributor to an unlimited number of custom stories at a time, but you can only have three that you've created running at any one time.

You can make it location-specific, so any friend within a certain radius — "about a block in circumference," according to Snap — can add to the story.

You can also set the geofence to allow friends of your Snapchat friends to contribute.

By default, custom stories are only visible to the contributors, but you can select which other friends can see them. If you select the geofence option and make your followers or friends of friends contributors, they can see it as well.

youtube.com

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2qRZ2cl
via IFTTT

The New Surface Pro Is Just A Little Better Than Last Year's

Microsoft

Today, at a special event in Shanghai, Microsoft took the wraps off its new, fifth-generation laptop-tablet hybrid, called just “Surface Pro,” dropping the number in previous models (eg. Surface Pro 4) because, well, they can.

For those with last year’s Surface Pro, there isn’t that much to upgrade to. The new device looks nearly identical to the previous model (save for a few more rounded edges), but now has a better battery life, improved performance, and a new cellular LTE option that lets you browse the web without Wi-Fi. Additionally, the fifth-generation Surface Pen, a stylus for drawing and note-taking on the Surface Pro’s touchscreen that has typically shipped with the device, will now be sold separately (its price has not been announced yet).

The announcement is one of several major Surface brand releases in the past year. Microsoft’s new desktop PC Surface Studio aimed at iMac customers started shipping in early 2017, and the company also announced a Chromebook-competitor called Surface Laptop, which runs a version of Windows that only runs apps from the Windows Store, earlier this month. The Pro line is Microsoft’s most lightweight, affordable device under the touchscreen-friendly Surface brand, and the latest Pro is slightly more productive than its predecessor, but still not as powerful as the more expensive Surface Book or Surface Laptop.

The two most significant improvements are battery life and performance.

Microsoft

The new Surface Pro now has 13.5 hours of battery life, up from 9 hours in the previous version, while the aspect ratio (3:2), screen resolution (2736 × 1824 and 264 ppi), and screen size (12.3 inches diagonally) remain the same. The processors are also being upgraded to seventh generation Intel core processors. You can choose between the lightweight m3 processor, the faster i5 (both of which are now quieter because they are fanless), and the fastest tier, i7 (which has always been fanless but is even quieter in this model).

In addition to those internal upgrades, a 4G LTE version of the new Surface Pro, for web browsing over a cellular data connection without Wi-Fi, will be available later this year.

Drawing, note-taking, and typing have also been improved on the new Surface Pro.

Microsoft

Although it’s now sold separately, the Surface Pen is really one of the defining features of any Surface device. The new stylus has a stronger magnet that snaps to the side of the screen with more force.

It also has more lifelike drawing capabilities. Now, when you tilt it slightly, you can also adjust the thickness of the stroke, and when you tilt it even more, you can shade with it. It’s faster and more accurate than the previous pen. The pen has 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity (up from 1,024 levels) and is twice as fast. The tablet’s kickstand also now goes down to 15 degrees for more comfortable pen interaction, mimicking Microsoft’s very high-end Surface Studio desktop PC.

The pen is also further integrated into Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, which all support the new tilt and shading capabilities. You can customize a toolbar of favorite pen styles (pens, pencils, and highlighters) and colors that is synced across the three Office apps.

Another enhanced input experience in the new Surface is typing. There’s a new keyboard cover, called the Signature Type Cover, that has more bouncy keys, a full-size trackpad (like one you’d see on a dedicated laptop) and backlit keys. The whole device is also designed to be more sturdy on your lap.

The new Surface Pro starts at $799 (remember: without a pen), and every tier is incrementally more expensive.

Microsoft

You can configure the Pro with the processor and memory of your choice (4GB, 8GB, or 16 GB of RAM) or, in other words, how fast your laptop/tablet will be, as well as storage capacity (128GB, 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB).

What you need will depend on how you plan to use it. Generally, if you need a laptop just for Internet access and streaming music and movies, you can get by with the entry-level Core M. But if you need to work with apps like Office or Photoshop a lot – or even if you’re a web surfer who open lots of tabs at once – you’ll want (at the very least) the Core i5 with 8GB of RAM. Microsoft hasn’t updated pricing tier details yet, but we’ll update this post as soon as they do.

The laptop, which ships with Windows 10 Creators Update, and new keyboard cover (in four different colors: silver, burgundy, cobalt blue, and black) can be pre-ordered starting today, and will ship on June 15 in 26 countries, including the US, UK, Australia, China, Germany, France, and Japan. The Surface Pen, which comes in colors matching the keyboard covers) won’t be available for another couple of weeks, however, and the 4G LTE Surface Pro will come later this year.

Should I switch to a tablet laptop hybrid?

Tablet-laptop hybrids are great for their flexibility. Many Windows laptops now have touchscreens and, increasingly, Chromebooks do too. Their screens can be detached for note taking or drawing and then, when it’s business or study time, you can slap on a keyboard cover and run full Windows 10 desktop programs, like Photoshop. The problem is that historically hybrids have been underpowered and hard to use on your lap because of light, flimsy keyboards, compared to a dedicated laptop.

Many may find Apple’s similarly lightweight MacBook, which start at $1,299 for a core m3 processor and 8GB of memory, to be too expensive (though new upgrades are rumored to arrive next month). And affordable Chromebooks, which run Google’s apps (Chrome, Google Docs, etc.) very well and Android apps sort of well, may be be too limited for some people. A device like the Surface Pro is a good alternative.

The new Surface Pro addresses (but doesn’t fix) any of those issues, so if you weren’t a Surface Pro believer before, this might not be the device that convinces you to get one. But for those with older Surface Pros (like the Surface Pro 3), the improvements in the new tablet might be what you’re looking for.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2qcJoXL
via IFTTT

How One Pro-Trump Site Feeds Its Own Conspiracy Theories

The top story on pro-Trump media last week was a conspiracy about a murdered DNC staffer and his alleged connection to Wikileaks.

A typical Gateway Pundit headline.

In July, a few days before the Wikileaks release of thousands of DNC emails, Rich, was killed in what police says was an attempted robbery. Far-right conspiracy theorists have claimed Rich was the leaker, and his killing was ordered by the Clintons in retaliation.

Since last Monday, the story has dominated far-right media — even as it's dismissed, debunked, and ignored by the mainstream, and despite a series of bombshells regarding the potential ties between Donald Trump and Russia. To better understand how the pro-Trump media keeps a conspiracy theory alive in the face of overwhelming evidence against it, it's instructive to look at one of its most popular blogs, The Gateway Pundit.

The Gateway Pundit is a pro-Trump site run out of St. Louis, Missouri by long-time blogger Jim Hoft. The site reaches a wide audience — Hoft claimed that during the 2016 campaign, it was pulling down over one million unique views a day. The site has a reporter who regularly attends White House press briefings. Outside of its readership, Gateway Pundit is maybe best known for reporting on and pushing sensationalized claims and rumors that get picked up on bigger sites like the Drudge Report. Some of its greatest hits: that Hillary Clinton was having seizures during the campaign, that Obama's birth certificate was a forgery, and that illegal voting cost Trump the popular vote.

Hoft and Gateway Pundit have been instrumental in championing the Seth Rich/Wikileaks conspiracy. On Hoft's Twitter feed alone, which has over 73,000 followers, Hoft has kept up a steady clip of Seth Rich tweets since a D.C. local Fox station broke the story.

Here's a sampling of Hoft's tweets from May 16th — the day after the Fox 5 Seth Rich story broke:

Hoft and Gateway Pundit are far from the only pro-Trump outlets to push the Rich story, but Gateway Pundit stands out as a prime example of how the pro-Trump media can not only champion a conspiracy but also continue to feed itself and whip up more outrage and intrigue. Here's how it works:

1) Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

In the last week, Gateway Pundit published 15 stories about the Rich murder and Wikileaks conspiracy — some of which are almost exact copies of each other.

For example, here are two Gateway Pundit stories from last Monday and Tuesday.

They have two different headlines:

"BREAKING: Seth Rich Family Detective Tells FOX 5 DC THERE IS EVIDENCE Seth was “Emailing” Wikileaks …UPDATED WITH REPORT"

And:

"IT WASN’T RUSSIA! FOX NEWS REPORTS SETH RICH LEAKED 44,000 DNC EMAILS TO WIKILEAKS – THEN HE WAS MURDERED"

But the body of the two posts are completely identical until the last few paragraphs:

The repetition serves two purposes. First, it makes it so that Hoft and Gateway Pundit can quickly churn out new posts without having to spend the time to re-write new copy. And second, it cements the narrative with its audience. There is maybe only a tweet's worth of new information in the two posts, but each post is framed as a huge new revelation, ensuring that the audience feels the story is constantly moving and developing, despite the fact that little has changed since the now-discredited Fox 5 report. The reader, trying to get to the new information, has to read to the bottom. And in doing so, re-absorbs the Rich narrative again and again.

2) Incendiary Headlines

Gateway Pundit uses headlines to increase the stakes of each story. Often, they describe how the reader is supposed to feel about the story (example: "ABSOLUTELY SICKENING!") or what they should take away from the piece (example: "IT WASN'T RUSSIA!").

They draw the reader in, and undoubtedly play well on social media, but, much like the constant repetition, they also add to the sense that the Rich conspiracy is rapidly moving forward and that the minor updates are actually shocking revelations. Basically: they add false gravity to a story that's largely stagnant.

3) A Closed-Loop Reporting Structure

Here's a story Gateway Pundit ran on Sunday:

There was no "bombshell": The post was a write-up of an appearance Gingrich made on Fox and Friends on Sunday morning. Though the headline suggests Gingrich put forth proof that the "DNC operative was behind Wikileaks DNC email release," Gingrich did no such thing. He merely acknowledged that the Rich story was "very strange" and repeated rumors pushed by Gateway Pundit.

As with the above examples, the body copy of the Gingrich story was nearly identical to the other Gateway Pundit stories about Rich. In this case, the only difference is the inclusion of the Gingrich video at the end, alongside a short transcription of his interview.

Though the transcript clearly shows there's no bombshell from Gingrich, the information is included so far down in the post that Gingrich's quote is almost beside the point. The incendiary headline, which reinforces the rumor Gateway Pundit has been pushing for a week, cements the narrative and Gingrich's name attaches extra credibility to the conspiracy theory.

To recap: First, Gateway Pundit promotes rumors. Then, a politician repeats those rumors. Finally, Gateway Pundit uses politician's sound bite as proof rumors are true.

4) Flimsy Evidence

Perhaps the best example of Gateway Pundit's manufactured controversy came on Sunday night, when the site reported "'Complete Panic' at Highest Levels of DNC."

The post hinges on an anonymous 4chan thread from an individual claiming to "work in D.C." The post claims that "the Seth Rich case has scared the shit out of certain high ranking current and former Democratic Party officials," and goes on to say the DNC "is near open panic." The post's headline doesn't take into account that the 4chan user in question is completely unverifiable or that 4chan is a notorious breeding ground for trolls and misinformation.

Later that evening, Sean Hannity tweeted about the Rich conspiracy using almost the exact same language as the 4chan post:

While it's hard to know how Hannity came upon the 4chan post, it's possible he stumbled upon this tweet (which Gateway Pundit notes was the first public tweet of the 4chan post):

In other words: Hannity, drawing on information likely gleaned from an anonymous 4chan post, claimed that "complete panic" had set in at the DNC. And Gateway Pundit — with no verification — reported this as fact.

In isolation, each one of these examples may seem extreme. But taken together, they present a formidable misinformation campaign that's highly effective at pushing and cementing a narrative among devoted readers. Gateway Pundit may not have started the Rich conspiracy, but thanks to its constant promotion, it's helping to keep it in the news.

from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/2qPD2OY
via IFTTT