Anthony Weiner mega-post
Follow-up to this post.
On BigGovernment.com, known serial liar and corporate hack Andrew Breitbart and friends have cooked up another Shirley Sherrod style attack on a Democrat, this time NY House Rep Anthony Weiner.
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY 9″) finds himself in a late night online pickle.
This evening a photo surfaced on Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account and in his verified Twitter timeline of a man in his underwear with an erection. The photo was reportedly sent to a woman on Twitter. We’ve protected her name and her account, which was at one time verified to be active but has since been deleted after the photo in question was deleted. Coincidentally, the rest of the photos in the congressman’s alleged yfrog account were also deleted around 11 p.m. eastern.
The picture in question is of a guy in his underwear with a boner. No face is shown.
I smell bullshit.
UPDATE: Rawstory.com is now calling this "easily debunked fraud"
LOL! Get popcorn!
More below the fold
Congressman Weiner claims that his Twitter account was hacked. Since I believe in innocence until proven guilty, I will give Congressman Weiner the benefit of the doubt for now.
But Andrew Breitbart and his cohorts don't get that benefit of a doubt. They have been proven guilty several times over during their brief history of smear campaigns and misleadingly re-edited videos. Think Shirley Sherrod. Think ACORN. In short, Andrew Brietbart is a sleazy fucking liar.
Andrew Breitbart's sole purpose of existence is to get rich by smearing the enemies of the Republican party and the special interests whom they serve. If Andrew Breitbart told me that it was raining outside I would open a window to verify it for myself. I don't trust him any farther than I can throw Sarah Palin's $150,000 wardrobe.
So now that we see who Brietbart and his horde of flying monkeys have chosen as his new target my question to you is "What are we gonna do about it?". With his history of lying his ass off and the American Press's long history of NEVER FACT CHECKING CONSERVATIVES (ugghh!) I am hoping that those of us online can try to verify or debunk these claims. Anyone want to give it a try? The corporate media long ago gave up on fact checking these Breitbart scandals before it claims the career of opponents of the right wing, so it looks like we are going to have to do it ourselves.
Any help in verifying or debunking this story will be greatly appreciated.
And remember, Breitbart is a sleazy piece of shit. Nothing would make me happier than debunking his too often falsified claims before they get onto the Drudge Report and into the Villagers heads.
UPDATE: Busted Brietbart FAKED IT (try and act surprised)
The pic isn't fake, but the screen grab of Congressman Weiner's twitter page was fake. What bullshit!
hat tip to Kossack Eileen B
Forensic analysis of the screen grab shows...
big shock: it's been manipulated. Not the yfrog photo, but the SCREEN GRAB itself that Brietbart is posting as "proof."
What was altered? The name "RepWeiner." Here's the proof:
http://errorlevelanalysis.com/...
Notice how the name RepWeiner is not only the brightest spot, but devoid of spatterings of color? That indicates that specific area -- the name -- has been saved more times than the rest of the image.
Gee, I wonder why?
Gee, I wonder why too!
FAIL Breitbart. Just FAIL
UPDATE Part II
RawStory.com confirms, Breitbart is full of shit.
How do I say EPIC FAIL? How do I count the ways?
Today, Breitbart has been taunting Weiner via Twitter, claiming that he has "much more" scandalous material to reveal.
The story was published late Friday night/Saturday morning by an pseudonymous contributor to "Big Government", under the byline "Publius". Breitbart's media enterprises have had serious credibility issues in the past, including questions surrounding the ACORN "sting" carried out by conservative prankster James O'Keefe and the selective editing of a speech by former USDA official Shirley Sherrod.
UPDATE: According to this website's analysis, the screen-grab Breitbart is posting as "proof" is an easily debunked fraud.
DailyKos 1
I've traced a sort-of timeline of Breitbart's latest faux-scandal targetting Rep. Anthony Weiner.
Follow me below the fold, I have pictures (but none of underwear). It appears to have gone down something like this:
UPDATE - Had to copy this Smoking Gun to the top of the diary, tweeted TWO WEEKS ago by the amazingly prescient @patriotusa76, who, incredibly, seems to have been the only witness on the scene when the underpants photo was (allegedly) tweeted.
Background: A college girl has been tweeting about her crush on Rep. Weiner. (I have done this myself - and I am a grown-ass woman - when I had a mad, unrequited crush on US Atty Patrick Fitzgerald. Oddly, nobody actually believed I was his secret GF. Why, world, why?)
Friday night, an underwear photo is (allegedly) mysteriously tweeted from Rep. Weiner's Twitter account to the college girl, and (supposedly) visible on his public page.
Also Friday night, a strange character named @patriotusa76 begins tweeting about it.
Strangely, this character seemed to have foreknowledge that something was about to go down. His May 12 tweets:
In the wee hours, Anthony Weiner tweets that not only is his Tivo broken, causing him to miss the hockey game, but his FB has been hacked.
Meanwhile, Dana Loesch of Breitbart's Big Govt curiously starts asking if it's possible to fake a yfrog account:
We can surmise that she has received the photoshopped screenshot, purporting to show that the underwear photo originated from Rep Weiner's yfrog account, and wants to know if it is legit.
Eileen B's analysis of the screenshot below:
It's pretty darn accurate. I was skeptical of it at first, so I ran my own tests. You're all welcome to post it anywhere you like. (And yes, I have an actual college degree in Digital Multimedia and Graphic Design. I've been using PhotoShop professionally nearly every day since 1993.)
Notice how the little birdie logo on the right (under the word Upload) shows a square of fuzz around it? That's because it's an image embedded in the screen grab. It's been saved multiple times before rendering itself on that page - then "grabbed" by Breitbart. Same goes for the logos on top, and the picture itself.
Now, look at the words on the top right -- Popular and Upload. They're generated by HTML when the page is loaded, just like the text "RepWeiner" is. So, they were created at at exactly the same time -- because they're fonts being rendered.
In an unaltered screen grab, they're equals.
However, under analysis, "RepWeiner" is rendering much brighter and with fewer color artifacts. It has clearly been saved more times than "Popular" and "Upload."
Meanwhile, Breitbart is taunting Rep. Weiner on his Twitter:
And at 12:24 a.m. Saturday, Breitbart posts the story, along with the doctored yfrog screenshot as "evidence" it was actually posted by Rep. Weiner.
A poster at Gawker watched the whole thing unfold live, and reports the college girl seemed bewildered by it all:
The Twitter user he is referencing is good old @patriotusa76. Thanks to kklausser who was kind enough to screencap these, one of which I've posted above:
Care to make a comment, @patriotusa76? We promise no sharia:
So I think we can see what happened here.
1) Rep. Weiner's Facebook was hacked, giving the hackers access to post on his Twitter if the accounts were linked.
2) [edit] A link, supposedly to [/edit] The underwear photo was then tweeted out by the hackers, tagging the college girl but visible to all of Twitterville.
3) Meanwhile, the hackers have taken a screencap of another yfrog account with the photo posted to it, and then photo-shopped Rep. Weiner's name in at the top of the page.
4) They send this photo-shopped screencap to Dana Loesch as "proof" that Rep. Weiner indeed posted the photo.
4) Crazy old @patriotusa76 is meanwhile tweeting madly about the whole thing.
6) Breitbart wastes no time in publishing the story.
Two questions remain:
Who is @patriotusa76 and did he participate in the hoax?
and
Was Breitbart in on it, or did he fall for it?
UPDATE: Colby Hall at Mediaite beat me to it, and has much more on the hapless @patriotusa76.
Who who is this Twitter user that appeared to luck out and sent the only unique RT of Weiner’s image? The Twitter profile claims that he is an individual named Dan Wolfe, and his bio reads: “Conservative Reagan Republican. No Obamacare, socialism, sharia. Proud of the USA & Proud to be an American with NO apologies. No elitists need apply.”
Its not an exaggeration to say that Wolfe is somewhat obsessed with Weiner; a simple search reveals that, since April, he has mentioned Rep. Weiner 287 times via twitter. Also, skeptics might see that Wolfe and his Twitter clique have been building a narrative about Rep. Weiner’s followers for months, perhaps best evidenced by this tweet to an underage high school girl, who requested a follow from Weiner and got it:
So the alt version of my scenario above is that Rep. Weiner's Twitter was not even hacked, and the link to the photo did not ever go out from his account, but was also faked. Rep. Weiner seems to think he was hacked, but that's an obvious immediate conclusion.
UPDATE: I grabbed some screenshots of what @patriotusa76 tweeted as the thing unfolded. He seems to think Dana Loesch witnessed the alleged tweet live as well. I'm not clear from her tweet whether she means she grabbed screenshots, or just that she HAS (alleged) screenshots.
Dana Loesch, is it true that you screencapped this alleged underpants tweet, live?
UPDATE: The college girl gives an interview to the New York Daily News. She says she has been harrassed for weeks on Twitter by (we can only guess who.) h/t BlueFranco:
[She] said she was harassed for weeks online after she started following Weiner on Twitter and the congressman added her to the list of about 200 people he follows.
Her harrasser "started posting about me, saying, 'Oh, the congressman is following school girls,' tweeting it over and over. It was very annoying," [she] told the Daily News.
When the crotch shot appeared online, she said the same Twitter user was the first to comment on it.
"Since I had dealt with this person and his cohorts before, I assumed that the tweet and the picture were their latest attempts at defaming the congressman and harassing his supporters," she said.
"Annoyed, I responded with something along the lines of 'are you f***ing kidding me?' and 'I've never seen this. You people are sick,'" she said.
UPDATE: In an amazing coincidence, @patriotusa76 aka Dan Wolfe, was anticipating JUST such a scandal more than two weeks ago. Isn't it crazy how he just happened to be the sole witness when it actually happened?
What do you call that? Dumb luck?
UPDATE: Let's be clear. The underpants photo did not appear on @RepWeiner's Twitter. What was alleged by @patriotusa76 to have been tweeted by Rep. Weiner was the LINK to a photo, supposedly the underpants photo. Yes, the link does go to Rep. Weiner's yfrog photo page, but somehow only @patriotusa76 was able to click through and screencap the photo. But anyone can post a LINK to someone else's yfrog photo page. For instance, here is @patriotusa76's yfrog photo page. Sadly, no photos there:
http://yfrog.com/...
But I could certainly paste the link anywhere. I don't have to own the account to do so.
UPDATE: @patriotusa76 has hidden his Twitter! Wassamatter Dan Wolfe? Not enjoying all the questions? Thinking twice about all your old tweets?
QUESTION: I have to ask, did anyone on Twitter actually see this tweet go out live from AW's account? AW has 45,000 followers. It was supposedly around 8:30 Pacific/11:30 on Friday night. I know people saw Dan Wolfe's retweet. I hear there is a cached version at TweetCongress. But is Dan Wolfe/@patriotusa76 the only person on Twitter who actually saw the Tweet go out live from @RepWeiner's account? If anyone else did see it I'd like to know. TIA.
DailyKos 2
There have been a couple high profile diaries on this matter here and here, both of which feature an image analysis supposedly demonstrating that the screenshot of the photo on Rep. Weiner's yfrog page has been tampered with.
However, I think it's pretty easy to show that this evidence isn't evidence at all and should NOT be used as evidence showing fraud.
I should start out by saying that any claims by Breitbart should be viewed with extreme skepticism. The second diary linked above does a good job reviewing other things that provide either circumstantial evidence that this was a pre-meditated fraud or demonstrating curious coincidences about who is involved. However, we shouldn't present things as evidence that aren't evidence.
First off, here is the image alleging to demonstrate that the screenshot was faked (from http://errorlevelanalysis.com/...)
The evidence mainly being that the "Popular" and "Upload" text on the page is clear, the area where the yfrog username would be is not, suggesting that the area had been resaved as a jpg more than once, making it more pixilated than it should be.
I, honestly, wasn't totally convinced. I could see it being an artifact of the design and presentation of the website, and I remembered how the right tried to use many of the same arguments to "prove" that Obama's COLB was fake. So I decided to do a control test, taking a screenshot of a verifiably real picture and running the same analysis on it. I came up with this: (from http://errorlevelanalysis.com/...
There are a few minor differences between the screenshots, but the two most important items are largely the same: the "popular" and "upload" text is clear while the area where the username is is clearly fuzzy.
This suggests that the anomaly both on my control and on the screenshot that was provided is a result of the design of the page, NOT a result of the image being tampered with (with all due respect to the person who did the original analysis).
This evidence falls more in line with Rep. Weiner's statement that his account was hacked, and thus the image in question was in fact actually posted on his yfrog account, where the screenshot of it was taken. However, this makes it harder to prove it was a fraud without getting into things such as seeing what IP address the image was uploaded from and other things, which would have to be done by yfrog. While doing this may not determine who uploaded the image (they could have been using a proxy server), it could eliminate Rep. Weiner as being the one who uploaded it.
In any case, I, like most people here, are still extremely skeptical of any story brought about by Breitbart. However, if we're going to use evidence to support I case, I hope we use evidence that is actually evidence.
DailyKos 3
New Twitter account of the young woman in question
Statement from student re: faux scandal involving Rep. Anthony Weiner
Speculation And Sloppy Reporting On Both Sides Of ‘Weinergate’
Anthony is my congressman y'all. For the record, I wasn't sure at first but now I'm convinced that he was hacked.
On BigGovernment.com, known serial liar and corporate hack Andrew Breitbart and friends have cooked up another Shirley Sherrod style attack on a Democrat, this time NY House Rep Anthony Weiner.
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY 9″) finds himself in a late night online pickle.
This evening a photo surfaced on Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account and in his verified Twitter timeline of a man in his underwear with an erection. The photo was reportedly sent to a woman on Twitter. We’ve protected her name and her account, which was at one time verified to be active but has since been deleted after the photo in question was deleted. Coincidentally, the rest of the photos in the congressman’s alleged yfrog account were also deleted around 11 p.m. eastern.
The picture in question is of a guy in his underwear with a boner. No face is shown.
I smell bullshit.
UPDATE: Rawstory.com is now calling this "easily debunked fraud"
LOL! Get popcorn!
More below the fold
Congressman Weiner claims that his Twitter account was hacked. Since I believe in innocence until proven guilty, I will give Congressman Weiner the benefit of the doubt for now.
But Andrew Breitbart and his cohorts don't get that benefit of a doubt. They have been proven guilty several times over during their brief history of smear campaigns and misleadingly re-edited videos. Think Shirley Sherrod. Think ACORN. In short, Andrew Brietbart is a sleazy fucking liar.
Andrew Breitbart's sole purpose of existence is to get rich by smearing the enemies of the Republican party and the special interests whom they serve. If Andrew Breitbart told me that it was raining outside I would open a window to verify it for myself. I don't trust him any farther than I can throw Sarah Palin's $150,000 wardrobe.
So now that we see who Brietbart and his horde of flying monkeys have chosen as his new target my question to you is "What are we gonna do about it?". With his history of lying his ass off and the American Press's long history of NEVER FACT CHECKING CONSERVATIVES (ugghh!) I am hoping that those of us online can try to verify or debunk these claims. Anyone want to give it a try? The corporate media long ago gave up on fact checking these Breitbart scandals before it claims the career of opponents of the right wing, so it looks like we are going to have to do it ourselves.
Any help in verifying or debunking this story will be greatly appreciated.
And remember, Breitbart is a sleazy piece of shit. Nothing would make me happier than debunking his too often falsified claims before they get onto the Drudge Report and into the Villagers heads.
UPDATE: Busted Brietbart FAKED IT (try and act surprised)
The pic isn't fake, but the screen grab of Congressman Weiner's twitter page was fake. What bullshit!
hat tip to Kossack Eileen B
Forensic analysis of the screen grab shows...
big shock: it's been manipulated. Not the yfrog photo, but the SCREEN GRAB itself that Brietbart is posting as "proof."
What was altered? The name "RepWeiner." Here's the proof:
http://errorlevelanalysis.com/...
Notice how the name RepWeiner is not only the brightest spot, but devoid of spatterings of color? That indicates that specific area -- the name -- has been saved more times than the rest of the image.
Gee, I wonder why?
Gee, I wonder why too!
FAIL Breitbart. Just FAIL
UPDATE Part II
RawStory.com confirms, Breitbart is full of shit.
How do I say EPIC FAIL? How do I count the ways?
Today, Breitbart has been taunting Weiner via Twitter, claiming that he has "much more" scandalous material to reveal.
The story was published late Friday night/Saturday morning by an pseudonymous contributor to "Big Government", under the byline "Publius". Breitbart's media enterprises have had serious credibility issues in the past, including questions surrounding the ACORN "sting" carried out by conservative prankster James O'Keefe and the selective editing of a speech by former USDA official Shirley Sherrod.
UPDATE: According to this website's analysis, the screen-grab Breitbart is posting as "proof" is an easily debunked fraud.
DailyKos 1
I've traced a sort-of timeline of Breitbart's latest faux-scandal targetting Rep. Anthony Weiner.
Follow me below the fold, I have pictures (but none of underwear). It appears to have gone down something like this:
UPDATE - Had to copy this Smoking Gun to the top of the diary, tweeted TWO WEEKS ago by the amazingly prescient @patriotusa76, who, incredibly, seems to have been the only witness on the scene when the underpants photo was (allegedly) tweeted.
Background: A college girl has been tweeting about her crush on Rep. Weiner. (I have done this myself - and I am a grown-ass woman - when I had a mad, unrequited crush on US Atty Patrick Fitzgerald. Oddly, nobody actually believed I was his secret GF. Why, world, why?)
Friday night, an underwear photo is (allegedly) mysteriously tweeted from Rep. Weiner's Twitter account to the college girl, and (supposedly) visible on his public page.
Also Friday night, a strange character named @patriotusa76 begins tweeting about it.
Strangely, this character seemed to have foreknowledge that something was about to go down. His May 12 tweets:
In the wee hours, Anthony Weiner tweets that not only is his Tivo broken, causing him to miss the hockey game, but his FB has been hacked.
Meanwhile, Dana Loesch of Breitbart's Big Govt curiously starts asking if it's possible to fake a yfrog account:
We can surmise that she has received the photoshopped screenshot, purporting to show that the underwear photo originated from Rep Weiner's yfrog account, and wants to know if it is legit.
Eileen B's analysis of the screenshot below:
It's pretty darn accurate. I was skeptical of it at first, so I ran my own tests. You're all welcome to post it anywhere you like. (And yes, I have an actual college degree in Digital Multimedia and Graphic Design. I've been using PhotoShop professionally nearly every day since 1993.)
Notice how the little birdie logo on the right (under the word Upload) shows a square of fuzz around it? That's because it's an image embedded in the screen grab. It's been saved multiple times before rendering itself on that page - then "grabbed" by Breitbart. Same goes for the logos on top, and the picture itself.
Now, look at the words on the top right -- Popular and Upload. They're generated by HTML when the page is loaded, just like the text "RepWeiner" is. So, they were created at at exactly the same time -- because they're fonts being rendered.
In an unaltered screen grab, they're equals.
However, under analysis, "RepWeiner" is rendering much brighter and with fewer color artifacts. It has clearly been saved more times than "Popular" and "Upload."
Meanwhile, Breitbart is taunting Rep. Weiner on his Twitter:
And at 12:24 a.m. Saturday, Breitbart posts the story, along with the doctored yfrog screenshot as "evidence" it was actually posted by Rep. Weiner.
A poster at Gawker watched the whole thing unfold live, and reports the college girl seemed bewildered by it all:
The Twitter user he is referencing is good old @patriotusa76. Thanks to kklausser who was kind enough to screencap these, one of which I've posted above:
Care to make a comment, @patriotusa76? We promise no sharia:
So I think we can see what happened here.
1) Rep. Weiner's Facebook was hacked, giving the hackers access to post on his Twitter if the accounts were linked.
2) [edit] A link, supposedly to [/edit] The underwear photo was then tweeted out by the hackers, tagging the college girl but visible to all of Twitterville.
3) Meanwhile, the hackers have taken a screencap of another yfrog account with the photo posted to it, and then photo-shopped Rep. Weiner's name in at the top of the page.
4) They send this photo-shopped screencap to Dana Loesch as "proof" that Rep. Weiner indeed posted the photo.
4) Crazy old @patriotusa76 is meanwhile tweeting madly about the whole thing.
6) Breitbart wastes no time in publishing the story.
Two questions remain:
Who is @patriotusa76 and did he participate in the hoax?
and
Was Breitbart in on it, or did he fall for it?
UPDATE: Colby Hall at Mediaite beat me to it, and has much more on the hapless @patriotusa76.
Who who is this Twitter user that appeared to luck out and sent the only unique RT of Weiner’s image? The Twitter profile claims that he is an individual named Dan Wolfe, and his bio reads: “Conservative Reagan Republican. No Obamacare, socialism, sharia. Proud of the USA & Proud to be an American with NO apologies. No elitists need apply.”
Its not an exaggeration to say that Wolfe is somewhat obsessed with Weiner; a simple search reveals that, since April, he has mentioned Rep. Weiner 287 times via twitter. Also, skeptics might see that Wolfe and his Twitter clique have been building a narrative about Rep. Weiner’s followers for months, perhaps best evidenced by this tweet to an underage high school girl, who requested a follow from Weiner and got it:
So the alt version of my scenario above is that Rep. Weiner's Twitter was not even hacked, and the link to the photo did not ever go out from his account, but was also faked. Rep. Weiner seems to think he was hacked, but that's an obvious immediate conclusion.
UPDATE: I grabbed some screenshots of what @patriotusa76 tweeted as the thing unfolded. He seems to think Dana Loesch witnessed the alleged tweet live as well. I'm not clear from her tweet whether she means she grabbed screenshots, or just that she HAS (alleged) screenshots.
Dana Loesch, is it true that you screencapped this alleged underpants tweet, live?
UPDATE: The college girl gives an interview to the New York Daily News. She says she has been harrassed for weeks on Twitter by (we can only guess who.) h/t BlueFranco:
[She] said she was harassed for weeks online after she started following Weiner on Twitter and the congressman added her to the list of about 200 people he follows.
Her harrasser "started posting about me, saying, 'Oh, the congressman is following school girls,' tweeting it over and over. It was very annoying," [she] told the Daily News.
When the crotch shot appeared online, she said the same Twitter user was the first to comment on it.
"Since I had dealt with this person and his cohorts before, I assumed that the tweet and the picture were their latest attempts at defaming the congressman and harassing his supporters," she said.
"Annoyed, I responded with something along the lines of 'are you f***ing kidding me?' and 'I've never seen this. You people are sick,'" she said.
UPDATE: In an amazing coincidence, @patriotusa76 aka Dan Wolfe, was anticipating JUST such a scandal more than two weeks ago. Isn't it crazy how he just happened to be the sole witness when it actually happened?
What do you call that? Dumb luck?
UPDATE: Let's be clear. The underpants photo did not appear on @RepWeiner's Twitter. What was alleged by @patriotusa76 to have been tweeted by Rep. Weiner was the LINK to a photo, supposedly the underpants photo. Yes, the link does go to Rep. Weiner's yfrog photo page, but somehow only @patriotusa76 was able to click through and screencap the photo. But anyone can post a LINK to someone else's yfrog photo page. For instance, here is @patriotusa76's yfrog photo page. Sadly, no photos there:
http://yfrog.com/...
But I could certainly paste the link anywhere. I don't have to own the account to do so.
UPDATE: @patriotusa76 has hidden his Twitter! Wassamatter Dan Wolfe? Not enjoying all the questions? Thinking twice about all your old tweets?
QUESTION: I have to ask, did anyone on Twitter actually see this tweet go out live from AW's account? AW has 45,000 followers. It was supposedly around 8:30 Pacific/11:30 on Friday night. I know people saw Dan Wolfe's retweet. I hear there is a cached version at TweetCongress. But is Dan Wolfe/@patriotusa76 the only person on Twitter who actually saw the Tweet go out live from @RepWeiner's account? If anyone else did see it I'd like to know. TIA.
DailyKos 2
There have been a couple high profile diaries on this matter here and here, both of which feature an image analysis supposedly demonstrating that the screenshot of the photo on Rep. Weiner's yfrog page has been tampered with.
However, I think it's pretty easy to show that this evidence isn't evidence at all and should NOT be used as evidence showing fraud.
I should start out by saying that any claims by Breitbart should be viewed with extreme skepticism. The second diary linked above does a good job reviewing other things that provide either circumstantial evidence that this was a pre-meditated fraud or demonstrating curious coincidences about who is involved. However, we shouldn't present things as evidence that aren't evidence.
First off, here is the image alleging to demonstrate that the screenshot was faked (from http://errorlevelanalysis.com/...)
The evidence mainly being that the "Popular" and "Upload" text on the page is clear, the area where the yfrog username would be is not, suggesting that the area had been resaved as a jpg more than once, making it more pixilated than it should be.
I, honestly, wasn't totally convinced. I could see it being an artifact of the design and presentation of the website, and I remembered how the right tried to use many of the same arguments to "prove" that Obama's COLB was fake. So I decided to do a control test, taking a screenshot of a verifiably real picture and running the same analysis on it. I came up with this: (from http://errorlevelanalysis.com/...
There are a few minor differences between the screenshots, but the two most important items are largely the same: the "popular" and "upload" text is clear while the area where the username is is clearly fuzzy.
This suggests that the anomaly both on my control and on the screenshot that was provided is a result of the design of the page, NOT a result of the image being tampered with (with all due respect to the person who did the original analysis).
This evidence falls more in line with Rep. Weiner's statement that his account was hacked, and thus the image in question was in fact actually posted on his yfrog account, where the screenshot of it was taken. However, this makes it harder to prove it was a fraud without getting into things such as seeing what IP address the image was uploaded from and other things, which would have to be done by yfrog. While doing this may not determine who uploaded the image (they could have been using a proxy server), it could eliminate Rep. Weiner as being the one who uploaded it.
In any case, I, like most people here, are still extremely skeptical of any story brought about by Breitbart. However, if we're going to use evidence to support I case, I hope we use evidence that is actually evidence.
DailyKos 3
New Twitter account of the young woman in question
Statement from student re: faux scandal involving Rep. Anthony Weiner
Speculation And Sloppy Reporting On Both Sides Of ‘Weinergate’
Anthony is my congressman y'all. For the record, I wasn't sure at first but now I'm convinced that he was hacked.