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.
You can click the link to see Anthoney Weiner’s weiner if you like. I’m not going to post it here.
This is hilarious. Protector if the uteri or sexual deviant? I guess they aren’t mutually exclusive…
For his sake, let’s hope that he was actually hacked, instead of being caught in a lie.
whyarethegoodurlsalreadytaken asks: Am I the only one who thinks this whole "Weiner-gate" is being blow out of proportion? I'm a New Yorker, and there is barely no coverage of the incident. Out of the NY Post, the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and the local paper Newsday, only the Post has had any coverage of it. It seems like most of the area has just dismissed the claims all together.
» SFB says: For what it’s worth, The New York Times has essentially ignored a Breitbart original once — with ACORN — only to be caught by surprise after the fact. (Also, the New York Daily News has covered it.) So, from our perspective, it’s better to be ahead of the story and catch what evidence we can than to see the steamroller of a smear campaign do the work for us. If Weiner’s in the right — and we hope he is — we merely want to be sure we exhausted all available options on the story, which has been picked up by large sites people read, like Mediaite and Gawker. — Ernie @ SFB
orioninacobweb-deactivated20110 asks: I have no questions; I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your latest post on Anthony Weiner. I thought you went about in exactly the right way, particularly noting your bias at the very beginning. I think keeping biases in mind in the best way to try to approach things from an analytic point of view. I should, of course, admit my bias as well and say that I also sincerely hope there is no truth to this scandal. So, thank you very much :)
» SFB says: Thanks for the comment. We know that tackling the Weiner story might be a little tough considering the guy has a big fan base among the left, but the analysis at least offers something to go by, instead of just denying it out of hand. I’d like to think that even if something goes against our own political lean, we at least air it out. I think it’s important to note that the guy who first retweeted Weiner’s tweet had been looking for a way to hang the guy out to dry for a long time. I err on the side of Weiner getting hacked (it’s too perfect not to be), but there isn’t any firm proof of it. — Ernie @ SFB
So, a guy who has been building exactly this narrative for months turns out to be the one and only unique retweet of the picture in question? Just as Rep. Weiner’s cryptic hashtag about the Seattle time zone is reason to raise reasonable flag of suspicion, so too is this.Mediaite’s Colby Hall • Who noticed the same trend we did with the Rep. Anthony Weiner saga yesterday — that the guy who retweeted the Weiner thing (which took place nearly half an hour before the BigGovernment post first went up) appeared to be going out of his way to build up a narrative that suggested a saga like the one that actually happened weeks before it actually did. The person who was targeted by the rogue tweet wrote an exclusive statement for the New York Daily News where she noted the same thing — that this specific Twitter user harassed her. We think that this evidence suggests strongly that Weiner’s Twitter account was hacked, rather than Weiner sending the rogue tweet himself. The user’s tweets are suddenly protected, but not before a number of people noticed the trend.
(Source: mediaite.com)
This is seriously the second deja vu article we’ve posted today. It’s like we’re getting “deja vu” deja vu. What’s going on?
Jon Stewart just cited my blog, “those blogs, that sounds a lot like reporting! Slow down Woodward and Blogstein!” (Taken with instagram)
You’ve made it, man. And you did it with much less of an obsessive take than half the bloggers out there. Take a bow. (EDIT: Here’s the link to the video, which is of course a must-watch.)
Former South Carolina Senate candidate Alvin Greene lets the world know what he thinks of Weinergate. Oh, Alvin.
We love Mediaite (they did a great interview with us a while back), but man oh man do we agree with Gawker. No single news source has owned Weinergate like Mediaite. Maybe now’s the time to take a breather? Possibly?
Anthony Weiner’s got a lot of problems this week, but they’re sorta inflated. First off, the story is kind of at a point where fatigue is very high. However, despite technical evidence, including a very obvious yFrog flaw that would’ve made it easy to post a rogue tweet on Weiner’s account, the congressman’s performance this week has proven to be a complete liability, giving conservatives enough rope to hang him with. (By the way, just wanted to point out — we discovered the @PatriotUSA76 angle 15 hours before DailyKos broke it.) But at this point, only the die-hards are really, truly following this story. One of them, by the way, is a reporter for Mediaite — Tommy Christopher. We criticized Mediaite for their aggressive coverage Thursday but will give some credit today. You guys did some good work that deserves praise. More info:
Congrats Tumblr!
Don’t screw this up Yahoo.
In 2007, I was...
I started tumblr when I was at one of the lowest points of...
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soon
Yahumblr.
So, here’s the EXIF data of that Weinergate photo we just uploaded: Notice any similarities with the data that Soup posted last week? Well … it’s almost exactly the same data. Trying to figure out what that means. *EDIT*: Same data from another Breitbart-uploaded photo. The only informative data we see here is “Rim Exif Version1.00a” … everything else is incredibly vague. Soup also has some useful commentary on this post. My own personal feeling is that it’s it’s pretty possible that the data was changed with the assumption an enterprising blogger would try to do the same thing.
I’ll be watching.
Thoughts that I genuinely have every time any politician announces a press conference: whether Jon Stewart will be able to change his opening monologue in time to comment on said event. Looks like this one is going to come down to the wire…
Also, the WaPo reports that ABC has been in touch with the woman who received the photos and will be naming the woman in an upcoming report.
Worst. Warm-up man. Ever. Oh, I know, let’s have the guy who just nailed your ass to the wall get the crowd ready!
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