It’s no surprise that Nashi, Rumol, and the rest regularly amuse themselves by launching some complete nonsense into the masses through LiveJournal, then sitting back to watch everyone comment on it and argue furiously. It really is insanely funny. And the technique is dead simple. Anyone can do it. A perfect example for Comrade Trickster 007’s next lecture on “Manipulation Through Blogs.” Kashin another_kashin has gotten into the habit of constantly mocking our movement over the name “NAROD” (“The People”). You know, like: now you’ll have to buy out the narod.ru website, and so on. A week ago he cracked the same joke again. He put up this post: Has anyone seen the newspaper "People’s Observer," supposedly published by Navalny’s movement "Narod"? I’d be curious to take a look. To explain: “People’s Observer” (Völkischer Beobachter) was the name of the NSDAP’s newspaper — Hitler’s main paper. So I played along in the comments: said it was sold at every kiosk, unlike your lame Russian Life, and that among those writing for us were Panyushkin (brought in by golishev) and Tregubova. Belkovsky was supposedly handling the creative side. I also wanted to add that the editor-in-chief was Yevgeny Kiselyov and the politics desk was headed by Akhmed Zakayev. But I got too lazy. So in the end we have a news item: **Navalny suddenly, in secret from everyone, has launched a newspaper. He borrowed the name from Hitler. The paper is sold at every kiosk. Panyushkin, Tregubova, and Belkovsky are working on it. Source of the news: comments on Kashin’s blog. **Sounds believable? That’s what I thought too — that it didn’t. Not a bit of it. Exactly one minute later, the New Right’s Ammosov fell for it. And denounced us. A couple of hours later several people called, including oleg_kozyrev (heh-heh, 1–0), saying they couldn’t find People’s Observer at a single kiosk. I got calls from several newspapers, including two VERY respectable ones. Some friendly journalists were even offended that I’d kept this information from them and they were only learning about it through LiveJournal. Several representatives of the right-wing movement were quite jealously asking about the Beobachter at the fifth anniversary of DPNI (the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, a Russian nationalist group). The delightful know-it-all Anatoly Wasserman awas1952 fell for it too and even offered to write something (that’s where I felt a little ashamed). Even yellow_reporter, who has worked three meters away from me for several years, came over to ask for a copy of the Beobachter. But all that is nonsense compared to this: MY OWN WIFE asked me last week: what’s this newspaper you people are starting up? And today there was even a devastating article on kompromat.ru, in which Belkovsky (as the ideologue of the Beobachter) got dragged into it for absolutely no reason: Whether this political strategist intends to continue moving ideologically in the direction of “Hitler the Liberator” remains unclear. But the fact that this already rather “unhinged” PR man is increasingly “letting off the brakes” is somewhat disturbing. So that’s how news gets made. I want to say a few things: People, don’t believe everything you read on LiveJournal. It may just be someone amusing themselves. My congratulations to dolboeb and the entire blogging movement. The level of trust in information posted on a blog — even the most absurd kind — clearly exceeds trust in the regular media. Sorry to everyone who ended up being the victim of the prank. I had nothing to do with it. Kashin started it first.