AntiSocialMedia.net

The first several posts published on AntiSocialMedia.net dealt with former BusinessWeek reporter Gary Weiss and his abuse of blogs, Wikipedia and message boards in defense of illegal stock market manipulation.

Almost immediately after publishing the first such post, I began to receive email from readers who were confident that any scam involving Gary Weiss was all but certain to involve a fellow named Floyd Schneider, as well.

Curious, I googled “Floyd Schneider”, and quickly found the 2002 BusinessWeek story entitled “Revenge of the Investor”, in which Floyd is painted as a crusading folk hero fighting against corporate fraudsters.

With that, I concluded that Floyd Schneider could not possibly be an associate of Gary Weiss.

Time passed, and I began to gain a better understanding of how Gary Weiss was not only a corrupt blogger, but how he had also been a corrupt reporter, often using his by-line at BusinessWeek to further the interests of his short selling patrons by casting black as white, and white as black.

Indeed, as anybody who’s followed his career knows, the First Law of Gary Weiss is: If Gary says something is bad, it’s probably good; and vice versa.

I’m ashamed to admit that the obvious “A-ha!” moment finally came in December of 2006. That’s when it occurred to me – rather randomly – that I ought to take another look at the 2002 piece on Floyd Schneider…particularly the story’s by-line (which BusinessWeek.com tends to print at the end of stories).

Looking back, what I found probably should have come as no surprise…

…the author of the story lionizing Floyd Schneider was Gary Weiss himself. Indeed, Floyd is also lovingly featured in Weiss’s second book.

Those facts, when viewed in the context of the First Law of Gary Weiss, were all I needed to know that the individuals who suggested Floyd Schneider was involved in the coordinated public attacks I had observed against Patrick Byrne and other opponents of illegal naked short selling, were correct.

At that point, I sought to determine which message board aliases Schneider was using at the time. The answer was to be found in this legal opinion filed in one of the (multiple) lawsuits brought against Schneider by companies defamed and libeled by his message board posting.

It reads:

…“Floydtheoneandonly,” “charlesp0nzi,” “thetruthseekercom,” are [stock message board] pseudonyms used by Floyd Schneider…

From there, the Dissembler Sorting Algorithm revealed that on Yahoo Finance alone, additional Schneider aliases included strethoechasity, returnofstockdung, baloneymarch, wackypat, zorro20934 and china39846.

As an aside, the alias zorro20934 was used by Schneider to post attacks (since deleted) against Matrixx Initiatives, in direct violation of an agreement Schneider signed stipulating that he would not do so.

Over time the vast majority of Schneider’s message board contributions have been deleted for their abusive nature. Possibly the best and most recent example of this appeared briefly on Yahoo’s INVESTools board, in a series of posts in which Schneider attempted to blame INVESTools management for former employee David Ragsdale’s tragic decision to murder his wife earlier this year.

Analysis of the thousands of posts made by Schneider revealed that they attacked – almost without exception, companies appearing on the Reg SHO Threshold Securities list – which is comprised of firms targeted by hedge funds engaged in manipulative naked short selling.

In addition, Floyd’s posting patterns tended to be very abnormal; meaning, he would focus intensely on one or two companies for a time, then abruptly shift focus to attacking another and never return to the prior. This, I reasoned, was what one would expect of someone being directed in their efforts, as opposed to someone whose attention naturally evolved over time.

The next breakthrough came when I discovered this message board post made to SiliconInvestor.com by former Schneider business partner and convicted stock manipulator Anthony Elgindy, reading:

From: Anthony@Pacific
4/21/2001 8:28:44 PM

Notice of termination of all association with The truthseeker.
As of Yesterday.
I wish him luck in his current business venture as a paid researcher/basher..
I dont pay for any posts..period and I’m not gonna start ever doing that.
Please dont ask me to elaborate , just know that he is being paid now by outside parties.
He has done some good work and we have had some good times , but all good things must come to an end..someday.

I first wrote about what I had discovered, vis-à-vis Floyd Schneider, in December 2006.

In early April 2007, a mysterious comment was added to the Schneider post, claiming to have been made by Floyd’s long-deceased father. It read…

The Truthseeker is incapable of ever telling the truth!

How do I know? That’s easy I was his father. Currently my wife and other 4 sons have completely disowned him and will have nothing to do with him anymore.

I passed away on 2/7/1996, let me tell you some of my own experiences with my 3rd son, Floyd D. Schneider.

TIMELINE:
1976-1979 while attending the University of Miami he has gambled with bookies losing thousands of dollars I had to bail him out of, and committed credit card fraud stealing credit card numbers.

1982 stock broker for Moore Schlay, embezzled monies from family and friends brokerage accounts and lost it all buying options, He was fired and I had to bail him out again.

1983 stockbroker for Shearson American express, again he did the same thing and he was fired, I had to mortgage my house this time to bail him out.

1983- 1988 in between this time there were a few more bets with bookies and in 1988 he married a con artist and became her 6th husband. They both ran an Insurance agency in Bradley Beach, NJ “The F. D. Schneider Insurance Agency” This was a total disaster, they both were issuing insurance cards to people and had them make out their premium checks directly to them and cashing the checks for money for themselves, never putting the policies through and having these people driving with no car insurance without them knowing.

Yup again this cost me money in 1991, my whole half years retirement package in fact to bail him out of this mess.

Floyd came home to live again and in 1992 became a Mortgage broker for Weichert Realtors. He got in more trouble in those years by having people sign lock-in agreements and not locking the interest rate in, hoping rates would go down and lock it in then making loads more money for himself. Problem was more often the interest rates went up and he had to arrange to pay large lump sums of money to the borrowers to keep them from getting him fired.

Thank goodness he was a “so called” top producer, giving him them means pay his way out of a mess for himself for once. Floyd is a compulsive liar and you never can get the Truth from him, always nothing but another lie after another. Guess that’s why now he feels a need to seek truth from others, lord knows he could never seek it from himself.

He has a very convoluted way of justifying things. I remember back in 1983 when he was with Shearson in that mess, he forged a signature from his Godfather’s account, when I sat down with him to explain he did something very wrong all he told me was:  “dad I never forged anything, I just signed the check Floyd Schneider, it’s my fault Shearson didn’t check to see if it was the right Floyd Schneider or not, so really it’s their fault not mine!” You see Floyd was named after his uncle and Godfather “Floyd Schneider” of Carpenter and Smith Oil in Monroe, NY.

I never could convince him he did anything wrong either, he really believes he has never done a wrong thing in his life. I died 6 months after Floyd was married to his second wife. His father-in-law has no idea of what his daughter married! I am starting to feel I am the lucky one now six feet under, but finally in peace!!!

Not feeling comfortable with a comment from a dead person appearing on my blog – particularly one leveling such extreme accusations – I removed it and contacted its author: not to ask for proof of the claims, but to discern with reasonable certainty that he or she was actually in a position to know whether or not they were true.

What resulted was a long and fruitful conversation with Roger Schneider, Floyd’s brother and – until days before – Floyd’s boss at the Ramsey, NJ branch of mortgage brokerage Nationwide Equity.

The circumstances behind Floyd’s dismissal from Nationwide provide what might be the most interesting and valuable bit of insight yet gained in my effort to prove that contrary to their repeated claims, some individuals are indeed paid to “bash” public companies on stock message boards on behalf of short selling hedge funds seeking to profit from a drop in the target company’s share value.

Here’s how Roger Schneider himself describes the situation:

“Floyd was writing up invoices on Nationwide Equity’s letterhead to Magic consulting instructing Magic to pay Nationwide for some phony service he made up, and too have Magic consulting make out the checks payable directly to Floyd D. Schneider. He did this many times before it was discovered and he was fired.”

(More on Michelle McDonough and Magic Consulting in a moment)

As Roger described the above scene to me, when Floyd was presented with the evidence of his history of illegally disguising payments from Magic Consulting as mortgage brokerage commissions, Floyd’s only defense was to point out that in this most recent case (the one for which he was caught), Magic owner Michelle McDonough had instead opted to pay him directly as a contract “stock researcher.”

This is a vital detail, because it confirms Anthony Elgindy’s claim that Floyd had engaged in a “business venture as a paid researcher/basher.”

It was while cleaning out Floyd’s desk a few days later that Roger discovered a print version of the same legal filing I had found online months before, and the partial listing of Floyd’s confirmed message board aliases. Then, while seeking additional information on what he’d found, Roger happened upon AntiSocialMedia.net and my post about his brother.

As it turns out, Floyd left behind many compelling insights into his relationship with Michelle McDonough’s Magic Consulting.

It seems that when hedge fund Third Point Capital needed some dirt spread about specific companies, they would enlist the help of McDonough, who would in turn enlist the help of individuals such as Floyd Schneider. McDonough would provide Floyd with a list of “talking points” and, moments later, these were the things Floyd would begin posting on stock message boards across the web, including Yahoo Finance, Raging Bull, and Silicon Investor.

Very soon, these were also the things business reporter Roddy Boyd (currently of Fortune, previously of the New York Post) was writing damning stories about.

Very frequently, Boyd would contact Floyd, asking for help digging up negative information on officers of specific companies. In every case, these companies were known to be under active and vicious attack by short selling hedge funds.

On one occasion, Roddy Boyd refers directly to Michelle McDonough as an acquaintance of his and Floyd’s…which is what makes the following email exchanges between Boyd and myself so strange:

Judd Bagley: “…What do you know about a woman named Michelle McDonough?”

Roddy Boyd: “re Michelle M: nothing. Should I? google has about 1mm entries for that name.”

Judd Bagley: “She used to go by the name Michelle Sarian. Today she runs “Magic Consulting.” I think she did a year in prison back in 2001.”

Roddy Boyd: “re sarian or mcdonough…youre [sic] concern, not mine.”

And later…

Judd Bagley: “While I’ve got you…you recently denied knowing Michelle McDonough (formerly Sarian). Is that still your position?”

Roddy Boyd: “sorry judd, im [sic] not talking to you about anything else, period. if youre [sic] not comfortable with me asking the questions-fine. but im [sic] not anwering [sic] yours.”

We’ve since learned yet more about Michelle McDonough and Magic Consulting.

Most notable is the fact that McDonough apparently offers her services to multiple hedge funds, not just Third Point Capital, as originally suspected.

It’s also emerged that, prior to leaving for prison, McDonough (then known as Michelle Sarian) was a very active message board poster, herself. Sources suggest that in those days, she primarily attacked the companies targeted by Evan Sturza, a former hedge fund manager who went on to publish Sturza’s Medical Investment Letter.

Based on evidence he saw, Roger Schneider estimates McDonough paid Floyd at least $14,000 in 2006 alone. A few years before that, Roger observed Floyd receive at least one payment of $10,000 from Paul C. Harary, who – it should come as no surprise – was recently imprisoned for securities manipulation.

Paul C. Harary.

Michelle McDonough.

Anthony Elgindy.

Sam E. Antar.

All convicted securities manipulators.

All past and present associates of paid stock message board basher Floyd Schneider.

In late 2005, I spent over four hours interviewing Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne as part of a podcast series on entrepreneurship I created.

After I published the audio of the interview, somebody posted a link to it on the Yahoo Finance message board dedicated to Overstock.com.

Seeking the origin of the resulting surge in downloads led to my first stock message board visit.

It was really strange.

What first struck me was the flurry of responses to the original posts in which users with foul mouths and bad attitudes warned that the linked mp3s contained computer viruses.

Of course, no mp3 has ever carried a virus, as I’m fairly certain the posters knew.

These were followed up by all manner of lies meant to discourage others from listening to any of the three Byrne interviews I would eventually publish.

Worse, they posted all manner of lies about Patrick Byrne personally – something I was in a unique position to recognize having just interviewed him at length.

Intrigued, I started examining the posting histories of the most prolific sources of this disinformation, trying to identify patterns that might in turn reveal their underlying motives and, often enough, their real identities.

Well over two years later, I remain engaged in the same pursuit. And, to be frank, I suspect that by now, I understand it better than anybody else, largely because of a few methods I’ve developed and the great amounts of information I’ve received from others.

What follows is a little bit about what I’ve learned.

First: just as there are dishonest people paid to post lies on stock message boards for the purpose of artificially boosting share prices, there are also bad people paid to post lies on stock message boards for the purpose of artificially lowering prices.

In the case of the latter, they are either paid outright as contract “stock researchers”, or paid in put options (which increase in value as a company’s stock drops in value).

Second: make no mistake, it’s short-biased hedge funds who are paying these stock “bashers” (as they’re often called).

Third: in some cases, it’s actually the managers of these short-biased hedge funds doing the bashing.

Consider the following notable example.

I’ve previously written about evidence received demonstrating that hedge fund Third Point, LLC contracted with convicted stock fraudster Michelle McDonough, whose duties included coordinating the efforts of message board bashers and inducing certain captured journalists to report negatively on targeted companies.

I’ve also written about Third Point founder Daniel Loeb’s well-known history of posting on the Yahoo and Silicon Investor stock message boards under the alias Mr. Pink.

Before getting to the rest of the story, here’s some background.

About the same time I first visited Yahoo Finance, a company called SFBC International (now PharmaNet Development Group) came under a blistering attack by Daniel Loeb, who very publicly announced Third Point’s sizeable short interest in the company.

SFBC got hit from all sides, and its share price withered.

In particular, there was a deluge of libelous (though tame compared to others I’ve seen) posts to Yahoo’s SBFC message board. Most notable were the attacks leveled against then-SFBC Chairwoman and President Lisa Krinsky.

Krinsky responded by filing a lawsuit against ten anonymous posters: Does 1 through 10.

In order to discover the identities of the ten Does, Yahoo was served with a subpoena.

In accordance with policy, Yahoo alerted the posters, giving them two weeks in which to contest the subpoena – an expensive proposition few bashers have the financial ability to pursue.

And indeed, none of the ten Does opted to put up a fight.

With one exception: Doe number 6, known on Yahoo Finance as Senor_Pinche_Wey (which is a slang Spanish term that is as obscene as you can imagine).

A typical post by Senor_Pinche_Wey reads:

…I will reciprocate [fellatio] with Lisa [Krinsky] even though she has fat thighs, a fake medical degree, “queefs” and has poor feminine hygiene…

Doe-6 fought the subpoena, was rejected, and appealed to California’s Sixth Appellate court.

Clearly, Doe-6 had some resources backing him up…to say nothing of a deep motivation not to be exposed.

And, fortunately for Doe-6, his appeal was successful and the subpoena was quashed.

This decision – handed down in February of this year – essentially affirms the First Amendment rights of message board bashers to say whatever they want about the officers of public companies. (An excellent analysis of the decision can be viewed here.)

In their decision, the Court noted:

We likewise conclude that the language of Doe 6’s posts, together with the surrounding circumstances — including the recent public attention to SFBC’s practices and the entire “SFCC” message-board discussion over a two-month period — compels the conclusion that the statements of which plaintiff complains are not actionable. Rather, they fall into the category of crude, satirical hyperbole which, while reflecting the immaturity of the speaker, constitute protected opinion under the First Amendment.

Interesting.

Ready for the other shoe to drop?

I’ve learned, through multiple sources, that the immature speaker in this case, Doe-6 (aka Senor_Pinche_Wey) was none other than Daniel Loeb himself.

As a matter of fact, Senor_Pinche_Wey is one of many abusive message board identities used by Loeb to harass officers of companies Third Point was shorting, often illegally.

On August 12, 2005, Patrick Byrne first publicly accused several hedge funds of working in coordination to illegally manipulate the share price of Overstock.com and many other small, public companies. Within 48 hours, armies of bashers arrived for the first time on the Overstock.com stock message boards across the web, all working off of a the same obvious set of talking points. Among the points these bashers took the greatest care to make, time and again: that Byrne was crazy for thinking that any two hedge funds would ever work together when shorting.

In case there are any doubts left regarding Byrne’s claims, I invite you to look at this message board exchange, between Senor_Pinche_Wey, LaseriumQueen, bobbingbargains, disgustedinvestor, kidstockjoec, jidoo, and Polytechnic_Trader.

What makes it so interesting is that at least 72% of the participants are hedge fund managers shorting the company they’re smearing.

Specifically, Senor_Pinche_Wey belongs to Daniel Loeb, while LaseriumQueen, bobbingbargains, disgustedinvestor, and kidstockjoec all belong to Robert Chapman, founder of hedge fund Chapman Capital.

Polytechnic_Trader and jidoo may or may not belong to Loeb or Chapman…I don’t know either way.

I do know that Chapman also posts under the aliases tautologicaltrader, ghaulty_lodgick, notably_absent, and herniatedgorilla – all of which can be seen, time after time, posting things I’m quite certain Chapman would not dare say in person.

Do hedge funds coordinate their attacks?

Yes.

And as you’ll read in a soon-to-be-published-post, message board bashing is only the beginning.

Over the past month, dozens of volunteers have joined together to assemble a staggering amount of evidence backing up one of the central claims of AntiSocialMedia.net: that former financial journalist Gary Weiss is possibly the most profoundly conflicted Wikipedia editor in the history of that website.

By all accounts, the resulting mass of evidence vastly exceeded any previous effort and produced a “case” supporting the claim that Gary Weiss has, in extreme violation of Wikipedia policy, deceitfully operated multiple accounts in an effort to skew the articles relating to naked short selling, Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, and Gary Weiss himself.

Those unfamiliar with Wikipedia policy might not appreciate just how big a deal this really is.

It’s very satisfying to see so much support for the claim that has, over the past year, created so much misery for the few who have believed it.

That misery was occasioned, in large part, by the inexplicable obstructionism of Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales, who intervened on multiple occasions to halt efforts threatening to tie Weiss to his many wiki sockpuppet identities.

Initially, it seemed reasonable to assume that Wales’s unreasonable behavior was based on bad information, and that he was otherwise acting in good faith.

That changed, however, when several of Wales’s contributions to a very small and private email list were recently leaked to me.

Of these, the most interesting, dated September 15, 2007, reads as follows:

From: jwales@wikia.com (Jimbo Wales)
I just want to go on record as saying that I believe the reason for this is that Mantanmoreland is in fact Gary Weiss.

Before lauding Wales’s apparent enlightenment on this topic, note the comment he made one month later, in reference to his support of an effort to block model Wikipedia editor Cla68 from making the most reasonable changes to the Gary Weiss article autobiography:

“Cla68, I fear that you have been manipulated by lying stalkers and trolls…”

In case it’s not clear, this is one of Wales’s many references to me as “lying stalker” and “troll.”

Kindly re-read the previous few paragraphs in case the following point is not made crystal clear to you: in private, Wales admitted knowing that I was correct about Gary Weiss, and yet in public, continued protecting Weiss, defaming me and castigating those who recognized and acted upon the truth as reported here.

What could possibly motivate someone to be not only deceitful, but deeply, irresponsibly and libelously deceitful?

Before you answer, consider the insights we can glean from the examples of Rachel Marsden and Jeff Merkey.

Rachel Marsden
Marsden is a controversial Canadian media personality and political consultant whose Wikipedia article has consistently tended toward the disproportionately negative.

While the full extent of their relationship is unknown, the emergence of a series of IM chat transcripts between Marsden and Wales makes it clear that in early February of this year, the relationship was…shall we say…a physical one.

Confronted with an overwhelming body of evidence, Wales conceded to a single “meeting” with Marsden, which took place on February 9, 2008.

While other evidence would suggest Wales isn’t telling the truth here, let us none-the-less focus on the circumstances surrounding that meeting.

In the following excerpted IM chat exchange between Wales and Marsden leading up to the February 9 meeting (originally published in Valleywag.com), the two discuss a specific point of inaccuracy in her article.

Wales: I wrote an email to the internal editors list about your entry recommending some changes, etc. I said that I would run it by you for clarification/comment and email again if there were any updates I think we have two major problems right now first, the timeline is wrong about the recent cop case… that is the worst error and easy to fix

Wales: right so the way it is told now, hang on a second let’s actually do this right now because the last thing I want to do is take a break from f**king your brains out all night to work on your wikipedia entry

"In September 2007, on her blog Marsden wrote about and posted a picture of a counterterrorism officer for the Ontario Provincial Police with whom she had an affair. She claimed that he had leaked secret anti-terrorism documents to her, then posted email messages from him as evidence that he had been pursuing her, and sent to the National Post these along with sexually explicit pictures of him that she had received. She was investigated for criminal harassment for this behaviour, but was not charged. The OPP’s criminal investigations branch cleared the officer of any wrongdoing."

so our timeline is wrong we say
(1) wrote about him on your blog
(2) posted email messages from him
(3) as a result he files harassment charges

Marsden: exactly. it was a retaliatory complaint on his part that was launched 2 months after they initiated their investigation into his stuff.

Wales: but the correct timeline is
(1) wrote about him on the blog
(2) he files harassment charges
(3) you post email messages to show how his harassment charges are bullshit

Marsden: you’re a sh*tdisturber. right I only posted the emails after he went public trying to create trouble. NOT before that.

Wales: so we can get that sorted and then this makes the story clearer

Marsden: that’s good of you to do. really.

Comparing the substance of this chat session with the edit history of the Rachel Marsden article in the days leading up to February 9, 2008, we see something rather striking: On February 7, wikipedian Guy Chapman (aka “JzG”) commits two changes (1)(2) which have the net effect of making precisely the content alterations Marsden requested.

Jeff Merkey
Merkey is a computer scientist and entrepreneur whose Wikipedia article came under attack by several editors critical of his professional associations.

According to Merkey, in 2006, Wales told him that in exchange for a substantial donation, Wales could use his influence to make Merkey’s article more agreeable, and to place Merkey himself under Wales’s “special protection” as an editor.

Merkey made a $5,000 donation and hinted at the possibility of something much larger in the future.

Merkey claims, and the record confirms, that following his donation, Wales personally made several edits to the Merkey article, including a complete blanking of the article and destruction of its edit history (extreme steps to take under any circumstances, and doubly so considering it happened without any effort at reaching consensus, which is supposedly the coin of the Wikipedia realm).

When he announced his unilateral “start-over” on the article, Wales offered:

I have deleted the old discussion because of the unpleasantness of it. Please be extra careful here to be courteous and assume good faith. We are nearing a resolution of this longstanding conflict. Play nice, everyone.

A priceless response came 20 minutes later by wikipedian Aim Here, who asked:

“…Have you been making secret dealings behind everyone’s back? So much for Wikipedia’s openness.”

To which Wales nervously responded:

“Secret dealings? What on earth are you talking about?”

To which wikipedian Aim Here replied:

Whether or not the original article was a mess, you did use the phrase ‘nearing a restitution of this longstanding conflict’, which suggests, despite the complete lack of evidence available in public, that there is an actual conflict going on, as opposed to one which had been completely dormant for ages now. After all, suddenly and with no warning, wiping out an article and ordering everyone to start again over some sourcing problems is rather heavy-handed and drastic. The normal WP procedure is to stick some tags on it and telling everyone to change the bad bits. The ’secret deals’ phrase was of course total speculation, and sorry about that, but I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t something happening in private that sparked off this wholesale deletion of yours, either a deal or a threatened lawsuit. After all, pretty much the last thing Merkey said on this whole stupid subject was that he had been trying, in private, to throw $2 million at you and/or Wikipedia and threatening his usual bag of lawsuits. Well, whatever…

If this exchange seems familiar, it may be because it roughly resembles this one, which followed Jimbo Wales’ unilateral blanking of the debate over the proposed deletion of the article autobiography on Gary Weiss:

The page contained wildly inappropriate speculation that a notable author was sockpuppeting. As I am sure you are aware, many authors have had their careers badly damaged by being caught sockpuppeting at Amazon, etc., and it is deeply wrong for people to ask me to restore a page with such speculations in Wikipedia after the claims have already been investigated and dismissed. If there are further problems in the future, there will be no problem restoring the article at that time.

As an aside, based on Wales’s promise that “If there are further problems in the future, there will be no problem restoring the article at that time,” wikipedian Cool Hand Luke asked Jimbo for permission to un-delete the deletion debate in order to reference it during the present ArbCom case relating directly to the matter of Gary Weiss and his conflict of interest on Wikipedia.

Jimbo’s response: “I see no benefit in doing so.”

Conclusion
As the Rachel Marsden example demonstrates, when he’s “getting something” in return, Jimbo Wales is willing to use his position to influence Wikipedia article content.

As the Jeff Merkey example demonstrates, in addition to female companionship, that “something” can also come in the form of donations to the Wikimedia Foundation.

As the Gary Weiss example demonstrates, Jimbo Wales is willing to use Wikipedia as a tool of libel and disinformation when doing so suits him.

Only one question remains: what exactly is Jimbo Wales getting in return for continuing to publicly defame me and shield Gary Weiss from accountability for his two-year campaign of malice and disinformation, in support of illegal stock market manipulation?

What seems to bother critics of AntiSocialMedia.net more than anything else is their inability to disprove the things written here.

That’s because AntiSocialMedia.net deals in facts. Period.

Often, having made my case, I’ll take the additional step of drawing conclusions based on the facts. It’s never easy leaving the comfort of what I know to be true for what I suspect is true — particularly when reputations are involved. Yet, with a single (quickly rectified) exception, every conclusion extrapolated here has proven accurate.

And, in at least one case, my conclusions have proven much more accurate than even I could have anticipated.
To learn more about that case, let us return to June of 2007.

At that time, I concluded that convicted stock manipulator Sam Antar and securities class action litigator Howard Sirota were working in concert with convicted stock manipulator Barry Minkow’s Fraud Discovery Institute (FDI) to manipulate the share price of USANA, a public company.

You can review my reasoning (which, I urge you to keep in mind, Sam Antar characterized as being “filled with deception, innuendo, deflection, insensitivity, and arrogance”) here.

Many things have happened since the post was published, most notably the deposition of Minkow, whom USANA is suing for reasons that I expect will soon appear obvious. You may access the deposition transcript, in two parts, here and here.

In his deposition, Minkow confirms that to say he and Sam Antar were “doing business together” was the understatement of the fiscal year.

Minkow states, under oath, the following:
At some point in the past two or three years, Sam Antar came to be a “spiritual advisor” to Minkow. But unlike a traditional spiritual advisor, Antar didn’t ask for money…he was handing it out.

According to Minkow, in mid-2006, Antar sent him, unsolicited and with no strings attached: $100,000. This was Antar’s way of saying: “Thank you…you’ve been an example for me that you can come back from failure.”

Shortly thereafter, and by pure coincidence, Minkow decided to use Antar’s money to finance FDI’s attack on USANA, which was published and delivered to the SEC on February 20, 2007 (precisely the same day as Minkow’s second book was published), but not before Minkow established a short position in USANA stock, as well as investing in put options (both of which gain value as a stock loses value).

Minkow says that in total, Antar’s support for FDI has exceeded $250,000.

Additionally, Minkow disclosed two payments totaling $40,000 by hedge fund manager (and frequent Herb Greenberg advisor) Whitney Tilson, and $10,000 by Anthony Bruan, owner of Cactus Capital.

Remember Howard Sirota? Bruan is a long-time Sirota law client, dating back to some high-profile scrapes with the securities laws in 2001.

Sam Antar is also a long-time client of Howard Sirota’s law practice.

For those of you keeping score at home, that means at least $260,000 – nearly 90% – of the disclosed $300,000 used to finance FDI’s attack on USANA, came from associates of Howard Sirota, who makes a living leading shareholder lawsuits against public companies, à la Milberg Weiss.

Here’s where things get strange…
Consulting public records, I discovered that on February 27, 2007 (seven days after FDI’s USANA report was released), the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance issued a warrant for unpaid taxes against Sam E. Antar, in the amount of $473.15.

A bankruptcy attorney I consulted with on this issue cautioned that from time to time these warrants are filed erroneously. Hoping to rule out that possibility, I conducted a deeper search and discovered that unpaid taxes are nothing new to Sam Antar. Indeed, between 1987 and 2007, Antar amassed over $333,000 in tax liens, warrants and judgments on the city, state and federal levels, in addition to just under $60,000 in judgments and liens by private creditors in 1992 and 1993.

None of these debts was discharged by Antar’s Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in 1998.

My point being, Sam’s history suggests this most recent – and nearly one year later, unsatisfied – tax warrant was not the result of an error.

And yet, from Minkow’s deposition, we’re supposed to believe that someone who can’t pay a $500 tax bill is in a position to give Minkow gifts totaling at least $250,000 – motivated by nothing more than the spirit of fraud fighting?

As noted in my earlier post on this topic, Howard Sirota was caught bashing (though in an unusually civil manner, to his credit) USANA stock on Yahoo Finance under the screen name StanleySargoy. In his first such post, dated April 14, 2007, Sirota declares (and Minkow’s deposition later confirms) that Sirota was shorting USANA stock, in addition to being long USANA put options.

Interestingly, five trading days later, USANA appeared on the Reg SHO Threshold Securities list for the first time.

Whether or not Sirota’s short position was a legitimate one, this post to Yahoo Finance by StanleySargoy in 2003 shows Sirota’s clear understanding of the relationship between public perception of a company and its share price, and of the value of using the media and other venues to spread negative information specifically for the purpose of lowering share price.

Based on these facts, I am led to conclude:

1. Sam Antar’s $250,000 “gift” wasn’t a gift, but the cost of a commissioned, negative report on USANA, intended to adversely impact USANA’s share price.
2. The money Antar gave Minkow wasn’t Antar’s at all. I suspect it belonged to someone else using Antar as an intermediary.
3. In addition to shorting USANA, Sirota likely intended to lead one of the (several) class action suits brought against the company in the months following release of Minkow’s report. That he did not do so just might be a consequence of his having been identified as StanleySargoy in this blog.
4. Finally, but likely most importantly, is my belief that this is a clear case of illegal stock manipulation.

If this sounds implausible, please remember that it is precisely the sort of activity Sirota’s counterparts at the law firm of Milberg Weiss are accused of engaging in. To learn more, you may either read this 105 page indictment of Milberg Weiss, or (as I would recommend) invest a few minutes watching an excellent presentation explaining how this sort of thing is happening on a broader scale than you could possibly imagine.

Nobody aspires to have “enemies.” I suspect, even the super-villainous would probably prefer to go about their villainy unopposed.

But just as the Yin and the Yang are opposite ends of the same stick, when one acquires a new friend, one often acquires that friend’s enemies, too.

Over the past month, it has become evident that AntiSocialMedia.net, which rarely boasts enough traffic to register on any scale, has acquired the least likely set of enemies: the leadership of Wikipedia (the ninth most popular website on the earth).

I’ll admit, it’s not easy finding the Zen in being on my side of such a grossly unfair fight.

To understand how unfair, I offer some perspective:

• It takes AntiSocialMedia.net about one week to log as many unique visitors as Wikipedia logs in less than one minute.
• Googling “AntiSocialMedia.net” returns 2,327 results.
• Googling “Wikipedia.org” returns 43,100,000 results (7,000,000 more than you get by googling “Google.com”).
• Of the three most frequently-cited sources of Wikipedia criticism (AntiSocialMedia.net, Wikipedia Review and Encyclopedia Dramatica), AntiSocialMedia.net is the smallest, the most obscure, most infrequently updated, most understaffed, and the only one not focused exclusively on “Wikipedia criticism.”

Given these extreme imbalances, how strange that Wikipedia would make AntiSocialMedia.net, the focus of its epic “BADSITES” initiative.

What’s “BADSITES,” you ask?

“BADSITES” apparently beat out “UNGOODSITES” as the shorthand name assigned to the month old (and counting) effort by the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) to officially forbid any reference to AntiSocialMeida.net on Wikipedia, under penalty of immediate banning.

To understand how extreme that move is, keep in mind the fact that Wikipedia currently endorses mentions of, and links to, websites that advocate pedophilia, racism, and related moral deprivation. Yet, the one website soon to be stricken as a matter of official Wikipedia, and which ArbCom member Fred Bauder claims “displays moral depravity,” is the one you’re reading now.

There have literally been scores, and likely more, of instances where the mere questioning of the validity of the claims against AntiSocialMedia.net results in immediate banning and removal of the comment.

If there is Zen to be found in these atrocities, it’s the de facto confirmation of the existence of “thoughtcrime” on Wikipedia.

Here’s a perfect example, engineered by me specifically to demonstrate this point.

For a month, a carefully managed discussion of the issues surrounding BADSITES has been taking place on a half-dozen sufficiently cloistered corners of Wikipedia. This is where naive and well-meaning editors go to die.

One week ago, User:Greenstick Break (previously created by me) jumped into the middle of one of these conversations to ask Fred Bauder what should have been the obvious question.

(Note: this is actually a two-fer, in that Fred’s comment nicely confirms one of the central theses of this site, as well as the searing dishonesty of Gary Weiss/Mantanmoreland.)

Fred Bauder: “…For example, one claim is that Matamoreland (sic) uses sockpuppets. Well, he did, when he first started editing two years ago. And he got caught, was warned, AND QUIT USING SOCKPUPPETS…”

Greenstick Break: “Now help me out here, Fred. You just confirmed that WordBomb was correct when he said Mantanmoreland was using socks. In another venue you confirmed that WordBomb was correct when he said Mantanmoreland had a [conflict of interest] problem. Whether or not you think the User:SlimVirgin/ User:Sweet Blue Water connection + User:jayjg oversight issue is a problem, I think it’s generally understood that WordBomb got those facts right, too.
Yet WordBomb is the one that’s banned and whose site cannot be named???
Will somebody PLEASE show me what WordBomb got so wrong as to justify all this?”

It took less than four minutes from the time that comment was posted until the time ArbCom member Jpgordon had removed it and banned Greenstick Break, claiming (impossibly), that he had managed to squeeze a completed CheckUser search in there, as well.

Greenstick Break mounted a tepid defense, partly for show and partly to force Jpgordon to actually consult CheckUser (as you’ll see, that was a necessary part of this plan).

About 45 minutes later, while Jpgordon remained actively editing, I created User:Fjse44 via precisely the same connection, IP address and browser (with all cookies intact) that I had used when editing as Greenstick Break just moments before.

I wanted it to be very easy for Jpgordon or any other CheckUser to know, if they cared at all, that Greenstick Break and Fjse44 belonged to the same banned user.

The only thing that made Fjse44 different from Greenstick Break was sentiment, as I used the account (for the greater good and while holding my nose) to respond dismissively to a perfectly logical comment by Dan Tobias on the same page as Greenstick Break’s.

*Dan T.*: “One should note that The New York Times linked to ASM when it was relevant to a controversy they were covering. But I guess we’re so much more mature, sophisticated, and tasteful in our editorial judgment than they are.”

Fjse44: “The New York Times gets to set its content policies as we do ours. Apples/oranges.”

Ten days later, the pro-BADSITES comment remains in place, and pro-BADSITES commenter Fjse44 remains a Wikipedian in good standing (though that will likely change soon, now that Fjse44 is tied to WordBomb).

The take home lesson here is that under otherwise identical circumstances, Jpgordon banned one user based entirely on his opinion.

That is thoughtcrime.

Normally, this lack of judgment would land even an ArbCom member in hot water. But by now, any sentient observer of the process has seen enough to know that when it comes to AntiSocialMedia.net, the rules have been officially suspended.

Here’s a beautiful example of Wikipedia’s new thoughtcrime paradigm.

It’s a portion of an exchange between the uncommonly gutsy User:G-Dett (whom I’m reticent to praise for fear of what might befall her) and User:Ryulong, shortly after the latter banned User:Onomato as a WordBomb sockpuppet, based on nothing more than his having made some minor changes to the Wikipedia article on Patrick Byrne.

G-Dett : “Would it be fair to say that Wikipedia’s current working definition of a WordBomb sockpuppet is anyone whose edits focus (either wholly or in part) on naked-short-selling -related articles, and who opposes User:Mantanmoreland and User:Samiharris?”

Ryūlóng: “They would be common traits as far as I know.”

G-Dett : “Of course they’re common traits; my question was whether they’re enough for a positive ID.”

Ryūlóng: “I would say so.”

Thoughtcrime. You may not like it, but at least it’s out in the open now.

Having laid that foundation, allow me to return to my initial point: that there’s an enormous disconnect between what’s been published on AntiSocialMedia.net so far, and the severity of Wikipedia leadership’s response to it.

I believe the reason these efforts are aimed against AntiSocialMedia.net, as opposed to the other, more obvious targets, is that I alone possess the past Wikipedia database dumps which, through analysis of what has since been covertly removed, provide unambiguous roadmaps of disturbing behavior at the highest levels of Wikipedia leadership.

I believe their primary concern – and the motive for such Orwellian behavior – is not for what I have published, but for what they know, based on the data in my possession, I potentially could publish.

Nobody aspires to have “enemies,” particularly when ambushed by a brass knuckle-wielding band of them. But if there is Zen to be found in the experience, it’s realizing that the subjects of my efforts – my self appointed “enemies” – appear to place a higher value upon my work than even I do.

In theory, two things should keep Wikipedia from descending into utter thug rule: transparency and accountability.

Transparency is a result of the extensive record of all editors and their contributions. The delete function, limited to administrators, retains a copy of deleted edits for other administrators to review, in addition to leaving a record of the deletion having taken place, and an explanation of the nature of the deletion. Thus, a check is maintained even on those in positions of authority.

Accountability is a product of standards of behavior that are born of the community and equally applied to all.

That’s the theory. What follows is the practice.
Oversight: the Nuclear Option
On June 25, 2006, Wikipedia introduced a tool known as “Oversight,” which made it possible to permanently delete edits while leaving no record of having done so. Oversight was necessary, it was argued, in three extreme cases:

1. Removal of nonpublic personal information such as phone numbers, home addresses, workplaces or identities of pseudonymous or anonymous individuals who have not made their identity public.
2. Removal of potentially libelous information either: a) on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel or b) when the subject has specifically asked for the information to be expunged from the history, the case is clear, and there is no editorial reason to keep the revision.
3. Removal of copyright infringement on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel.

In other words, the theory of Oversight was that its use would be limited to cases where retaining the offending material in any capacity represented a threat large enough to justify the transparency lost as a result of stealthily eliminating it.

Among the first group of administrators to be granted Oversight was then-Arbitration Committee member JayJG, who is often found operating in close association with fellow administrator SlimVirgin.

CheckUser: License to Kill
JayJG is among an equally small group of administrators granted CheckUser authority, allowing him to see which IP addresses a given editor has been assigned while logged in.

CheckUsers often play judge, jury and executioner of Wikipedia editors accused sockpuppetry.

It is my contention that since their arrival at Wikipedia, JayJG and SlimVirgin have engaged in gross and ongoing policy violations allowing them to systematically silence dissenting voices, and then abusively employ their administrative tools for the purpose of covering up their own violations.

Given the opaque manner in which JayJG, in particular, has applied Oversight and CheckUser, this would normally be impossible to prove. Fortunately, the license under which Wikipedia content is created requires liberal documentation of, and access to, every edit. Compliance with that license is achieved in part through regular “database dumps,” which anybody may download and apply as they wish, contingent upon their further compliance with the license.Serendipitously, in the days immediately prior to the institution of Oversight, I happened to download a full Wikipedia database dump. Recently, I’ve endured the oddly cumbersome process of expanding and formatting that archive, for the specific purpose of identifying oversight edits and assessing their aptness, given the WikiMedia Foundation’s own criteria.

I’ve concluded, without regard for motive, that JayJG and SlimVirgin have consistently made a mockery of both the spirit and letter of Wikipedia policy, and then misused the tools entrusted them in order to hide their misdeeds.

What follows is the first of many such examples I’ve identified.

Below you’ll see two tables, one showing the edit history of the Wikipedia article on Pierre Salinger as it appears today (on the left) and the other showing the article’s actual edit history, with missing edits in red.

Slimv has long been acknowledged as the first screen name used by SlimVirgin. Additionally, her IP address, while dynamic, is known by Slim-watchers to have consistently started with the octets 70 and 64. For these reasons and others to follow (primarily, the substance of edits made, including the first by 70.64.24.120, recreated here), I claim that the same person made the oversighted edits above, attributed to Slimv, SlimVirgin, and 70.64.24.120.

Between 11/1/2004 and 4/29/2005, a total of four edits were made by 70.64.24.120…each of them later removed by oversight. Referring to my database dump, I have recreated those edits and found them to be very instructive.

Before moving on to examine the second and third edits of 70.64.24.120, some background…

On January 5, 2005, User:Leifern made a substantial edit to the Wikipedia article on Palestine, commenting: “this was such a redundant mess to other topics, I drastically cleaned out”.

A few hours later, User:Sweet Blue Water opted to revert Leifern’s work.

In response, Leifern posted the following to Sweet Blue Water’s talk page:

Next time you revert someone’s edits, leave an explanation in the discussion area. –[[User:Leifern|Leifern]] 13:27, 2005 Jan 5 (UTC)

Two days later, a reply (since oversighted) was posted on Leifern’s talk page, reading:

I did leave a reason for the edit. You had deleted a large amount of information, without explanation, calling it a “clean up,” but without explaining why you chose to delete what you deleted. [[User:70.64.24.120|70.64.24.120]] 03:14, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

As you can see, Sweet Blue Water forgot to log in before making that reply; as a result, it’s attributed to IP address 70.64.24.120, which, as demonstrated earlier, belonged to SlimVirgin at the time.

From this, we can conclude that Sweet Blue Water is a sockpuppet of SlimVirgin.

The question then becomes one of abuse.

Of the 13 content articles edited by Sweet Blue Water, SlimVirgin edited nine, of which five edit pairs were made on the same day, and in one case, within a span of just ten minutes.

On another occasion, Sweet Blue Water was used to give the appearance of more support than really existed for a particular article’s featured status nomination: an article in which SlimVirgin was heavily invested as en editor.

Links to five instances of apparently abusive sockpuppetry can be found below.

Good-bye accountability.

Of course the larger issue here appears to be that of abuse of Oversight authority.

The permanent deletion of all four edits made by 70.64.24.120 was not:

1. Removal of nonpublic personal information,
2. Removal of potentially libelous information, or
3. Removal of copyright infringement on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel.

…but instead to eliminate embarrassing evidence of SlimVirgin’s abusive sockpuppetry.

Good-bye, transparency.

If transparency and accountability are what will ensure Wikipedia’s enduring success, these and comparable abuses by SlimVirgin and JayJG (to be examined here in future posts), are certain to ensure Wikipedia’s eventual failure.

As much as everybody seeks after the easy win, there’s also a unique sense of satisfaction to be found in confronting a truly worthy opponent.

AntiSocialMedia.net spent its first few months essentially shooting fish in a barrel. That’s because for over a decade, Gary Weiss and his many identities had stomped around the internet, leaving tracks behind that were far too easy to find and connect. When confronted with the evidence, the best Gary could do was accuse me of lying and/or “cyberstalking,” characterize me as “nauseating,” and go out