Joy Reid, the MSNBC yapper most retweeted by Russian trolls, having learned nothing from Anthony Weiner, claimed that some mysterious figures had hacked her blog to make her look like she hates gay people.
The Internet Archive, an invaluable site that provides a very useful service, is somewhat skeptical.
This past December, Reid’s lawyers contacted us, asking to have archives of the blog (blog.reidreport.com) taken down, stating that “fraudulent” posts were “inserted into legitimate content” in our archives of the blog. Her attorneys stated that they didn’t know if the alleged insertion happened on the original site or with our archives (the point at which the manipulation is to have occurred, according to Reid, is still unclear to us).
When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions. At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.
We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation. Consequently, and due to Reid’s being a journalist (a very high-profile one, at that) and the journalistic nature of the blog archives, we declined to take down the archives.
I blame Joy's toaster.
Who exactly would want to go to the trouble of framing Joy and in that particular way? It must be the Russian bots. The ones who had retweeted her... only to turn on her. It's the story of Frankenstein's monster all over again. First the bots retweet you. Then they make you look like a homophobe.