A dodgy supplement supposedly ended Sidney Crosby’s career (it didn’t). Want some?

Something’s up with Sidney Crosby, though a collection of dodgy sites can’t quite decide what or why exactly:

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All of these apparently different URLs go to the same place, though — a faked version of the ESPN site featuring a story by ‘Senior Staff Writer Ryan Hasman.’

Now, if you click on Hasman’s byline, you get a hint of what is to come — a sales page for ‘Alpha Force Testo,’ a supplement which the maker promises “helps enhance sexual stamina,” “helps gain strength fast,” and “helps reinvent your body,” which to be honest sounds a bit alarming.

What does this have to do with Sidney Crosby? Well, the reason that he’s forced to retire early/may be out for the season/finds his career jeopardized (depending on which bit of clickbait caught your eye) is that Crosby (we are told) uses Alpha Force Testo himself.

Why is that a problem? Well, it’s been ” … clinically proven to make athletes 145% stronger on average and triples stamina, making it unfair to players who don’t use it.”

Also, “users experience massive muscle growth and fat loss without lifting a single weight.”

The rest is a sales pitch of a familiar kind — you won’t be surprised to read that Hasman was once a skeptic himself, this being an age-old device. It will also not surprise you to learn that a special offer ends today (Friday) and it would not surprise me to learn that a special offer would be ending today on any other day you found yourself looking at the page. Equally unsurprising are the half-dozen adoring comments at the bottom of the story, one of which calls Alpha Force Testo “unbelievable, all I have to say is WOW.”

Losing weight usually involves some effort and self-denial, Hasman acknowledges — most diets “impose unrealistic restrictions on how you live your life.”

After four weeks on Alpha Force Testo, however, Hasman’s “final results were shocking” — he had lost “an unbelievable 19 pounds” and his “doubts and skepticism had absolutely vanished!”

By this point in the infomercial, I’d kind of forgotten about Sidney Crosby.

WATCH: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg released a statement today revealing that the social media giant will be rolling out new standards of transparency in political advertising.

5:47 Facebook to roll-out new standards in political advertising

In fake news news:

• In the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal reflects on Facebook’s role, still only dimly understood, in the 2016 U.S. election: “The informational underpinnings of democracy have eroded, and no one has explained precisely how.” A long read, worth your time. (One detail I’d forgotten — a few years ago, liberals assumed that Facebook’s role in elections would only benefit them. That seems like a long time ago now.)
• UBC professor Taylor Owen takes an early look at Facebook’s potential role in Canada’s 2019 general election. Measures mostly aimed at catching password hacking early miss the point, he writes; what is needed is more transparency about dark advertising.
• RBC, a Russian magazine, ran a long feature this week on how the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg troll farm, lured unsuspecting Americans to events in the United States that it had orchestrated. (It’s in Russian, but Chrome will translate.) In one scene, New Yorkers showed up at a park expecting free hot dogs they had been promised, as trolls watched them from St. Petersburg on a livestreamed security camera. “The action was to test a hypothesis — is it possible to remotely organize the event in the U.S. cities?”
• It was. Buzzfeed talks to Americans who showed up to real events — protests and self-defence classes — without realizing they were being organized in Russia.
• The groups the troll farm funded were ecumenical, the Guardian reports: they included Black Lives Matter-related groups, gun rights groups and Texas independence activists.
• Meduza reports on a Russian-language interview with a former Internet Research Agency troll. The 200 employees of the ‘international desk’ included a ” … separate “Facebook desk” (which) supposedly battled endlessly with the website’s administrators, who regularly deleted their fake accounts just as IRA staff managed to “develop” them into supposedly powerhouse influencers (accounts with many friends and posts).”
• Why go to the effort? The Guardian suggests one motive: “Owners of the imposter pages could post controversial – or seemingly sympathetic – messages or event announcements, and then, by inviting and observing interactions such as “likes”, comments or merely views, gather information about genuine American Facebook users, and potential voters. Those voters could then be targeted with political content that appealed to some of their most closely held sympathies.”
• “The real problem is far broader than Russia: Who will use these methods next — and how?,” Anne Applebaum asks in the Washington Post. “There is no big barrier to entry in this game: It doesn’t cost much, it doesn’t take much time, it isn’t particularly high-tech, and it requires no special equipment.”
• At Buzzfeed, Charlie Warzel looks at how Facebook’s internal culture sees the controversy. Facebook has an ” … engineering-driven culture, which they argue is largely guided by a quantitative approach to problems. It’s one that views nearly all content as agnostic, and everything else as a math problem … What the public sees as Facebook’s failure to recognize the extent to which it could be manipulated for untoward ends, employees view as a flawed hindsight justification for circumstances that mostly fell well beyond their control.”

• A bill in the U.S. Senate would bring some transparency to online political advertising by making companies like Facebook and Google disclose the ads and their buyers. NiemanLab explains.
• Harvard-based First Draft News points out the fake news niche of image-based deceptions, like the faked London Underground signs that emerged after the terrorist attack there last March. “Recent research has demonstrated that people are very poor at identifying manipulated images. And while the technology companies have vowed to combat the sharing of mis- and dis-information, their efforts have focused solely on text, which is much easier to discover and interpret.”
• The Daily Beast points out that senior figures on the Trump campaign, including Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Jr., retweeted @Ten_GOP, a Russian troll account which had over 100,000 followers when Twitter shut it down.
• The Washington Post looks at the now-defunct Russian-operated Heart of Texas Facebook page, which advocated secession. At the time it was closed, the site had 250,000 followers, “more … than the official Texas Democrat and Republican Facebook pages combined.” The page’s English was always shaky and its cultural references more than a bit off — but followers “were unbothered by its mangled English, its rank nativism and its calls to break up the United States.”
• The Pacific Standard looks at citizen-led attempts to counter fake news in Mexico City after the earthquake there in September. Troublingly, soldiers and rescue workers trying to manage the aftermath were getting information from the same dodgy online sources that everybody else was.
• Ad networks Outbrain and Taboola say they weren’t used to spread fake news during the U.S. election; Wired isn’t so sure.
• Hannah Arendt reminds us that one effect of fake news — and its purpose, perhaps, in some circles — is not so much to propagate lies as to degrade the whole information ecosystem of a democracy: