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The Post Millennial

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The Post Millennial is an English-language Canadian online website. Founded in 2017, it publishes national and local news and has a large amount of opinion content. It has been owned by Human Events Media Group, the parent company of the American right-wing website Human Events, since 2022. It is described as a far-right website by Southern Poverty Law Center[1] and Media Matters for America.[2][3]

The Post Millennial
TypeOnline news magazine
Owner(s)Human Events Media Group
Founder(s)
  • Matthew Azrieli
  • Ali Taghva
EditorElizabeth Emmons
Founded2017; 7 years ago (2017)
LanguageEnglish
HeadquartersMontreal, Quebec, Canada
Websitethepostmillennial.com Edit this at Wikidata

History

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The Post Millennial was founded in August 2017 by Matthew Azrieli and Ali Taghva with Madison Hofmeester.[4][5] Azrieli is the grandson of the billionaire Canadian-Israeli real estate developer David Azrieli.[6] Taghva is an Iran-born blockchain developer,[5] who used social media to coordinate a student protest against the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation over the Putting Students First Act while at Richmond Green Secondary School in 2012.[7] Hoofmeester worked as a SEO consultant.[4] The trio also founded the short-lived conservative news website The Nectarine in 2018 with Jeff Bellingall,[4] who was then a political campaigner for Ontario Premier Doug Ford through his advertising group Ontario Proud.[8][6] According to Taghva, the two websites shared "back-end resources".[4]

The site's Facebook presence expanded rapidly between June 2018 and May 2019, with page interactions growing from 36,000 to 194,000 per month.[8] By January 2019, the website was receiving up to 200,000 monthly visits per Similarweb data.[4] Meanwhile, a new office was sited in Montreal, and the organization planned for another expansion into Toronto in 2020. In May 2019, Jeff Ballingall was hired as the company's Chief Marketing Officer.[8] He was credited by Taghva with leading the successful Conservative Party of Canada leadership election campaign of Erin O'Toole in August 2020.[9] A media study by Canada's National Observer found that 8 per cent of Conservative respondents read The Post Millennial.[10]

In mid-2020, Taghva left his position as editor-in-chief to build a cybersecurity company.[9][5]

In early 2022, The Post Millennial was ranked 23rd among Canadian media outlets by audience size, with an average of 1,968,000 unique monthly visits between January and March 2021 per Similarweb, but it did not meet Comscore's minimum reporting standard.[6]

Ownership and revenue

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The website was initially owned by the Montreal-based The Post Millennial Corporation.[11] It was criticised for the lack of transparency about its ties to Conservative Party politicians.[8][6]

In mid-2019, in announcing its hiring of Ballingall as executive, The Post Millennial said it was funded by "private investors".[8] According to Taghva, the site was receiving revenue from consulting clients and through paid subscriptions or advertisements; it did not reveal the number of subscribers and displayed no ads.[8][4] After securing a buyer for The Post Millennial in 2022 and announcing his own departure, Azrieli stated he had self-funded the website.[12]

In May 2022, the Human Events Media Group announced that it had acquired The Post Millennial.[13][14] The Human Events Media Group also owns Human Events, an American conservative publication founded in 1944 that went online-only in 2013.[13][14]

Content

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The Post Millennial provides both national and regional stories. It runs stories on politics and culture. Its opinion section is a significant portion of its content, and conservative figures such as Barbara Kay have written opinions for the outlet. According to a CBC report published in 2019, much of the news content provided by The Post Millennial is reused from other media outlets with no additional reporting.[8] In an interview for Rebel News in 2020, Ali Taghva said the website had been intended as a media outlet delivering unedited stories that would "speak for themselves".[5]

The website Bellingcat described an article The Post Millennial published during the 2019 Australia fires as disinformation. Conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson released a false story alleging that the wildfires resulted in large part from arson. The Post Millennial used Watson's story as a basis for their own reporting, alleging that "legal action" had been taken against 183 people during the bushfires. Bellingcat argued that their presentation "did not botch the basic facts" but was misleading.[15]

In July 2020, after Black Lives Matter protester Garrett Foster was fatally shot in Austin, Texas, The Post Millennial falsely claimed that Foster had fired shots at a civilian vehicle. In fact, Foster had not fired any shots before he was killed. The Post Millennial later issued a correction, but continued to blame Foster for the death; The Daily Dot described the episode as an example of how "disinformation circulated by fringe groups to support their preferred narrative—that Black Lives Matter protesters are violent and lawless—works its way into the conservative media ecosystem and up to the White House."[16] An analysis by Politico and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue on media in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election in the United States found that the most prominent figures claiming violence by Black Lives Matter and claiming fraudulent ballots, James O'Keefe and Turning Point USA, were posted by The Post Millennial.[17]

In July 2020, The Daily Beast exposed an online network pushing United Arab Emirates propaganda against Qatar, Turkey, and Iran using op-eds placed in news outlets using fictitious authors. The Post Millennial published one of these articles under the fake persona "Joseph Labba". In response, The Post Millennial said that: "It appears we were caught up in an operation involving false identities that involved 46 other outlets including The Washington Examiner and The Hill Times... The submission was evaluated by a member of our editorial team and deemed to be a meritorious submission... [and] a well-written, well-reasoned opinion piece about an important issue... We stand by the decision to run it and we will be putting the piece back up shortly under The Post Millennial's byline."[18][19][20]

Many articles published by the website use aggregated content from other news sources, social media sites, and press releases with "inflammatory headlines"; the latter has been described as rage bait— for far-right accounts and pages on social media websites.[9]

In 2021, The Post Millennial played a key role in creating a viral narrative falsely claiming that some members of the U.S. women's national soccer team had disrespected a 98-year-old World War II veteran when he played the "Star-Spangled Banner" prior to a game.[21][22] The claim was false (the players in fact turned towards a U.S. flag while he played), but the story nevertheless went viral in right-wing media).[22][23] After the story had been corrected by other media outlets, The Post Millennial changed its story to include a quote from player Carli Lloyd: "We turned because we faced the flag."[24]

In August 2021, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, The Post Millennial ran a story implying that unvaccinated high school students in the Eatonville, Washington public school system were forced to wear ankle monitors; in fact, the devices were proximity monitors that do not track location, were worn by both vaccinated and unvaccinated students (as well as staff), and were required only while participating in high and moderate contact indoor sports.[25][26][27] The devices were similar to those in use by the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball.[28] After being contacted, The Post Millennial updated their headline[25][26] but added no correction.[29]

Staff

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Andy Ngo has been editor-at-large since late 2019. Ngo was previously with Quillette.[30] Several advertisers such as Logitech pulled ads from the site due to its association with Ngo.[31]

Yaakov Pollak, a former provincial Conservative Party candidate, joined the media group in July 2019. Pollak ran a variety of Conservative Party-affiliated Facebook pages, including "Liberty Now" and "Elect Conservatives" pages. Pollak did not declare his connection to these pages; until he was contacted by interested media groups, the majority of content on those pages was sourced from The Post Millennial.[32]

The Post Millennial employed Cosmin Dzsurdzsa as among its first hires from late 2018; he wrote over 500 articles for the site. In August 2019, after the National Observer asked The Post Millennial about Dzsurdzsa's previous articles published in Russia Insider and his work for Free Bird Media, sites known for pro-Kremlin propaganda and white supremacist commentary, respectively, the publication parted ways with Dzsurdzsa.[33][9]

References

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  1. ^ "SubscribeStar Website Lets Extremists Profit From Hate". Hatewatch. Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on 11 May 2024. Retrieved 12 May 2024. far-right website the Post Millennial
  2. ^ "Fox News and right-wing media circulate seemingly inauthentic "antifa poster" to fearmonger about police protests". Media Matters for America. Archived from the original on 12 May 2024. Retrieved 12 May 2024. far-right website The Post Millennial
  3. ^ "Fake racial advocacy group asks white parents to keep students out of Ivy League schools". The Independent. Archived from the original on 12 May 2024. Retrieved 12 May 2024. the Canadian far-right website the Post Millennial
  4. ^ a b c d e f Gordon, Graeme (6 January 2019), The Canadaland Guide To New Popular, Populist Political Media, Canadaland, archived from the original on 7 January 2019
  5. ^ a b c d Levant, Ezra (8 March 2020), Delete TikTok? Cybersecurity expert Ali Taghva explains why, Rebel News, archived from the original on 18 March 2020
  6. ^ a b c d Legg, Heidi (12 February 2022), "Canadian Media Ownership Index", The Future of Media Project, Harvard University, archived from the original on 16 February 2022
  7. ^ Parness, Naomi (19 September 2012), Students use social media to fight for extracurricular activities, CTV News, archived from the original on 3 June 2024
  8. ^ a b c d e f g Yates, Jeff; Rogers, Kaleigh (13 August 2019). "Canadian News Site The Post Millennial Blurs Line Between Journalism and Conservative 'Pamphleteering'". CBC News. Archived from the original on 15 March 2020. Retrieved 4 April 2020.
  9. ^ a b c d Holt, Jared (10 September 2020). "The Post Millennial: The Latest Canadian Outlet Serving Rage Bait to Far-Right America". Right Wing Watch. Archived from the original on 16 November 2020. Retrieved 22 November 2020.
  10. ^ McIntosh, Emma (7 August 2019). "Canadians' Media-Consumption Habits Lead to Misinformation, Study Finds". Canada's National Observer. Vancouver. Archived from the original on 2 November 2020. Retrieved 16 August 2020.
  11. ^ A letter from the co-founders, The Post Millennial, archived from the original on 23 July 2019
  12. ^ Victor, Jon (4 May 2022), Conservative news site Post Millennial sold to U.S. buyer for undisclosed sum, The Logic, archived from the original on 4 May 2022
  13. ^ a b "The Post Millennial acquired by Human Events Media Group to form 'new media powerhouse'" (Press release). The Post Millennial. 4 May 2022. Archived from the original on 23 May 2024. Retrieved 6 November 2022.
  14. ^ a b Claire Goforth, Human Events, Post Millennial join together in big right-wing media merger Archived 17 August 2023 at the Wayback Machine, Daily Dot (5 May 2022).
  15. ^ Evans, Robert (3 April 2020). "How Coronavirus Disinformation Gets Past Social Media Moderators". Bellingcat. Archived from the original on 3 April 2020. Retrieved 4 April 2020.
  16. ^ Goforth, Claire (27 July 2020). "Slain Austin Protester Falsely Accused of Firing First by Far-Right Trolls, Trump". The Daily Dot. Austin, Texas. Archived from the original on 12 September 2023. Retrieved 16 August 2020.
  17. ^ Scott, Mark (27 October 2020). "Despite Cries of Censorship, Conservatives Dominate Social Media". Politico. Archived from the original on 16 November 2020. Retrieved 5 November 2020.
  18. ^ Rawnsley, Adam (6 July 2020). "Right-Wing Media Outlets Duped by a Middle East Propaganda Campaign". The Daily Beast. Archived from the original on 7 July 2020. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
  19. ^ Covucci, David (7 July 2020). "Right-Wing Troll Andy Ngo Busted for Publishing Stories by Fake People". The Daily Dot. Austin, Texas. Archived from the original on 3 August 2020. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  20. ^ "Right-Wing Media Outlets Duped by a Middle East Propaganda Campaign". Press Progress. 7 July 2020. Archived from the original on 24 October 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  21. ^ Dale, Daniel (2021). "Fact check: How right-wing outlets spread a false narrative about the US women's soccer team disrespecting an elderly veteran". CNN. Archived from the original on 7 July 2021. Retrieved 7 July 2021.
  22. ^ a b Stevenson, Stefan (5 July 2021). "No, U.S. women's soccer team did not disrespect a WWII veteran playing national anthem". Star Telegram. Archived from the original on 6 July 2021. Retrieved 7 July 2021.
  23. ^ Goforth, Claire (6 July 2021). "Conservatives are triggered over false claim that U.S. women's soccer team protested national anthem". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 6 July 2021. Retrieved 7 July 2021.
  24. ^ Cathell, Mia (5 July 2021). "DISGRACEFUL: US women's soccer team members turned away from flag as 98-year-old WWII vet played the national anthem". The Post Millennial. Archived from the original on 25 September 2021. Update: This story has been updated to include a response from the US Women's Soccer Team and a clarification from player Carli Lloyd.
  25. ^ a b Thalen, Mikael (25 August 2021). "High school falsely accused by conservative outlet of forcing unvaccinated teens to wear ankle monitors". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 25 August 2021. Retrieved 25 August 2021. However, the Post Millennial's framing that the school was forcing unvaccinated students to wear monitors, the basis of this article, remains untrue
  26. ^ a b Lee, Ella (27 August 2021). "Fact check: Claim that school put 'ankle monitors' on unvaccinated athletes is missing context". USA Today. Archived from the original on 6 September 2021. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  27. ^ Tian, Emily (25 August 2021). "Proximity monitors at Wash. school are for vaccinated students and staff, too". Politifact. Archived from the original on 7 September 2021. Retrieved 7 September 2021.
  28. ^ Burke, Minyvonne (25 August 2021). "Covid trackers for student-athletes shelved at Washington state school". NBC News. Archived from the original on 4 July 2022. Retrieved 4 July 2022.
  29. ^ Binion, Billy (27 August 2021). "COVID Money Funded Ankle Monitors for Student-Athletes in Washington". Reason. Archived from the original on 4 July 2022. Retrieved 4 July 2022. The article was later updated without a correction appended.
  30. ^ Thompson, Don (5 June 2020). "Portland Conservative Writer Suing 'Antifa' for Injuries". KATU. Portland, Oregon: Sinclair Broadcast Group. Associated Press. Archived from the original on 9 August 2020. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  31. ^ Goforth, Claire (1 October 2021). "Advertisers keep dropping the Post Millennial for employing Andy Ngo". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 8 November 2021. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  32. ^ Silverman, Craig; Lytvynenko, Jane; Boutilier, Alex; Oved, Marco (26 July 2019). "A Set of Facebook Pages Promoting Conservatives and Attacking Trudeau Are Run by a Post Millennial Staffer". BuzzFeed News. Buzzfeed News. Archived from the original on 23 May 2024. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  33. ^ McIntosh, Emma (22 August 2019). "He Used to Work for a Site That Promoted Racists – Now He Edits a Canadian News Outlet". National Observer. Vancouver. Archived from the original on 20 May 2020. Retrieved 4 April 2020.

Further reading

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