There has been an ongoing argument, not really rising to the level of debate, just and argument in west Texas. Does what the blogging VP of Marketing at K&M Steam Cleaning posts online qualify as journalism? This article, written by a human without any AI, intends to demonstrate that the blogger is not in any way a journalist.
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To begin we will examine what the blogger posts online. He has 2 AI slop blogs at www.bigbendtimes.com and www.texreporter.com. Neither of these are registered businesses in Texas. He also has his own personal FB page and two more pages on FB related to the blogs already mentioned.
www.texreporter.com has only had 2 stories posted in the month of April. These stories appear to be entirely AI generated and scraped from other sources. It’s difficult to identify any original reporting on the blog. Much of it seems to be repostings from The Texas Tribune.
If one examines the Texas Reporter page on FB, there seems to be even less content. It’s primarily posts about people calling The Gulf of Mexico The Gulf of Mexico. Usually with a snowflake reference as well. In the past 24 hours, there have been FIFTY posts on the Texas Reporter FB page. More than half are posts about The Gulf of Mexico. Second place in number of posts seems to be things about President Trump. Almost all of the 50 posts are reposts that he has put up before. Not one single thing related to journalism. It’s all rage farming, more on that below.
Next let us take a look at the www.bigbendtimes.com site. This one gets a lot more content posted to it compared to Texas Reporter. On this site he is scraping content from all over west Texas, his AI creates a slop summary of the article, and posts it to his site. None of the posts every include a link to anything related to the story. He steals people’s images and posts them with some AI slop, and that’s it. That way when people go to his site, there’s no link to the original content. That way he steals the clicks from the actual sites. Then he occasionally posts web metrics showing him having all the clicks. This is one way he can stay up in search results. He even claims here that he prompts his AI to include a URL. It seems he must have changed the prompt. As explained here, his sites appear to be entirely AI slop, except for his grudge articles.
An examination of the Big Bend Times page on FB finds the exact same type of content. Mostly posts of old pics that have been posted many times before. Plus links to his AI slop stories on the website. One thing that does stand out is how few posts from his website appear on FB that include pictures of children. One can be forgiven for thinking that he posts these pictures to intentionally try and trigger their parents. This reporter knows of at least one parent who has called Flash (512-745-1700) to demand he stop posting pics of their children on his blogs and FB. Again, even the posts with children in them are scraped from some other source and reposted with an AI slop summary. The people at The Texas Tribune might think that’s journalism, but it isn’t. It’s all posting old pics, posting about The Gulf, and various other rage farming posts, mostly about the president.
On FB both his blog pages, Big Bend Times and Texas Reporter get a little bit of response from people. One of his typical examples of bad photography might get a couple dozen reactions and sometimes a comment. If one clicks on the profiles of the people who comment, the profiles often look suspicious. Like maybe someone created the profiles just so they could comment on David’s posts. We already know Flash will Flood The Zone with extremely long comments when the discussion isn’t going his way. Does he also have an army of fake profiles to make it look like people pay attention to what he posts when the truth is that perhaps almost no one looks at his posts?
One way to tell is to examine the third page Flash has on FB, his personal page. There he posts almost exclusively pictures from all over. Old pics, new pics. Just a ton of boring stuff. And if we look at the posts he has made on his personal page in the last few days, there isn’t one single response or comment. No likes, no shares, no comments. The guy has 790 people he calls friends on FB, and none of them have looked at a single thing he has posted in days. And there is nothing related to real journalism on his personal page.
Rage Harvesting is a term that comes from gaming, and I adjusted a little to fit David Flash’s M.O. Rage Farming describes the type of person that lives online and constantly looks for things to post about that will cause people to argue and get mad at each other. Usually to create engagement online for profit. This is exactly the tactic of the blogger David Wayne Flash. He has a couple of blogs and some pages on FB that he uses to appear as a journalist. At least appear that way to people like Carlos Nogueros Ramos who don’t seem to be interested in the facts and are just looking to generate a story that fits their narrative and that they can get paid for. Flash farms rage from people online. Usually using leftwing/rightwing tropes that he hopes will generate the most anger, arguing, and clicks.
If you would like to hear Flash explain it himself, listen to the last 3 or 4 minutes of this:
Three FB pages with a bunch of Rage Farming content and old pics, and a couple of AI slop blogs that are exclusively posts of material scraped (stolen) from someone else, is not journalism. David Flash is not a journalist.
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