AltWatcher

Thanks for reading! I guess I got mad enough about it that I ended up getting pretty obsessed. It's infuriating watching them lie.

Alt National Park Service: We’ve gotten some email requests from our supporters asking us to include more sources so you can use our posts to push back against misinformation. Going forward, we’ll be adding additional source in the comments of our posts to help with that.

Re: plagiarism, they again tried to spin it as "emails from our supporters" asking them to graciously provide sources. Like they're doing us all a favor, somehow.

Appreciate it! Totally slipped my mind this time.

The "Alt National Park Service" Sounds an Awful Lot Like QAnon, Pt. 2 How to act like a spy on Facebook without really trying.

No, but it's complicated. One thing I learned quickly was that AltNPS is a master of deflection and spin.

When they got some heat for their "numbers" posts, they punted and said it was because of Stingray surveillance devices.

But they didn't say they were BEING surveilled. I wrote about it here:

I'm less interested in the actual website, or lack of one; plans fall through all the time.

But it's a great example of how people take AltNPS's claims at face value. People thought this would happen, and they spread the word!

Alt National Park Service, March 5th, 2025: We are working on launching an ALT DOGE website. It will soon feature a team page listing all of Elon’s staffers, our own wall of receipts (tracking the money he’s taking from America), and a section to help Americans keep tabs on the false claims on Doge’s website—which now exceed 52%.

Along with the "Alt Junior Ranger Program," I don't want to forget about AltNPS and their promise of an "Alt DOGE" website that never materialized.

If their other posts are any indication, this likely would have been a carbon copy of the NYT's reporting on DOGE, or something similar.

Exactly! You'd think if they wanted to share news, they'd just include a link at the top, instead of weirdly listing out each source at the very end.

It's almost like they're doing it begrudgingly after getting too much heat!

I beg to differ. Lots and lots of people treat AltNPS as a primary news source, and frequently thank them for providing "inside" information that they think they can't get anywhere else. Take a look at their Facebook comments sometime if you want tons of examples.

This is not a paraphrase. This is direct, unambiguous theft of an entire article from Wired.

If not journalists, they absolutely claim to be government insiders with a frankly impossible amount of information. They're the Park Service. Why would they have inside information about, e.g., ICE?

They did in theory, but not in practice. They still only provide a source maybe half the time, and those are still often wrong.

But the larger issue is that they spent months ripping off journalists, and haven't addressed that. They spun it as "our adoring fans asked for links" instead.

If the material in the screenshots isn't plagiarism, then what could possibly be? We're looking at word-for-word copying of existing articles.

And for an account posturing as a news source, I expect them to at least provide links. What good-faith reason is there for them to not link a source?

I'm actually not super familiar with AngryStaffer, but I've definitely heard that name mentioned in this context before.

For the other Alts, it depends, but for the most part, they go out of their way to cite their sources, and even to vocally distance themselves from AltNPS. Which is interesting!

That's exactly why I'm confused lmao

And as NPR staff will tell you, they're down, but not out. Now's a great time to donate and support local journalism.

bsky.app/profile/lind...

If your opinion is that stealing the work of journalists and passing it off as your own, a hundred times, is no big deal, then I don't know what to tell you. If you want to support journalism, I'd start by unfollowing the unrepentant plagiarists.

The "Alt National Park Service" Sounds an Awful Lot Like QAnon We're all looking for hope in the face of fascism. For some, that's the perfect springboard to online clout.

That's what originally got my attention! The "numbers" especially sounded a LOT like Q.

substack.com/home/post/p-...

Old Tumblr comic from user Nedroid Fun Times: "I made this!" "You made this? [Pause] *I* made this."

I can think of one comic in particular that fits AltNPS a lot better:

A screenshot of the Alt National Park Service's post. They posted an image of a comic called "The four stages of reading the news: denial, anger, depression, RESISTANCE."

Stage 5: Repost the news word-for-word and act like you wrote it.

And most interesting of all: where the hell is the money going?

I'm going to be writing mostly about AltNPS's plagiarism for a while (there's a LOT to talk about), but eventually, I want to dig into some of their claims that I haven't had time to focus on.

What's up with the "Alt Junior Ranger Program" they were raising money for? Or the "Alt DOGE" website?

And there's decent evidence that they're LITERALLY LLM-posting, too! Lots of their citations are wonky, strange, or just straight up wrong in the way that asking ChatGPT often gets citations wrong.

No that was definitely them lol. It was MONTHS of numbers, dozens of them. I saw lots of people in AltNPS's comments trying to decipher the numbers for hidden meanings.

And that's not even getting into their "poetry" codes:

Thanks so much for reading! Most of the anonymous Altgov accounts honestly seem pretty harmless, but AltNPS is legitimately malicious, and it makes me angry to see them manipulating so many people.

Thank you for reading! I thought the same thing; these are the kinds of sneaky changes that my students used to try and get away with.

I taught eighth graders.

[MCLAUGHLIN:] It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending. [ALTNPS:] This wasn’t routine data—it included sensitive information on union strategies, ongoing legal cases, corporate secrets, and even personal details of workers and officials. None of it had anything to do with cutting costs or improving efficiency. It simply wasn’t supposed to leave the NLRB under any circumstance.

But there's no disguising this. This is the outright theft of a journalist's hard work, stolen and reposted for clout.

I've criticized AltNPS for their conspiratorial posts, and their fake spy games. But at their heart, this is what they are: boring, common engagement farmers and thieves.

[MCLAUGHLIN:] They've said their unit's overall mission is to review agency data for compliance with the new administration's policies and to cut costs and maximize efficiency. [ALTNPS:] They claimed their mission was to improve efficiency and cut costs.

In the linked article, I use an article by @jennamclaughlin.bsky.social at NPR as an example. AltNPS reposted the first several paragraphs of her article with only very slight changes, intended to throw off accusations like this.

Alt National Park Service Tracking Document

I created a massive spreadsheet to track every instance of stolen work, and honestly, it was less work than it sounds like. In most cases, I found the original source of AltNPS’s post with a simple Google Search.

Finding and citing sources is easy, which makes AltNPS's plagiarism even more damning.

The "Alt National Park Service:" On Plagiarism, Part 1 The first in a three-part series.

The Alt National Park Service has spent months stealing from journalists, directly plagiarizing the work of others more than a hundred times.

With more than 4.3 million followers on Facebook and nearly 900k here on Bluesky, they've built a massive following on theft.

This is what it looks like when AltNPS starts copy-pasting from an article (or the ChatGPT summary of that article) a *little* too quickly