From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece | Hacker News Reader

From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece

nytimes.com

60 pointsdanso59 comments

> In a dubious art just coming into its prime, this bogus story would be his masterpiece.

New York Times clearly has no respect for its readership.

Just coming to its prime? That very Pulitzer prize that they award to each other is named after one of the more famous practitioners of publishing fake stories to sway public opinion.

This is not a new dubious art form. It is called propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8...

The banality of evil, right there.

Good work by NYT reporter Scott Shane, who did the legwork and got the confession.

I think the mainstream media is using this to support their own delusions.

It is because of the drop in credibility of mainstream media that people have begun believing in unverified sources. It is because of the blatant and obvious bias and hypocrisy in mainstream media that people seek other sources to support their own biases.

If the mainstream media were to be more honest and unbiased in their reporting and did not try to massage delivery to suit a narrative, the fake news out there wouldn't have that many takers. As it stands today, people place as much credibility in a CNN or nytimes piece as they do in a whatsapp forward or tweet.

That's a romanticized view of the way the world works, or how people make choices. When music sales started falling precipitously around the rise of the MP3 player, was it because music became measurably worse? When artists started making money from digital downloads, was it because they just started making better music? Or because iTunes/etc vastly improved the digital download purchasing process?

Most big cities had morning and afternoon newspapers. Now there are only morning newspapers. Is it because afternoon newspapers just happened to be shittier than their morning competitors in every city in America? Or because the advent of radio and TV news changed the timing of how we get daily news?

Notice that I didn't say "newspaper" or "tv"? It isn't about the medium - mainstream (established) media is as much on social media as other news websites that may or may not be fake. It's the credibility that has been lost and a huge advantage that they had coming in that has been squandered.

You might have a point if the sample group here weren't people that watch Fox News. Instead, they are questioning one of the most respected newspapers in the world while still eating up talking points from Rush Limbaugh.

I know this to be true.

At one job the entire department voted trump. If I went to them and asked them what they thought of fake news, and in particular this specific article "Clinton ballots in Ohio was really a fake including the photo", they would ask "where did you hear that?"

If I say the New York Times their answer would be "of course. They hate trump. Why should I believe that story?"

If I say it's from hacker news they would not know what HN is and perhaps listen.

We are at a point where the "I don't trust any media" is already out of the bag. It's too late to add new trust. They will only keep those that trust them now.

Eventually something will gain trust and take over the trust again. It won't be an incumbent.

Yeah from an outsider looking in (not in the US), it's really scary.

You have people believing fake news because it makes them feel something about themselves, and call real news fake, because it's the easiest way to cover up facts.

Social media is a wild fire of BS and "friends" can literally influence each other, every day. It's social hacking with dominoes.

What doesn't make is that they decided to trust Trump. When did the rich New York loud mouth earn their trust?

We talked. It was the lesser of 2 evils.

The fake news was a side show and not important in their decision. They didn't want a Clinton. Period.

Any republican candidate would have had their support - even Donald trump.

So fake news fits in perfectly to the malleable mindset theory that without fake news trump would not win.

Fake news outing is actually good. Fake news is like glaucoma. It's silent and displays no symptoms. Every reader of any news should assume it's fake until proven useful and true

Is this legal? Seems like a fraud concocted for the purpose of financial gain. Obviously has no redeeming value like a satire.

I think the main example of fake votes found in Ohio would be legal, in the sense that no (real) person's reputation was harmed. But the article about "NYPD Looking to Press Charges Against Bill Clinton for Underage Sex Ring" seems like a strong libel case. In the U.S., public figures (like Bill Clinton) have a higher standard of proof for libel, and they can't sue just because something false was printed about them. But knowingly publishing falsehoods is something that a public figure can sue for.

How does the fake ballot story not harm Hillary Clinton's reputation?

Well he used the copyrighted photo without permission, so the photographer has a case..

I'm pretty sure fraud also requires a financial loss for the deceived party.

I want it to be illegal. I want people like this thrown in jail. It's a far worse crime against society than drinking in public, and yet the latter is illegal and the first is protected so long as no one is directly harmed by it. Perhaps the deomcratic party has a case?

No, you don't. You want an aggrieved party to be able to pursue for defamation, which is quite tough for public figures in the United States after Sullivan. This is what 'danso (who would know) is talking about upthread; I agree with him that specifically named figures in these stories would likely have a quite strong case for libel if they can prove intent, what Sullivan calls actual malice. The article runs a very long way toward showing actual malice itself, so deposition will likely end this guy. These civil cases succeed, too. Rolling Stone lost more than once after the Erdely affair.

What you are otherwise proposing with the call for jailing is criminal prosecution -- as in, the state, prosecuting a citizen -- for what we would tend to call "free speech." Don't propose that, particularly with the incoming administration.

I don't know. Calling into question and misleading voters with fabricated information about a crime that didn't happen under the auspices of a legitimate news source?

I hear you on first amendment concerns, definitely. And generally suing where there is a party that has been harmed is generally the right recourse. But in this case it's generally the, American voter...

    But when men have realized that time has upset many
    fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more
    than they believe the very foundations of their own
    conduct that the ultimate good desired is better
    reached by free trade in ideas.

-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., dissenting in an important free speech case, Abrams v. United States, 1919.

I quote him intentionally because litigating restraint on free speech (as you're doing here) was delicate enough to make him evolve his opinion. Those cases were over much more serious circumstances than reputation, too. I suggest reading more about it, because you'll get more out of it than I could offer.

Bringing things back to relevance, any future where the subject of this article ends up prosecuted by the state and imprisoned is not a future anyone should request. Them's super duper bad steps to take, yo, and the United States was specifically founded in defiance of such things being routinely prosecuted by the Crown. Yes, even "Bill Clinton hangs out with pedophiles" is something we must tolerate, because the alternative is far, far worse. Let Bill Clinton sue and keep the state out of it.

As you seem to have such a strong handle on the law around this area. I have a question, what makes false advertising not protected speech? And what do you see as the difference between false advertising and fake news (where at the time of the writing is known to be false)? And no, I'm not referring to things that are clearly written for comedy or satire like the Onion, which is clearly protected speech and should be.

<was delicate enough to make him change his mind.

More please. Changed from what to what?

I reworded that for the very reason you asked the question. Sorry. Schenck v. United States and then Abrams v. United States is what I'm referring to; he didn't change his mind, but there was a clear evolution of thinking around free speech even between those two cases and among his fellow justices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_and_present_danger discusses it.

I know this isn't the place but I'll ask any way. Where can a novice get good reads on court cases? Somewhat complex but not overfilled with legal gobblygook. I really enjoy bloombergs law segments, for example.

>> That was a sizable share of the $22,000 an accounting statement shows he made during the presidential campaign from ads for shoes, hair gel and web design that Google had placed on his site.

Is this for real? That article also claims around $1000 per hour earning with these ads. I had google ads on my blog for years and hardly made anything of note in terms of earning. I understand this is different type of site attracting a different audience, but even then I find it hard to believe people would have clicked those ads (let alone bought anything) to earn him that much.

Is this rate of earning common for sites like these?

I checked the traffic for the mentioned website on Simlarweb and it is around 750,000 in Nov and 650,000 in Oct, so yeah, considering this is all US traffic, if he had put advts in the right places, these earnings are not really difficult to make.

> He had put in perhaps half an hour a week on the fake news site, he said, for a total of about 20 hours.

Taking the numbers literally, that's working over the course of 40 weeks. It doesn't really say how long those revenues lasted for the total of $22k, but given the context I'd assume it's around a year.

> With a quick Google image search for “ballot boxes,” he landed on a shot of a balding fellow standing behind black plastic boxes that helpfully had “Ballot Box” labels.

Do ballot boxes actually look like that?

Is it a coincidence that the labels are all identically sized, aligned with the picture and perfectly clean/unscuffed .. quite unlike the boxes they're "on"?

Curious where the pic came from, in any case.

The article states that he got the photo from the Birmingham Mail. Funnily enough, after this NYT article, the Birmingham Mail released an article about how their own image was used for this fake news article.

Even stranger, it looks like someone took this original photo, flipped it, got rid of all of the labels, then created new labels for a few boxes. Probably to make it more difficult for reverse image search to find the original.

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/birmingha...

also, the photo is taken inside the back of a truck. Hence the webbing and blankets. Just how credulous are people?

Would google ban ads for fake news sites?

Yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/technology/google-will-ba...

People learn. I still believe more in people than algorithms to debunk fake news. This election was step 1 in people's learning curve about it.

Of course, if they don't want to learn, they won't. But no algorithm or laws will change that anyway.

> Of course, if they don't want to learn, they won't. But no algorithm or laws will change that anyway.

Hasn't the recent cycle shown the power of algorithms, whether we recognize their work? If fake news was less back in the "good ol days" of the Internet, it was because Google's PageRank was inherently biased towards sites maintained by organizations with the resources and brand names to have popular sites, e.g. news organizations.

If Facebook prioritizes shared stories in your news feed based by how many people shared it, then that makes it much easier for randomnewssite.biz to make it to your eyeballs via FB's ranking and filtering algorithm.

Agree. But my point is that people adapt and learn. They assumed PageRank was still ruling and could be somewhat trusted, and now they're learning -a little late- that FB's popular randomnewssite.biz should be challenged.

Maybe something new will happen at the next election, but it will be harder to convince people with this type of fake news.

I think you give users too much credit. I don't use Facebook often, but this "Related Articles" caught my eye when it popped up in the newsfeed: http://imgur.com/a/83kzS

There's no differentiation between the 3 items in terms of visual layout, and the domains of the respective news items are visually deprioritized by Facebook's design. If you don't actually click through to "bigbluevision.org" -- and studies claim that 50-60%+ people just read a headline before sharing/moving on -- the claim that "Obama's Lawyers Official Admit Birth Certificate is Fake" has as much cognitive impression as ABC News's "Obama Calls Conversation With Trump'Excellent'". Seeing a bunch of fake headlines, over time, would seem to have the same effect as watching advertisements. The viewer doesn't have to do anything, but are affected nonetheless.

Anyone talking about fake news without talking about operation mockingbird hasn't done their homework.

meta: The submitted title, "How a 23-Year-Old Wrote a Fake News Masterpiece" is the headline as the NYT currently has it formatted for the front page. It's obviously catchier than the article's standalone hed, "From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece", but the fact that this was instigated by a recent college grad is one of the more memorable parts of the article to me. What he did was the kind of cynical play that I would expect from people much older and savvier about how the world works.

That said, I think he's a shitty opportunist. Not for his specific politics, but for his actions in general, and his weak attempts to justify them (“Hardly anything a campaign or a candidate says is completely true").

It'll be interesting to see where his aspirations of being a political consultant end up. The article mentions he was exposed by "a reporter who had discovered an electronic clue that revealed his secret authorship of ChristianTimesNewspaper.com".

I wonder what that "electronic clue" was? He bought Godaddy's whois privacy protector for that domain.

So what's the difference between that guy and the Onion? Both make money selling fake news, as do the tabloids.

The Onion doesn't try to be perceived as real: it's satire. He wanted you to believe his story was true.

One is a joke, the other is fraud.

Did you really believe there was a warehouse full of Clinton ballots?

Do you think everyone knows the Onion is satire?

Those questions are irrelevant to your first question. You asked what is the difference between the guy in the story and the Onion. That answer doesn't depend on people being cautious or rational about what they chose to believe. It only depends on the intent of the writers.

In one case, you have the intent of humor, not at all immoral by itself, though perhaps tasteless from time to time. The other case you have the intent to deceive, to fake reality with the goal of changing people actions: deeply immoral.

And for the record:

I never heard the Clinton story before this... I find most the news is written for emotional engagement and actually doesn't help to inform me in any important way, so why stress myself out with it? I read very little news... haven't watched a local news broadcast in decades. The recent election was the perfect display of this deficiency.

For the Onion, there are documented instances of people taking it seriously... but what can I say? There are documented instances of people doing and believing just about everything. I don't bother with them anymore than I do with "the news".

>The other case you have the intent to deceive, to fake reality with the goal of changing people actions: deeply immoral.

Here's a blurb. Real news, tabloid, Onion, or fake news?

>Roger Stone — the D.C. insider who's exposed some of Washington's deepest secrets — was targeted for assassination! That's the shocking claim by the popular author and consultant to Donald Trump, who says that even the Center for Disease Control determined that he was poisoned! He's now gone public with his story of feeling stricken with a “routine stomach virus” in Dec. 2016 — before suddenly becoming exceedingly ill.”

I guess the point I'm trying to make is this fake news phenomenon is nothing new. The only difference is one guy was able to make such a large splash.

Since the purpose of satire is to criticize or ridicule ideas. When people don't recognize satire, the writers have failed in their job. The only people I see labeling this site as satire are backsplaining after it was exposed. According to the article, even the creator doesn't claim that.

I think satire falls into that group of endeavors where when you fail so thoroughly, you're automatically out of the group. An executioner who only non-fatally botches executions is another example.

The Onion is obvious satire. Tabloids are in a weird "entertainment" zone.

The onion is not spread as if it is truth. The Onion is satire. If you have a hard time telling the difference, I do not think it is their problem.

They are both hyperbolic. You know they are both hyperbolic. Most people know they are both hyperbolic. His can certainly be construed as satire. He sure made the people who believed it look foolish, as does the Onion.

>If you have a hard time telling the difference, I do not think it is their problem.

Perhaps there isn't much difference.

Perhaps your inability to see a difference is a personal problem, not a cultural one.

I was asking what the difference was because I wanted to have a discussion about hyperbole in the news; what's acceptable, what isn't. I think a lot of news outlets sensationalize the stories through insinuation and salacious headlines. I think that is just as bad as fake news because fake news is easier to spot. Sounds like a lot of people got their feathers ruffled about it. Either they are die hard Onion fans, or they are emotionally married to the argument.

It's just politics man, everyone is full of beans. The second you become tribal, you're the sucker.

If you want to compare fake news to real news, The Onion (which is obviously satire) is not an appropriate comparison to make to start that discussion. You're making a stupid comparison. Of course people will be biased against it.

Is this an onion-comment?

But seriously: intent. To just name one.

He said his intent was to make money. Do you not think the Onion has the same intent?

If you're going to be reductive like that, then maybe cop-killers could argue that their intent was realizing "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" as stated in the Declaration of Independence.

The Onion presents itself as satire [0]; ChristianTimesNewspaper.com didn't. Bill Clinton can't sue The Onion for libel all the times they've made fun of his infidelities. But he could make a case for ChristianTimesNewspaper, which chased pageviews by purporting to be truth. Otherwise, who would visit that site when you can find bucketfuls of blog posts calling Clinton a rapist?

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/the-onion...

> The Onion office in New York confirmed that the tweet was not a hack, saying: “This is satire. That’s how it works.”

I asked what the difference was. The difference he came up with was intent. The intent was the same: to make money.

You're obviously pretending to be dense, but to spell it out: "The onion does not intent to create the appearance of a legitimate news source beyond a superficial resemblance as is necessary for the joke".

>You're obviously pretending to be dense

I'm not trying (hah), I'm trying to have a discussion about this (not) new phenomenon of fake news and examples of where we are more accepting of it.

I went to the Onion (haven't in years, not my type of humor) and it's obvious to me they are trying to be satirical. It's pretty over the top.

But how about the other group I mentioned, the tabloids? They make money by deception and they do it intentionally. They also write articles about political figures.

I guess why this matters is that Google banned this guy's site from their ad network and cost his domain property to lose $100K in value, when they same derision isn't extended to tabloids which do essentially the same thing.

I think the biggest difference between this guy and the tabloids is that over time, we recognize the tabloid brands as being full of beans, but when individuals do it, we have no frame of context, no prior body of work to examine. That will be dangerous at first, but liberating in time when people start to realize how much horse manure is out there (and not just from the hard right types).

The elephant in the room is of course Fox News. They've been publishing fake news as real since Bill Clinton. Drudge too. Limbaugh since the 80s. The danger in this is who decides what news is fake? How about that Trump dossier? Is that fake news? There is certainly no proof any of it happened and most of it is impossible to prove. Should Google ban Buzzfeed and NBCNews from their advertising network?

(I can't believe I'm saying this, but..) FOX, for all it's faults, doesn't usually publish lies. Neither do tabloids except for the National Enquirer, as far as I know.

They'll wilfully misrepresent, obfuscate, stretch, massage the truth – whatever you want to call it. They'll add insane opinions. But they don't fabricate complete events such as the one from the article. (Druge IIRC, has actually broken a few important stories).

Buzzfeed, similarly, made abundantly clear that they could not verify anything in that document. And they, or at least the "mainstream media", did sit on it for months and didn't publish it (even though it'd been more useful to their supposed agenda) before the election. What allowed them to publish was the (undisputed) fact that Obama & Trump were briefed on it.

(Note that I'm not actually a big fan of this fake-news debate, at least the part about making it illegal etc. Even though I believe the difference is pretty obvious when discussed in sane company, it plays so obviously into the narrative of this new counterculture that it's probably going to make them stronger rather than weaker)

An interesting aside, I was reading my local news this morning and there was a story about Yellen. She was reporting the unemployment figures. In the comments, someone disagreed with her unemployment numbers and labelled the article, "More fake news." I live in a red area.

I'm wondering why the NYT would even push a piece like this. I'm not sure it's even newsworthy. This has been going on since our inception (check out Andrew Jackson's election). Are they trying to cast it against their own reputation? Are they worried about it?

I do believe journalists go at it with a mindset of "this is wrong – people will want to know they're being lied to". Witness the "fact checking" trend (which started in the Bush years as a reaction to Karl Rove's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community).

Another factor is simply that there's probably nothing that gets a democrats blood pressure to rise quite as much as simply not accepting facts. The first time you're saying "Russia's invasion of Ukraine made me really nervous" and your uncle says "Yeah, you should know that this Ukraine doesn't exist, it's just George Soros' plot to declare martial law in Arkansas" you really get to know how your dog feels when he kinda tilts his head and looks at you.

And as soon as the right wing noticed that reaction, they couldn't get enough of it. It's so easy. Just deny the existence of oxygen, or satellites, or the accuracy of unemployment numbers – anything, basically. You'll give ten Harvard PhDs heart attacks with half a sentence of work.

That does, however, require a view the right wing that is a bit more pessimistic than I'm completely willing to subscribe to, yet. Because those people would more or less knowingly be destroying any actual discourse, and harming themselves as much as anybody. I'm not sure I can believe in such malice, although one essay that makes this case is somewhat believable. In that view, (parts of) the right wing have basically given up and are now only out to tear everything down (https://www.thenation.com/article/this-political-theorist-pr...).

Oh, and regarding the original question: the fake-news debate is happening, irregardless of weather that good or bad, and if this guy was really making 6-figures that's a valuable datapoint people should know, and it points at a possible counter-strategy of going after the sources of funding. So yeah, it's very far on the "publish" side of that debate. Also, journalists are quite proud of operating independent of the business side of their publications, so they would at least profess (and honestly believe) that they're not writing such an article in an effort to do anything but inform.

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