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Comment by mrmcd | Hacker News Reader

Instead of crazy conspiracy theories, how about this: USA Today isn't actually that popular, but some botnet programmer with an imperfect understanding of American culture thought it was a brand ordinary Americans all love and read regularly. So they were all instructed to follow their page in an attempt to make the bots look legit.

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USA Today has the highest circulation in traditional newspapers. Not really sure why that is, but my guess would be that they have some enduring relationships with hotel/motel chains. It's definitely a brand that resonates.

Source: https://www.infoplease.com/arts-entertainment/newspapers-and...

And airlines.

It's a generic newspaper without a regional focus, unlike the NY Times, LA Times, etc. It's distributed nationally, and it's popular with travelers and companies who cater to travelers (airlines, airport kiosks, hotels, etc).

USA Today was the first newspaper of its kind. Flashier, more concise, graphic-laden news. A larger focus on celebrity, entertainment, etc. news. From wikipedia on USA Today: "derided by critics, who referred to it as "McPaper" or "television you can wrap fish in," ". It was the Buzzfeed of its time.

I never really thought of that but that is a fantastic analogy.

USA Toady: for people who think television news is too complicated.

Our city's paper focuses exclusively on local and regional issues and includes a USA Today section to cover national stories. I suspect a lot of smaller metros' papers do the same.

Specifically those owned by Gannett: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gannett_Company_asse...

Smaller/local papers also make extra money on the side through print contracts -- USA Today pays the local paper to print USA Today for distribution in that area.

Thirty years ago, I traveled a lot for work. In hotel rooms in Springfield, Missouri, or Dubuque, Iowa, I would often enough find USA Today slid under the door when I got up. Now, USA Today didn't really stack up against the local papers in Chicago, New York, or Atlanta, but a smaller city's paper could be pretty thin, and with national coverage largely pulled from the wire services.

I tend not to read it much, but it would serve for breakfast reading in a small town.

That was my first thought as well. Bots just looking for a page with "USA" in it.

This is what immediately crossed my mind too. I have talked to quite a few people from other countries who assumed that USA Today is our foremost national paper, like the American Der Spiegel.

I have no idea where the idea comes from though.

Because it's ubiquitous and small enough to conveniently carry. Source: I visited USA for the first time recently.

It's also of a much higher* quality than I expected. It's got something for everyone.

* my expectations were very low

I have no idea where the idea comes from though.

It is one of the only newspaper of note without a city name in the title. Also it is one of the best selling newspapers in the US.

I went to American University and it has a huge number of international students, both because of its location in DC and also because of its name, they thought it was the national university.

My thoughts too. It's also something that might come up if you were searching for "USA" pages that had lots of likes already.

Ok, why is that more plausible than USA Today buying fake page views? Why is that such a crazy conspiracy theory?

One stakes the reputation of an entire company, and one is as easy as a script kiddie setting up a bot.

A lot of people seem to think that setting up a botnet is difficult, and it's very surprising when you decide to research and actually do it. It's ridiculously easy. You can rent out established botnets with almost no effort, and if you can run payloads on compromised internet-enabled devices, you can set up your own and coordinate it without much fuss.

This is a big problem that no one really knows how to solve.

I wonder if there's a way to build a bot net that takes down other bot nets. Basically, create a feedback loop such that the decreasing price of a bot net leads to some action that drives the price back up.

I mean, look at the shenanigans Wells Fargo gets caught up in, which are worse than "buying likes" bot activity. Is it that unbelievable some manager with a bonus tied up in vanity metrics would use bots to boost them?

They reported the unexpected activity from foreign countries to Facebook themselves. I don't think they were in on it.

> The purge of such accounts culminated a six-month effort by Facebook to combat the scam, which routed faux profiles through Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.

> ...

> The USA Today spokeswoman told CJR that they flagged the issue for Facebook after noticing an unusually large uptick in followers from the aforementioned countries. “Since we first brought this issue to Facebook’s attention, we have been in close communication with them and look forward to a swift solution that prevents this illegitimate activity from happening on our Facebook page in the future,” Maribel Wadsworth, Gannett’s chief transformation officer, told USA Today Friday.

When sites pay other services to increase their fb likes, they are always from other countries for some reason. Because in this case the payer only wants to see the actual like count go up.

Not saying we have proof that they did this.

Because that is an illegal / unethical business practice which would severely tarnish their reputation?

Assuming they even know what they are doing.

because it's less depressing.

I'm proposing a corollary to Occam's razor called avs postulate:

1) The likelihood of an explanation being true is correlated with how boring it is

2) crazy conspiracy theories are a useful exercise with which to guide convergence and formal presentation of evidence of 1.

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