Fake News Is Unbelievably Cheap to Produce
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
1. Remember that most people don't care about how 'well written' an article is, and simply care that it tells them something they wanted to know about (or reaffirms their pre existing opinions).
2. Go even further and remember that most people don't even read the article to begin with. They just look at the title and icon on a social media site, and share it based on that. Quite a few really lazy fake news sites don't even write real articles. They just post attention grabbing headlines and simply have realistic seeming gibberish on the page itself.
It takes infinitely more resources to refute and disprove BS then it does to produce it.
> ... they confronted a person of interest who confessed to writing the note.
This case was one of only two examples given in the article, and it doesn't even support the thesis that the sources of fake news are organizations. So, we shouldn't automatically assume that all instances of fake news or Twitter trolls are being paid to do what they do ... some people are simply trolls because they like to be trolls.
The media is all high and mighty about stamping out fake news while acting as the major purveyors of the same low quality, canted, and often times deliberately conjured out of whole cloth, non-information.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-mac...
“If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.” “Asamocra?” “Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction."
I'll bet that Stephenson was probably inspired by the way auctions for Google AdWords work. In any case, the idea of conducting an auction to determine reputation of a data source is intriguing.
> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
> “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
> “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
> “What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
> “Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
> “As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”
> “Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
(Emphasis mine.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...
Part of that problem is that it has to be cheaper to produce so corners are cut because of the loss of revenue in the news business. It's become cut throat and a war for views to get pennies in advertiser revenue with slim to no margins. It's become a case of we get what we pay for, but even the subscription news sites with pay walls have gotten sloppy of late.
PS: भारतीय recently moved to Americas lol so pardon me for my ignorance of your politics.
Correct the Record got 10 million dollars in funding last year. That goes a looong way. It wouldn't be surprising if disinformation campaigns were rampant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
https://np.reddit.com/r/shills/comments/4kdq7n/astroturfing_...
It seems to me, as an European that the last US election got many "rustles" "jimmied" particularly about finding reasons for why Trump got in, and more than why Hilary didn't. one factor that is mentioned is that people believed lies on the internet. CTR appears to me as an outsider as fighting the very real issue of Fake News but is actually fighting for the Democrats.
I could be wrong though.
Mainly I think it's interesting (and worrying) that popularist politics is associated with propaganda and manipulation and the those who see the lies are minority enlightened educated people.
I would add that the comedian Dennis Miller was also drafted into spouting pro-war propaganda on late night tv.
It was all very deliberate.
Note that the organization has been reorganized into Shareblue, you can read about their tactics and decide for yourself whether it's fake news or just politics as usual.
https://www.scribd.com/document/337535680/Full-David-Brock-C...
There were some statistical studies by Gelman on the previous elections (prior to 2016) that show that rich and middle class people in red states voted republican vs those in blue states (although rich people tend to vote republican in general). The poor basically vote democrat all the way around the country. This is why you have huge voter suppression campaigns in the poorer red states that should turn blue if enough people voted. It also explains gerrymandering to maintain minority control. Obama was an outlier in that he got more of the rich/middle class red state vote than Hillary did.
So the question is, why do middle class people in red states vote republican?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/appeals-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/us/politics/voter-id-laws...
This is not to say this article isn't useful—it's good to get some confirmation. My only qualm is that someone selling a service to create fake content is by definition untrustworthy, so the prices they list might be unrealistically low.
Some of these operators are incredibly sloppy using (presumably) real home addresses. Their "origin story" on archive.org is equally sloppy-- immediately starting with primitive, thoughtless slurs against their targets and sometimes a glimpse into the genuine interests of the operator.
Unfortunately, these people don't have to be clever to "get the job done." Stupid is perfectly OK, when the only way of dealing with this problem is effectively a game of wack-a-mole.
If the public is interested in news why the fuck does the public need to know the view count?
What this means in practice is that, if one of the services was to unilaterally take down these kinds of features, its users would flee to the other services which still offer them. Addicts need to feed their addiction. Which would be suicide for the service that did it, which is why none of them will ever do it voluntarily.
Which in turn is where the parent's mention of regulation comes from -- when economic pressures force companies into a race to the bottom like this, introducing exogenous pressures like regulation can be the only way to stop the race.