Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks | Hacker News Reader

Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

theregister.co.uk

169 pointshsnewman120 comments

I gave a talk at Denver startup week last year about the underlying profit incentives tied to fake news and how industry reforms in the way media companies do business could not only benefit the advertisers but also stop Fake news. At the end of the talk I had 3 people ask how they could make fake news to promote their startups. That this has turned into a booming industry surprises me 0%, though it is depressing.

8 years ago I used NLP to generate fake user profile bios for a social media company (not one you've heard of). The SEO/marketing guys went nuts over it and started using it for everything. It was super effective and they had the money to scale it. Eventually Panda came out and hosed the rankings on the blogs/domains they used it for.

Around the same time I discovered https://narrativescience.com/ and read about how they accomplished the same task. It was essentially similar to what I had done - write tons of templates, like Mad Libs, and then algorithmically fill in the blanks. Mine sometimes generated nonsense (e.g. "I love Mozart! I saw him in concert last year."). But for our purposes, or rather the purposes the marketing people came up with, it didn't matter much.

I saw the list of Narrative Science's investors and noted that In-Q-Tel was on there. Then I asked myself why the CIA's R&D funding arm would want that. The answer was obvious - to generate misinformation to spread to adversary orgs/states. Drown the real message in a sea of lies and your foes will waste more resources trying to find the truth.

This is a stab in the dark but the pattern fits: did the social media company no one has heard of happen to be TuneWiki?

Hate to be the one to tell you this...they're doing it domestically (in their own country) as well.

I went to a local tech event. A few folks gave talks about their products / services and their marketing. A few included people straight up talking about paying "influencers" or pod casters, or youtubers, to mention their product or service and so forth. Nobody seemed to note anything about disclosing that it was an advertisement or not.

I liked to think that maybe they just assumed the influencer was going to mention it was paid or everyone understood that was the case but me .... but it never was actually spoken about.

I couldn't help but wonder if the people paying for these services think that they are ever exposed to other companies doing the same? Do they care?

> I liked to think that maybe they just assumed the influencer was going to mention it was paid or everyone understood that was the case but me .... but it never was actually spoken about.

All major social media (Instagram, Youtube, ...) require you to disclose any promotions. It's absolutely normal in "old" media. I think that it's assumed if the audience was composed of actual business people.

A lot of "influencers" (I hate that phrase so much) like to play the vague game.

"Thanks, Club Med, for a great week!"

and consider that "disclosing the paid nature of the item".

I'm a local "influencer" [1] and am part of a local group of other influencers for the city I live in and marking a promotion as such just goes without saying. The FTC even has rules on influencer promotions [2]. I see a lot of sponsored posts from other bloggers and influencers I'm friends with and they're all marked as "#ad" or "#sponsored" or something along those lines.

No one is saying "I'm running an AdSense campaign but forgot to tell Google that they need to mark it as an advertisement!" It goes without saying. These people are professionals same as anyone else and know the rules of their trade same as anyone else.

[1] "influencer" meaning someone with a significant presence on social media, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, etc.

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...

Can you recommend some material on this and how to design the incentives properly?

Yeah let me try and find some good articles. As for my talk, the tl;dr is that the lack of inventory transparency by ad networks coupled with the way that the CPM pricing model is currently administered incentivizes a system where the only that matters is clicks and not context or outcomes. Fake news is an extreme example, but a less sinister one is the Buzzfeeds and Upworthys of the world.

It's been pretty pervasive in certain niches for a long time. Homeopathic health products, for example. You can find lots of ads disguised as news reports that are more than a decade old. Dr Oz has been slinging crap for a similar time period.

My thought experiment for considering the moral limits of capitalism: If producing Soylent Green were legal and profitable, would there be actors willing to produce and sell it?

If you answer no, see: Philip Morris, Lockheed, Beretta, etc.

Coca-Cola will likely kill more people than guns and organized crime, honestly. But I see your point.

There is a lot of evidence that organized crime is a substitute for opportunities in legitimate society, so that example is perhaps not applicable. The opioid crisis caused by US pharma may be a bigger and better example.

Organized crime is a huge problem. Like just take Mexico. Really poor and that's because of organized crime. If they were richer they could probably save a lot of lives. I think that's a bigger factor than the number of people shot dead.

"Organized crime" is an exceptionally poor example since the premise involves the legality of the activity/product. Edited. Regarding Coca-Cola vs guns - the list wasn't comprehensive :).

I agree with you, people can do all kinds of terrible things especially for the sake of profit. I believe comparing defense contractors and firearms manufacturers with eating people could be considered disingenuous, however.

I suspect you are being downvoted for comparing secretive cannibalism to security/defense.

But yes, supply will provide every legal thing in demand. Indeed, that is how the invisible hand is "supposed" to work.

Lockheed's involved in the maintenance (and previously, manufacture) of thermonuclear weapons. I'm pretty comfortable with my comparison.

Thermonuclear weapons also have been the single most effective peacekeeping tool in the history of the world.

That's a remarkably confident statement that's completely unprovable.

I could just as easily posit easy international travel, world trade, mass media, democracy, and many other things as more effective than h-bombs for bringing about the relative peace of the late 20th/early 21st century.

Those particular things have the added benefit that they generally don't risk the side-effect of world annihilation.

> completely unprovable

Yes, it's challenging to answer with certainty.

Though "easy international travel, world trade, mass media, democracy, etc." were not invented at almost the precise moment that all-out large scale wars ("world wars") on Earth ended.

The world came pretty close to large-scale nuclear war, actually. I'm not sure why you think that's no longer possible.

So you are upset we won ww2 and think they are responsible somehow? Whats your reasoning?

Blatant straw man.

There are moral implications to building weapons of annihilation in exchange for wealth.

Also, Lockheed's role in Manhattan Project era nuclear weapons development was non-existent. And the delivery aircraft was manufactured by Boeing.

You're being downvoted for some reason, but the point on morality and capitalism is sound.

For examples you might have been better choosing cases where the production rather than use by customers is problematic.

Radium paint and dials, asbestos, prior to 20th century regulations food and medicine fraud and adulteration so endemic that finding just the correct product was almost impossible. Which is what led those regulations in the first place.

Allowing businesses to divorce themselves from responsibility for the effects of what they produce, regardless of consumer choice, is too easy. I have no idea what the equivalent of "Saturday morning cartoons" is today, but 20 years ago, that slot was filled with commercials for sugary foods, targeted at children. Now we have payday loans, "buy here pay here" and a host of other services that capitalize on unsophisticated consumers in precarious economic conditions.

Capitalism is what it is - an utterly amoral engine of profit. Without regulation and legal frameworks it will create slaves, destroy the environment, kill and maim people - there's almost no limit.

What the OP's anecdote illustrates is that there's also a deep cultural issue at play.

What if my business is the one of informing people of the possible risks their neighbors or other inhabitants of their nations pose to them?

Free Markets aren't amoral at all, if I produce something of value and we swap value, I fail to see how that is amoral. In fact, preventing that transaction is amoral. Slavery itself was amoral, and codified and enforced by the state.

Many in the South abhorred slavery and segregation, but had no choice but to follow the law.

Killing and maiming people has been a State activity since they've existed. It's one of the things they're very efficient at.

This is some absolutely disgusting historical revisionism with regards to how the south treated slavery.

Make no mistake, Slavery was an intended feature. Not a bug, nor a result of a state gone wild. It was considered part of their economy and part of their free market.

I think you confused the words "amoral" and "immoral". OP was talking about "amoral" - lack of concern about moral principles. You seem to be talking about "immoral" - actively breaking moral principles.

Wow. Laws which were put in place by plantation and slave owners wishing to preserve the profit and status quo they created. They controlled most of the machinery of government as well as their little plantation.

Slavery was only ended at the insistence of laws put in place by the state.

Like other commenters, I think this thought experiment goes much too far. On the other hand, many companies worked with the Nazis, work with the Saudis, Russians, and many others today, and sell all sorts of things to oppressive governments including the tools of oppression (such as those selling censorship and hacking tools to various dictatorships[0]). If the U.S. became an authoritarian dictatorship, I don't doubt that many companies would do business with the dictator too.

But I'd like to examine it with more nuance: Does it vary across time or across place? Is it different than the culture of the people from which the company emerged (e.g., how do private American citizens behave differently than large American companies)? Most importantly, on what factors does good and bad corporate behavior depend? My guess is that some of this research has been done - I'd love some pointers to it.

[0] A recent headline: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-israel...

Capitalism is capitalism. It's limited by laws and culture. In the US, that means it's limited by laws - Wall Street doesn't care about culture.

Is your talk or similar online anywhere?

Unfortunately, I don't believe it was recorded. That said I've been submitting it to some local TedXs so hopefully, I can get a recording in the near future.

Would you happen to have a slides or transcripts then ?

I’d love to see/read that talk. Any way to get hold of it?

Is this something that requires government oversight or is it just a business plan/strategy. If the latter then the free market should tell you that your plan is right or wrong. If it requires government overshight I would say its inherently flawed. "Fake news" isnt a problem the problem is a lazy populace that take any word for granted as long as the production value is good enough.

Fake news is how free speech is supposed to work. People get to say what they want and the populace decides for themselves what is right or wrong. Liable and slander are still in effect.

> Fake news is how free speech is supposed to work.

I can't agree with your statement. Game news is the contrary of what free speach stands for. Free speach is about being able to express your opinions. Fake news are intentionally misleading and hurt other people's well-being.

> Fake news" isnt a problem the problem is a lazy populace that take any word for granted as long as the production value is good enough.

Blame the victim. If you cheat me, it is my fault to not see thru your lie, if you rob me it's my fault for not being more vigilant.

If I lie about my products, or about other things for economical gain. Shouldn't the state make sure that I'm punished for that? Should not be the same case that for breaking a contract?

> Free speach is about being able to express your opinions. Fake news are intentionally misleading and hurt other people's well-being.

As fake news is a form of expression, how do you propose to draw a meaningful distinction between protected speech and speech that may hurt the well-being of others? Especially one that does not risk chilling effects or becoming prior restraint, and is thus compatible with freedom of speech.

I wonder if we'll look back at the Bloomberg "chip implant" story as fake news, and if that's the case, can you imagine the police breaking into their offices with a warrant because of it?

Fraud is one thing, but hiring some e-celeb to pitch your product isn't something we need jack-booted thugs kicking in doors for. We don't even have an objective definition of "fake news", and you'll never convince me the State should be the one defining or enforcing that.

The fake news phenomenon is something that worries me at a local level: friends and family. I'm constantly bombarded by forwarded messages from them that don't pass a simple cursory review and are 99% fake if you dig further.

I've tried to combat this by researching what's forwarded to me and pointing that out (including how I discovered it was false) but people either don't reply back or get hostile, assuming I'm one of the "others" (because these messages are usually trying to instill people to hate something). I have _never_ received a thank you from anyone for this and nobody ever apologized back, and I try to be extra polite when pointing these errors.

I've left various chat groups and feel my energy is depleted to continue on this fight. It amazes me that people default to a "believe in everything that comes from WhatsApp/FB/Instagram" mentality versus distrusting the Internet completely (which would be more sensible if coupled with a minimum amount of research on what's shared with you).

"Belonging" and "gnosticism" are the drivers.

Belonging: people are really desperate for things to participate in and cheerlead. It doesn't matter if it's true, and (rather like the famous paper on criminal signalling) it's better if it's not. Because that demonstrates that the people who listen to what you say believe in you. Conversely, by contradicting people you're showing them that you don't belong together.

Gnosticism: salvation through secret knowledge. The public sphere is compromised, so the best kind of knowledge is forbidden and non-mainstream. "Doctors don't want you to know this".

In a way, every false chain letter is a tiny cult.

A lot of people with that mindset really don't care where it comes from. Like you said, they're in part trying to fuel some hatred towards a particular person or group of people. It simply exists to propogate ideas in those who are unwilling to listen to any sort of reason, who will then spread and share these ideas with others. These people are perfectly fine living in a bubble and feeding off of each other all because they are unwilling to form their own opinions and face the facts, imagined or real.

I've had very similar experiences and find it really frustrating. People inherently don't like being wrong, don't like being proven to be gullible and are less likely to believe information that doesn't reaffirm their beliefs. It's a scary issue that's only likely to get worse.

Superstition, gossip and rumours have been around since long before the internet.

I’d also doubt that half of the people spreading these stories believe half of what they’re saying. Some people just like the attention.

> I've left various chat groups and feel my energy is depleted to continue on this fight.

Basically the worst part about the fake news issue - the sheer volume of it makes it in effect impossible to deal with at an individual level.

I feel most people who trust social media for news are super-late Internet adopters who don't quite understand how any of this stuff works. I know some older (but not old, really) people who use Facebook without understanding the boundary between Facebook and the rest of the web. They just see text on the screen and make arbitrary assumptions on where it's coming from.

This is the price society is paying for making social media "accessible" through phone apps and such.

I know millenials who fall for fake news just as much as older people do.

This is a great point. I wonder what studies, if any, has been done on age/tech experience vs susceptibility to believing fake news.

Direct link without lead harvesting nonsense: http://info.digitalshadows.com/rs/457-XEY-671/images/Digital...

This is super lazy, the paper seems like it was produced by a PR drone whose knowledge on the subject was limited to a list of keywords to google.

The article itself is pretty lazy too, like it was a paid placement. It mentions "Digital Shadows" nine times.

The way theregister.co.uk works is that along with their own writers, anyone can submit articles. They pick whether to publish it it/edit then publish.

Most news sites do this, even the biggest and most respected. But I think they get a larger amount of their content this way, and consequentially some of it can be a bit self-promoty.

I'm pretty sure that John Leyden works for The Register. https://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/John-Leyden

I could be wrong, but that seems exceedingly unlikely given the amount of stories he authors. Very much seems like either he or The Register got paid for this article.

It could be very meta if it turned out that the story about fake news is fake itself ;)

If you haven't seen Century of the Self[1] I recommend it. It is a documentary about the history, and rise of PR. We are now, perhaps, at the end of the century of the self - as the trustworthiness (and hence value) of broadcast information drops to zero (not that it has yet, but it will). How our current news/media copes, and what replaces it are still unknown.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04

Good point. I highly recommend this documentary to anyone who hasn't watched it.

I highly recommend too - Adam Curtis at his finest

>How our current news/media copes, and what replaces it are still unknown...

You should be more worried about how the current government copes with it. I think fake news might have helped Trump gain power in part, but it's DEFINITELY contributing to Trump losing power. Which illustrates that it's much easier to tear down with fake news than it is to build up.

That doesn't bode at all well for anyone who wants to be a mayor, or president, or senator, or police chief or whatever in the future.

100% agree with you, but I think for a lot of people who voted for Trump it might definitely have been an act of "tearing down" what was perceived as the corrupt establishment politics by these voters.

> DEFINITELY contributing to Trump losing power

I thought that was the gradual exposure and prosecution of his money-laundering accomplices, along with the conspicuous nastiness of his few policies, and the huge amount of time spent golfing or tweeting?

I have come across cloned news site of mirror.co.uk promoting crypto-currency scams.

They talk about it here: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/warning-fake-mirror-we...

It was from an advert on a legitimate website, but it had redirects/popups that show only on mobile devices.(this seems to affect a lot of even normally very trustworthy websites for some reason)

Honestly, some of those fake articles could have legitimately been written by the original Mirror. It's slightly amusing to me how they pretend like they're the beacon of truth and journalism in that article; I'd be completely sympathetic if it was the BBC, but it's not. I'm not saying they deserved this, but I'll be lying if I said I don't feel a small amount of schadenfreude. The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Mirror are so unreliable and clickbaity.

Here's someone far more reputable to feel sympathy for, Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert:

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/fake-martin-lewis...

People promoting affiliates are using this technique too...It's been around loooooong before fake news was fake news

The term 'fake news' is unhelpful.

Yellow journalism, deliberately confusing and deflecting writing and scams are as old as printing

Agree that the term wasn't helpful overall (it unfortunately is politically loaded).

But looking at the original paper (already posted but re-linked here -- http://info.digitalshadows.com/rs/457-XEY-671/images/Digital...) I guess the author was trying to link a "current news event" with various other disinformation that is more relevant from a business perspective -- black hat SEO strategies, site / brand spoofing, social media spamming, and the like.

I'm not sure how helpful the high-level overview is either :) but from what I can tell the intended audience was non-technical. One that, say, might not even be familiar with any of the above terms in the first place, yet is vaguely familiar with the concept that cyber threats exist, and might be looking at purchasing something from a digital security company (like, um, Digital Shadows) to help this. Businesses absolutely would be concerned about brand protection and preventing any malice (digital or otherwise) that could damage the business.

The concept of "fake" news is a slippery slope. Anyone that's in the business of gathering and presenting news has a number of vested interests. Sensationalism. Fabrication. Fear mongering. Persuasion. Ingratiation. Language itself is mostly a tool for some shade of lying and/or intimidation, with the occasional fringe use of conveying factual information or for enabling cooperation between peers.

> Language itself is mostly a tool for some shade of lying and/or intimidation

No, not at all. Language can be used to that effect, sure, but there exists a little something called true/false.

Train yourself on seing nuances, if you have trouble separating false things from regular partisanship.

We are not talking about exaggeration, we are talking about people who make actual fake news. Fake and as in completely artificial, no basis in reality, and imaginary. Its creating news that doesn't exist.

> Sun Won't Rise Tomorrow, Click Now To Find Out Who's At Fault

^ This is what is effectively going on. Its objectively false and fake news. But the problem is that people are believing this shit.

In what way is that worse than technically factual news that conveys a counterfactual meaning.

Really not sure what kind of people are downvoting these kinds of comments. Anyone care to enlighten?

Usually the kind of people who esteem journalists as philosopher-kings, and the organizations who employ them as paragons of perfect, unassailable virtue.

The Fourth Estate is not to be criticized.

What kind of conspiracy nonsense is this?

'It’s Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled'

Yikes.

I'm puzzled by the down votes too

Personal news hygiene must be practiced in the same way food hygiene is practiced. You will not eat a free sandwich found on a public toilet floor. You should not consume news sourced from FB, Twitter, etc...

Define your hygienic sources of news and stick to them, accept that you may need to pay for quality. Enforcing this is a personal responsibility.

Oh... and teach the children personal news hygiene.

I've been working on some algorithms I think can identify fake news easily and reliably.

The key part is you have to have a massive dataset of historical information.

With Datastreamer (my company) we have about 1PB of news, blogs, and social media from the last 4-5 years.

I'm curious if it would make sense to ship an open/public API that would allow people both to report AND check on whether something is fake news.

Sort of like Hacker News but a browser extension that allows you to flag whether you think something is fake.

What could possibly go wrong?

False flagging, FUD based on groupthink and cognitive biases, accidental suppression of newly created websites in favor of older ones. Just to start off a list.

Not everything is solvable through algorithms. Especially if your initial goad is ill-defined. There are about half a dozen completely separate things that are being labeled as "fake news" today, from websites impersonating news agencies and pushing lies, to actual news agencies pushing lies, to viral hoaxes on social media.

Ultimately, whether a news article is fake or not is determined by its relation to reality. You could use context as heuristic to filter out complete garbage, but this is something that's actually being abused by many subcategories of "fake news" to begin with.

People should be able to use their own judgement to spot nonsense, without algorithms telling them what to think. If they can't, the first questions should be "why?" and "why now?", not "how do I make an app to fix it?".

Personally, I think the underlying assumption behind current social media are profoundly broken and can't be fixed just by sprinkling more tech on top of it all. Obvious example: if you release a news-checking app and someone else releases a fake news-checking app, how do you expect your users to choose the right one?

> People should be able to use their own judgement to spot nonsense, without algorithms telling them what to think. If they can't, the first questions should be "why?" and "why now?", not "how do I make an app to fix it?".

Sort of.

People should also be able to use their own judgement to spot scams.

And yet there are spam filters. Both to detect garbage, and also to hide garbage.

Obviously, the email client that classifies my bank loan documents as "spam" is not going to be popular.

What would make more sense is to build a certificate system around this that news organizations can use to declare an article is Fake News Free. Might be a nice business to start riding the Fake News Boom.

Taking this idea. What would be the hypothetical flow for the recent Bloomberg chip article? I’m sure it would have been published with the cert since it’s from Bloomberg but later when it turns out to be less than true or more inflammatory than intended. Do they lose their cert? Or maybe just the article has to persist with the cert rating?

I love the idea, just curious how it works logistically.

Maybe something like:

Bloomberg registers with cert auth. They publish articles and each has a pending cert item (image?) on their page that is loaded from 3rd party cert auth. The cert auth uses algos to determine if it's fake or not and published results back to the placeholder.

Edit: Forgot to mention, please do take the idea. And good luck!

Thx for the info. So could this possibly run as a browser plugin?

That way the site doesn’t need to assert its own trust? And you wouldn’t have to deal with the heavy lift of updating every news site.

Just thinking out loud typing... you could integrate this with an ad blocker so that only cert content could show an ad. This would create an incentive model not only for the publisher but the advertising partners to make sure content is good and certified. Sites and content with no cert or lost cert would block ads for that page and for repeat offenders you could escalate to say all ads are blocked for the sesssion.

While I’m not a fan of ads I understand their purpose and maybe with something like the above, the market could find equilibrium once again.

Hi I am interested in this sort of service. I have 2 concerns. First is I don't install browser extensions unless I really trust them. Too many are pumped up and then sold to some malware company, one update later and you're owned. My second concern is that if this works well eventually the fake news producers will become aware of it, reverse engineer it and then attempt to game the detection.

Fakespot has been popular for years, and spam reviewers haven't been able to game it.

I launched something like that as a side project https://www.quod.us (to let people report misinformation) and I was going to add an API to let people report things from anywhere, but I got busy with other projects.

What I found was that it's really hard to get people to report this stuff, I never really found my ideal user. A lot of people signed up, but only a few people ever actively reported things. I never finished validating the concept, but my general feel is that the only way to keep the project afloat is via grants and donations, and that's hard to do.

Email me if you ever want to collaborate.

> The key part is you have to have a massive dataset of historical information.

Why is this historical information not susceptible to the exact same issues today's news is?

How does an algorithm short of strong AI do that?

Most of what they would need has existed "as a service" for shady internet marketers, SEO companies, etc, for quite some time. Buying tweets, likes, spammed/spun content/comments, and so on isn't terribly new.

ok but what is the quality control like on all these tools to help do you illegal stuff? Better or worse than normal software.

Is there any open source tools to help you do illegal stuff? Because if you can't see the source I think a good illegal tool moneymaking scheme would be to sell the tools to do illegal stuff and then blackmail the people who did illegal stuff for a part of the money. but that might also be dangerous.

Almost all of the tools used to do legal stuff can also be used to do illegal stuff. You think scam websites are deep down built on Linux and Apache like everything else?

Sure, but the article suggested that there were tools that were written with pulling particular scams as their purpose.

Click baits gonna click bait

Targeted smearing and destroying of one's reputation is quite an old endeavour. Works amazingly well online, too. Don't give up Internet anonymity like some governments want you to.

I don't think Internet anonymity is a thing though.

Even if you make a fully unrelated identity, smearing that identity is enough to discredit your ability to engage online. Sure, you can make another and another, but starting over with zero online credibility is the same thing as losing all your credibility.

One of the components of online anonymity is having different identites for different communities. That way if your expiremental political blog goes horribly wrong it doesn't take your professional life or hobby group with it

Well sure, you can treat being online as an advanced form of roleplaying, but then that just limits your ability to really engage in serious discussion, because you're just talking to other roleplayers.

And that's fine for most topics, but when you talk about certain issues, I feel that speaking in an honest manner (and assuming everyone who isn't obviously trolling is doing the same) is the only way to really have a discussion, otherwise it just makes all online discourse totally meaningless.

I'm talking more about different pseudonames and siloing personal information rather than full on different identites. I'm as authentic here as I am on my Reddit or professional GitHub accounts, and yet it still will require corporate level shenanigans to find and link them all together

Experimental political blog? What an interesting euphemism.

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