“Hacker X”–the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire–unmasks himself | Hacker News Reader

“Hacker X”–the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire–unmasks himself

arstechnica.com

So the network is now banned, he's made his money, and he's looking for notoriety and a new lucrative opportunity — it's no wonder the article reads like a résumé.

Exactly. I bet all my horses that he's paving the way for the promotion of his own book which could be already completed, printed and ready to be announced and distributed.

Hopefully readers will leave it on the shelves.

This "ethical hacker" needs to be charged with something severe - the damage he helped create is long-lasting and potentially resulted in 100,000's of deaths.

    Payton believes the hacker just wants to do the right thing.

The hacker isn't being interviewed with a ouija board, so he hasn't done the right thing yet.

Also worth reading: https://robertwillishacking.com/the-machine-enabled-by-faceb...

What I don't get is why they are protecting the name of the company that funded all this and all their properties? If you want to stop people from doing this sort of thing in the future, it helps to know who to hold accountable.

Really surprised this isn't gaining more traction on HN. Maybe it's because of the clickbaity title...

In the meantime, the comment section on Ars is delivering in equal parts rage and comedy.

Does Speed Racer have any brothers that don't suck?

There are many fake news real empires including all the newspapers that published the WMD and Gulf of Tonkin and Syria chemical weapons/caliphate etc. stories:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/terrorism-hoax-ontari...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9958679/BBC-admits-...

https://www.arabnews.com/node/1945091/media

Not the same things AT ALL.

Stories 1 and 3 are about one fantasist who managed to trick a bunch of regular news outlets.

Story 2 is about a single flawed report from the BBC.

You can sit back and complain that not enough checking is being done by reporters and editors at mainstream media sites, and you would be right; the pressure is always on reporters and editors to get the story out and move on to the next one; the news cycle has got shorter and at the same time budgets have got tighter.

But an occasional failing to meet high standards like that is a million miles away from deliberately setting up a ring of supposedly independent web sites with the intent of pushing lies 24x7 and carefully calculating how to get as many people as possible to believe in those lies.

And that is different how exactly from the advertisement industry, which pushes trash nobody really needs?

Not to mention the secondary industry of fake reviews latched onto that.

Not really meant as what about, because at the end of the day it is the same annoying shit almost everybody seems to accept as necessary evil, that's just the way it works, yada yada.

edit: Put another way, every channel is oversaturated with noise. No Signal anymore, except for Virtue maybe. I don't give a shit. Just bad entertainment.

Mainstream media clearly labelled their adverts (and BTW the BBC doesn't carry them at all). They also don't carry fake reviews. Fake reviews are the kind of thing that made money for Hacker X.

Doesn't matter. The beeb carried fake-news, though. And isn't neutral. At least not nowadays. Maybe that was different a long time ago. Why is it so hard to accept that you can't trust anyone? Is there an urge to believe which I seem to lack?

The BBC is right now an arm of the Tory government with very little editorial independence. I hope a future Labour government swiftly replaces the editorial staff to ensure independence and institutes mechanisms to prevent such hijacking from ever happening again.

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