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Right-Wing and Fake News Writers Are Now Going After Elon Musk (qz.com)
Fake news galvanized US president-elect Donald Trump's supporters, and sullied his enemies. Now it may be Elon Musk's turn. Quartz adds: The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has his fair share of detractors, but a new era in a public relations battle to discredit him appears to be taking shape. Bloomberg reports that hard-right groups are lining up to back misleading websites and fake journalists who attack Musk's business empire. Many of the attacks on Musk begin with something factual: His businesses were built, legally, with the help of billions in government contracts and incentives for renewable energy and space transport. But they go on to accuse Musk of fraud and wasting taxpayer dollars; some compare him to a convicted felon. At least three conservative sites have run negative pieces about Musk -- by a nonexistent writer named "Shepard Stewart" -- that include "Elon Musk Continues to Blow Up Taxpayer Money With Falcon 9" and "Elon Musk: Faux Free Marketeer and National Disgrace." Two later retracted the stories. "There's a very obvious precedent" for this, says Sam Jaffe, managing director of Cairn Energy Research Advisors. "That's Hillary Clinton." Musk tweeted this week, "Can anyone uncover who is really writing these fake pieces?"
Actually, having thought about this slightly more, another possible motivation occurred to me: there is a fair bit of evidence of Russian meddling in this election and that some of the anti-Hillary propaganda came from Russian sources to try to push the election to the candidate they favored. By the same token, Musk is potentially a real danger to Russian interests, since Russia is heavily oil dependent and also has an advantage when the US is dependent on Russia for manned space launches. If they have the now existing resources and hooks into the US public, then using it to harm Musk is a natural thing.
The motivation? Page views. Duh! It makes a lot of ad money. They don't give a damn about the consequences as long as the ad revenue keeps flowing.
I think you missed the point of this whole "fake news" controversy. These twenty-something goofballs start a fake news site to make money off the alt-right, and alt-right news sites who don't do any fact checking immediately pick up the stories.
In the past few days, there have been several interesting interviews with some of the people who run fake news sites. The reason th doing it. Alsoey say that fake news doesn't work on the Left will blow your mind.
I heard about this story yesterday on NPR, about an alt-right fake-news writer living in Los Angeles.
TL/DR: Jestin Coler (the fake-news writer) claimed that he does it to show how easily hoodwinked people are by fake news, but when pressed, he admitted he could make lots of money doing this. A few interesting quotes from his interview:
The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly false or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.
[...]
We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Make no mistake this is serious and these people are paid. It's about money and preserving the old energy business structure. Musk needs to hire massive PR and counterattack.
One thing that Republicans/Conservatives (speaking as one myself) need to do better is recognized that racism still actually exists, but may not be typically seen by most white people. I heard the lone black Republican senator was pulled over seven times in a year. He admitted a couple of those were for speeding, but others seemed to be for trivial matters, or nothing at all.
From the senator:
Scott went on to describe a time an officer pulled him over and began questioning if the car he was driving was stolen. "An officer pulls me into the median and starts telling me that he thinks perhaps the car is stolen. Well, I started to ask myself because I was smart enough not to ask him, asking myself, is the license plate coming in as stolen? Does the license plate match the car? I was looking for some rational reason that may have prompted him to stopping me on the side of the road."
It's unfortunate that the movement got started on a very questionable incident, in which it became apparent that the police did nothing wrong, because it gave the political opposition a reason to disbelieve the rest of the story. That shows the damage that "fake news" can do.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.