A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News To Influence Elections Costs $400K, Says Report (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: A 77-page report released today by cyber-security firm Trend Micro explores the underground landscape of fake news, where anyone can buy influence and create artificial trends to serve personal interests. An examination of Chinese, Russian, Middle Eastern, and English-based underground fake news marketplaces reveals a wide range of services available on these portals. The report explores several websites where customers can purchase services ranging from "discrediting journalists" to "promoting street protests," and from "stuffing online polls" to "manipulating a decisive course of action," such as an election. According to researchers, the typical clients of such services are interested in warping the way others perceive reality. These services are usually used for character assassination, swaying political trends, or creating fake celebrities. Trend Micro has compiled a "fake news" price catalog in its report, which is imbedded in Bleeping Computer's article. Some of the most expensive services include $200,000 for helping to instigate a street protest via fake news articles, $50,000 to discredit a journalist, and $400,000 to influence elections.

Comments

Re:Only the commercial monetization is new

[Kiuas]

You're right that the concept of a propagandist is not new at all.

However you're incorrect in saying that only the commercial monetization is new. The social media technologies in use globally bring an entirely new dimension to propaganda, namely: customization and targeting of the message on a user-by-user basis. No longer do you have to think about crafting propaganda which will appeal to a broad base of people, you can write several different angles on the same story and disseminate them so that different versions are only visible to a target audience that's most likely to buy that version of it. Quoting the report itself:

We didn’t directly interact with Boryou’s sales agents, but we can understand their pricing models by measuring it against a comparable service, the Yunjing Public Opinion Monitoring System, Yunjing's service monitors news sites (Chinese and English), forums, blogs, search engines, and regional sites and applications like Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging site, and WeChat, China’s prevalent social media platform. It claims to be capable of analyzing Weibo in order to find or create “opinion leaders” and provide customers information that include their region as well aspost, repost, and comment count.

Yunjing charges its customer per keyword. The price ranges from RMB 12,800 ($1,850) for 10 keywords to RMB 28,800 ($4,175) for 20 keywords. The service comes packaged with analytics reports for WeChat, Weibo, and special or customer-defined topics.

This level of segmentation of your target audience would never have been possible in the age of tv or newspaper lead propaganda. Also crowdsourcing has now entered the game:

What’s notable in the Russian underground, however, is how it leverages crowdsourcing to manipulate public opinion. It works just like any crowdsourcing effort would—funding projects by sourcing them from the contributions of a sizeable number of people—except that the contributions amount to the promotion
of profiles, subscribers, and likes. By adopting this model, the barriers of entry for disseminating fake news and manipulating public opinion are practically lowered to completing tasks and promoting other content with little to no monetary capital involved.

Case in point: VTope—a multiparty, online collaborative system with a throng of over 2,000,000 mostly real users and support for platforms such as VKontakte (VK), Ok.com, YouTube, Twitter, Ask.fm, Facebook, and Instagram. Its workflow comprises implementing tasks (liking or following a profile or a post, joining a
group, etc.) that incentivizes users with points, which they can resell or use for self-promotion. VTope’s service is initially free of charge, and participants can earn points by completing tasks. Points can also be purchased as coupons that can be bought on-site, but they are also widely available in underground marketplaces where they're often cheaper than on VTope. For instance, a coupon worth 10,000 points is sold for RUB 1,190 ($21) on VTope, and RUB 500 ($8) in the underground. A coupon worth 50,000 points costs RUB 3,490 ($62). - -

like4u takes crowdsourcing up another notch by touting its capability to control the speed of promotion and set up time limits for tasks, which helps avoid bans from the media. Such tasks per time limits come in a choice of 5 or 15 minutes, or 1, 4, or 24 hours. like4u’s customers can also decide between using dedicated bots or real people for their promotional efforts. It similarly uses a point system, which can be bought from RUB 11 to RUB 4,500. ($0.2 to $80).

And so on. The game is changing rapidly because traditional news channels are no longer the primary channel of information delivery to most people. If you can get a piece of propaganda out on social media before commentary hits on the news, you have a huge advantgae: you've already primed the targeted audience with preconceptions

Re:How much would it cost...

[nine-times]

How much would it cost to fund proper investigative journalistic institutions, non-commercial like the BBC, that could identify, shame, and counter such efforts?

There isn't really any amount of money that could fund enough journalism to counter propaganda. And really, let's call it "propaganda". The term "fake news" makes it sound trivial, and diminishes the danger this stuff represents. "Propaganda" has become a dirty word because it conjures images of authoritarian dictators performing mass manipulation, but the thing is, that's exactly what's going on.

You're never going to completely counter the ability to disseminate propaganda. There will always be some people who believe it. And no amount of journalism alone can counter it.

If you want to counter is as thoroughly as possible, first, you need a good education system. People need to know what propaganda is, and how it works, so they can spot it. They need people to know enough history to understand when and how propaganda has been used in the past, and for what reasons. You need people to know enough logic to spot poor arguments, and enough philosophy to understand why a logically consistent argument might still lead you astray. You need this kind of education to be widespread and free, so that as many people receive it as possible.

Then, yes, you also need journalistic institutions that at least attempt to be unbiased. They also need to be set up to avoid turning into tabloids, chasing the most sensationalistic stories rather than informing the public. You need extensive fact-checking, in order to make sure everything said is as accurate as possible. The information they provide needs to be open and freely available. I'm not sure how you accomplish those things.

You also need good communications infrastructure, so people can talk to each other. Here's where it gets hard: You need public forums that also attempt to be free of bias and sensationalism. Computerized social networks, which are becoming the popular public forums, aim to get their audience to feel the need to constantly review their feeds, and because of that, they're designed to elicit and promote controversy. Facebook and twitter may be the worst things ever to happen to public discourse.