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

Propaganda on a budget

[rmdingler]

Winning the hearts and minds of the populace has always been a dirty business. From Machiavelli to Goebbels to the more recent trend of powerful men buying up newspapers that are not profitable in the traditional sense.

When paying for influence goes on sale, does it not lessen the importance of the elite?

How much would it cost...

[RyanFenton]

...To fund proper investigative journalistic institutions, non-commercial like the BBC, that could identify, shame, and counter such efforts?

The journalistic system we have today is basically a self-standing set of dominoes - basically competing to generate attention-getting emotions - looking for any excuse to re-trigger their sequence. It isn't new - yellow journalism has an amazing and lengthy history, but increasingly tabloid coverage is the only news for most folks.

It's not a moralistic thing that's the problem here - it's informational vulnerability. Like folks growing up in a 'company town' or a cult, it becomes statistically likely that without a path to a wider source of information, that folks will be unable to break out of objectively wrong information and will become willing victims to pure exploitation.

Even here, lots of folks have given up on the idea of pursuing truth as a societal good. Down that path lies a deep stagnation and victimhood.

Ryan Fenton

Re:How much would it cost...

[alvinrod]

It's a bit dangerous to create a reliance on large institutions that can easily be turned into the purveyors of fake news themselves. You can look at it with only good in mind, perhaps like the BBC and think that they're more good than bad, but you can just as easily get something like RT (Russia Today) which (from my own subjective perspective at least) seems to be a bit more slanted. I'd be remiss to give the state anything that could approach a monopoly on the news. If you create a power structure like that, eventually you'll find it filled with the kinds of people who want to abase and abuse it for their own ends.

As you point out, yellow journalism has been around forever in some form or another. I think that people just haven't quite learned to understand the internet or online media yet, as I suspect that a lot of the people who get duped by so-called "fake news" are the same who would scoff at someone believing something that they read from the National Enquirer or any of those other tabloid rags that line the check-out aisles in grocery stores. It's a bit like exposing a population to a new disease, or a new strain of an old one. We haven't developed a resistance or defenses against this at a societal or cultural level yet, so it seems like a big problem.

Fundamentally, I think the problem is rooted at a deeper level of human nature. We prefer to seek out things which confirm our beliefs rather than challenge them, and this cuts across more than just the news. Without taking time to train ourselves not to fall into those cognitive traps, we're never going to solve the problem. Seeking the truth is a difficult task, not only because the path is fraught with peril, but because when you get to the end, the truth is often incredibly ugly. How often are people so disgusted by what they discovered that they shut it away completely or only let out parts of it?

Au contraire...way more was spent

[PortHaven]

Just look at all the articles published by Huffington Post and CNN.com, so many were patently false. Millions was spent publishing fake news to benefit Hillary.

This isn't talked about, because it was in the Democrats' favor.

Re:Au contraire...way more was spent

[ckatko]

It wasn't talked about because of the insane amount of existing bias in the media. Just like the media curiously didn't cover the 1996 Telecommunications Act--Thanks, Bill Clinton!--that allowed the media to go from over 200 owning companies to 5. 5 companies control 90% of all information the typical US citizen sees. That should scare anyone. It's easy as hell to buy off 5 companies.

Imagine if Facebook was the only company that anyone got their news from. Would you magically start trusting Facebook to give people fair news? We're already heading that direction.

Likewise, why has Bill Clinton not had wall-to-wall news coverage? Bill COSBY probably raped women and he got wall-to-wall coverage. But Bill CLINTON also raped tons of women in the same way, in the same numbers (or higher), and nobody talks about it. There's no wall-to-wall coverage. There's no investigative journalism prying deeper and deeper. Nope.

Which means we're left with two options: The media is allied with/owned by the Clintons and Cosby (who criticizes Black America) is a threat. Or, the media is racist as fuck and defends a powerful white man, and goes balls-to-the-wall to throw a successful black man in jail the same way they hunted Michael Jackson without proof. (Fun fact: If you actually read up on MJ, you'll find a complete lack of plausible case against him.)

Re:Only the commercial monetization is new

[nomadic]

"I can respect that these people are wrestling this power from the hands of media conglomerates and making it a commercial service."

Yes, people subverting the course of democracy for personal profit should be respected.

Re: Only the commercial monetization is new

[Kierthos]

I'm sure it's not the only reason for U.S. politics becoming so partisan, but the Soviet Union fell in '90-91. Before that, the Democrats and Republicans may have not gotten along, but they had the the "common enemy" of the USSR.

Once it was out of the picture.... without that common enemy, it was inevitable that they would turn on each other, more or less. Then throw in that news programs are ratings driven these days, and there's no incentive for the news to calm things down.

good grief, Slashdot, cut the crap

[ooloorie]

The page you point to talks about campaigns on VK, a Russian social media site. And even then, the article just provides fact free assertions like "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."

Citation needed [Re:Au contraire...way more wa...]

[XXongo]

Just look at all the articles published by Huffington Post and CNN.com, so many were patently false. Millions was spent publishing fake news to benefit Hillary.

I'm not at all a fan of the Huff, but if you're going to state that they and CNN publish articles that are "patently false," some documentation showing specific examples (and more than one example: you said "articles") would be needed. Right now, my summary of what you said is "they published stories that don't support my pre-existing opinion, therefore I will state that these articles are patently false."

Or, to quote wikipedia: citation needed.

Re:Educated population

[Tranzistors]

[..]nobody would believe any of their shit if they had a grounding in logic and critical thinking[...]

I guess you are not familiar with the theological traditions of Abrahamic religions, which are not strangers to logic or critical thinking. The problem is not lacking those skills, it's the lack of domain knowledge. I used to believe a lot of bullshit (Who am I kidding? I still believe a lot of bullshit, I just don't know which ones are bs), but rarely have I got rid of false beliefs because I learned De Morgan's laws, or found out about yet another fallacy. If you don't know anything about chemistry and biology, “structured water” sounds as credible as quantum cryptography.

Re:Educated population

[MobyDisk]

Religious Reich is always trying to shit on public education

Your term "religious reich" conjures images of flat-earthers and young-earthers trying to change school boards to ban actual science. As you point-out, real actual science is the cure. Fair enough, but do not make the mistake of believing that this problem only exists on the right: the far left is doing the same thing.

I know pseudo-science hippies who take Homeopathic remedies, attend Reiki sessions, bless their water to change it's molecular structure to be happier, and plaster Facebook with articles about how nuclear plants in Japan are causing birth defects in Wyoming. They caution me that I live to close to power lines, then wear magnetic bracelets to improve the flow of their aura.

The problem is kinda related to religion, but it isn't religion itself. Questioning the origin of the universe, believing in God, and being spiritual aren't problems in-and-of-themselves. I've known suicidal drug-addicts who just needed to know they are loved, who were afraid of death. And religion saved them and gave them productive lives. The real problem is dogma.

Religion is a plague that retards progress.

Dogma is a plague that retards progress. It is what organized religion and organized political parties devolve into. But dogma != religion. When people on Slashdot talk about religion, they are rarely talking about God. Instead, they are talking about some particular dogma. It's not God that is the problem, it is humans. Part of the reason we conflate religion with dogma is because the media can't report on healthy normal people having normal religious practices. They can only show the extremists because that is all that is newsworthy.

In other words, this is Modern Day Propaganda

[zifn4b]

For those who are history buffs, you know very well the history of political propaganda. So really, this is nothing new. The only thing that's changed is the medium. Instead of newspapers and posters, social media is now the primary medium. I think most likely many of us forgot about propaganda because we stopped reading newspapers and watching network television in favor of streaming media, websites and social media. The propaganda spinsters finally caught on and are using social media and now we're aware of it all over again. It's the new old thing.