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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.
When paying for influence goes on sale, does it not lessen the importance of the elite?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"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.
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?
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.