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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.
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?