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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
...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
Time for me to spend some karma (as I will do) pointing out that the Religious Reich is always trying to shit on public education because nobody would believe any of their shit if they had a grounding in logic and critical thinking. The single strongest negative correlation to religion is education. Church membership is plummeting faster than any time in history. Churches all over the western world are going out of business (being merely businesses that sell... hope) and the buildings being turned into homes and coffeeshops, and good riddance.
Religion is a plague that retards progress.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Good thing we have such awesome government schools. Without the top notch critical thinking skills these havens of learning provide, our population might be susceptible to these shallow disinformation campaigns.
I received a better education from public school than private school, and I'm rather aware that:
- Trump is actually doing shit. Congress has not stopped. Legislation is passing.
- Hillary isn't fucking going to prison.
- Trump isn't getting impeached.
Meanwhile, my ol' private school pals either believe Pelosi is in her basement looking for the impeachment she took off the table, or that Clinton and friends will be frogmarched down Pennsylvania avenue in orange jumpsuits within the week.
Our education system, as a whole, blows asschunks. The government has demonstrated an unbelievable inability to fix it, but that magic free hand of the market hasn't come up with shit, either.
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.
On the bright side, CNN is now launching a real news site for those interested in things that actually happened.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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.)
Mr trumpy told me that this itself is a #fakenews and could never happen in soviet america!!!
It could never happen in Soviet America. Never. But if it did, from everything I'm told, there would be nothing wrong with that.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"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.
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.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
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:
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:
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
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
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."
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.
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.
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.
We'll make great pets