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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.
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.'"
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.
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
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?