Slashdot Mirror
The Fake News Machine: Inside a Town Gearing Up for 2020 (cnn.com)
CNN has a story on Veles, riverside town in Macedonia, which back in the day was known to make porcelain for the whole of Yugoslavia. But now, as an investigation by the news outlet has found, it makes fake news. Veles has become home to dozens of website operators who churn out bogus stories designed to attract the attention of Americans. Each click adds cash to their bank accounts. From the report: The scale is industrial: Over 100 websites were tracked here during the final weeks of the 2016 U.S. election campaign, producing fake news that mostly favored Republican candidate for President Donald Trump. One of the shadowy industry's pioneers is a soft-spoken law school dropout. Worried that his online accounts could be shut down, the 24-year-old asked to be known only as Mikhail. He takes on a different persona at night, prowling the internet as "Jesica," an American who frequently posts pro-Trump memes on Facebook. The website and Facebook page that "Jesica" runs caters to conservative readers in the U.S. The stories are political -- and often wrong on the facts. But that doesn't concern Mikhail. "I don't care, because the people are reading," he said. "At 22, I was earning more than someone [in Macedonia] will ever learn in his entire life." He claims to have earned up to $2,500 a day from advertising on his website, while the average monthly income in Macedonia is just $426. The profits come primarily from ad services such as Google's AdSense, which place targeted advertisements around the web. Each click sends a little bit of cash back to the content creator. Mikhail says he has used his profits to buy a house and put his younger sister through school. [...] That site was blocked a few months ago after Facebook and Google started cracking down on fake news sites. Mikhail is now retooling his operation, with his sights set firmly on the 2020 presidential election.
One man's lies are another's news these days.
Inventing news for the sake of ratings is more of the issue here than outright lies. Sometimes it's more about what they choose to report on than that the reporting is false. I learned about this a long time ago...
I was watching the local news reporting covering a Senate campaign in North Carolina (Jessie Helms was running for re-election for who knows how many times..). I remember a day when both candidates had rallies in Raleigh on the same day and the local TV news on WRAL covered both events on the evening news. For the challenger's rally, they covered the candidates speech, which was highly critical of the incumbent. Nothing wrong with that right? Yea, but for the incumbent's rally they covered only the protestors that shoed up, who where (you guessed it) highly critical of Senator Helms, but didn't choose to report on anything Helms said. Yes, they covered both rallies, but ALL the reporting was critical of Senator Helms. THEN they reported on a poll they had taken, that showed the incumbent loosing the upcoming election by nearly 10%... Helms won by nearly 20% in the election 2 weeks later.
This is how "fake news" is made. Nothing they reported on was actually a out right lie, it all was true. However, the perception is that Helms was loosing the election because everybody was critical of him and the polling showed it. The perception was fake...
I'll leave it to you to apply this to today's political reporting... But "Fake news" is not always untrue, sometimes it's just really biased in it's selection of the reported facts that makes it fake.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If you read the article at all and happened to follow the links, it's quite obvious the main site(s) they're talking about are digital tabloids. They're website and headlines are about as believable as the onion. I don't believe you could convince me that the majority of people who visit politicspaper don't see that. The most amusing thing about this is you have a new organization who actively tries to manipulate facts with bias and pass them off as the whole truth calling a tabloid fake news. Of course it's fake news, every knows they are, but cnn has their head so far up their own ass that they believe they're the good guys when they're even more guilty of it.
There are many parties influencing the election. What is the difference between anonymous donations that are protected as free speech (under the Citizens United verdict) hiring shills versus a sovereign nation doing the same thing. Ideally, elections should be closer to Canada, where there is no advertising permitted so candidates have to stand on their own merits.
Or just dispense with the pretexts, and just auction the seats off to the highest bidder. Money is free speech, right, as per that SCOTUS decision.