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.
The election was rigged.
Just call it 'lies'.
You are correct -- they don't give two shits about any party. They are just marketing towards the folks who will fall for this sort of thing.
New York and Los Angeles undoubtedly will still have the lock on supplying fake news in 2020. In case you have forgotten that's where all the stories about how wonderful Hillary was came from and how she was a lock in for the win.
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.
Just in case somebody is thinking of taking this seriously. Macedonia has an average internet speed between 4 and 10 Mbps.
The idea that Macedonians don't have the ability to make websites is quite frankly insulting. Whether on not they can swing elections is of course debatable. However that wasn't the aim of the sites, the aim was to generate content that people wanted to read (or believe), and they appear to have succeeded.
http://www.bandwidthplace.com/...
http://www.dospeedtest.com/spe...
Trump-era logic.
Yes, my friend, if you share these stories, you have fallen for them. That's the whole point of their existence - to be shared. Just because you do it, "for the lulz" doesn't mean you have somehow risen above their intended effect.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have it on good authority that a guy named 'Sergey' founded Google, was born in Russia and is behind this whole 'ad-sense' payment system!
See!Proof that the Russians are to blame.
politically motivated + biased != fake
"fake news" apparently now means "i don't like the perspective used to discuss this news event.", which is exactly that certain people wanted: de-legitimatize all sources of news. However what fake news *should* mean is "this story is made up/has no basis in fact."
Fox news is also not fake news(most of the time) though it is also politically motivated and biased.
just because people share these things, doesnt mean they fall for them. that is something that seems to be ignored.
Sharing things and "falling for them" are precisely the same thing, whether you want to believe that or not. What's the goal of the people creating the fake news stories? To get people to share them, and click on them. That's the goal. The goal is not to get people to believe them. They don't make money when people believe their stories, they make money when people read and share them. So, you did fall for them. You're one of the people paying the people who write fake news, so congratulations.
As far as the political lean of the stories, the creators themselves will point out how stories that would appeal to conservatives spread far more quickly than those targeted at liberals. The people who would share a story like the fake Denver Guardian story in the article don't even bother to look at the source site and figure out that this fake news story is literally the only one posted on the site. You'll get people calling bullshit on any little detail on a site like Slashdot and doing research to back up their point of view, but that doesn't happen on the Facebook feeds of conservatives. People like the guy in that article rely on the lack of fact-checking among conservatives to bring him 5 figures in income per month, so it obviously works.
When did you notice that fake news does best with Trump supporters?
Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin's famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it as. This isn't something that started with Trump. This is something that's been in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his supporters. When we were coming up with headlines it's always kind of about the red meat. Trump really got into the red meat. He knew who his base was. He knew how to feed them a constant diet of this red meat.
We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
that mostly favored Republican candidate for President Donald Trump
Yes, of course it did. Even if it didn't. It still did. It has to. Trump is evil, he can do no right.
They don't give a flying F about the man's morals. What's important to them is that his followers have been trained for decades to trust only information that confirms their beliefs and to trust that information no matter what the source. It starts with disimissing any story you don't like as "biased liberal media", and ends up with an industry of people making a living out of lying to your supporters. If only once side gets these kinds of parasites attached to it, perhaps its time to take the hint that that side has a problem.
And really these guys in Macedonia are playing for peanuts. Half of Washington these days makes their living lying to Conservatives, and that's in the Billions or Trillions. Remember all those guys who spent the last 8 years promising to kill "Obamacare" if sent to Washington? They were lying about what it does, and they were lying when they said they'd get rid of it. They are just the tip of the iceberg. There are lobbyists, TV and radio personalities, columnists, authors...
3 people resigned from CNN as a result of a retracted article. I'm unable to find any evidence of anyone being fired or resigning from New York Times for fabricating stories. The difference between CNN and actual fake news sites is that when CNN learns that it made a mistake, they issue a retraction. Actual fake news sites don't care and leave it up.
> this entire russia thing is the epitome of fake news
No it isn't. But the Russians have their own sophisticated troll and fake news factories. They probably don't need to rely on some freelancers in Macedonia.
The "entire Russia thing" is the epitome of fake news? Well, you're not necessarily wrong. Here's some research which shows that some of these bots, identifying themselves as British people or whatever, post exclusively between 8am and 8pm Moscow time. People pushing out propaganda which favors Russia and their goal of destabilizing the Western governments set up after the fall of the Soviet Union, doing their work during 12-hour days in Moscow time.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
So despite the stories for the past year or so about groups of young people in Macedonia cranking out fake news sites, you've decided that this story is fake because CNN is now also reporting on it. So, just to be clear, you're saying that anything reported by CNN is fake, correct? Anything at all, if it appears on the CNN site, it's fake, right?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Sorry but your claims about the "staged Muslim protest" are unsubstantiated claims, with no evidence. The CNN side of the story is a heck of lot more believable than yours (I say yours because you're the one promoting these tweats). Sorry. You weren't there; you don't know what was going on. Talk to someone that was involved in the protest as the reporter did. All you can do is make allegations based on your own feelings and beliefs. That's not news. To perpetuate these unsubstantiated claims as if they were facts is, well, a lie. Fake news. And it promotes the very kind of hatred that people at that protest were trying to protest against. You are part of the problem. Maybe you should stop following extremists on Twitter and make friends with Muslims, blacks, hispanic immigrants, refugees that live near you, and find out what things are really like in their families and neighborhoods.
Muslims in many places feel they want to speak up, protest against those who commit atrocities in the name of Islam, and tell us what the vast majority of Muslims think and feel about peace. I'm glad those protesters talked to the reporter and showed her their signs, and posed for pictures. It's a very important thing!
I feel like instant runoff, range voting, or approval voting would have had a strong chance of electing Johnson. I don't think that Trump's most ardent supporter could claim that he would win under approval voting, and Hillary was nearly as disliked. The country seemed like it was poised to take a more conservative turn, or perhaps I should say some conservative backlash, but Johnson might have won broad approval as everybody's second choice.
I disagree totally with libertarian principles, but I think that it's pretty clear to everyone that they are a large segment of American politics and that our political parties don't necessarily reflect the broad divisions in our society very well. I would like to institute a voting system which would more accurately reflect the support there is for your party. I think it would be better for the nation for us to have more choices at the polls, and more meaningful ones. I mean, at this point random lottery might even be a good option: I can certainly say that I trust the average person far more than the average politician. In any case, I reserve the right to an opposite opinion, but I do think it's a shame that neither of us are being heard.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
but this news based on an interview of a supposed, unnamed fake news publisher is real.
If you're referring to the link that I posted, which contains the interview I quoted, some observations:
1. You did not click on the link.
2. You did click on the link, but did not read the story.
3. You did click on the link and read the story, but you didn't understand anything.
In case you're still not getting it, the person is cited, by name, in an interview about a rather famous piece of fake news which he admits to publishing. That's a pretty fantastic tactic you're going with there though. "This 'fake-news' interview does not fit into my predefined worldview which says that liberals are idiots and I'm not, even though it's my side that falls for the fake news. Since this goes against what my gut tells me, I'm going to suggest that this interview itself is fake news. Checkmate, libs!"
As for the rest of your so-called "observations", the fact that people make 5 figures per month spreading obvious bullshit to conservatives tends to undermine your arguments about who engages in group think, who questions what they read, who does even the most basic research, etc.
I thought fake news was about Russia influencing the election, not "clicks" to generate advertising money.
"If there's one thing I know, it's that if Russia is using bots to spread the stories that they want to spread, then that makes it impossible for teenagers in Macedonia to create bullshit news sites and get ad revenue. The two things cannot co-exist in any possible universe. I know this is true because I'm a fancy conservative thinker that reads news in a critical way while I paint everyone else with as broad a brush as possible."
Anyway, see you next time, Anonymous Coward, you bastion of intelligent analysis.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black