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.
Just call it 'lies'.
Not rigged, influenced. Mostly it's just a reflection of Americans seeking validating stories to share with others gullible enough to be influenced.
I don't read AC
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.
"False equivalence", was the secondary theme of the entire election, right after post-truth Trumpian lies.
Plenty of people who don't pay enough attention saw the garbled mess, along with the very valid, but exaggerated criticisms of Clinton (shouldn't have had her own email server), and concluded that all sides were equally bad.
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
> 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