Fake News Is Unbelievably Cheap to Produce

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608105/fake-news-is-unbelievably-cheap

by smacktoward • 9 years ago

59 39 9 years ago

sven-j• 9 years ago

Turn the counts off. The retweet, view, like counters do not need to be running in real time. It's a great way to program people's behaviour. And those counts need to be regulated.

If the public is interested in news why the fuck does the public need to know the view count?

yukisaka• 9 years ago

Sure it's a way to control the flow of bullshit, but the folk at YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will never do it until everything is burning. In that sense, they are as robotic as the people who buy into the fake news.

smacktoward2• 9 years ago

But the reason they won't do it is entirely logical. They won't do it because the counters are part of what make their services so addictive to their users. Pushing buttons and seeing the counters go up turns their service into a kind of video game, or slot machine -- entertainments that we know are very hard for some personality types to put down.

What this means in practice is that, if one of the services was to unilaterally take down these kinds of features, its users would flee to the other services which still offer them. Addicts need to feed their addiction. Which would be suicide for the service that did it, which is why none of them will ever do it voluntarily.

Which in turn is where the parent's mention of regulation comes from -- when economic pressures force companies into a race to the bottom like this, introducing exogenous pressures like regulation can be the only way to stop the race.

fivestar4• 9 years ago

I don't think there is. I think the answer is more speech, not less. Having someone who decides is just another form of tyranny as soon as they begin abusing the power, which they will. The elite abuse it every day.

sr22• 9 years ago

It won't stop the army of fact-checkers debunking articles for having no reliable sources, and denouncing them on social media. Social being both the main distribution for fake news, and also the platform where articles are routinely ridiculed and mocked. Something like Wales' WikiTribune[1] are a response to fake news and propagandists, and are a welcome step to try and address the issue. Facebook are also up in arms about this and are trying to spot fake news either algorithmically or using a paid taskforce of highly trained fact checkers (the mechanical turk approach). Reddit also warns users of posts which are regarded as fake news and warns users to take them with a pinch of salt.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitribune

ThrustVectoring• 9 years ago

The problem is targeting and segmentation. If a hundred thousand people see evidence for X and a hundred thousand people see a debunking that always convinces you of not-X, the debunking doesn't matter unless it's the same hundred thousand people. If the segment is the roughly 100M voters in America, you'll reach one in a thousand unless you've got the same targeting/segmentation filters.

exolymph• 9 years ago

Fact-checks don't spread as widely as the original sources.

aaron-lebo• 9 years ago

You don't even have to produce fake news. If you want to drive discussion on a topic, how much would it cost to hire people to sit at home and comment/upvote/downvote in various portals? Those are chokepoints for information; control them, and you can control the flow.

Correct the Record got 10 million dollars in funding last year. That goes a looong way. It wouldn't be surprising if disinformation campaigns were rampant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

sr22• 9 years ago

You mean like a Sybil Attack? You might be right about a certain culture of sockpuppetry on places like Reddit where it's actually trivial to setup multiple accounts under different IPs and then upvote all your stuff. It's no secret you can pay for services where people do this for you and 'astroturf' your chosen topic and make it seem more popular than it actually is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

https://np.reddit.com/r/shills/comments/4kdq7n/astroturfing_...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdaPJLJCK1M

akhilcacharya• 9 years ago

Your best example is Correct the Record? AFAIK revolution media spent even more.

thinkingemote2• 9 years ago

Who is Revolution Media? Why and what did they do? I've attached heard of CTR but not other groups, and am interested.

thinkingemote2• 9 years ago

Is Correct The Record primarily an anti Fake News organisation or a pro US Democratic Party internet marketing wing?

It seems to me, as an European that the last US election got many "rustles" "jimmied" particularly about finding reasons for why Trump got in, and more than why Hilary didn't. one factor that is mentioned is that people believed lies on the internet. CTR appears to me as an outsider as fighting the very real issue of Fake News but is actually fighting for the Democrats.

I could be wrong though.

Mainly I think it's interesting (and worrying) that popularist politics is associated with propaganda and manipulation and the those who see the lies are minority enlightened educated people.

MichaelGG• 9 years ago

They and Share Blue are just propaganda wings and aren't set out to provide accurate news. Both parties were pretty shitty and it's nice to see they both lost in their own way.

creaghpatr• 9 years ago

More information: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct...

Note that the organization has been reorganized into Shareblue, you can read about their tactics and decide for yourself whether it's fake news or just politics as usual.

https://www.scribd.com/document/337535680/Full-David-Brock-C...

sjg0072• 9 years ago

Fake news basically began with Fox news aka Faux News. You also see it rise out of the fear mongering promoted by Rush and then taken further right. The real problem is that it works in the sense that it is profitable and it dominates discussion / media frenzy.

There were some statistical studies by Gelman on the previous elections (prior to 2016) that show that rich and middle class people in red states voted republican vs those in blue states (although rich people tend to vote republican in general). The poor basically vote democrat all the way around the country. This is why you have huge voter suppression campaigns in the poorer red states that should turn blue if enough people voted. It also explains gerrymandering to maintain minority control. Obama was an outlier in that he got more of the rich/middle class red state vote than Hillary did.

So the question is, why do middle class people in red states vote republican?

actuallyalys• 9 years ago

This seems intuitive. Fake news relies on people's fears, assumptions and misconceptions, so it's not like creators need to spend time actually researching or reporting, which doubtless makes it cheaper.

This is not to say this article isn't useful—it's good to get some confirmation. My only qualm is that someone selling a service to create fake content is by definition untrustworthy, so the prices they list might be unrealistically low.

billmalarky• 9 years ago

What cost? Fake News pays for itself and turns a profit.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-mac...

notadoc• 9 years ago

Well obviously, making something up requires no effort or reporting or verification. You just make something up.

It takes infinitely more resources to refute and disprove BS then it does to produce it.

2sk21• 9 years ago

I'm reminded of a throwaway line from the book Anathem by Neal Stephenson (well worth reading by the way)

“If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.” “Asamocra?” “Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction."

I'll bet that Stephenson was probably inspired by the way auctions for Google AdWords work. In any case, the idea of conducting an auction to determine reputation of a data source is intriguing.

yrro2• 9 years ago

For those who have not read Anathen, some context may be interesting.

“Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
“Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”
“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Florin_Andrei• 9 years ago

That book is awesome in many, many ways.

NietTim• 9 years ago

I do hope no-one on here is surprised by this?

crispyambulance• 9 years ago

One hilarious exercise is to check your favorite fake news URL's in archive.org and also try a whois lookup.

Some of these operators are incredibly sloppy using (presumably) real home addresses. Their "origin story" on archive.org is equally sloppy-- immediately starting with primitive, thoughtless slurs against their targets and sometimes a glimpse into the genuine interests of the operator.

Unfortunately, these people don't have to be clever to "get the job done." Stupid is perfectly OK, when the only way of dealing with this problem is effectively a game of wack-a-mole.

davidw• 9 years ago

Reminds me of the bullshit asymmetry principle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...

trendia• 9 years ago

This article really only focuses on organized fake news campaigns directed by a larger organization. But that's not the only source: sometimes fake news comes from a single individual looking to score fake internet points, such as the St. Olaf note that was fabricated by a student for a personal reason:

... they confronted a person of interest who confessed to writing the note.

This case was one of only two examples given in the article, and it doesn't even support the thesis that the sources of fake news are organizations. So, we shouldn't automatically assume that all instances of fake news or Twitter trolls are being paid to do what they do ... some people are simply trolls because they like to be trolls.

duskwuff• 9 years ago

For that matter... could it be the case that some instances of "fake news" are constructed by PR groups as demonstrations of their influence? If misinformation is being sold as a product, after all, the easiest way for a vendor to distinguish themselves is to have some samples available...

fivestar4• 9 years ago

The Sinking of the USS Maine comes to mind--the Yellow Journalists egged the US into a war with Spain over an attack that never took place. Or perhaps it was a false-flag type of deal. We'll never know. The tinkering with public opinion is what is unethical, and it doesn't matter if it is the NY Times (and its owners), The Washington Post, a tv network owned by GE, a blogger, a naive college student, or whoever, it is still unethical behavior.

The media is all high and mighty about stamping out fake news while acting as the major purveyors of the same low quality, canted, and often times deliberately conjured out of whole cloth, non-information.

prophesi• 9 years ago

Not to mention it's trivial to set up a blog using a news template with a reputable-looking TLD.

CM30• 9 years ago

Gets even cheaper if you:

1. Remember that most people don't care about how 'well written' an article is, and simply care that it tells them something they wanted to know about (or reaffirms their pre existing opinions).

2. Go even further and remember that most people don't even read the article to begin with. They just look at the title and icon on a social media site, and share it based on that. Quite a few really lazy fake news sites don't even write real articles. They just post attention grabbing headlines and simply have realistic seeming gibberish on the page itself.

carsongross• 9 years ago

True, but fake news can be quite expensively produced as well.

surge2• 9 years ago

Not just fake news, inaccurate or lazy journalism is also cheaper to produce. It's largely the reason for mainstream distrust of MSM over time as they've sensationalized the news and gone more for what's interesting more than accurate. See Buzzfeed, blog style news sites, and also some of the stuff that's been put out by WSJ and Forbes of late.

Part of that problem is that it has to be cheaper to produce so corners are cut because of the loss of revenue in the news business. It's become cut throat and a war for views to get pennies in advertiser revenue with slim to no margins. It's become a case of we get what we pay for, but even the subscription news sites with pay walls have gotten sloppy of late.

TokenDiversity• 9 years ago

I wonder what enables them to do this with impunity though? I mean it looks like Fox does it frequently and it recently turned out from the FBI testimony that NYC did it on the Russia Trump connection but I don't know if they apologized.

PS: भारतीय recently moved to Americas lol so pardon me for my ignorance of your politics.

surge2• 9 years ago

They all kind of do it with impunity, if there is a later retraction or correction, it's kind of too late, and they don't exactly put it on the front page that "we got the facts surrounding this event wrong or were originally misreported from erroneous or unverified sources".

sctb• 9 years ago

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552553

Fake News Is Unbelievably Cheap to Produce

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