Targeted smearing and destroying of one's reputation is quite an old endeavour. Works amazingly well online, too. Don't give up Internet anonymity like some governments want you to.
I don't think Internet anonymity is a thing though.
Even if you make a fully unrelated identity, smearing that identity is enough to discredit your ability to engage online. Sure, you can make another and another, but starting over with zero online credibility is the same thing as losing all your credibility.
One of the components of online anonymity is having different identites for different communities. That way if your expiremental political blog goes horribly wrong it doesn't take your professional life or hobby group with it
Well sure, you can treat being online as an advanced form of roleplaying, but then that just limits your ability to really engage in serious discussion, because you're just talking to other roleplayers.
And that's fine for most topics, but when you talk about certain issues, I feel that speaking in an honest manner (and assuming everyone who isn't obviously trolling is doing the same) is the only way to really have a discussion, otherwise it just makes all online discourse totally meaningless.
I'm talking more about different pseudonames and siloing personal information rather than full on different identites. I'm as authentic here as I am on my Reddit or professional GitHub accounts, and yet it still will require corporate level shenanigans to find and link them all together
Some of the later accusations could have been targeted smears, or they could have been true.
But if Dr. Ford was intentionally lying in an attempt to smear Kavanaugh, she was laying the groundwork for her accusation all the way back in 2012. That's a pretty far reaching conspiracy.
Sure it could have been, which is why I said "if Dr. Ford was intentionally lying".
If you believe that she was sincere though, I think it's much more likely that Kavanaugh was lying to protect himself than it was that an assault victim randomly mixed him up with her assaulter. From her story she knew him and had fairly prolonged close contact with him. It wasn't like she just caught a glimpse of him from a distance.
The mistaken identity defense was just a way for people to say they didn't believe the story without calling her a liar.
There's the identification during the event, and there's the identification many, many years later (even 2012 was still 30 years after the event).
> I think it's much more likely that Kavanaugh was lying to protect himself than it was that an assault victim randomly mixed him up with her assaulter.
I agree. And if it were 1982 that would weight heavily.
On the other hand, delaying charges for multiple decades, then bringing them out within a narrow several-week window that happens to have the greatest possible maximum political effect...what are the probabilities of underlying motivation?
Unfortunately, either way there are some incredulous events.
> There's the identification during the event, and there's the identification many, many years later (even 2012 was still 30 years after the event).
So you think it's likely that she was attacked by someone in 1982, but she didn't know who that person was at the time, and then she randomly decided in 2012 that it was this one guy she knew from high school?
Or are you saying it’s likely that she knew who it was in 1982, and then in 2012 she misremembered and decided it was someone else?
>I agree. And if it were 1982 that would weight heavily.
On the other hand, delaying charges for multiple decades,
In the early 2000s my younger sister had a similar event happen to her. 2 guys grabbed her and tried to pull her clothes off at a party. My parents called the police, a detective came out and interviewed my sister. He interviewed the guys. The guys denied it. There was no way to prove that she wasn’t lying.
The result: Sorry nothing we can do. It’s your word against theirs. Don’t go to parties.
Christine Ford’s assault allegedly happened in 1982. What do you think the police response would have done in 1982 if girl accused 2 boys of sexual assault, with no evidence, and no witnesses? Keeping in mind one of the boys was the son of a judge. More importantly what do you think a 15 year old girl in 1982 would have thought the response would have been?
>then bringing them out within a narrow several-week window that happens to have the greatest possible maximum political effect...what are the probabilities of underlying motivation?
She told her therapist in 2012. What are the probabilities that she was prescient enough in 2012 to know that some day Kavanaugh would be nominated for SCOTUS so she better start laying the groundwork for an attack?
She called The Washington Post, contacted her congressman, and wrote a letter to her senator in July. Right after Kavanaugh was nominated.
>Unfortunately, either way there are some incredulous events.
Nothing about a 15 year old girl not going to the police about a crime she can’t prove is hard to believe. If anything is hard to believe it’s Kavanaugh’s responses to the questioning. Especially his explanation of “Renate Alumnius”. I don’t buy that one for a second.
Is her testimony enough to convict Kavanaugh of a crime? Certainly not--nor do I think it should be. Personally I’d say there’s a better than 50% chance it’s true though.
> My parents called the police, a detective came out and interviewed my sister.
And this is what is supposed to happen. Unfortunately, there wasn't a conviction (two of the proverbial 10 guilty free), but your sister has far, far, far more credibility than if she contacted law enforcement in 2040 when one of them was in the public spotlight, or about to be promoted. Everything about her and your parents behavior in that situation is very consistent.
> she called The Washington Post, contacted her congressman, and wrote a letter to her senator in July. Right after Kavanaugh was nominated.
Exactly. Assume -- just for a minute -- that Ford is lying.
At what point would she have accused Kavanaugh? 1982? 1983? 1984? 1985? 1986? 1987? 1988? 1989?...2012? 2013?...Jan 2018? Feb 2018? Mar 2018?...Or July 2018?
Obviously that she waited until July 2018 doesn't prove she's wrong. It's just circumstantial.
> Especially his explanation of “Renate Alumnius”.
Agreed. Or Ford's explanation of a phobia of flying so intense she nearly couldn't leave her hometown.
>And this is what is supposed to happen. Unfortunately, there wasn't a conviction (two of the proverbial 10 guilty free), but your sister has far, far, far more credibility than if she contacted law enforcement in 2040 when one of them was in the public spotlight, or about to be promoted. Everything about her and your parents behavior in that situation is very consistent.
Yes she does. That's not the point of my story. The point is that many women today see the end result and they don’t think it’s worth the public shame.
30 years ago in 1982 when a rape investigation could end up with the victim being accused of wanting it because they dressed too slutty.
It’s not about what women should do it’s about what they actually do. The evidence shows that they are very likely not to immediately report assaults.
>Exactly. Assume -- just for a minute -- that Ford is lying.
At what point would she have accused Kavanaugh? 1982? 1983? 1984? 1985? 1986? 1987? 1988? 1989?...2012? 2013?...Jan 2018? Feb 2018? Mar 2018?...Or July 2018?
If she was lying. She was lying in 2012. The potential motive of wanting to sink a SCOTUS nominee, didn’t hold in 2012. And since she didn’t do so publicly, the potential publicity motive didn’t hold then either.
Her testimony isn’t proof, but it’s strong enough evidence that I would pass on the candidate if I were interviewing him for a job.
>Agreed. Or Ford's explanation of a phobia of flying so intense she nearly couldn't leave her hometown.
This explanation?
-------------
Mitchell: I ask that because it’s been reported by the press that you would not submit to an interview with the committee because of your fear of flying. Is that true?
Ford: Well, I was willing—I was hoping that they would come to me. But then realized that was an unrealistic request.
Mitchell: It would have been a quicker trip for me.
[Both laugh.]
Ford: Yes. So, that was certainly what I was hoping, was to avoid having to get on an airplane. But I eventually was able to get up the gumption with the help of some friends, and get on the plane.
-------------
It sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I hate flying, but I fly 2 or 3 times a year for work because they pay me a lot of money to do it. I won’t do it if I can avoid it, but with sufficient motivation I will.
> Now, DeVarney also said in her August conversation with Blasey Ford, Blasey Ford told her a story about how when she was remodeling her home with her husband, she sort of insisted to her husband that every bedroom had to have a door that led to the outside space because otherwise she would feel trapped.
> Now, just a disturbing and noteworthy detail from what she told me, she said that in the years of knowing Blasey Ford and being friends with her, she already knew that she had a hard time being in enclosed spaces and she also did not enjoy flying for this reason because, in her words, an airplane was the ultimate closed space where you cannot get away.
---
> Mitchell: When you were here in the mid — mid-Atlantic area back in August, end of July, August, how did you get here?
> Ford: Also by airplane. I come here once a year during the summer to visit my family.
> Mitchell: OK. In fact, you fly fairly frequently for your hobbies and your — you’ve had to fly for your work. Is that true?
> Ford: Correct, unfortunately.
> Mitchell: I also saw on your C.V. that you list the following interests of surf travel, and you, in parentheses” Hawaii, Costa Rica, South Pacific islands and French Polynesia.” Have you been all to those places?
> Ford: Correct.
> Mitchell: By airplane?
> Ford: Yes.
> Mitchell: And your interests also include oceanography, Hawaiian and Tahitian culture. Did you travel by air as a part of those interests?
> Ford: Correct.
Yes, of course you can be afraid of flying and still fly.
But to be so frightened to request that multiple Congressmen flys across the country to see you, when you already fly multiple times every year...
It's not impossible, just improbable, or spun. Like Renate Alumnius.
> she said that in the years of knowing Blasey Ford and being friends with her, she already knew that she had a hard time being in enclosed spaces and she also did not enjoy flying
So it's well known to her friends that she doesn't like flying. If she's been lying she's been doing it for some time. It's not something she made up for this situation.
>But to be so frightened to request that multiple Congressmen flys across the country to see you, when you already fly multiple times every year...
It doesn't seem improbably to me. I would literally do the exact same thing.
Despite flying multiple times per year. If a group of people asked me to fly out to meet them, I'd request that they fly out to meet me instead. Particularly if this group of people was likely going to be hostile anyway.
Only if they refused, and I was sufficiently motivated, would I agree to fly out to meet them.
I can fly. I don't like to fly, and if there's a way around it I'll take it. This seems to be exactly what she's saying.
The way theregister.co.uk works is that along with their own writers, anyone can submit articles. They pick whether to publish it it/edit then publish.
Most news sites do this, even the biggest and most respected. But I think they get a larger amount of their content this way, and consequentially some of it can be a bit self-promoty.
I could be wrong, but that seems exceedingly unlikely given the amount of stories he authors. Very much seems like either he or The Register got paid for this article.
ok but what is the quality control like on all these tools to help do you illegal stuff? Better or worse than normal software.
Is there any open source tools to help you do illegal stuff? Because if you can't see the source I think a good illegal tool moneymaking scheme would be to sell the tools to do illegal stuff and then blackmail the people who did illegal stuff for a part of the money. but that might also be dangerous.
Almost all of the tools used to do legal stuff can also be used to do illegal stuff. You think scam websites are deep down built on Linux and Apache like everything else?
I gave a talk at Denver startup week last year about the underlying profit incentives tied to fake news and how industry reforms in the way media companies do business could not only benefit the advertisers but also stop Fake news. At the end of the talk I had 3 people ask how they could make fake news to promote their startups. That this has turned into a booming industry surprises me 0%, though it is depressing.
Yeah let me try and find some good articles. As for my talk, the tl;dr is that the lack of inventory transparency by ad networks coupled with the way that the CPM pricing model is currently administered incentivizes a system where the only that matters is clicks and not context or outcomes. Fake news is an extreme example, but a less sinister one is the Buzzfeeds and Upworthys of the world.
Unfortunately, I don't believe it was recorded. That said I've been submitting it to some local TedXs so hopefully, I can get a recording in the near future.
My thought experiment for considering the moral limits of capitalism: If producing Soylent Green were legal and profitable, would there be actors willing to produce and sell it?
If you answer no, see: Philip Morris, Lockheed, Beretta, etc.
Coca-Cola will likely kill more people than guns and organized crime, honestly. But I see your point.
There is a lot of evidence that organized crime is a substitute for opportunities in legitimate society, so that example is perhaps not applicable. The opioid crisis caused by US pharma may be a bigger and better example.
"Organized crime" is an exceptionally poor example since the premise involves the legality of the activity/product. Edited. Regarding Coca-Cola vs guns - the list wasn't comprehensive :).
Organized crime is a huge problem. Like just take Mexico. Really poor and that's because of organized crime. If they were richer they could probably save a lot of lives. I think that's a bigger factor than the number of people shot dead.
You're being downvoted for some reason, but the point on morality and capitalism is sound.
For examples you might have been better choosing cases where the production rather than use by customers is problematic.
Radium paint and dials, asbestos, prior to 20th century regulations food and medicine fraud and adulteration so endemic that finding just the correct product was almost impossible. Which is what led those regulations in the first place.
Allowing businesses to divorce themselves from responsibility for the effects of what they produce, regardless of consumer choice, is too easy. I have no idea what the equivalent of "Saturday morning cartoons" is today, but 20 years ago, that slot was filled with commercials for sugary foods, targeted at children. Now we have payday loans, "buy here pay here" and a host of other services that capitalize on unsophisticated consumers in precarious economic conditions.
Capitalism is what it is - an utterly amoral engine of profit. Without regulation and legal frameworks it will create slaves, destroy the environment, kill and maim people - there's almost no limit.
What the OP's anecdote illustrates is that there's also a deep cultural issue at play.
Free Markets aren't amoral at all, if I produce something of value and we swap value, I fail to see how that is amoral. In fact, preventing that transaction is amoral. Slavery itself was amoral, and codified and enforced by the state.
Many in the South abhorred slavery and segregation, but had no choice but to follow the law.
Killing and maiming people has been a State activity since they've existed. It's one of the things they're very efficient at.
I think you confused the words "amoral" and "immoral". OP was talking about "amoral" - lack of concern about moral principles. You seem to be talking about "immoral" - actively breaking moral principles.
Wow. Laws which were put in place by plantation and slave owners wishing to preserve the profit and status quo they created. They controlled most of the machinery of government as well as their little plantation.
Slavery was only ended at the insistence of laws put in place by the state.
This is some absolutely disgusting historical revisionism with regards to how the south treated slavery.
Make no mistake, Slavery was an intended feature. Not a bug, nor a result of a state gone wild. It was considered part of their economy and part of their free market.
That's a remarkably confident statement that's completely unprovable.
I could just as easily posit easy international travel, world trade, mass media, democracy, and many other things as more effective than h-bombs for bringing about the relative peace of the late 20th/early 21st century.
Those particular things have the added benefit that they generally don't risk the side-effect of world annihilation.
Though "easy international travel, world trade, mass media, democracy, etc." were not invented at almost the precise moment that all-out large scale wars ("world wars") on Earth ended.
I agree with you, people can do all kinds of terrible things especially for the sake of profit. I believe comparing defense contractors and firearms manufacturers with eating people could be considered disingenuous, however.
Like other commenters, I think this thought experiment goes much too far. On the other hand, many companies worked with the Nazis, work with the Saudis, Russians, and many others today, and sell all sorts of things to oppressive governments including the tools of oppression (such as those selling censorship and hacking tools to various dictatorships[0]). If the U.S. became an authoritarian dictatorship, I don't doubt that many companies would do business with the dictator too.
But I'd like to examine it with more nuance: Does it vary across time or across place? Is it different than the culture of the people from which the company emerged (e.g., how do private American citizens behave differently than large American companies)? Most importantly, on what factors does good and bad corporate behavior depend? My guess is that some of this research has been done - I'd love some pointers to it.
Is this something that requires government oversight or is it just a business plan/strategy. If the latter then the free market should tell you that your plan is right or wrong. If it requires government overshight I would say its inherently flawed. "Fake news" isnt a problem the problem is a lazy populace that take any word for granted as long as the production value is good enough.
Fake news is how free speech is supposed to work. People get to say what they want and the populace decides for themselves what is right or wrong. Liable and slander are still in effect.
> Fake news is how free speech is supposed to work.
I can't agree with your statement. Game news is the contrary of what free speach stands for. Free speach is about being able to express your opinions. Fake news are intentionally misleading and hurt other people's well-being.
> Fake news" isnt a problem the problem is a lazy populace that take any word for granted as long as the production value is good enough.
Blame the victim. If you cheat me, it is my fault to not see thru your lie, if you rob me it's my fault for not being more vigilant.
If I lie about my products, or about other things for economical gain. Shouldn't the state make sure that I'm punished for that? Should not be the same case that for breaking a contract?
> Free speach is about being able to express your opinions. Fake news are intentionally misleading and hurt other people's well-being.
As fake news is a form of expression, how do you propose to draw a meaningful distinction between protected speech and speech that may hurt the well-being of others? Especially one that does not risk chilling effects or becoming prior restraint, and is thus compatible with freedom of speech.
I wonder if we'll look back at the Bloomberg "chip implant" story as fake news, and if that's the case, can you imagine the police breaking into their offices with a warrant because of it?
Fraud is one thing, but hiring some e-celeb to pitch your product isn't something we need jack-booted thugs kicking in doors for. We don't even have an objective definition of "fake news", and you'll never convince me the State should be the one defining or enforcing that.
I went to a local tech event. A few folks gave talks about their products / services and their marketing. A few included people straight up talking about paying "influencers" or pod casters, or youtubers, to mention their product or service and so forth. Nobody seemed to note anything about disclosing that it was an advertisement or not.
I liked to think that maybe they just assumed the influencer was going to mention it was paid or everyone understood that was the case but me .... but it never was actually spoken about.
I couldn't help but wonder if the people paying for these services think that they are ever exposed to other companies doing the same? Do they care?
> I liked to think that maybe they just assumed the influencer was going to mention it was paid or everyone understood that was the case but me .... but it never was actually spoken about.
All major social media (Instagram, Youtube, ...) require you to disclose any promotions. It's absolutely normal in "old" media. I think that it's assumed if the audience was composed of actual business people.
I'm a local "influencer" [1] and am part of a local group of other influencers for the city I live in and marking a promotion as such just goes without saying. The FTC even has rules on influencer promotions [2]. I see a lot of sponsored posts from other bloggers and influencers I'm friends with and they're all marked as "#ad" or "#sponsored" or something along those lines.
No one is saying "I'm running an AdSense campaign but forgot to tell Google that they need to mark it as an advertisement!" It goes without saying. These people are professionals same as anyone else and know the rules of their trade same as anyone else.
[1] "influencer" meaning someone with a significant presence on social media, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, etc.
It's been pretty pervasive in certain niches for a long time. Homeopathic health products, for example. You can find lots of ads disguised as news reports that are more than a decade old. Dr Oz has been slinging crap for a similar time period.
8 years ago I used NLP to generate fake user profile bios for a social media company (not one you've heard of). The SEO/marketing guys went nuts over it and started using it for everything. It was super effective and they had the money to scale it. Eventually Panda came out and hosed the rankings on the blogs/domains they used it for.
Around the same time I discovered https://narrativescience.com/ and read about how they accomplished the same task. It was essentially similar to what I had done - write tons of templates, like Mad Libs, and then algorithmically fill in the blanks. Mine sometimes generated nonsense (e.g. "I love Mozart! I saw him in concert last year."). But for our purposes, or rather the purposes the marketing people came up with, it didn't matter much.
I saw the list of Narrative Science's investors and noted that In-Q-Tel was on there. Then I asked myself why the CIA's R&D funding arm would want that. The answer was obvious - to generate misinformation to spread to adversary orgs/states. Drown the real message in a sea of lies and your foes will waste more resources trying to find the truth.
Hi I am interested in this sort of service. I have 2 concerns. First is I don't install browser extensions unless I really trust them. Too many are pumped up and then sold to some malware company, one update later and you're owned. My second concern is that if this works well eventually the fake news producers will become aware of it, reverse engineer it and then attempt to game the detection.
What would make more sense is to build a certificate system around this that news organizations can use to declare an article is Fake News Free. Might be a nice business to start riding the Fake News Boom.
Taking this idea. What would be the hypothetical flow for the recent Bloomberg chip article? I’m sure it would have been published with the cert since it’s from Bloomberg but later when it turns out to be less than true or more inflammatory than intended. Do they lose their cert? Or maybe just the article has to persist with the cert rating?
I love the idea, just curious how it works logistically.
Bloomberg registers with cert auth. They publish articles and each has a pending cert item (image?) on their page that is loaded from 3rd party cert auth. The cert auth uses algos to determine if it's fake or not and published results back to the placeholder.
Edit: Forgot to mention, please do take the idea. And good luck!
Thx for the info. So could this possibly run as a browser plugin?
That way the site doesn’t need to assert its own trust? And you wouldn’t have to deal with the heavy lift of updating every news site.
Just thinking out loud typing... you could integrate this with an ad blocker so that only cert content could show an ad. This would create an incentive model not only for the publisher but the advertising partners to make sure content is good and certified. Sites and content with no cert or lost cert would block ads for that page and for repeat offenders you could escalate to say all ads are blocked for the sesssion.
While I’m not a fan of ads I understand their purpose and maybe with something like the above, the market could find equilibrium once again.
False flagging, FUD based on groupthink and cognitive biases, accidental suppression of newly created websites in favor of older ones. Just to start off a list.
Not everything is solvable through algorithms. Especially if your initial goad is ill-defined. There are about half a dozen completely separate things that are being labeled as "fake news" today, from websites impersonating news agencies and pushing lies, to actual news agencies pushing lies, to viral hoaxes on social media.
Ultimately, whether a news article is fake or not is determined by its relation to reality. You could use context as heuristic to filter out complete garbage, but this is something that's actually being abused by many subcategories of "fake news" to begin with.
People should be able to use their own judgement to spot nonsense, without algorithms telling them what to think. If they can't, the first questions should be "why?" and "why now?", not "how do I make an app to fix it?".
Personally, I think the underlying assumption behind current social media are profoundly broken and can't be fixed just by sprinkling more tech on top of it all. Obvious example: if you release a news-checking app and someone else releases a fake news-checking app, how do you expect your users to choose the right one?
> People should be able to use their own judgement to spot nonsense, without algorithms telling them what to think. If they can't, the first questions should be "why?" and "why now?", not "how do I make an app to fix it?".
Sort of.
People should also be able to use their own judgement to spot scams.
And yet there are spam filters. Both to detect garbage, and also to hide garbage.
Obviously, the email client that classifies my bank loan documents as "spam" is not going to be popular.
I launched something like that as a side project https://www.quod.us (to let people report misinformation) and I was going to add an API to let people report things from anywhere, but I got busy with other projects.
What I found was that it's really hard to get people to report this stuff, I never really found my ideal user. A lot of people signed up, but only a few people ever actively reported things. I never finished validating the concept, but my general feel is that the only way to keep the project afloat is via grants and donations, and that's hard to do.
If you haven't seen Century of the Self[1] I recommend it. It is a documentary about the history, and rise of PR. We are now, perhaps, at the end of the century of the self - as the trustworthiness (and hence value) of broadcast information drops to zero (not that it has yet, but it will). How our current news/media copes, and what replaces it are still unknown.
>How our current news/media copes, and what replaces it are still unknown...
You should be more worried about how the current government copes with it. I think fake news might have helped Trump gain power in part, but it's DEFINITELY contributing to Trump losing power. Which illustrates that it's much easier to tear down with fake news than it is to build up.
That doesn't bode at all well for anyone who wants to be a mayor, or president, or senator, or police chief or whatever in the future.
100% agree with you, but I think for a lot of people who voted for Trump it might definitely have been an act of "tearing down" what was perceived as the corrupt establishment politics by these voters.
I thought that was the gradual exposure and prosecution of his money-laundering accomplices, along with the conspicuous nastiness of his few policies, and the huge amount of time spent golfing or tweeting?
Based on what the experts they hired told them this is example of "Telling only part of the story, showing bias, spinning things".
The experts NBC hired to conduct the demonstration insisted that the rockets wouldn't matter unless fuel spilled. They also told them that the explosion was sparked by a broken headlamp, not the rockets they added as part of the demonstration.
Additionally, the demonstration was designed not as a scientific test, but as a demonstration of something that had been proven to happen in the past. The problem was that the audience was likely mislead into believing it was an experiment as opposed to a dramatic recreation. They didn't create the story out of thin air.
Regardless it was 25 years ago, and the news organization in question was shamed, retracted the story, and made a apology.
Q: Is it true that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moscow won a car in a lottery?
A: In principle yes, but:
it wasn't Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov;
he is not from Moscow but from Odessa;
it was not a car but a bicycle;
he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him.
It's not fake. He was in Saudi Arabia in the back of the Saudi Arabian hotel he said he was staying at.
From the linked article: "It looked like a studio shot because they are using studio lights, outside, at night. They are standing on a raised wooden frame built especially for their reports."
It was from an advert on a legitimate website, but it had redirects/popups that show only on mobile devices.(this seems to affect a lot of even normally very trustworthy websites for some reason)
Honestly, some of those fake articles could have legitimately been written by the original Mirror. It's slightly amusing to me how they pretend like they're the beacon of truth and journalism in that article; I'd be completely sympathetic if it was the BBC, but it's not. I'm not saying they deserved this, but I'll be lying if I said I don't feel a small amount of schadenfreude. The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Mirror are so unreliable and clickbaity.
Agree that the term wasn't helpful overall (it unfortunately is politically loaded).
But looking at the original paper (already posted but re-linked here -- http://info.digitalshadows.com/rs/457-XEY-671/images/Digital...) I guess the author was trying to link a "current news event" with various other disinformation that is more relevant from a business perspective -- black hat SEO strategies, site / brand spoofing, social media spamming, and the like.
I'm not sure how helpful the high-level overview is either :) but from what I can tell the intended audience was non-technical. One that, say, might not even be familiar with any of the above terms in the first place, yet is vaguely familiar with the concept that cyber threats exist, and might be looking at purchasing something from a digital security company (like, um, Digital Shadows) to help this. Businesses absolutely would be concerned about brand protection and preventing any malice (digital or otherwise) that could damage the business.
The concept of "fake" news is a slippery slope. Anyone that's in the business of gathering and presenting news has a number of vested interests. Sensationalism. Fabrication. Fear mongering. Persuasion. Ingratiation. Language itself is mostly a tool for some shade of lying and/or intimidation, with the occasional fringe use of conveying factual information or for enabling cooperation between peers.
Usually the kind of people who esteem journalists as philosopher-kings, and the organizations who employ them as paragons of perfect, unassailable virtue.
We are not talking about exaggeration, we are talking about people who make actual fake news. Fake and as in completely artificial, no basis in reality, and imaginary. Its creating news that doesn't exist.
> Sun Won't Rise Tomorrow, Click Now To Find Out Who's At Fault
^ This is what is effectively going on. Its objectively false and fake news. But the problem is that people are believing this shit.
The fake news phenomenon is something that worries me at a local level: friends and family. I'm constantly bombarded by forwarded messages from them that don't pass a simple cursory review and are 99% fake if you dig further.
I've tried to combat this by researching what's forwarded to me and pointing that out (including how I discovered it was false) but people either don't reply back or get hostile, assuming I'm one of the "others" (because these messages are usually trying to instill people to hate something). I have _never_ received a thank you from anyone for this and nobody ever apologized back, and I try to be extra polite when pointing these errors.
I've left various chat groups and feel my energy is depleted to continue on this fight. It amazes me that people default to a "believe in everything that comes from WhatsApp/FB/Instagram" mentality versus distrusting the Internet completely (which would be more sensible if coupled with a minimum amount of research on what's shared with you).
I feel most people who trust social media for news are super-late Internet adopters who don't quite understand how any of this stuff works. I know some older (but not old, really) people who use Facebook without understanding the boundary between Facebook and the rest of the web. They just see text on the screen and make arbitrary assumptions on where it's coming from.
This is the price society is paying for making social media "accessible" through phone apps and such.
A lot of people with that mindset really don't care where it comes from. Like you said, they're in part trying to fuel some hatred towards a particular person or group of people. It simply exists to propogate ideas in those who are unwilling to listen to any sort of reason, who will then spread and share these ideas with others. These people are perfectly fine living in a bubble and feeding off of each other all because they are unwilling to form their own opinions and face the facts, imagined or real.
I've had very similar experiences and find it really frustrating. People inherently don't like being wrong, don't like being proven to be gullible and are less likely to believe information that doesn't reaffirm their beliefs. It's a scary issue that's only likely to get worse.
Belonging: people are really desperate for things to participate in and cheerlead. It doesn't matter if it's true, and (rather like the famous paper on criminal signalling) it's better if it's not. Because that demonstrates that the people who listen to what you say believe in you. Conversely, by contradicting people you're showing them that you don't belong together.
Gnosticism: salvation through secret knowledge. The public sphere is compromised, so the best kind of knowledge is forbidden and non-mainstream. "Doctors don't want you to know this".
In a way, every false chain letter is a tiny cult.
Most of what they would need has existed "as a service" for shady internet marketers, SEO companies, etc, for quite some time. Buying tweets, likes, spammed/spun content/comments, and so on isn't terribly new.
Personal news hygiene must be practiced in the same way food hygiene is practiced. You will not eat a free sandwich found on a public toilet floor. You should not consume news sourced from FB, Twitter, etc...
Define your hygienic sources of news and stick to them, accept that you may need to pay for quality. Enforcing this is a personal responsibility.
Oh... and teach the children personal news hygiene.
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