
Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks - hsnewman
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/fake_news_as_a_service/
======
jsonne
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.

~~~
whyaduck
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.

~~~
smt88
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.

~~~
notatcomputer68
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.

------
gtirloni
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).

~~~
gambler
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.

~~~
twblalock
I know millenials who fall for fake news just as much as older people do.

------
ryanlol
Direct link without lead harvesting nonsense:
[http://info.digitalshadows.com/rs/457-XEY-671/images/Digital...](http://info.digitalshadows.com/rs/457-XEY-671/images/DigitalShadows-
TheBusinessofDisinformationFakeNews.pdf)

This is super lazy, the paper seems like it was produced by a PR drone whose
knowledge on the subject was limited to a list of keywords to google.

~~~
strictnein
The article itself is pretty lazy too, like it was a paid placement. It
mentions "Digital Shadows" nine times.

~~~
blinky1456
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.

~~~
ryanlol
I'm pretty sure that John Leyden works for The Register.
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/John-
Leyden](https://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/John-Leyden)

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.

------
fredley
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.

1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04)

~~~
bilbo0s
> _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.

~~~
manux
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.

------
blinky1456
I have come across cloned news site of mirror.co.uk promoting crypto-currency
scams.

They talk about it here: [https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/warning-fake-
mirror-we...](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/warning-fake-mirror-
websites-promoted-12427136)

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)

~~~
adtac
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.

~~~
sefrost
Here's someone far more reputable to feel sympathy for, Martin Lewis of Money
Saving Expert:

[https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/fake-martin-
lewis...](https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/fake-martin-lewis-ads/)

------
olivermarks
The term 'fake news' is unhelpful.

Yellow journalism, deliberately confusing and deflecting writing and scams are
as old as printing

~~~
soundwave106
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...](http://info.digitalshadows.com/rs/457-XEY-671/images/DigitalShadows-
TheBusinessofDisinformationFakeNews.pdf)) 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.

------
blueadept111
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.

~~~
jotm
Really not sure what kind of people are downvoting these kinds of comments.
Anyone care to enlighten?

~~~
daxorid
Usually the kind of people who esteem journalists as philosopher-kings, and
the organizations who employ them as paragons of perfect, unassailable virtue.

The Fourth Estate is not to be criticized.

~~~
aurailious
What kind of conspiracy nonsense is this?

~~~
olivermarks
'It’s Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled'

------
sorokod
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.

------
burtonator
I've been working on some algorithms I think can identify fake news easily and
reliably.

The key part is you have to have a massive dataset of historical information.

With Datastreamer (my company) we have about 1PB of news, blogs, and social
media from the last 4-5 years.

I'm curious if it would make sense to ship an open/public API that would allow
people both to report AND check on whether something is fake news.

Sort of like Hacker News but a browser extension that allows you to flag
whether you think something is fake.

~~~
gambler
What could possibly go wrong?

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?

~~~
paulddraper
> 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.

------
tyingq
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.

------
bryanrasmussen
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.

~~~
PeanutNore
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?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Sure, but the article suggested that there were tools that were written with
pulling particular scams as their purpose.

------
sbhn
Click baits gonna click bait

------
jotm
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.

~~~
yifanl
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.

~~~
tomatotomato37
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

~~~
yifanl
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.

~~~
tomatotomato37
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

