
Fake News Is Unbelievably Cheap to Produce - smacktoward
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608105/fake-news-is-unbelievably-cheap
======
CM30
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.

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notadoc
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.

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trendia
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
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...

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

[http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-
mac...](http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-macedonian-
teen-earns-thousands-publishing-lies-n692451)

------
2sk21
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.

~~~
yrro
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
That book is awesome in many, many ways.

~~~
yrro
I really enjoyed it. That said, I also really enjoyed this in-depth takedown
of the novel and its ideas: [http://gmfbrown.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/why-
anathem-sucks.htm...](http://gmfbrown.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/why-anathem-
sucks.html)

------
davidw
Reminds me of the bullshit asymmetry principle:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle)

------
surge
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
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.

~~~
surge
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".

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aaron-lebo
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record)

~~~
thinkingemote
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
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.

~~~
fivestar
They are left wing examples, but I know that during 2003 during the propaganda
campaign that got us the second Iraq War that there was an unacknowledged but
very real effort of the same size and scope going on initiated by the neocons.
I am absolutely certain of what I observed back then. No one--no one--would
believe me, though.

I would add that the comedian Dennis Miller was also drafted into spouting
pro-war propaganda on late night tv.

It was all very deliberate.

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actuallyalys
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.

------
sr2
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitribune)

~~~
ThrustVectoring
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.

------
crispyambulance
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.

------
sven-j
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
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.

~~~
smacktoward
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.

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

------
sctb
Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552553)

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

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

