Author Topic: Faking news for cash  (Read 6098 times)

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Offline Maik

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Faking news for cash
« on: Wednesday, 09 November, 2016 @ 13:14:00 »
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The rise and rise of fake news

The deliberate making up of news stories to fool or entertain is nothing new. But the arrival of social media has meant real and fictional stories are now presented in such a similar way that it can sometimes be difficult to tell the two apart.

While the internet has enabled the sharing of knowledge in ways that previous generations could only have dreamed of, it has also provided ample proof of the line, often attributed to Winston Churchill, that "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on".

So with research suggesting an increasing proportion of US adults are getting their news from social media, it's likely that more and more of us are seeing - and believing - information that is not just inaccurate, but totally made up.

There are hundreds of fake news websites out there, from those which deliberately imitate real life newspapers, to government propaganda sites, and even those which tread the line between satire and plain misinformation.

But why go to such trouble? The answer is there is big money to be made.

"We've had stories that have made $10,000 (about £8,100). When we really tap in to something and get it to go big then we're talking about in the thousands of dollars that are made per story," Montgomery says.

"Recently we did a story about Hillary Clinton being fed the answers prior to the debate. There was already some low level chatter about that having happened - it was all fake - but that sort of headline gets into the right wing bubble and they run with it."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-37846860


As it says in the article, part o the problem is that sloppy journalists pick up 'news' on social media and report it as true without checking. And, unfortunately, Fart's win isn't fake news. Though I suspect there's a lot fake about him.

Offline Maik

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Re: Faking news for cash
« Reply #1 on: Wednesday, 09 November, 2016 @ 13:28:23 »
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This election has laid bare Facebook's deteriorating relationship with the truth

The US election has been a low point for Facebook’s relationship with the truth. Dozens of fake websites, several run by teenagers in Macedonia, are making a decent living writing purposefully fake news targeted at Donald Trump supporters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/11/09/facebook-has-a-deteriorating-relationship-with-the-truth---and-d/


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How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News
BuzzFeed News identified more than 100 pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

“This is the news of the millennium!” said the story on WorldPoliticus.com. Citing unnamed FBI sources, it claimed Hillary Clinton will be indicted in 2017 for crimes related to her email scandal.


“Your Prayers Have Been Answered,” declared the headline.

For Trump supporters, that certainly seemed to be the case. They helped the baseless story generate over 140,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.

Meanwhile, roughly 6,000 miles away in a small town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a young man watched as money began trickling into his Google AdSense account.

Over the past year, the Macedonian town of Veles (population 45,000) has experienced a digital gold rush as locals launched at least 140 US politics websites... They almost all publish aggressively pro-Trump content aimed at conservatives and Trump supporters in the US.

The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo

Offline Maik

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Re: Faking news for cash
« Reply #2 on: Tuesday, 15 November, 2016 @ 16:41:41 »
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Facebook and Google promise to cut off fake news websites from advertising

Facebook and Google have pledged to ban websites that peddle fake news from their advertising services after the world’s two most popular websites were accused of spreading false and incendiary articles about the US presidential election.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/11/15/facebook-and-google-promise-to-cut-off-fake-news-websites-from-a/

Offline Maik

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Re: Faking news for cash
« Reply #3 on: Wednesday, 07 December, 2016 @ 14:29:37 »
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Trump adviser’s son loses transition team job for spreading fake news

The son of Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has lost his job in the president-elect’s transition team after he spread a false conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton that led to shots being fired in pizza restaurant.

While working for his father, Michael Flynn Jr tweeted an erroneous theory that Clinton’s allies had been running a paedophile ring in the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlour in Washington.

Even after a man on Sunday fired a rifle in the restaurant, in an incident apparently sparked by the conspiracy theory, Flynn said on Twitter that the fake news would “remain a story” until proven false.

The incident has heightened concerns about the incoming administration’s fondness for fake news and raised further questions about the suitability of Flynn Sr, who has also shared bogus stories on social media.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/07/trump-adviser-son-michael-flynn-sacked-pizzagate-comet-ping-pong-restaurant

Offline Maik

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Re: Faking news for cash
« Reply #4 on: Wednesday, 22 February, 2017 @ 18:06:07 »
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If newspapers won't check viral stories, who will listen to them about fake news?

Even as the media continues to take Facebook to task over its fake news problem, many parts of the news business are doing their best to undermine their argument that they should be considered more trustworthy.

On Tuesday evening, a video of a female cyclist responding to cat calls from workers in a van by chasing them and pulling off a wing mirror was picked up by the media, after being posted on a Facebook page and attracting millions of views.

Most outlets including the Sun, The Mirror, Mail Online and the Huffington Post reported it as fact without even mentioning the source.

The Independent also covered it, saying the source of the video couldn’t give any more details, while the Telegraph mentioned it came from viral creative agency Jungle Creations.

The Evening Standard even went as far as suggesting there could be concerns about its authenticity, though not until the 14th paragraph of the story. And the quote they included from Jungle Creations co-founder Paul Beiboer was particularly revealing. “We couldn’t verify its authenticity, but we don’t think it’s fake.” So the people providing the video couldn’t even confirm it was real.

As my colleague Elena Cresci has pointed out, there were lots of reasons to suspect the video was a hoax. Yet not a single publication has yet responded to a question about whether they tried to independently verify whether it was real before publishing.

And inevitably, it looks likely that it was staged.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/22/newspapers-viral-stories-fake-news-cyclist


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Why a viral video of a cyclist's revenge on catcallers may not be all it seems
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/22/why-a-viral-video-of-a-cyclists-revenge-on-catcallers-may-not-be-all-it-seems

Offline TonyKath

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Re: Faking news for cash
« Reply #5 on: Wednesday, 22 February, 2017 @ 19:37:27 »
Fake vids on YouTube... surely not!  ;)

Tony