A 12-Month Campaign of Fake News to Influence Elections Costs $400K

Yep:

-a lot about what was written in the presidential election last year seems to have been wishful thinking or meant to influence not inform. And this is from somebody who doesn't like Trump.

- Swedish police has no-go zones, firefighters gets attacked - journalists keeps telling everything is fine.

- and bad reporting from the Middle east has plenty of crazy examples. (Journalist: "Israelis, the most advanced army in the area, actually tries to kill civilians". Fact is of course, for anyone who bothers to think for 15 seconds that if the Israelian army tried to kill civilians then I must say they have failed spectacularily.)

> Perhaps prohibit news organizations from lying; then we only need to figure out how to do that without falling into censorship.

That's an interesting idea, though it then leaves a few very difficult questions that would need answering. Namely:

1. Who's a news organisation/journalist (this is already an incredibly controversial point as is)?

2. How do you prove intent? Because you could easily defend lies as mistakes on the organisation's part, which could serve as a get out clause for everything but obvious 'fake news' sites.

3. As well as perhaps the issue of who is actually within reach of your laws. The internet is global and the laws on it are localised as well.

seems like you need people to agree on "what is truth" first?

>In practice many places have outlawed various forms of lying effectively. Look at Canada and their false advertising laws or UK's defamation laws. Neither are perfect, both have some unintended side-effects but neither elected trump.

When the government has laws to suppress "lying", but also gets to determine what constitutes a lie, you've pretty much abandoned any pretence of liberal democracy.

Well, there is this extremely fishy article from Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/the-life-and-death-...

They make no mention that any malware was found in this email and I seriously doubt that anybody would be stupid enough to make a spear phishing attack so obvious and suspicious. Who in his right mind would click confirmation link on an invitation to a service he didn't request?

As I see it, there is zero evidence that it wasn't just some random idiot typing this publicly known email address into the signup form but they don't even consider such a mundane possibility.

James Andrew Lewis, the expert they quote, appears to be more of a politician than technologist.

edit:

And some verified fake news:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/ru...

The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space. Nobody who lives in that part of the world today ever thought of themselves as living in Novorossiya and bearing allegiance to it—at least until several months ago. Now, Novorossiya is being imagined into being: Russian media are showing maps of its ‘geography,’ while Kremlin-backed politicians are writing its ‘history’ into school textbooks.

Problem is, Novorossiya indeed existed on the territory of modern Ukraine. There is an English Wikipedia article on it dating back to 2005 and I've even confirmed it with a dead tree book from the '80s.

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

edit:

I guess the above doesn't really pass as evidence that "most journalists spend their days discrediting themselves", but it does show that at least sometimes they are pretty happy to skimp on fact checking and basic sanity if a story fits whatever narrative they personally believe.