The term 'fake news' is unhelpful.
Yellow journalism, deliberately confusing and deflecting writing and scams are as old as printing
Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
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Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telling only part of the story, showing bias, spinning things. Surely. But fake news? Examples please..
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977814,...
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.
Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
#33Fake news as a service; CNN and NBC have been doing that for decades... well ahead of the curve.
Where do you get your news, oh wise one?
Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
#34The 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.
Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
#35I 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.
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.
Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
#36I 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... 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.
Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
#37I'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.…
> The key part is you have to have a massive dataset of historical information.
Why is this historical information not susceptible to the exact same issues today's news is?
Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
#38I 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... 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…
Here's someone far more reputable to feel sympathy for, Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert:
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/fake-martin-lewis...
Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
#39I 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... 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)
People promoting affiliates are using this technique too...It's been around loooooong before fake news was fake news
Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks
#40I 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.
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.