[anna]

We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned

A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one.

We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. The site was registered anonymously. So we brought in some professional help.

Interesting article and interview at the link.

So they find the fake-news creator and find out that he's a Democrat who's making a lucrative living off the gullibility of the alt-right. I've seen that gullibility in action first-hand as I countered them elsewhere online by frequently debunking the headlines they'd race to post. It didn't seem to occur to them to fact-check the stories they passed on, they believed them without questioning. That was so incredibly disturbing to me. And they never seemed to learn. As fast as one story was debunked, they'd post another clunker.

Here's more:

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.

"What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says.

During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," Coler says. "It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election."

This gave me a chuckle:

Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.



I wouldn't go so far as to say never... but I definitely think they're less likely to take the bait.

[anna]

My first attempt at posting a thread. My apologies for the formatting, I couldn't find a way to indent text.

[quetzalcoatl]

I'm worried that the Democrats are going in a really bad direction with this tack. The Washington Post is relying on a list compiled by the shadowy PropOrNot, which is allegedly non partisan. It's not. The list does include some fake news vendors, but the main emphasis is discrediting any alternative new source. Not only does Zero Hedge take a hit, but left outlets like Counterpunch, Naked Capitalism, truthdig, etc. The "List" is described as sources that reliably echo Russian porpaganda, which in practice means anyone who questions the neoconservative narrative.

The membership of PropOrNot is secret and its methodology is totally hidden. Not good signs.

http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html

They even have a Chrome Extension to flag questionable websites. Lovely.

[anna]

More on fake news:

How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study

Eric Tucker, a 35-year-old co-founder of a marketing company in Austin, Tex., had just about 40 Twitter followers. But his recent tweet about paid protesters being bused to demonstrations against President-elect Donald J. Trump fueled a nationwide conspiracy theory — one that Mr. Trump joined in promoting.

Mr. Tucker's post was shared at least 16,000 times on Twitter and more than 350,000 times on Facebook. The problem is that Mr. Tucker got it wrong. There were no such buses packed with paid protesters.

But that didn't matter.

While some fake news is produced purposefully by teenagers in the Balkans or entrepreneurs in the United States seeking to make money from advertising, false information can also arise from misinformed social media posts by regular people that are seized on and spread through a hyperpartisan blogosphere.

Here, The New York Times deconstructs how Mr. Tucker’s now-deleted declaration on Twitter the night after the election turned into a fake-news phenomenon. It is an example of how, in an ever-connected world where speed often takes precedence over truth, an observation by a private citizen can quickly become a talking point, even as it is being proved false.

[anna]

I'm worried that the Democrats are going in a really bad direction with this tack. The Washington Post is relying on a list compiled by the shadowy PropOrNot, which is allegedly non partisan. It's not. The list does include some fake news vendors, but the main emphasis is discrediting any alternative new source. Not only does Zero Hedge take a hit, but left outlets like Counterpunch, Naked Capitalism, truthdig, etc. The "List" is described as sources that reliably echo Russian porpaganda, which in practice means anyone who questions the neoconservative narrative.

The membership of PropOrNot is secret and its methodology is totally hidden. Not good signs.

http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html

They even have a Chrome Extension to flag questionable websites. Lovely.

Putting up the original WaPo article here for further research:

Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say

[anna]

I have to say I knew the alt-right was gullible, but reading the NYT timeline of the phantom story from Austin it really hits home. And no surprise at all to see FreeRepublic and Gateway Pundit right in the thick of things.

[noemon]

For all intents and purposes in this video, "Macedonia" refers to F.Y.R.O.M.

[Hong Wu]

This fake news thing is kinda sad. The MSM is afraid they won't survive the next eight years so they are trying to gin up an assault against everyone who was right about the election. I have followed this closely and never even heard about this story they're citing, their real target of course is not hoax websites.

[anna]

This is more about the willingness of the right wing to believe everything that comes their way - as long as it fits their narrative, they pass it along unquestioningly. Anti-Clinton? Check. Anti-immigrant? Check. Pro Trump? Check. Pro-2nd. amendment? Check. Apocalyptic? Check.