Fake news: how it works

The Barbarian

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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.


By day, John Jansen is head of engineering at Master-McNeil Inc., a tech company in Berkeley, Calif. In the interest of real news he helped us track down the owner of Denverguardian.com.

Jansen started by looking at the site's history. "Commonly that's called scraping or crawling websites," he says.
...

"That was sort of the thread that started to unravel everything," Jansen says. "I was able to track that through to a bunch of other sites which are where that handle is also present."

The sites include NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co. All the addresses linked to a single rented server inside Amazon Web Services. That meant they were all very likely owned by the same company. Jansen found an email address on one of those sites and was able to link that address to a name: Jestin Coler.

Online, Coler was listed as the founder and CEO of a company called Disinfomedia. Coler's LinkedIn profile said he once sold magazine subscriptions, worked as a database administrator and as a freelance writer for among others, International Yachtsman magazine. And, using his name, we found a home address.
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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."

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

Coler's company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won't say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.

At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the "Denver Guardian" that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.

"The people wanted to hear this," he says. "So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then ... our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire."


And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltec...f-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs
 

The Barbarian

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Have you checked whether Mrs. Barbarian could use another potting bench?

No, but this week, I upgraded the solar system so that it will power her radio, and charge up my electric mower. Probably will run most small electrical motors as well.

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I should be annoyed, but the idea of a liberal taking the Russian effort to help Trump get elected, and finding a way to make big money off the suckers who listen to it, kinda tickles me. My favorite part?

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

john w

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Like this "fake news:?"

death-to-equities-8-13-79.jpg

August 13 1979: Dow Jones Industrial Average close: 875


March 6, 2018: Dow Jones Industrial Average close: 24,884.12
 

The Barbarian

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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."

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

Coler's company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won't say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.

At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the "Denver Guardian" that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.

"The people wanted to hear this," he says. "So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then ... our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire."


And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.
 

The Barbarian

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Makes you wonder if you could do it. I mean $30,000 a month for trolling Trump followers seems like a pretty lucrative business.

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

H. L. Mencken
 

jsanford108

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I find this to be a good post, Barbarian. It demonstrates that fake news abounds.

While the part about liberals not buying into fake news is false, the premise of fake news finding a target demographic is completely accurate.

Just the other day, I saw a fake news story on a very credible site. One had to only do a quick google search to find the "facts" we're lies. (It had to do with gun sales being cut)

Another liberal site ran the same story, just with a different spin. Same "facts," yet still fake.

I do think this is literally the most well informed thread you have ever started. Good job.


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The Barbarian

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I find this to be a good post, Barbarian. It demonstrates that fake news abounds.


It's ironic that a liberal is making money by feeding the need of Trump followers for new conspiracy theories. It's not exclusively money-making; the DOJ discovered a huge number of Russian sources were doing pro-Trump fake news.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department charged 13 Russians and three companies on Friday in a sprawling indictment that unveiled a sophisticated network designed to subvert the 2016 election and to support the Trump campaign. It stretched from an office in St. Petersburg, Russia, into the social feeds of Americans and ultimately reached the streets of election battleground states.

The Russians stole the identities of American citizens, posed as political activists and used the flash points of immigration, religion and race to manipulate a campaign in which those issues were already particularly divisive, prosecutors said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indicted-mueller-election-interference.html



While the part about liberals not buying into fake news is false


They tried; liberals just didn't go for it.
 

john w

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Bad news sells. If you buy headlines, you will never become financially independent. All news, is the same news, happening to different people.
 

The Barbarian

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Bad news sells. If you buy headlines, you will never become financially independent. All news, is the same news, happening to different people.


That might be the deepest thing I've seen you contribute to this forum. And I'm not being sarcastic in the least.
 
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