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An examination of Chinese, Russian, Middle Eastern, and English-based underground fake news marketplaces reveals a wide range of services available on these portals

How laudable that the propaganda for hire industry is so multicultural.

So this is the cost, what about the effectiveness? How does it stack up against the millions paid in traditional campaign outreach?
It should be far more expensive to lie to me, otherwise that will continue to be the logical choice.
It's going to be interesting to see how this evolves. I would expect there to be much, much more of this in future elections.
Link to the underlying report (PDF): https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wp-fake...

I'm not clear on how effective such a campaign promises to be. But assuming that folks wouldn't pay if they couldn't get something out of it, what does this tell us about democracy? Do we need to throw out either democracy or freedom of speech?

Freedom of speech purism is probably unworkable. I'm old enough to remember people arguing that spam was free speech and that spamfighting was immoral.

Fake news is much more sophisticated than spam but is ultimately going to encounter the same fight.

Today, we have a big 10 situation where 95% of all email travels through 10 hosts... gmail, live, aol, yahoo, etc. Email was designed to be open to all, but thanks to the spam fighting tactics employed, we ended up with all the power concentrated in the hands of a few.

We lost nntp entirely, but that wasn't due to spam. The copyright industry shut it down under the premise of "think of the children."

http was designed to allow anyone to run a server, but thanks to asymmetric bandwidth and port blocking, it's all hosted on the NSA cloud.

It hasn't been a good two decades for free speech. The only fight we won was crypto, and they're coming after that again.

NNTP is still alive, with basically the primary purpose of disregarding copyright.

The talk groups are all abandoned for web forums with UX that people end up preferring (I understand that NNTP allows choice of client and people are going to explain how much better that is; over here in the reality experiment, the abandonment already happened).

Some combination of spam and usability was already killing NNTP in the very early 2000s. Really it was replaced by phpbb; easier to deploy a new board without the social bureaucracy of USENET, easier to administer. On NNTP it was hard to establish authenticity of posters, hard to ban people, hard to filter spam, and hard to do community moderation.

What I think free speech purists don't acknowledge is the huge amount of volunteer emotional labour that goes into making communities work and defending against toxic posters and harmful content. Almost all audiences prefer curated communities.

Agreed. I think this is the same fundamental issue as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
You need a more engaged and educated electorate.
I think engagement is part of the problem - many people are very eager to spot "gotchas!" of their opponents, rather than taking a more broad and measured view.

And educational achievement doesn't seem to be any barrier to the acceptance of bogus news - even being a leader in one field doesn't make you immune to disinformation from an unrelated quarter, and in fact we see this every day.

Is it possible to throw out one without the other?
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.

I think the more practical issue is how to get laws to keep the people who make laws from lying. I don't how to get there from here. I think we might be in a position where we either get a market solution or bust.

EDIT - Of course I totally discounted any problems with censorship and these are real issues that I just presumed there will be some way to deal with.

"$50,000 - Discredit a journalist" wow.
Looks like a lot of people on social networking sites are missing out on some easy cash here. Why pay $50,000 to discredit one when their opponents on Twitter/Reddit/wherever (or heck, even themselves through stupid comments) will do it for free?
Pretty expensive when most journalists spend their days doing it themselves at no extra cost.
Do you have non-anecdotal evidence to back up this claim?
It's a joke.

But if you want some examples, have a look round the UK political punditry scene for anti-Corbyn articles from before the election, many of which look much less credible now.

32% of people trust the media at this point according to Gallup. And the downward trend may not be over.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...

Later part of Iraq war trend really takes a dive.

To be frank, it's surprising someone would ask for "non-anecdotal evidence" of journalists discrediting themselves. It manifestly happens fairly regularly.

("most of their day" is hyperbole obviously, but still).

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.

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.)

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. - Thomas Paine

I think voting rights and electoral integrity is more important than fake news (i.e. propaganda) which has been around forever and isn't going away.

I wonder if the Byzantine generals algorithm could be applied to fake news. A distributed truth block chain.
seems like you need people to agree on "what is truth" first?
Not even remotely scratching the surface. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajes.2017.76.issu...
Since this is HN, the bigger question is how much of this can be automated? For example, you go to one of those sites, fill out a form, pay in bitcoin, and let the system do the rest?
A 12-month campaign of fake promises, ruthless hypocrisy and BS interpretation of reality (which has been the standard for decades) has comparable costs...
Seems expensive for what mostly sounds like basic black hat marketing tricks
This article was purchased through a fake news vendor.
Correct The Record and Share Blue cost millions. Maybe the DNC should outsource.
unless you're going to do full censorship there is no cure, the MSM is clearly against trump in the election which could be decisive in the past, the social network dared to disagree this time and actually made a difference, but, what is wrong then, let them compete and people will know where to turn to, remember, majority of them have already made their mind no matter what, it's the middle ground that is affected.
>unless you're going to do full censorship there is no cure, the MSM is clearly against trump in the election

by giving him billions in free air time?

Yep. As far as I can see he outsmarted American media.

They really tried hard to help every other candidate but ended up playing right into his hands.

Given what people think about the current president this says quite a lot about media.

I have said for many years now that before anyone can vote they need to take a test. It's a dead simple 5 question T/F test. And you only have to get 3 right to vote.
This has been done many times before, to allow only the 'right' people to vote. Its been made illegal for a reason.
And to add: That reason is that democracy (voting) is not (primarily, although it often follows) about correctness of result, but about people's interests being represented.
Far better to educate the general public so well that such a test becomes redundant, than to live in a society where such a test is necessary.
> Far better to educate the general public so well that such a test becomes redundant

Easier said than done!

Seems onerous to administer, why not only allow land-owners to vote? Seems simpler to verify.
I believe we don't have a land-owners only voting scheme because of our current landlord situation. Should a majority of our population not get a say in votes because they either won't or can't afford land?
Something like a Louisiana literacy test!
I get where you are coming from but it all depends what is on the test.

Although it would be inefficient my ideal situation would be that before casting your vote you have to read each parties manifesto, answer a few questions to prove you've read it (if you fail, you repeat until it's sure you understand the policies each party is putting forward), and then you cast your vote fully informed of what it actually means.

What would happen to people with a learning disability?

Would you protect their vote? Or are they subhuman and not allowed to take part in democracy?

That's a reasonable question, and reasonable people come down on different sides.
>Or are they subhuman and not allowed to take part in democracy?

To be fair, the point was never that they were subhuman.

Yours is a loaded question.

So children are subhuman?
Who decides the questions?