Manufacturing Fake News

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Manufacturing Fake News

Postby Marcuse » Tue Nov 27, 2018 9:12 am

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/id ... _fake_news

The BBC has obtained and published an interview with someone they call one of the world's most prolific writers of fake news. He's supposedly written sensational and entirely false stories making racist, sexist, and pure nonsense attacks on figures like Hillary Clinton and Obama and liberal America in general.

The thing is, he himself claims to be a liberal, and his entire schtick is to fake news stories to conservatives in order to troll them. He's participated in (he claims) the seizure of many right wing FB groups by pretending to their views and getting admin rights then changing every image to goats.

He's also used real images of people without permission in his stories; once using the image of a Canadian imam for a story about an imaginary imam who would only shelter Muslims. This exposed the real person to racist attacks. He also used images of a real soldier as part of a story about a deserter.

I dont really know what to think about this really. The guy claims to be leading "resistance" to President Trump but if anything his fake stories seem to have been propogated across the internet by other fakers in a way that may have contributed to his election. If this article is right, he seems to have done so for the money and damn the consequences which feels really wrong.
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby gisambards » Tue Nov 27, 2018 5:07 pm

I find this guy entirely unsympathetic and the article's treatment of him bizarre (it feels like they're trying to make us like him, particularly through the pictures they choose to use and the comparatively perfunctory treatment the debunker who found him gets). I'm not sure I believe his claim of doing it for a good cause, although if that is his motivation then he's going about it in an awful way and, if he's as influential as the article makes out, has probably actually done a lot of damage. I certainly don't believe him when he says money wasn't a motivation, as this is entirely contradicted by the opening of the article. It does appear now he's doing a minor good in that the debunker can now use his articles to make searching for fake news easier, but a) surely it's the debunker who's doing all the actual good work there, and b) he's still pumping out fake news which is still going to be disseminated. So really he's awful, and while I think he's definitely an interesting subject for an interview I don't understand why it was so indulgent of the positive image he wanted to present of himself, and didn't challenge him at all.
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby Crimson847 » Wed Nov 28, 2018 2:29 am

I really enjoyed the fake story they mentioned about Hillary Clinton being killed by a flying monster truck tire. Sure, Hillary seems like she'd enjoy going to monster truck rallies in her spare time; that seems legit.

Blair spent more than two decades as a construction worker, a trade that took a toll on his body. In the late 2000s, when the Great Recession hit and his industry slumped, he started looking for another source of income in liberal political blogging.

He loved to write and found that he had a flair for making words come alive. He began a blog, the first of many. He found it liberating being able to say what he wanted - arguing in favour of a range of positions on the left-hand side of American politics.

But although it was fun and a few people started reading, blogging didn’t pay.

And so he tried another tactic. He began to write fabricated tales that looked like real news headlines. Streams of consciousness flowed from his head to the keyboard.

When he saw the results online, the hundreds and thousands of likes and shares his posts were getting, he felt validated. Far more people were interested in fake news than Blair’s opinions or true stories.


A classic story, and entirely relatable. He mentions that his day job was breaking him physically, and construction took an enormous hit in the late 2000s, which made work unreliable and infrequent for many in that industry. This new arrangement allowed him a relatively steady income and the ability to work at home and be with his children without further injuring himself. Hard to judge a man for taking that option.

But wait, money and those related human factors had nothing to do with his decision. The real reason he started spreading fake news was so he could do this:

Once his stories go viral, the Facebook comments burst forth. And that’s when Christopher Blair the fake news writer becomes Christopher Blair the crusading left-wing troll.

“The mission with the trolling first and foremost is we pull them into the comments [section underneath each fake article],” he says.

It's then that he starts on the offensive. The faker becomes the exposer, weeding out and reporting the most extreme users among his fans.

“I can show you hundreds of profiles we’ve had taken down,” he says. He claims that he’s exposed Ku Klux Klan members and hardcore racists.

“We’ve had people fired from their jobs,” he says.

“We’ve exposed them to their families. Say what you want about me being a monster. I’m pretty proud.”


See, the purpose of the fake news is just to attract racists so he can "out" them. There was no other way to do that apparently; since nobody else posts racially inflammatory content on social media, he had to make some himself to serve as a lure.

For Blair, the money began to dry up. Largely because of Facebook’s changes, he says he now makes a fraction of what he did at the height of the fake news boom.

But he insists money was never the motivator, and instead he claims to be a “leader of the resistance” against President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.


It's an awful shame, too, because I could respect a guy who did something he felt a little uneasy about so he could pay the bills amidst a historic crash in his industry and spend more time with his kids and such. But if he's really set on trying to convince me that had nothing to do with it and he's really a "leader of the resistance" because his racist trolling attracts other racist trolls whom he then outs to show them that racist trolling is wrong, well...
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby cmsellers » Thu Nov 29, 2018 5:34 pm

So what you're saying, Crimson, is "Why do we troll racists to show racists that racist trolling is wrong?"

But yeah, I basically agree with Crimson. I've been unemployed long enough that if I could make good money writing fake news stories, I would absolutely do it. The only question is what price would be enough for me to compromise my personal values in this way. (I want to say 72k, but when I contemplate writing the sort of shit Chris Blair did, even that seems low.) Is it unethical as fuck? Absolutely. But when you've unemployed long enough, you start to ask yourself what ethics you're willing to put a price on, especially if the price is good enough.

I was considering writing papers for college students until Dino convinced me that that's unethical because honest students in classes graded on curves will suffer, and everyone at that college might suffer if it devalues the degrees in the eyes of employers. But in this case, while I wouldn't exactly call it a victimless crime, I think his degree of culpability for Trump is really murky. There are so many things that might have tipped the balance to Trump's election (I'd argue that Comey and Hillary deserve more individual blame than this guy, and the real media collectively deserves way more for all the free airtime they gave him), I can't really convince myself to hold Mr. Blair particularly at fault for Trump's election the consequences thereof; I can't convince myself that there's a direct line of culpability from Chris Blair to Jamal Khashoggi (or any of the other victims/likely victims of Trump's presidency).

I would also agree that he's slimy because he's trying to present what he's doing as good. If he'd just said "hey I was unemployed and this paid the bills and then some"? Well, I would have been at least 90% on board. But there's nothing good in what he's doing, except for himself, it's still wrong, I just think that if Clinton, Comey and the real media could help Trump out of self-interest on the assumption that no one would hold them accountable (even if Comey and Clinton ultimately did suffer as a result of their fuckups), I'm not going to be particularly mad at him for that. But the "oh, I'm actually a good guy" schtick? No, fuck that guy, fuck you Mr. Blair.
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby ghijkmnop » Thu Nov 29, 2018 5:42 pm

Redacted
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby cmsellers » Thu Nov 29, 2018 6:56 pm

The thing about parables is that it doesn't matter if the story is true, the story is told to illustrate a general moral principle. I wasn't sure how a parable is different from a fable, so I looked it up, and it turns out that starring humans rather than animals is the only reliable difference. Would you accuse Aesop of lying, Jeff?
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby ghijkmnop » Thu Nov 29, 2018 7:27 pm

Redacted
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby cmsellers » Thu Nov 29, 2018 8:04 pm

ghijkmnop wrote:To quote George Costanza: It's not a lie if you believe it.

I actually studied the nature of lies for my undergraduate thesis, and that's basically true. The way that most people would interpret a statement as a lie generally requires a statement to 1. be untrue, 2. be known by the speaker to be untrue, and 3. be intended to deceive.

However while these three rules work as a rough heuristic, it's not as neat and clear-cut as you might like, and I can think of several examples that break this paradigm. People don't believe white lies to be as lie-y as regular lies, suggesting that intended harm is an aspect. People often believe that people saying things they believe to be false are lies, even if they turn out to be true. People can "lie to themselves," though it's not clear if this is really seen as lying. But lies by omission are also considered lies, even though they are 100% true. They are the truth and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth.

And then there's the big one for the point you raise: I would argue that a reckless disregard for the truth constitutes a lie. Trump probably has no idea whether what he's saying is true, and may even have convinced himself. But as far as I'm concerned, he's still lying. Similarly, in my thread on nutrition, I believe that any diet expert who makes influential policy prescriptions and either doesn't examine the evidence themself or cherrypicks the evidence to support what they already believe is engaged in dishonesty. The fact that they don't or do only with blinkers on means that I am willing to say that groups like the AHA, USDA, and WHO are lying to us, even if they 100% believe what they are saying.

But my willingness to say that they are lying to us as opposed to merely being dishonest also stems from my belief that their advice is recklessness leading to substantial harm. Taxonomical authorities continue to use many taxonomical groups which have been debunked, but because the stakes are far lower, I would accuse them of dishonesty or even laziness rather than lying, the word "lie" definitely carries a value judgment to a greater degree "than dishonesty" or "untruth."

I would say that Paul Grice's Maxim of Quality plus half of the Maxim of Quantity describes pretty well what I believe to constitute willful untruths.

  • Do not say what you believe to be false. (Quality)
  • Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. (Quality)
  • Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange. (Quantity)

But a willful untruth is not necessarily a lie. A work of fiction is not a lie, nor is a simplification for a lay audience, nor is an expression of sarcasm, irony, or hyperbole. I would say that both the likely outcome and the intended effect determine whether such an untruth is a lie, and I also think I have a higher standard for reckless lies and lies-by-omission (the latter two points) than I do for deliberate lies-by-commission (the first point).
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby ghijkmnop » Thu Nov 29, 2018 10:01 pm

Redacted
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby Crimson847 » Thu Nov 29, 2018 11:36 pm

cmsellers wrote:So what you're saying, Crimson, is "Why do we troll racists to show racists that racist trolling is wrong?"


It's a bit more fundamental than that. He's not just trolling racist trolls, he's essentially posing as one of them. So he looks for all the world like a racist troll, and he's out there outing people and getting them fired and such because they...look for all the world like racist trolls. Dude best hope he's the only person who ever had this idea, or this could get hilarious quick.
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- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby iMURDAu » Fri Nov 30, 2018 12:24 am

People will believe whatever they want. All they need to do is have an idea or stumble across it. If they find it on facebook it is instantly believable because from what people have told me in a stern voice, "it has to be real, it was on facebook". There was an untapped market and good, I guess, for the people who made money off this. Isn't this what capitalism is about? Making a profit?
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Re: Manufacturing Fake News

Postby cmsellers » Fri Nov 30, 2018 1:02 am

ghijkmnop wrote:Did you really just analyze my joke?

No, I really just analyzed your fake news.

(But seriously, sorry, I had no idea you were joking.)
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