Fake news for the win

[Tracy Riddle]

[Tracy Riddle]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/face...b63b0da2ea

"No news is good news," the old saying goes. But fake news isn't. In the echo chamber of social media, outright lies can go viral as easily as fact-checked reporting.
Just don't ask Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to care. He has dismissed as "pretty crazy" the idea that fake news spread on his site could have affected the presidential election.
He also claimed that 99 percent of the stories circulated on Facebook are factually accurate, which is itself a questionable data point.
Some of Facebook's employees appear to be taking the issue a bit more seriously. A group of anonymous workers informed BuzzFeed News on Monday that they'd formed a "renegade" internal task force to combat fake news.
"It's not a crazy idea," one employee said. "What's crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season."
One example of fake news is this anti-Hillary Clinton story from the faux Denver Guardian, which declared in all caps: "FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE."
Everything about the article was made up, from the city where the crime supposedly occurred (there is no Walkerville, Maryland), to the quote from "Walkerville Police Chief Pat Frederick." (A town with a similar spelling ― Walkersville ― does exist, but doesn't even have a police department.)
The story was so egregious that The Denver Post, an actual legitimate news source with a reputation to uphold, felt it had to run its own article denying any connectionto the fake news whatsoever:

THE DENVER POST

Nevertheless, the bogus Clinton hit piece has been shared on Facebook some 568,000 times and earned more than 15.5 million impressions. That's according to CrowdTangle, which tracks how content is shared across social media and which was recently acquired by Facebook.
"Zuckerberg's position that Facebook has no responsibility for the fake news on their platform because it has no influence is beyond absurd," Jon Favreau, President Barack Obama's former speechwriter, wrote on Twitter.
Another faux story, also apparently produced by someone trying to boost Donald Trump:

View image on Twitter

[URL="https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__"]
Follow[/URL]
[URL="https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__"]Ben Collins
@oneunderscore__[/URL]

This Facebook trending story is 100% made up.
Nothing in it is true.
This post of it alone has 10k shares in the last six hours.
1:01 PM - 14 Nov 2016

• [URL="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?in_reply_to=798269541344276481"]
  [/URL]
  
• [URL="https://twitter.com/intent/retweet?tweet_id=798269541344276481"]
  5,4825,482 Retweets[/URL]
  
• [URL="https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=798269541344276481"]
  4,7634,763 likes[/URL]
  

To be fair: This problem isn't unique to Facebook, and the lies aren't all in conservatives' favor. Both Google and Twitter have facilitated the spread of outright falsehoods, and all three digital giants are trying to clean up their act. But given Facebook's sheer size ― 44 percent of U.S. adults get news from the website ― it has a clear obligation to try to weed out blatant misinformation.
"The systems that carry information to us all are filtered by what's sensational not by what's true," noted Eric Tucker, an Austin, Texas, resident who inadvertently helped spark a fake story about paid protesters on Twitter last week. "People are surprisingly uninterested in truth but very interested in what helps them to make their own case."
Here are some other examples of "news" stories spread on Facebook that you really shouldn't believe:

• 
  
  Facebook
  
  False. Indeed, the pope said of Donald Trump earlier this year, "This man is not Christian."
  
  
• 
  
  Facebook
  
  Big league false.
  
  
• 
  
  Facebook
  
  This Facebook post is actually a link to the very article that disproves it. Eagle-eyed readers will notice the description itself even says it's "fake." False.
  
  
• 
  
  Facebook
  
  False.
  
  
• 
  
  Facebook
  
  This is false.
  
  
• 
  
  Facebook
  
  False.
  
  
• 
  
  Facebook
  
  Still waiting for this sex tape. Not holding our breath.
  

[Tracy Riddle]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-...?tid=sm_tw

Facebook fake-news writer: I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me'

By Caitlin Dewey November 17 at 6:00 AM
Twitter, Google, Facebook change policies regarding online bullying and fake news
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Twitter, Google, Facebook are changing their policies to prevent bullying and improve accuracy. (Reuters)

What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common? For starters, they're all make-believe and invented by the same man.
Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he's British graffiti artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. "South Park" lawsuit last year.

But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump's son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner's faux-articles. His stories have also appeared as news on Google.

(Paul Horner)
In light of concerns that stories like Horner's may have affected the presidential election, and in the wake of announcements that both Google and Facebook would take action against deceptive outlets, Intersect called Horner to discuss his perspective on fake news. This transcript has been edited for clarity, length and ahem bad language.
[The only true winners of this election are trolls]
You've been writing fake news for a while now you're kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I'd call it hoaxing or fake news. You'd call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?
Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because they'd already accepted it. It's real scary. I've never seen anything like it.
You mentioned Trump, and you've probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that?
My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don't fact-check anything they'll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

(Twitter via Mediaite)

Why? I mean why would you even write that?
Just 'cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at their rallies, and that's just insane. I've gone to Trump protests trust me, no one needs to get paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually believed it.
I thought they'd fact-check it, and it'd make them look worse. I mean that's how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it's false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he's in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].
You think you personally helped elect Trump?
I don't know. I don't know if I did or not. I don't know. I don't know.
Donald Trump's victory speech, in less than three minutes

Embed Share
[FONT=FranklinITCProBold !important]Play Video[/FONT][FONT=FranklinITCProLight !important]2:16[/FONT]



Early on the morning of Nov. 9, Republican President-elect Donald Trump addressed supporters in New York, declaring victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Here are key moments from that speech. (Video: Sarah Parnass/Photo: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

I guess I'm curious, if you believed you might be having an unfair impact on the election especially if that impact went against your own political beliefs why didn't you stop? Why keep writing?
I didn't think it was possible for him to get elected president. I thought I was messing with the campaign, maybe I wasn't messing them up as much as I wanted but I never thought he'd actually get elected. I didn't even think about it. In hindsight, everyone should've seen this coming everyone assumed Hillary [Clinton] would just get in. But she didn't, and Trump is president.
[Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its human editors]
Speaking of Clinton did you target fake news at her supporters? Or Gary Johnson's, for that matter? (Horner's Facebook picture shows him at a rally for Johnson.)
No. I hate Trump.
Is that it? You posted on Facebook a couple weeks ago that you had a lot of ideas for satirizing Clinton and other figures, but that "no joke . . . in doing this for six years, the people who clicked ads the most, like it's the cure for cancer, is right-wing Republicans." That makes it sound like you've found targeting conservatives is more profitable.

Yeah, it is. They don't fact-check.
But a Trump presidency is good for you from a business perspective, right?
It's great for anybody who does anything with satire there's nothing you can't write about now that people won't believe. I can write the craziest thing about Trump, and people will believe it. I wrote a lot of crazy anti-Muslim stuff like about Trump wanting to put badges on Muslims, or not allowing them in the airport, or making them stand in their own line and people went along with it!
Facebook and Google recently announced that they'd no longer let fake-news sites use their advertising platforms. I know you basically make your living from those services. How worried are you about this?
This whole Google AdSense thing is pretty scary. And all this Facebook stuff. I make most of my money from AdSense like, you wouldn't believe how much money I make from it. Right now I make like $10,000 a month from AdSense.
[Google's top news link for final election results' goes to a fake news site with false numbers]
I know ways of getting hooked up under different names and sites. So probably if they cracked down, I would try different things. I have at least 10 sites right now. If they crack down on a couple, I'll just use others. They could shut down advertising on all my sites, and I think I'd be okay. Plus, Facebook and AdSense make a lot of money from [advertising on fake news sites] for them to just get rid of it. They'd lose a lot of money.
But if it did really go away, that would suck. I don't know what I would do.
Thinking about this less selfishly, though it might be good if Facebook and Google took action, right? Because the effects you're describing are pretty scary.
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Yeah, I mean a lot of the sites people are talking about, they're just total BS sites. There's no creativity or purpose behind them. I'm glad they're getting rid of them. I don't like getting lumped in with Huzlers. I like getting lumped in with the Onion. The stuff I do I spend more time on it. There's purpose and meaning behind it. I don't just write fake news just to write it.
So, yeah, I see a lot of the sites they're listing, and I'm like good. There are so many horrible sites out there. I'm glad they're getting rid of those sites.
I just hope they don't get rid of mine, too.

[Tracy Riddle]

[Tracy Riddle]

Donald Trump Is the First Brand President, and That's Dangerous A brand doesn't have to be truthful to be successful, but it must never change and must deliver on its promise. Imagine that applied to the White House. Clive Irving 11.18.16 9:01 PM ET

The chorus of mea culpas from the political intelligentsia, pundits and reporters who never saw the Trump phenomenon coming is a striking measure of their lack of acquaintance with the science and practices of branding. Every day we buy stuff based on how we have been successfully persuaded of a brand's distinct qualities, but we have never bought a president this way before. Make no mistake, brands can be dangerous things that bamboozle millions of people. The essence of branding is to associate a distinct set of values with a product. It's not necessary for those values to actually be inherent in the product, people just have to be persuaded that they are.

For example, in the 1990s the oil giant BP realized that along with the rest of the industry its reputation was suffering because environmentalists had targeted them as being, at best, indifferent to the plight of the planet and, at worst, active polluters of it. Consequently the company rebranded itself, using a new green logo of a blossoming flower and pledging itself to the idea of sustainable energy sources and new levels of safety and cleaner emissions at its plants. Hard-hatted BP managers appeared in TV commercials preaching that their operations from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico were subjected to rigorous new environmental controls. Then came Deepwater Horizon and the mother of all oil spills in the Gulf. In one stroke the company lost half its market value. This was followed by revelations about lax standards at its refinery in Texas, where an explosion killed 15 workers and injured more than 170 others, partly as a result of financial cutbacks made simultaneously with the launch of the "greening" initiative. The makeover was exposed as a cynical sham. A recent case is just as egregious and will be even more costly to the company involved. Volkswagen admitted that it manipulated the emissions test results of 11 million diesel-powered vehicles, including 500,000 in the U.S. Just two weeks ago the chairman of VW's supervisory board, Hans Deter Potsch, was confirmed to be under investigation for his role in the cheating and the subsequent cover-up. The scandal is costing VW at least $16.5 billion to settle lawsuits in the U.S. alone. This exposed another sham of branding. Under the slogan of "Das Auto" VW sold its cars to Americans as exemplary works of "German engineering." In fact, unable to meet U.S. emissions standards, the company gave up trying to engineer a solution and deliberately cheated on a scale never before seen in the auto industry.

Now with the ascension of Trump we have serious cause to weigh what branding can do when it is fully embraced in a political campaign. Why were the values being sold as part of the Trump brand so persuasive? For the consequences will be far more profound and far-reaching on the country than even the largest oil spill or polluting fleet of cars. First, it's highly unusual for a brand to be built around one person. For sure, a brand is sometimes hitched to an emollient invention like Ronald McDonald to make fast food for kids seem like a worthy social mission, or it can express the values of a singular ego and genius as it did with Steve Jobs and Apple. But for a brand to be so dependent on one dominant personality and for that brand to make a crossover from commerce to a presidential election is uniqueand probably uniquely American as well. Consistency is always essential for a brand, a never-varying core message. From his beginning in the Manhattan real estate business Trump had one consistent characteristic: Trump would always be Trump. He would never apologize for being what he was, for what he said, for what he did and the way he did it. He found that this played very well with the local New York media. He was good copy. In some ways he was prototypically a New Yorker. Although he didn't drink he often sounded like the kind of boorish contrarian you would encounter in a Manhattan bar after the theaters had emptied. But he didn't look like that personhe was too slickly groomed and aware that women were tempted to love him almost as much as he loved himself. These might not seem like wise components for a personal brand contemplating a run at the presidency and winning the national acclaim required to succeed. After all, the Republican base as well as large parts of the Republican leadership were instinctively averse to "New York values"indeed, it was Ted Cruz who sneeringly used this epithet against Trump in the primaries only to discover that it was like throwing a Molotov cocktail at a battleship. What manifested the brand more than the Babylonian Manhattan edifice from which Trump launched his campaign? Trump Tower was impossible to beat as the quintessence of his taste. Other Manhattan skyscrapers branded with the names of their corporate patrons had led the modern movement in urban architecture, the Seagram Building and the Lever Building, both on Park Avenue. But who bought whisky or soap powder because they liked these towers?

Once the Trump campaign got under way Trump Tower became a wonder for out-of-towners to gawk at, and as they did they reasoned that a man who put that much gold into a building must have the Midas touch and might be what they wanted in the White House: a no-nonsense vulgarianvulgarian in the original sense of the term, as the free expression of common discourse and taste. Trump the developer and builder of self-glorifying edifices whether residential towers, casinos or hotels provided an important metaphorical underpinning of brand Trump. Before he built, he deployed the wrecking ball. That was what the country neededsomeone to take a wrecking ball to Washington and rebuild the country in the shape of a vaguely-suggested glorious past. This spoke to another intuitively clever underpinning of the brand, its slogan. And this where the contrast between brand Trump and brand Clinton became lethally clear. "Make America Great Again" observed one of the most indispensable laws of branding. It was an unambiguous product offer with a powerful and simple emotional connection. It didn't matter that in reality the "Again" implied a current decline that to many people didn't exist. To the market it was aimed at it did exist. "Stronger Together" wasn't an offer, it was a platitude, passive and nebulous. And it went with a logo that was graphically clumsy, the Hillary "H" intersected uncertainly by an arrow, leading nobody really knew where. Crucially, the Trump brand's rollout from a regional base to a national market began years earlier with The Apprentice. For the first time this gave Trump name recognition among millions of people who had been completely unaware of a noisy Manhattan real estate mogul called The Donald. Through the TV show the brand became aspirational. Here was a one-man arbiter of successor failure. Of course, at this point the brand's real purpose was basically merchandising, to sell anything from books to a university that extended the appeal of Trump's unique portal into the American Dream. Given that national base and the way that reality television enabled him to frame his message, not even Trump himself could have imagined how television would propel his political campaign to a whole new level of brand recognition. Something extraordinary happened. The cable networks opened up to Trump on his own termsas someone who was an absolute amateur in politics but also a masterful entertainer. In fact, they enjoyed him too much. He was good for ratings, so they fed him the oxygen he craved. They were funding the dissemination of his message.

No other brand in history has had such a free rideexposure worth billions of dollars that gave him more or less universal name recognition. And he knew how to exploit the platform for maximum effect: by violating all the rules of political discourse. Strong brands have an inimitable proprietary voice, and this one was characterized by a stream of abuse and personal insults delivered nightly. Trump connected to his audiences through a demotic that came naturally to him, and despite its strangled syntax sounded natural to them. Not even the vilest language could undermine the message. For a few days it seemed that the Access Hollywood tapes, with Trump's lewd and predatory behavior toward women there for all to see, might be terminal. They were not. Trump was as always Trump, and that was his prime asset. By the time the networks realized that the clown had become a formidable political player it was too late to retract the gift. The Clinton campaign was spending millions every week on television according to a 20th century playbook and getting little in return for it, certainly never establishing the idea of an alternative brand [right on]. What was most galling of all for the Clinton campaign was that the Trump brand had carried out a devastating feat of reverse-branding. They had defined their competition with a clarity that the competition had never been able to do for itself. In this proposition the competition was the liberal metropolitan elite in cahoots with the "dishonest" mainstream media. The way this works is perverse but very effective. When your market accepts that the competition is what you say it is then this conviction serves to reinforce brand loyalty and loathing of "the other." The apotheosis of this principle in action was Trump's preposterous appeal to black voters"What have you got to lose? These people have never done anything for you." (At least, it seemed preposterous. But some black voters apparently bought into it.)

His rapidly expanding base seemed impervious to the contradiction being proposedthat a billionaire who had never got his hands dirty in his whole life (indeed, he was a germaphobe always wary about dirt and whom he touched) was the guy who understood their pain and would give them back their jobsand their dignity. "Post-truth" has just been voted the word of the year, and it's obvious who made it so. It's a term that George Orwell would have understood and parsed. In 1946 he wrote an essay, Politics and the English Language, that remains today chastening to anyone using that language. He called the political language of his day a "catalogue of swindles and perversions." Nothing has changedexcept that the language is now expressed in brutally uncouth form and without apology. And the contempt for truth is far more naked. We shouldn't have been surprised that the Trump brand treated truth as a needless constraint. A lot of commercial branding has never been too fussy about the truth. For example, just a year ago Wells Fargo was selling itself as a champion of cultural diversity and banking probity under the slogan "Why I Work." Right now the bank's new slogan is "We're making changes to make things right." That, of course, follows a scandal in which the bank's staff created at least 2 million false accounts.

The Trump brand is about to face the moment of truth that must come eventually to every brand: Can it deliver? The fiasco of the Trump transition team is not a good sign. Trump enjoyed a few days of triumph during which he behaved as though the White House would become the final and richly deserved brand extension. Once he was seated in the Oval Office the brand's values would logically inform the decisions he faced. Perhaps he's beginning to understand the yawning mismatch between his promises and what can realistically be delivered. Consequently, if this turns out to be a classic case of bait and switch, there would be an ugly outbreak of buyer's remorse. At the same time, he can't go soft if the brand is to remain credible because consistency is vital to a brand's success. Trump has to remain Trump. We can only hope that brand Trump's encounters with reality don't end as they did for BP in its masquerade as a safe pair of hands for the future of the planetwith a terrifying explosion and damage to the ecosystem that could last for hundreds of years.

[Tracy Riddle]

[LR Trotter]

Tracy, it sometimes appears as though "being duped" is a chosen frame of mind. I often wonder, as I often wander, if it is used as a mechanism to continue a high degree of hatred, regardless of truth. JMO.

[Peter Lemkin]

This is but ONE of many ways the election was rigged. Trump's endless whine about the election being rigged against him should have warned everyone his team was planning to rig it FOR him...and they did quite a lot. The Democrats did this only in the primary against Sanders as far as I can tell. Voter suppression is by the Republicans only. Voting machine manipulation is done by Republican-friendly voting machine companies only as far as anyone knows. This now makes two clearly stolen elections for the Republicans. The question in my mind is twofold: 1] who are the core of people orchestrating this, and 2] why don't people in the USA 'get it' and do something about it. We move further and further away from democracy. Voting even if not tampered with is pretty far removed from real democracy - but throw in tampering with the vote and 'news' and you have nothing but propaganda most in the USA are apparently too stupid to see through. Very sad. W didn't really win. Trump didn't either. W almost brought the USA to the brink of outright fascism [long past has the USA had crypto-fascism]; sadly, I fear Trump will bring us over the 'line'......and the Sheeple will only bleat.

[Tracy Riddle]

[Tracy Riddle]