Business on lies

Like false news on the Internet, like an invasive biological species, the real and what to be in this new world to the reader is gradually replaced by the New Times.

Information hygiene is a personal file of everyone

At the end of last year, the last, 86th, the column “What else turned out to be a fake on the Internet this week” entered the Washington Post. Her author Kaitlin Dewey, saying goodbye to readers, says that it became simply pointless to expose pseudo -monk on the network: they appear in such quantities that there is no sense in disassembling each separately.

“We launched a column about fakes on the Internet in May 2014 in response to the fact that then it seemed to the whole epidemic of urban legends and draws. Since then, the flow of these rumors and jokes has not been weakened at all, but the tone and intensity of false news have changed. If earlier, in order to expose the fake, it was necessary to conduct at least a minimum investigation, now it is enough to look at the section “About us” the site on which it appeared. And if earlier people believed in fakes from ordinary naivety, now fakes become viral thanks to the gloating of their readers - or even hatred. ”

It is profitable to lie

This wave of falsifications, writes the author of the column at the Washington Post, there is a simple economic reason: making fakes on the Internet has become a very profitable business. Somewhere from the first half of 2014, many Internet entrepreneurs realized that nothing collects traffic as headlines that enjoy ignorance, prejudices and phobias of readers. If earlier fake news have been isolated cases, now sites that do not produce nothing more than them one by one. Sites with names and design, mimicing under “serious”, such as World News Daily Report, hundreds generate “News” like “The first death from genetically modified products”, which are then massively shackled in social networks, people who are waiting for confirmation of their bizarre ideas about reality.

The spread of intentional misinformation in social networks has become such a global problem that it is studied as a scientific phenomenon

The spread of intentional misinformation in social networks has become such a global problem that it is studied as a scientific phenomenon. Several groups of scientists from different universities under the leadership of Walter Quatrochki came to disappointing conclusions: people devote to discussion of obviously false news and conspiracy theories for the same time as real events and tend to form the so-called echo-cameras in which the same fakes circulate without the impurities of the truth. In other words, it is simply pointless to refute fakes: those for whom these refutations are intended will never read them by virtue of the narrowness of their interests and cognitive distortions, encouraging them to look for only confirmation of their own prejudices. Other, more practical research (their results are given, for example, Craig Silverman, the author of the exhausting information to verify information from the Internet - Verification Handbook), show that no matter what a refutation, it, according to statistics, will read and share them in social networks less readers than a sensational fake that it refutes.

Patriotic specificity

All of the above fully applies to Russia, but with its own local color. Firstly, pseudo-monk from foreign “satirical” sites found their grateful audience among editors and readers of Russian media. Find the name of any of the sites such as Empire News, World News Daily Report or Your News Wire in the search for Yandex.NOUSKENTS - and you will see that any fantastic nonsense of the same “Death from GMOs” reprint the sites of federal TV channels and newspapers with millions of circulations. “This is not a newspaper duck,” the website of the REN-TV TV channel precedes its note, although it is directly written on the portal from which the news is taken: “Everything that you read here is a newspaper duck.”

Text about the war in Syria on one of the fake sites (after the editing)

Secondly, Russia itself does not lag behind the civilized world in the production of fake news. It is interesting that the author of the column at Washington Post notes precisely May 2014 as a water-preclaimed between time, when Internet fakes have been special cases, and a new era, in which misinformation, as an invasive biological species, supplants the actual information itself, and nothing can be done with it. It was at this time that in Russia itself, the unprecedented on the scale of the campaign of propaganda and disinformation was deployed, which itself was awarded the masses of both journalistic and scientific research. As part of this campaign on the Internet, there are a lot of sites with addresses like v-kieve.net, Xerson.net or nahnews.com.ua-“Kharkiv news agency”, which, according to the results of journalistic investigations (one of them was published in “business Petersburg”), were created in Moscow or St. Petersburg in house No. 55 on the street. Savushkina, where until recently there was a “troll factory” that became the world famous world (aka LLC “The Agency for Internet Bloods”, aka Olgino, at the place of the previous deployment). These pseudo -monitoring sites also mimic for the present: their content consists mainly of the news automatically assembled from other sites, which from time to time are diluted with directed stuffing of anti -Ukrainian misinformation - “Ukrainian defenders were detained for robbery in Kyiv” or “American mercenaries are involved in Mariupol”. Then these “news” are already legally “solid” publications, for example, sites of federal television channels that reprint them with a heading type “Media report that ...”

Get to the fake

When the Ukrainian topic began to gradually give way to the new military propaganda campaign related to the war in Syria, politically conscious falsifiers also changed the course. Pure commercial calculation is successfully combined with a political agenda. Fake sites are created on the principle of MFA - Made for Advertising. Most often, this is just a blog, developed on a free template of popular WordPress Platform Blog with a layout that allows the site to be like a news edition. Content collects a robot - automatically copies texts and pictures from other sites, including the same fake, and the owner of the site collects income from advertising banners. Such anonymous pseudo -monk sites from time to time throw fakes with the expectation of a ride on the wake of a loud topic and collect advertising traffic from not too selective readers.

“This is not a newspaper duck,” the website of the REN-TV TV channel precedes its note, although on the portal, from which the “news” is taken, it is directly written: “Everything that you read here is a newspaper duck”

It happens that there are also real, without quotation marks, solid publications: so it was with the American version of Forbes, which gave the note “Russia accidentally revealed the number of soldiers who died in Ukraine”. And in early September, a month before the official beginning of a military campaign in Syria, the same mimicry under a news site called The Russian Times published the text “Russian troops began a rapid offensive in Syria” (at that time, Russian officials stubbornly denied the fact of preparation for war). Before the title had time to get into Yandex.No, as the text of the note has changed to the completely opposite: now "this information has turned out to be an informational stuffing of the British media." And in this form, the state information agency Sputnik (MIA Russia Today) has already quoted. NT attempts to find out who and why first put a note on the site, and then changed its text to a completely opposite, but corresponding to the propaganda agenda, did not lead to anything. The person who registered the domain and the license of Roskomnadzor for IA The Russian Times denies his involvement in the “editorial office”, referring to a certain Michael, who is allegedly the editor -in -chief. It was not possible to find any traces of the existence of this Michael.

The Reginum news agency refused to remove the fake even after the BBC circulation

Many probably caught the eyes of “News”, written according to the same template: (a well-known edition) reports that (the current enemy of propaganda) (got to the hospital/died/did or said some kind of stupidity or muck). For example: “BBC: Poroshenko is hospitalized with severe alcohol poisoning” or “In an interview with the Radio France International correspondent, Yatsenyuk announced sexual harassment by Tymoshenko.” The last “news” got along the chain to the website of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation “Zvezda”, which caused a considerable scandal when the correspondent of RFI Elena Servavetaz, which, of course, did not interview Yatsenyuk did not take attention. And the next news of the death of Mikhail Gorbachev (also “BBC reports”) penetrated the website of the REGNUM news agency. When the general producer of the Russian BBC Russian service Andrei Goryanov and the author of this text was asked by the editor-in-chief of REGNUM Modest Kolirova to remove the obvious fake, Krerov refused, motivating this by the fact that he was clear to the “engagement of the refutants”.

Father of lies

Many such news, designed for an audience, which with great pleasure (or on duty) shall be shared by them in social networks, not paying attention to any refutations, come from one source. This is the Opps.ru website-an endless schizophrenic tape from the advice of “how to cleanse the body in three days” and “how to make homemade butter” interspersed with the “news” in the spirit of the “rain” TV channel said that Ksenia Sobchak, in a state of drug intoxication, was expelled from the Putin’s press conference ”(of course,“ rain ”did not report, but nerves and them, and them, and them and them. Sobchak colleagues spoiled a lot). The anonymous owner of this site was more sociable and verbose than the rest. Its motivation for the production of fake news (however, he claims that Opps.ru does not write them himself, but copies from other resources, but the chain is often interrupted precisely on his website) is simple - this is advertising traffic. Demand for “News” about the “drunk Poroshenko” and “dead Gorbachev” is only growing - and those who consume them will never be more attentive to sources. But to the question, “why exactly Poroshenko and Sobchak, but never, for example, not the“ daughter of Putin ”, the owner of Opps.ru erupted with a tirade that hides some kind of deep personal insult. He complained about the collapse of the USSR, and the fact that in America they “plant everyone”, and the fact that “liberalism is a deception”, and they lie according to the “echo of Moscow”. Why then increase entropy and lie even more? Fake news, the interlocutor of NT said to this, is needed so that a person does not forgot how to think independently: “It seems to me that each person individually should learn to think and analyze, and not believe everything that they write in tyrnets” (the author’s spelling and punctuation are preserved. - NT ).

The publication of fake news on the website of the Ministry of Defense TV channel caused a scandal

Paradoxically, to hear similar from the owner of the site, which produces fake news on an industrial scale, but it is absolutely right. The liar is in deliberately more favorable conditions than the lie that refutes it. A note about the fact that the Earth is about to fly into the heavenly axis, three thousand people will retilt, and the refutation-three, so the modern media consumption is arranged. And there will not be enough disproving for everyone. Therefore, before sharing any news with the others, do not be lazy to spend a few minutes and find out if it is adjacent to the source website with conspiracies of reptiloids and death from GMOs. Do not fall into the "echo-cameras", do not allow you to hang noodles on your ears and remove it from the ears of others. Information hygiene is now important than ever.

Photo: tvzvezda.ru, REGNUM.RU, Therussiantimes.com, Andriii Bielov/Shutterstock