In Steven Levy's new book (which I really liked), Facebook: The Inside Story, he talks about teenagers in Macedonia pushing fake political news stories to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites so they could make money.
They didn't care about the political content, the incentive was to figure out what would get shared the most/fastest so they could drive traffic. They tried fake news targeting the left, but it wouldn't get very far because people would call it out in comments and then the posters would delete/remove it.
Fake news targeting the right (primarily crazy anti-hillary stories) would spread without any resistance and drive a ton of traffic, so they ended up focusing their attention there.
I think this is pretty good evidence that there's a bigger problem on the right since the Macedonian teenagers didn't care about the politics and just wanted to drive traffic for money.
There are lots of other interesting details in that book - it's good.
In Steven Levy's new book (which I really liked), Facebook: The Inside Story, he talks about teenagers in Macedonia pushing fake political news stories to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites so they could make money.
They didn't care about the political content, the incentive was to figure out what would get shared the most/fastest so they could drive traffic. They tried fake news targeting the left, but it wouldn't get very far because people would call it out in comments and then the posters would delete/remove it.
Fake news targeting the right (primarily crazy anti-hillary stories) would spread without any resistance and drive a ton of traffic, so they ended up focusing their attention there.
I think this is pretty good evidence that there's a bigger problem on the right since the Macedonian teenagers didn't care about the politics and just wanted to drive traffic for money.
There are lots of other interesting details in that book - it's good.