Fake News a Service

4 October 2021

It is unsurprising that fake news is now an industry.  Clearly if Facebook and other social media have many posts, it is just a question of paying people to say what you want, either a lot of people or a few people pretending to be a lot of people.

This is now at the stage that it can determine perceptions and elections.  It is as if technology empowers little people for a while until those with power are able to use and control it.

Here is a story that I had missed, the use of tweets to rubbish the BBC for having a story that forest fires were deliberately lit in Indonesia to clear forests for palm oil plantations.  And the people paying for a slag on the BBC were…?

The Oxford Internet Institute found 48 cases of States working for influence-for- hire firms in 2019-20, up from 21 in 2017-18.