YouTube wasn’t just for posting funny cat videos or online tutorials anymore. It had become a powerful platform for distributing news and commentary. The ‘YouTube stars’ weren’t just entertainers, beauty vloggers and gamers anymore, but news commentators and anti-social justice warrior activists.
Many found that social media platforms weren’t just useful for communicating with friends and family, but the technology could also easily be used as a massive publishing outlet allowing literally anyone to be able to have their content seen and heard by just as many people as a major newspaper or television network, and with little or no cost at all. The news and tech conglomerates figured if they could remove the financial incentives for this rapidly growing industry of alternative media platforms and personalities, they could dramatically discourage people from putting out content and commentary, and thus reduce the growing number of conservative voices online whose audience kept growing by the day as more people abandoned mainstream media and were turning to new independent outlets and online personalities for their news and commentary.
In this book we’ll look not just at the recent phenomena of fake news and how trying to weaponize the term dramatically backfired on liberals, but we’ll also look at the power and influence of the media in general. Media today now means more than just television, newspapers, and radio. It includes social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, which have become major media companies that host and distribute content in quantities previously unimagined.
We’ll look at how these companies manipulate and censor the content that users post, how the trending lists function to restrict certain stories from going viral and artificially aid others to do just the opposite. We’ll look at how powerful multibillion dollar networks can influence the public conversation through their agenda-setting power, and at the same time sweep important stories and issues under the rug through lying by omission. You’ll see the real power mainstream media has to shape our culture, our fears, and our tastes; and how it keeps most people mesmerized by an endless stream of meaningless and mindless entertainment.
Because media has changed so dramatically with the creation of the Internet, smartphones, and social media; people don’t just get their news from TV, radio, and newspapers anymore as you know. There are now countless blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages dedicated to posting news and analysis◦— many of which rival or eclipse the reach of traditional media outlets. The distribution of content posted on these platforms has complex implications regarding how it spreads online, what role these companies have in distributing (and suppressing) user generated content, and how information flowing through these platforms influences their audience.
We’ll also look at the role Google has as a search engine in filtering out certain information or websites and prioritizing others, as well as Wikipedia’s role as an ‘encyclopedia’ that so many rely upon as a source of knowledge, and how it too is another cog in an Orwellian machine of censorship and media manipulation.
You may be surprised to hear the evidence and admissions that the CIA actually created a powerful program in the 1970s to place CIA agents and assets in high-level positions within major news organizations so they could kill stories and perpetuate government propaganda by facilitating its publication at the media outlets they controlled. It may sound like the plot of a Communist conspiracy or a science fiction film, but you’ll see it’s a very real covert operation that happened right here in the United States of America.
Now, let’s enter the fascinating maze of media manipulation and get a closer look at the forces behind what can only be called an information war. This is a war of facts vs. fiction, of perception vs. reality, of average well-meaning and hard working people vs. shady multibillion dollar international corporations that want to control what you see, hear, and think. This is The True Story of Fake News.
Real Fake News
Grocery store tabloids have been a standard feature at the checkout stands for decades, and I’m not just talking about the clearly fake and satirical papers about finding “Bat Boy” or the “Redneck Vampire.” Usually these rags cover celebrity gossip and just fabricate claims about cheating and breakups, but tabloids like The National Enquirer cover politics as well, and despite breaking a few legitimate stories like Senator John Edwards’ affair and love child, they’re usually just fake news that nobody ever takes seriously.
But with the development of the Internet, we’ve seen some shady websites pop up which are designed to look like actual news sites or have names sounding like a newspaper from a major city, and they post fake news stories in hopes of having them go viral trying to bring traffic to their site so they can earn some ad revenue or get some laughs from the joy of pranking people. These fake stories trick a small number of people, but most are smart enough not to fall for a “breaking” story coming from a “news” outlet they’ve never heard of. While people may succumb to their clickbait titles out of curiosity, most people can spot that the website is bogus or is just a satire site.
Many of the supposed “fake news” articles that went viral during the 2016 election weren’t really ‘fakes’ but were just satire that some people thought were real after only reading the headline or the first few sentences of the stories. Before “the Russians” got blamed for fake news being shared on social media, it was teenagers in Macedonia, a country in Southeastern Europe once part of Communist Yugoslavia.28 Mainstream media began writing stores about the “Macedonian teenagers” who were allegedly making thousands of dollars a month from writing fake news about Hillary Clinton in the run up to the election.29 Macedonia was said to have been the home of various pro-Trump websites which were allegedly “cashing in” on writing fake news about things like Hillary Clinton’s “imminent criminal indictment.”30
While a small group of friends with a misguided entrepreneurial spirit in Macedonia may have registered a bunch of domain names, wrote some fake news stories that got shared on Facebook and made them some money from Google Ad Sense, no credible expert claimed that this amounted to anything more than one of a million Internet scams run by people trying to make a quick buck.
A few fake news websites the media focused on after the election were National Report.net and The Denver Guardian, both run by the same guy who calls himself Jestin Coler, who found a niche on the Internet by writing fake news stories which relied on people sharing them through social media.31 Some of his articles include: “RFID Chip Now Being Issued in Hanna, Wyoming As Part of New Obamacare Plan,” “Trump to Nominate Chris Christie to Supreme Food Court,” “Man Shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Blowing Up Friend’s Inbox,” and “Atlanta Falcons Win Popular Vote, Still Lose Super Bowl.” Most of them are clearly just jokes, and not ‘fake news’ in the true sense of the word, but a few of them were, like the one titled, “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide,” which was posted a few days before the election.32