Punk Fake News is about making money. Hot Global News looks like a real news website but is made up hoax stories written by two Canadian boys. Headlines abound: Obama wears a ‘Fuck Trump’ T-shirt to White House Barbecue or Justin Trudeau Bans Trump from entering Canada. These boys push out their preposterous news to social media; traffic surging to their news site results in a flood of ads, and that brings in huge revenue. By the way, the site Hot Global News was recently renamed to The Avocado News. These boys are young entrepreneurs who’ve found a way to make money by exploiting inherent flaws in the Internet. As ridiculous as these online media outlets are, some people believe their news. And here is when that gets dangerous. The two boys in Canada are not alone in their entrepreneurial pursuits. Fake news during the 2016 Presidential election was generated by legions of adolescents in Macedonia who cashed-in on Trump’s rise to power and were just looking to make money from ads.
New York Magazine noted that entrepreneurial punks were born and bred in America too. “Locals, mostly teenagers and college students, have “launched at least 140 US politics websites” with “American-sounding domain names such as WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co, and USADailyPolitics.com.”
Making the leap from entrepreneurial punks making money by exploiting the internet to political strategists leaking, planting, concocting, fabricating and distorting the truth for their own political gain is a shot that can be heard around the world and Americans need to be on red alert.
Political Fake News is a grab for power.
Pinpointing when the Political Fake News Phenomenon began is tricky. Early on during the 2016 election, YouTube Videos featured #CrookedHillary lookalikes wearing dominatrix garb, flogging Bill for his transgressions. Myconservative.com claimed a rivalry existed between Michelle Obama and Melania Trump. In Mrs. Obama’s photo, she wore no makeup, her hair was askew and her skin bore the trace of perspiration; it was as if she was jogging and snapped from a telescopic lens. Mrs. Trump was snapped under perfect light with fresh makeup, glossy hair and a stunning, stylized wardrobe. The Fake News story suggested Mrs. Obama was a nappy-haired little black girl who had no business being first lady, while Mrs. Trump would restore glamour to the White House.
It’s not clear who created the #CrookedHillary YouTube video and the thousands like them. MrConservative.com has since removed the Fake News story discrediting Mrs.Obama. It is true that the thousands of entrepreneurial punks started their web businesses by copying stories from conservative American news sites, such as Breitbart and MrConservative.com. Somehow Russia’s sophisticated network of Desinformatsia invaded our media and created a new red zone. Desinformatsia (dezinformatsiya) or Disinformation “is intentionally false or misleading information that is spread in a calculated way to deceive target audiences.” Russian-architected Desinformatsia amplified political Fake News with an army of botnets, human trolls, social media accounts and shadow websites. Even using sophisticated search engine DomaineTools have not been able to identify the owners of the many political shadow websites.
Who paid for the amplification of Fake News? Human trolls, writers, video makers, photographers, photo curators, web editors, and web developers don’t work for free, even if they’re Russian. Ads and political campaigns are also not free. It costs big money to deploy a propaganda machine as sophisticated as the full-out, war-time military operation that is being called Fake News.
The Washington Post noted that the onslaught of Fake News during the 2016 Presidential election “got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.”
Despite the avalanche of so-called Fake News, we’ve all set news alerts on our cell phones so we can quickly learn of the latest blow that the perp has inflicted on America and the free world. Red herrings are infiltrating everything we see, hear and read. The perp has framed the mystery to make every nation in the world “bad,” and has led us to believe that all news is fake, except for his version of the facts, which contain unpardonable errors, grievous omissions and downright lies. The perp asserts that any news that is not favorable to him is Fake News! What is really scary, is how little we know to sift through the red herrings to learn the perp’s real motives. Why would an American President discredit our free press: CNN, The New York Times and The New Yorker by categorizing them as Fake News? Why would the leader of the free world ignore and dismiss the Russian invasion of our own nation’s news media? Only the true perpetrator of a major crime would use the rhetoric of Desinformatsia to assert that all news, except his news, is Fake News. In the new world order, all the world is his stage. We know for sure who the perpetrator is; it’s just a matter of time before we catch him red-handed.
EDITORS’ NOTE: Word of Warning to the Free Press: Be hypervigilant about getting your facts validated, corroborated, checked, and checked again. Whatever methods you used to check sources and facts in the past need to be made even more secure and certain. The perp is out to get you and will deliberately toss you bait to entrap you.