40 | New Scientist | 19 October 2019
and shaped by algorithms that could be
reverse-engineered, gamed and manipulated.
The platforms also became increasingly
personalised, serving up the information
they thought users wanted and, in doing
so, sometimes creating bubbles of hyper-
partisanship – small online knots of identity
that could each be contacted and exploited.
In the space of a decade, it became far easier,
faster and cheaper for people to mould the
public with social media using networks like
the one Facebook had found. And it didn’t take
the resources of a state, either. Anyone could
do it, so long as they had a smartphone.The fake news economy
When I met one such fake news merchant in
a dimly lit bar in Kosovo in November 2018,
his phone never stopped chirping. Each noise
was a click – the sound of someone stepping
into a vast digital web that could also be called
coordinated and inauthentic. One where bay
leaves can cure cancer and George Washington
was really Albanian. The man, who I’ll call
Besar, told me his operation was all about
pumping out content that, true or false, was
so shocking that people couldn’t help but
be drawn in. Some stories were patently false,
others simply clickbait. But for Besar that
distinction is a waste of time. “It’s all total
nonsense,” he told me. “I don’t even read
this stuff.” Click on any of Besar’s stories,
and you’re taken to the money-making part
of the operation. On a series of crude-looking
websites, he turns eyeballs to money in the
same way as any journalist: advertising.
A former waiter, Besar was now building and
buying Facebook groups with huge audiences
dedicated to everything from evangelical
Christianity to holiday destinations. He created
thousands of fake accounts to rope in even
more people. He would use already large
groups to grow new ones, and invest
thousands of euros in carefully targeted
advertising to drive numbers up even further.
When we met, I judged he probably had more
online readers than some UK broadsheets.
Besar isn’t alone. He showed me a whole
network of invitation-only groups on
Facebook, with memberships ranging from a
few hundred to several thousand. They formed
a kind of marketplace where pages with
hundreds of thousands of likes were traded
for thousands of dollars. Others sold fake likes
or fake accounts, or offered advice on how to
get around Facebook’s evolving enforcement.
I found a “fake news starter pack”, complete
with a collection of pages to get an audienceand websites to monetise them. It wasn’t
just Facebook that was innovating, people
like Besar were too.
Around the world, thousands of people are
using the same tools to game and manipulate
social media platforms on an industrial scale.
For $3 you can buy a “HUGE MEGA BOT PACK”
on the darknet, allowing you to build your own
army of automated accounts across hundreds
of social media platforms. Other services
can manipulate search engine results, buy
Wikipedia edits or rent fake IP addresses to
make it look like your accounts come from all
over the world. There are even “legend farms”
that you can recruit, giving you control of tens
of thousands of unique identities, each with
its own personality, interests and writing style.
Despite the power these rogue agents
claim to possess, the harm they cause is
purely incidental to them; their biggest driver
is profit. They work in small groups, with
limited budgets – they are the agile start-ups
of the influence industry.
The giants when it comes to propaganda
and influence are the nation states. Their aimisn’t profits, but geopolitics, and they work
at a far larger scale.
Yevhen Fedchenko, the director of Mohyla
school of journalism in Ukraine, was among
the first to realise that states were joining
the race for influence. That realisation came
after what he called Maidan: the public
demonstrations in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014
against Russian influence in the country.
In the months that followed, new messages
and narratives appeared in Russian media.
They were on TV bulletins and in newspaper
stories, as they had been during the cold war,
but were now joined by mobs on social media.
In July 2014, a gruesome story appeared on
Russia’s most popular TV station, Channel One.
It claimed that Ukrainian officials had nailed
a 3-year-old boy to a wooden board in the city
of Slovyansk. It wasn’t true, but in story after
story, interview after interview, tweet after
tweet, a case was being put together using
false stories: that the Ukrainian authorities
were a Western-backed junta; that Ukraine
was a failed state, a fascist state. Ukrainian
journalists were hounded and threatened.
“All Russian media started to describe Maidan
using the same words, and the same kind of
perspective,” says Fedchenko. “It was massive.”
It was almost like a preordained narrative had
been switched on.
The Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) in
the UK is one of a number of think tanks that“ This fake news
merchant had
more online
readers than some
UK broadsheets”
Anger is a powerful
tool for change, but
can easily be hijackedMIKE KEMP/GETTY