"What a Map of the Fake-News Ecosystem Says About the Problem"

[Hortensis]

http://fortune.com/2016/11/28/map-fake-news/

Even Fortune's summary of this research is rather dense, but just scanning gives a fascinating glimpse into the complexity of the right-wing disinformation web, as well as organic spread through emails and so on. (Note that although sites like Amazon and YouTube have surprisingly become important electronic nodes in the spread of disinformation/fake news--big circles on the graphic--these sites are not found to generate it.)

Next Albright did what he called a "medium-scale data analysis," crawling and indexing 117 websites that are known to be associated with fake news. In a follow-up post, entitled The #Election2016 Micro-Propaganda Machine, he mapped the connections between those sites and plotted them as dots, based on the strength of their connections.



Albright subsequently expanded his sample to include more than 300 sites, ... More than anything, the impression one gets from looking at Albright's network map is that there are some extremely powerful "nodes" or hubs that propel a lot of the traffic involving fake news. And it also shows an entire universe of sites that many people have probably never heard of.

Two of the largest hubs Albright found were a site called Conservapedia—a kind of Wikipedia for the right wing—and another called Rense, both of which got huge amounts of incoming traffic. Other prominent destinations were sites like Breitbart News, DailyCaller and YouTube (the latter possibly as an attempt to monetize their traffic).

And the article Fortune is reporting on: https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba#.7tgi8kyfq

[Nitram]

1. Conservapedia is run by a bunch of whack job right wingers with hardly a functioning

brain cell to share among them. Designed for conservative home scholars (sic), it is about as weird and lightweight as you can get.

[Hortensis]

2. For sure, and apparently it IS fake-news's version of Wikipedia,

a huge "incoming" node for people who get disinformation and take it elsewhere, like those huge "organic" email distributions.

I wouldn't say those behind this are all whack jobs, though. This is an important part of a giant right-wing conspiracy to lead people so far down the rabbit hole they'll never find their way out.

[Nitram]

6. I spent quite a bit of time monitoring Conservapedia, and most of the people who...

are allowed to post on the site (they are very restrictive) are obsessed with their own little niche conspiracy theories. None of it reaches a level of credibility that would bear re-printing. They are mostly anti-abortion young earth creationists. They even ran a project to remove all the "liberal" material from the Bible, if you can believe it. The site is run by Phyllis Schlafly's son. The web site Rationalwiki was created to counter Conservapedia and other whacko conspiracy sites and theories. They have an amusing section where they print the latest idiocy posted on Conservapedia and vote on the best ones:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:What_is_going_on_at_CP%3F

[kimbutgar]

3. I used to look at rense during the bush years and it was anti bush

Looked at it a couple of years ago and it was anti obama. Realized then it was a propaganda site by a foreign entity. Now I know it was Russia all along.

[Hortensis]

4. Russia and virulent hatemongering for the truly loony fringe.

It is a chokingly smelly sewer. I'd stumbled across it only once before, so it's shocking to learn it's an important node.

Just grabbed these from the top of a Rense-Russia search:

"Russia saved the United States from division and destruction by the slimy network of the Rothschild moneymen at a crucial point of the American Civil War."

"Today, much of the world views Russia and the brilliant leadership of Vladimir Putin as the only hope of stopping the malignant and deadly spread of world zionism."

[kimbutgar]

5. Those headlines are disgusting