By Alec Hogg
LONDON – On Sunday, 28 year old Edgar M Welch walked into a Washington DC pizza outlet, pointed his AR-15 assault rifle at an employee, swung around and fired off some warning rounds.
This was no random or lunatic attack. Welch, a father of two who volunteered at the local Fire Station on weekends, had driven six hours from his home in North Carolina. He was determined to “self investigate” Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria he believed was the hub of a satanic child abuse ring controlled by politicians.
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Court papers show when Welch realised no children were being kept there as sex slaves, he surrendered to police. He now faces a string of charges. The real criminal, though, hasn’t been apprehended. Welch and thousands of others had fallen for a fake news creation designed to defame Hillary Clinton.
Fake news is the latest disease to infest the Internet Age. The more outrageous the allegation, the faster such invented fiction morphs into “fact”. Those propagating fake news often start as pranksters. But the structure of online revenue streams means today’s “parody” account is tomorrow’s big business.
Advertising wholesalers who sell eyeballs by the million only pay attention to the volume of those reached by their client’s marketing messages. The quality of the audience matters less. On the other end, fake news purveyors realise the more people they can fool, the more outrageous the lie, the higher their earnings.
American National Public Radio tracked down fake news entrepreneur Jestin Coler, a one-time freelance journalist who owns a raft of legitimate sounding website like DenverGuardian.com and NationalReport.net. He admitted earning up to $30 000 a month from advertising.
And he isn’t even one of those who have harvested the new opportunities presented by the addition of .co to web addresses. For instance, contrast abcnews.com and abcnews.com.co – one is the online home of a major US television network; the other revels in headlines like “Secret Service man agent Obama is Muslim and gay.”
Fake news is rearing its head in South Africa. I regularly receive mails from an organisation called Black First Land First whose far-fetched garbage is so easily debunked that few bother. But there will be others. And the situation isn’t helped when supposedly well-informed people like SA President Jacob Zuma continuously repeats fake news like “blacks only own 3% of the JSE”.
The father of modern propaganda, Hitler’s henchman Joseph Goebbels, taught the more you repeated a lie, the more those hearing it will believe it to be true. Because they want it to be. And in a world where the income inequality is being flagged as the ultimate challenge, the ability for those with dark agendas to make mischief has never been greater.
