This website is part of iGov, socialist self-governance online. Learn more here

How-to Decode Fake News?

Written on 7 December 2021 by Andrijan Apostoloski — Bushi

The mystique that’s priorly narrated is often finished by the time you are viewing your third Google result, and the path of the journey you took to process the news information disappears as cheap WordPress templates reveal the low-effort fake news outlets.

Run by God knows who, these act like the cancer in society feeding from the dopamine need of humans, with an often companionship of horrible click-bait titles which ask the always big questions, only to artificially create a desire that is revealing and cracking the mystery in the content itself.

The mystery though, it never has any substance behind and carries this cheap revelation of many of current news floating from the geopolitical scene, and is constantly overthrowing the viewer with some hyped-up and exaggerated information which loses any power right after revealing itself. Science, art, culture, everyday life, the ‘show-bizz’, science scene… Everything falls under the claws of fake-news outlets, and you get tons of new ones each new day.

From one side you get the news from this bubble: Vaccines are deadly, vaccines are that, COVID pandemic is staged, they alter our brains with a microchip, you have no idea what Trump eats for breakfast, the Earth is flat yo… what else?

Everything else. From having ‘Russian and Chinese state-controlled media’ stamped on Facebook, you should be aware that equivalent Western media doesn’t get the same privilege to get marked as such, that much that the BBC will pass without having ‘Western/British’ state-controlled media, when it’s literally that. No worries, it doesn’t stop here. The wish to control the information and misbalance the whole neutral view of geopolitics has been a battle since forever, however, the ying-yang must always be balanced with the most hardcore and pure journalists doing the good job of being able to stay in the middle and see the information and process it on a complete neutral grounds, with these sweaty teenagers with the wish to become the next big hit that are building audience with cheating and lying throwing huge punches to the real ones, but also to the whole media in general.

But those fake-news low-effort sites that have cheap WordPress templates and poor execution, believe that only by having a news platform hosted online, people would trust their words and that their chaotic ramblings about many topics are to be of any value.

The most fucked up thing in this society is that no matter how stupid they (articles) seem to be, there are in matter of fact, people that completely fall pray to these directed mishaps of society, and lots of work needs to be done on how to distinguish between, especially if no advanced knowledge of the internet is in upper hand, and if you don’t see platforms such as projects that need a certain timely manner to develop… and these fake-news outlets always seem to fall in that 1-day news agency category, no matter where it is to be seen.

Facebook does not mark Western news as government-controlled, and Facebook does not tell you that it’s fake news until the news is completely spread out and it has already complete its mission. Facebook does for days leave untruth information to float around inside their algorithms, but if you want to share something from the other side of the World, especially the Russian viewpoint of things, most mediums are heavily censored with lesser importance points than their Western counterpoints, even if they’re completely legit information of news.

We live in a world that’s censored, and we live in time where news is entertainment, and is always played as a short dopamine bomb with life-changing and completely utter atomic bombs with no substance at the end, and just another one of those bombs that seemingly trap most of the society’s NPCs which don’t take at least 15 minutes of research before judging and making a conclusion of theirs, also always ending with an opinion, because the news bomb revelations steer in directing you an opinion and stance that would otherwise  be completely ignored, because… because mass media control.

Right now as the media is failing with the fight of fake-news, there should be a guide of distinguishing between what’s real, what’s not, what’s biased and what’s not but also what’s coming from a relatively transparent source and what needs triple checking before forming any opinion for that matter, if you even wish to do so.

For example I believe Russia Today equally as Deutsche Welle, as they’re both respectable media outlets, but it’s not a secret they’re funded by governments, so I tend to see them as information from the country’s window, instead of completely neutral media that much to form an opinion already. For European topics a quick-check of the British and American media outlets slowly reveals the truth about certain topics, however, because the West and East (Russia and China) are playing Cold War tactics for quite long, even that information is often quickly saturated or distorted on the neutrality side of things, and you can get mis-leaded even from reputable sources of legit media.

On top of everything, a little decoder that works pretty good is having Reddit as media with world news and country-specific sub-reddits followed or checked, with high observation of the news and decoding and researching each new website from development side of things, their professionalism and portfolio of news, but also viewing their impressum and some quick researches in that field alone. It’s seeing the HTML source of a given news article and checking for WordPress leftovers by searching “wp-“, seeing their template, and if a certain site is low-effort enough to be an aggregator of fake news, a very poorly built footer will follow which gives away the whole situation about what you’re reading. The content of these websites is provocative and always intrigues the visitor to click, an artificial dopamine hunter that wins by simply having itself clicked and viewed, as tons of ad platforms enrich the content by building fat with no substance at all to contribute for the content.

These low-effort websites are many, but Facebook and other media outlet still haven’t find an algorithm to manage them, as every person on Earth can create their own medium without even needing to open up a company, nor be anywhere near a journalist with opinion of their own and validity to continue pushing information that they find is acceptable, but can be backed up by absolutely nothing and zero.

This is why most often the low-effort fakies have no credits attached to the articles, so no writers are linked, and their About/Crew pages are seemingly always in construction and have very generic explaining about the ‘media’, always referring to itself as the best and quickest outlet to get your news from.

This saturation and distortion of news is why we have problem with the internet, as it uses its lawless state to privately gain leverage by tricking people to visit their content, as they’re making money from advertisements and forget that when information is given to society, there should be liability and proof, finishing the formula of the mystery on a truth basis with references included, however there never is such a thing.

The internet is good because it has no laws, but the internet is also very bad because it doesn’t have the same. When even governments from both sides could freely contribute in this fake-news propaganda materials going on from both sides equally, then when and how will this stop?

I am not certain if algorithms that do a globally-acceptable check of media will be pushed to the public soon, however it seems like as long as ‘fake news’ is present in the wild, even bigger media companies can twist their view, and people don’t seem to find that very non-forgiving, but they are accompanied to it that much that it’s simply the new norm now.

A whois check is making research on a given domain name, it gives you information about the owner and date of purchase. For example if we whois ‘example.com’ it will print back info such as the owner of the domain name, the date first purchased and many more that reveal the server connection and their ISP to provide all this information to you.

When you ping a fake-news outlet, most often the information will be hidden behind a privacy bottleneck which gives every domain owner an umbrella to completely hide under, and often these options come very cheap and sometimes even free, depending on the domain provider.

This wall of information block most often gives away servers that that are bought from very cheap hosting providers, thus, revealing the fake-news outlet and their narrow system that they fall upon, only to completely destroy it by wanting to hide from the world completely, with every article on the site written by the site itself and nobody to personally take credit for, because nobody will get behind information that’s fake-news, so nobody wants to hold with that liability and be taken account for.

The low-effort level varies from medium to medium, but the most basic ones are so absurd that I’m having a laugh at first, only to continue to dig deeper with research to simply make fun of them.

The answer in general is abstract, but the only thing it requires is deeper analytics and fact-checking with multiple creditable sources, and if they don’t have this “insane” news already published, most often it means it’s simply a creation of some teenager or government propaganda payee doing his job poorly and being another tear in the ocean of fake-news and other gibberish that’s based and never transparent.

Also, just visiting fake-news portals already does it for them, a view and visit has been registered and ads have been presented, so you did them a huge favor. And if you’re one of those middle-aged people that constantly shares them? Oh boy, they’ve hit the jackpot with ya.