Christopher Blair: Fake News Artisan
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_godfather_of_fake_news
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-41147572
The short biographic/long interview piece above looks into the life and works of Christopher Blair, who has spent the last few years deliberately writing fake and sensational news articles. Some examples of the headlines of his articles include “• BREAKING: Torture Chamber in Bill Clinton’s Basement Described As A ‘Kill Room’” and “• BREAK ING: New Orleans Saints Stranded on Runway in London After Pilot Takes A Knee and Walks Off”. Although Mr. Blair himself identifies as a liberal, his pieces are aimed at a conservative base. His goal is ultimately to get people to be emotional and to share his articles so he is able to collect more ad revenue.
Fake news is an excellent example of the dangers of information cascade in real life and this is a great in-depth look into how and why fake news is created and spread. One man, Christopher Blair, is able change what thousands of people feel and perceive as the truth through his writing. The advent of social media has made this process terribly efficient. As more and more individuals fall into his snare, they proceed to get riled up by the sensational headlines they read and share the articles to their friends, exposing more and more people to it. As a result, the more people that believe in the article, the more people will share, and in turn, the more people that see and believe in the article; this becomes the information cascade. It’s interesting to note that Christopher Blair notes that this works better when the reader gets riled up or emotional after reading the article, meaning for people to believe and share the article it has to shock their sensibilities and beliefs. One could then conclude that these types of information cascades work best when the reader is shocked, emotional, or irrational, meaning that these authors will try to be as scandalous as possible, however this can lead to dangerous results in the real world.
The article also goes into the real life consequences of such a negative information cascade. One of Christopher Blairs articles falsely claimed that a Muslim mosque refused to shelter non-Muslims during storm Harvey in Texas; a story that was shared over 200,000 times. While the story and mosque were fake, he used a real person’s photo and caused a storm of Islamophobic and hateful comments. This was just one example of how information cascade can create a torrent of misinformation and hate speech.