![]() Sarah Palin's famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. Well, this isn't just a Trump-supporter problem. When did you notice that fake news does best with Trump supporters? "What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says. He wrote one fake story for about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot. He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right. ![]() He sent us an email and we set up an interview.Ĭoler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. But a couple of hours later he had a change of heart. We left Coler our contact information thinking he wasn't likely to talk. The Two-Way Study Finds Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real There was a black minivan in the driveway and a large prominent American flag. His home had an unwatered lawn - probably the result of California's ongoing drought. Coler lived in a middle-class neighborhood of pastel-colored one-story beach bungalows. On a warm, sunny afternoon I set out with a producer for a suburb of Los Angeles. And, using his name, we found a home address. ![]() Coler's LinkedIn profile said he once sold magazine subscriptions, worked as a database administrator and as a freelance writer for among others, International Yachtsman magazine. Online, Coler was listed as the founder and CEO of a company called Disinfomedia. Jansen found an email address on one of those sites and was able to link that address to a name: Jestin Coler. That meant they were all very likely owned by the same company. All the addresses linked to a single rented server inside Amazon Web Services. "I was able to track that through to a bunch of other sites which are where that handle is also present." "That was sort of the thread that started to unravel everything," Jansen says. Jestin Coler, publisher of fake news sites The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |