We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs
What boggles my mind is that Facebook and Twitter are so very complicit by creating platforms for very granular targeting.<p>You liked the Green Bay Packers, a gun owners group, an old 2008 Tea Party video, live 60 miles outside of a city and between 40-65? Not only is that profile there, Facebook ads will tell you almost exactly how large your reach is.<p>This is nothing more than information arbitrage, and that the unit economics from advertisers hasn&#x27;t quite caught up yet. It&#x27;s what allowed Buzzfeed to exist in the first place, and ultra targeted startups like Teespring to grow, by training a small part of the crowd to become content creators. Moreover, traditional content creators like NYTimes don&#x27;t even understand how much they are being undercut cents-to-words.<p>You work out the funnel conversion, hope for some organic spread, and just pump things out. In a few years, this whole thing could be automated and AI generated to sway elections and public opinions. All you need is a training dataset for the targeted population&#x27;s underlying views and beliefs.<p>Imagine a startup trying to do this at scale, growing 10% week over week or something insane. At this point it&#x27;s basically going to match the velocity of information across online networks of people.<p>If this becomes a positive feedback loop where readers start to accelerate the spread after becoming radicalized - this becomes a social virus.