Fake Game Strong

Israeli soldiers duped by Hamas 'fake women' phone ruse
Feb 2020, BBC News

Hey, let's chat!
Who the f*** downloads a link to get pictures on their phone? Nobody: 1998 dial-up users:

North Carolina Facebook page labelled fake news
Feb 2020, BBC News

50,000 followers in one month is apparently a good score for a fake news site. They did all the right things: labeling the page "satire" gets it past the fact-checking algorithms, and so does using real stories. Only thing is, the stories could be from anywhere and old as hell. Doesn't matter, got clicks.

The site administrators also said they were a research group from North Carlina University  conducting social media research, good one.

Facebook removes 'foreign interference' operations from Iran and Russia
Feb 2020, BBC News

"Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour"

All 16 Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the Museum of the Bible are fakes
Apr 2020, Ars Technica

Somebody stop me! "The Museum of the Bible" though.

Researchers use machine learning to unearth underground Instagram 'pods'
May 2020, phys.org

More inauthentic coordinated behavior.

Fake game on overdrive with this one. This press article starts with a good rule of thumb -- not all engagement is organic.

NYU/Drexel researchers found a coordinated group of inauthentic users who game algorithms and artificially amplify content. And they give us a new term as well -- "reciprocity abuse".

Reciprocity abuse can only be done with groups of disingenuous agents all working together; this is not something that one can do by themselves, especially in a social network where the power lies in the network and not in the individual.

Some findings:
Seventy percent of users experienced a two-fold or greater increase in interaction level on control posts after they began posting in pods, and on average, these users saw a five-fold increase in comments

Each pod had, on average, about 900 users, though some had as many as 17,000 users

And there's way more to come: "Already there is evidence of recently increasing adoption of this strategy: the pods we discovered have emerged at an accelerating pace over the last two years." -NYU Ph.D. student Janith Weerasinghe

'Fake' meat on the menu as China reopens restaurants
May 2020, BBC News

Can't tell whether this is fake fake meat or just fake meat. Must investigate. Meatgate.

And would you look at that, it's just China trying to get-in on the plant-based burger wave. Guaranteed headline by next summer, "Fake fake meat on the menu...".

Fake America Great Again
Aug 2018, MIT Technology Review [soft paywall]

Reminding us of the origins of deepfake in reddit and porn, and also generative adversarial networks.

Fake Drugs, Fake Board Games, Fake Blog Posts
Network Address, 2018

-image source: Fake America Great, Bruce Peterson
As I look at this picture of the iconic red Make America hat and with the eyes of a draughtsman, I conclude that the text is shopped, because it doesn't match the curve of the hat as it turns away, especially visible on the bottom half where it should start tilting upwards after the midpoint. But the letters do get smaller as they recede. Maybe it's just a great photo taken at just the right angle.