How Fake News is Made (Plus Who, Why and How!)

In the 2016 election season, Fake News websites sprung up quickly and in shocking numbers. Many believed their lies and voted based on them, but what IS fake news and how does it work?

How propagan-do???

Making headlines is hard, but making fake news is as easy as ABC (but in Russian). Fake news comes from Macedonia, Russia, these United States, and really everywhere.

First you just have to pick a website name. Make it something slightly off-brand like,, the non-existent Boston Tribune or Empire News.

Copy their logos and graphics so you look just like the real thing, and steal their news stories too while you’re at it. Fill it with random content, so it looks like a news site what that actually

is. Do this by posting dozens or hundreds of wholly plagiarized stories from real news sites, even the ones you’re trying to copy.

Watch the video…

Isn’t this illegal?

Of course! It’s totally illegal, but it’s a civil infraction, not a crime, so you’d have to sue them in their home country, and that’s basically impossible.

And if the copyright guys catch you, switch to another of your hundred sites, or use a bot to rejuggle and repost them as what Americans basically call gibberish.

Swoop in for the kill

Whip up a crazy story how someone is a lizard or prefers the company of goats. Say the person is a rapist, a murderer or mass criminal of any variety, and that charges are coming down any day.

You’ll need to cite a couple high-level sources who wish to remain anonymous. And also cite some people willing to go on record with their names with juicy, salacious details, even though those people don’t actually exist.

Get social media out there

Use the hundreds of social media accounts you made or bought on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, to forage for dippy smarts. In the industry, this is know as trade-farming.

Clusterblast your lie far and wide with a headline so preposterous that rubes can’t help but like, share and Tweet the unholy heck out of it!

Round one is complete

While co-worker-1 is across the room adding more filler, co-worker-2 goes onto social media personally insulting and intimidating anyone who doesn’t buy your bulishness.

If they have to dox them, learning their real names, addresses and places of employment just to intimidate them, that’s fine too.

While you’re free to start dreaming up the next impossible headline spun entirely from whole touched cloth.

Does it work?

Quashing dissent
Here’s where you have to hire one more full-timer to sow the unreaped stalks of pre-harvest anti-truth. You need hundreds of folk, or at least their identities, to go out all over the web calling EVERYTHING “fake news”.

Don’t like a headline? Call that fake news!

Don’t like a comment on social media? Call that fake news too!

NBC retracts a story from an hour ago? FAKE NEWS!

The more they pretend real news is fake, the more it takes the sting out of their jellyfish bulldog milkshake.

And that’s why they call it propagan-does, instead of propagan-don’t!

Royalty-free music “This House” by Kevin MacLeod — Outro by Greg the Hero.

Author: Brian K. White

