This morning, an email came across a company email inbox. It was from “Trump Supporters” with the email address, [email protected].
With the subject line, “We promised to build a wall, Can we depend on your support?”, the email went on to say:
We appreciate your continuing support.
We promised to win the election and we did it.
We promised to create jobs, to protect this great nation
and to make America great again!
We promised to build the wall and I’ll tell you what,
we’re going to deliver on that promise as well.
Read more at [site removed]
to find out about how our nation’s next president,
the great Donald Trump, is making moves to build that wall!
Again, we appreciate your support. God bless America!
The email linked to a real fake news article that claims that President Elect Donald Trump has started to buy land along the Mexican border – a claim that is clearly and utterly false.
While Hillary Clinton’s cohorts and the executives at Facebook decry “Fake News” as the scorn of their existence and why they lost the election, the reality is the motivation to produce fake news is very, very simple . . . it’s all about the Benjamin’s.
The link that was included in this email went to what is called a “slideshow.” It’s a series of short articles or blurbs and images that require readers to navigate from one page to another. Many publications use slideshows as a way to entertain readers and to increase ad revenue . . . even this publication.
For each thousand page views, publishers typically earn $6 to $15. It’s not a lot money if you think about it and in retail terms, the earnings are anemic – consider 1,000 customers walking into a store and only $12 is spent.
To make up for the low earnings, unscrupulous characters on the Internet (and unfortunately there are no shortage of them), fabricate news with extraordinary headlines in order to drive in traffic and boost earnings. Some call it “click bait” others call it unethical.
With that said, the email above was also considered unsolicited bulk email, aka, SPAM, and is illegal.
Does that matter? No as most spam originates off shore and even from places like . . . gasp . . . Russia where people are less interested in overturning an election and more interested in putting another ruble in their pocket.
Comment below.
