Liquid modernity: fake news, fake people, and real problems

Falsehood, according to MIT professor Sinan Aral, travels farther, faster and more broadly than the truth. That was his conclusion in 2018, co-authoring a study on how false information spreads on Twitter, and the finding applies just as easily to the entire digital ecosystem we now live in. Fake news spreads effortlessly across the internet, fuelled by our own involvement. Beyond bots and coordinated disinformation campaigns, it is our quick-trigger approach to retweeting, commenting and sharing other people's inaccuracies, speculations and rushed conclusions that allows falsehoods to circulate at lightning speed.

One of the study's co-authors, Soroush Vosoughi, noted that the gap between the spread of false and true news remained even after every bot was removed from the database. Keeping critical thinking and reading comprehension low has always been the most effective way to influence public opinion, for anyone with an interest in pulling the strings.

Fake influencers

The battle for influence in the digital era has given rise to a whole new breed of digital players. Influencers shape the reputations of fashionable places and products. To expose the shaky foundation on which the credibility of that recommendation network rests, in 2018 the agency H2H, which specialises in influencer marketing, set out to create a fake influencer from scratch.

With just €500 spent on buying followers and meticulously crafting an authentic-looking profile, they created the account @almu_ripamonti, played by an actress. In three weeks the account had accumulated nearly 100,000 followers, mostly bots. Nobody noticed. Soon enough the fake influencer was flooded with party invites, gifts and perks, all in exchange for a positive review. Every brand that approached her did so purely on the basis of her follower count.

As Luis Díaz, director of the agency behind the experiment, put it: for many players in this ecosystem, digital influence is a matter of more is better. More followers, faster recommendations, more self-promotion. Just as fake news spreads thanks to our careless clicks, fake people win over brands with their fake followers.

Hacking the system

There are platforms that aim to democratise the evaluation and ranking of services and businesses by leaving the power in the hands of users. It sounds good in theory, but even these apparently meritocratic systems have flaws that can be exploited by anyone who understands their inner workings.

Take Oobah Butler, a 27-year-old journalist at Vice in 2017, who managed to turn his garden shed into the number one restaurant in London without ever serving a single dish. He documented how he gamed Tripadvisor's algorithms and filters, creating fake dishes out of detergent, shaving foam and sponges to simulate gourmet meals. As word spread, people were desperate to book a table, and Butler went one step further by hosting a single real dinner at the shed. With four chairs, some cheap pre-cooked food and a bit of flair, he made diners feel they were experiencing something exclusive at London's top-rated restaurant. The Shed at Dulwich has since been removed from Tripadvisor, but the five-star reviews and glowing comments can still be found in the archives. It was not even the first time such a scam had been pulled off.

A more recent example comes from Australia, where YouTuber Stanley Chen exploited the same vulnerability from another angle. After visiting a restaurant that served frozen food disguised as gourmet, Chen set up a fake restaurant called Nise Jangaru Ramen. His twist was to serve instant ramen at €40 a bowl. Diners who waited up to three hours for a seat believed they were about to enjoy an exclusive culinary experience. In reality they were eating instant noodles anyone could have made at home.

Don't blame the bots when we act like them

In all of these cases the takeaway is the same. It is us, the citizens, with our suicidal tendency to shy away from complexity, avoid fact-checking and reject the critical thinking that should protect us, who facilitate the perversion of what Zygmunt Bauman called the liquid universe. We only make it worse with the media's obsession with speed, competing with social networks or, worse, relying on them as their sole source of information.

I still remember the advice a wise professor gave me years ago: don't let anyone read the news for you.

Bonus track: ego remains king, on and offline

One clever example of gaming the system comes from Alec Brownstein, a copywriter who, with just six dollars, used the egos of five advertising directors to land interviews and, ultimately, a job at Y&R New York. I wrote about it separately in Hacking your dream job.