AUSTIN — A keynote offering a sometimes-uncomfortable perspective on fake news at the South by Southwest Conference here started with a pitch suggesting a different story.

The description below a generic title on the conference’s website for Tuesday’s talk byYasmin Green, director of research at Google’s Jigsaw project, implied she’d speak about countering the radicalization of at-risk audiences. That’s a serious issue that would make for a great SXSW panel, but it’s not what Green’s talk actually covered.

Instead, after explaining that her job at the Alphabet, Inc. (GOOG, GOOGL) offshoot was to make the internet safer for “the next billion people who are coming online,” Green said she would conduct some onstage research into one particular problem: fake news.

That’s the current name for stories circulated to bamboozle readers, although Green also used “disinformation,” the term adopted in the 1980s for misleading information the Soviet Union propagated. After the 2016 election, some observers blamed fake news for tilting the outcome; lately, President Trump has latched onto the term as a generic description for stories he doesn’t like.

To unpack the problem, Green brought out two proprietors of fake news. One, a Los Angeles-area publisher named Jestin Coler, found made-up stories unexpectedly profitable, while the other, Tampa-based lawyer Jeffrey Marty, created a popular Twitter account for a fictional congressman.

From satire to market-tested fake news

 

 

But neither Coler nor Marty said they set out to subvert that promise.

For Coler, creating a satirical site called National Report was “really just about having fun,” he said.

Then advertisers started showing up, which led Coler and his colleagues to concoct stories that drew more clicks. Conspiracy theories tended to work well, he said, citing a phony story about a government mandate “that you received an RFID chip as part of Obamacare.”

The financial rewards mattered — Coler said he later went on to start the fake Denver Guardian  because “my mortgage was due” — but the practice yielded an emotional high too. “It certainly turns into something that’s very addictive.”

Coler’s fake stories, though, had real-world consequences. He said a fake piece about Coloradans being able to buy marijuana with food stamps led a state representative to introduce a bill banning the practice.

(But even that claim is fake. The Denver Post reported that state Sen. Vicki Marble introduced her bill months before Coler’s story.)

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Therapy turns political tool

Marty, meanwhile, said he created the phony “@RepStevenSmith” account in 2013 as a form of therapy after the suicide of a close friend with whom he’d collaborated on many pranks. “It was just kind of like a way of lashing out,” he said.

But as Donald Trump’s campaign for president accelerated through the Republican primaries, the account’s popularity did too — and Twitter users including Star Trek’s William Shatner got faked out by it. The phony congressman’s endorsement of Trump drew some 7,000 retweets, Marty said.

None of this made him money, but Marty realized he could use the account to vent about the dishonesty of many mainstream Republicans. Later, he employed it to generate publicity about the WikiLeaks disclosures of Democratic National Committee co-chair John Podesta’s e-mails.