> And who would be behind it if they followed the money? Advertisers, probably. I worked in adtech doing fraud detection back in ~2013 and “fake news” sites we

> And who would be behind it if they followed the money? Advertisers, probably. I worked in adtech doing fraud detection back in ~2013 and “fake news” sites were already prevalent, but their business model was usually boring old advertising. They were also big on ad fraud (e.g. serving ads in hidden iframes). That’s not to say that the Kremlin/IRA were not behind some of it, but Occam’s razor is that most fake news is just a result of sites with no incentive to do honest journalism trying to drive clicks.