Overseas, nations like Russia, China, the Philippines, India, and more, have thriving digital economies built solely on defrauding digital communications. I'm not talking cyber-spies and plots. This is pure economics.
Also worth a read - clickfarming.
The problem so clogged up the giant Instagram platform that in 2014 they had to purge over 18 million suspected fake accounts.
Such digital tactics have been honed into a targeting political tool which found great success in the presidential election.
Cutting across many demographic groups, the rise of believers in Fake coalesced around a TV celebrity, Donald Trump, whose identity is and remains more of an Avatar than a person. He's the perfect spokesman of the Fake generation.
Accuse the spreaders of fakery (and their leader) and they'll respond such accusations are proof of guilt of the accusers. A political writer at Politico chucked mainstream news outlets for a couple of weeks and just followed the Fake generation online for information:
"Indeed, my feed was totally saturated with Pro-Kremlin sentiment. Part of that seemed connected to the likely Russian hack of emails that weakened the Clinton campaign and were published on Wikileaks, an organization that seems to have the trust of the alt-right. Anti-ISIS sentiment was baked in, and many Tweeters were just parroting the nation’s most prominent Russophile, Donald J. Trump. In any event, Russian propaganda intersected with Trumpian propaganda to such an extent that I observed little skepticism of Putin or RT, his English-language mouthpiece. At one point user @neverRINOs retweeted an image of Bashar Al-Assad on RT, saying, “Western media has no credibility, morality.” Above it, he wrote, “FACT CHECK: TRUE.” As Cernovich tweeted, “Putin is a larger than life alpha male who loves his country and will fight to defend it. Why don’t you admire him? Brainwashing.”
It's a swamp that isn't being drained, it's growing.