Drag the trolls' reasons for making fake news to the trash can.
Drag the reasons for real news to Doge's magnifying glass.
A visit to the troll factory
Wow, come and check out the troll factory!
I am the main troll and in charge of the factory's operations. I'll be your guide on a tour of our troll factory.
We receive dozens, if not hundreds, of fake news, malicious gossip, nasty comments, and photo and video scams every day. Ignorant and careless internet users believe everything, and that's fine with us!
Let's start the tour here. Dozens of fake news writers work in this room. They have quite a lot of fun coming up with the most incredible fake news stories and publishing them on sites that look almost like real news sites.
But if you're paying attention, you'll notice that our stuff is really silly. We never write under our real names and we don't tell the source of the story. Of course not, because the stuff is our own invention! We just try to write as attention-grabbing as possible – the more incredible the better.
Fake news is often published because we trolls get money out of it. When there is a really juicy fake headline, people click on it and read the story and at the same time the ads on the page, and we trolls get the advertisers money! In the best case, readers still share the news on social media and get us more readers. Huh!
Last week, our completely imaginary story about the king of the forest who lost his tail, Otso Mesikämmene, got the most clicks. Have you ever seen a bear's tail? Of course, even the pictures in the story were false.
How would you feel to read fake news about yourself?
The story was liked and shared by Susi Ropolainen, who plans to aspire to be the next prince of the forest. The Wolf is now getting good publicity for itself while the Bear's reputation has been damaged and it is completely confused by the strange news.
Let's move on. In this room, the trolls write nasty comments and nasty stories about other inhabitants of our forest. Every morning we choose a new group about which we write false claims and incite others to oppose this group. Wow, we're really good at this!
For example, yesterday we targeted hedgehogs, those silly little balls of spikes. We published a fabricated study, according to which hedgehogs nibble on the food of other forest animals. It's not really true, but when we write it on the forum, a lot of people believe and agree! We also wrote that hedgehogs take the best nesting places from the forest. Some of the animals got really nervous and wanted to evict the hedgehogs from the forest completely. Tomorrow we could make fun of ants, for example. Hehe!
The next room is interesting. Here, we work on photo hoaxes and videos , which have nothing to do with reality. Look at this bird spider! So funny!
People believe them very easily and are happy to share them. Incredibly entertaining!
We can change the face and even the voice of the person appearing in the video to another person. Last week, we published a video of a bear that trotted out in the yard of a house and bleated like a sheep. It sounded so real! We claimed that it was a cross between a sheep and a bear, the first in the world. People believed and we got a good laugh!
