> The story was then promoted by MSN, a web portal owned by Microsoft.
Kind of surprising that someone as mainstream and reputable as Microsoft got wrapped up in this fraud. Don't they vet their suppliers? Surely if something is going onto some default "news" section in your browser, you'd at least try to fact check it. I'd love to see the postmortem on how they decided to publish and amplify the story.
EDIT: Further in the article, it looks like other reputable companies, like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian, chose to syndicate this crap. Does nobody even spot-check their suppliers anymore?
That’s so much of the problem with chasing scale. Everyone wants to report stuff happening in the real world, but without doing work in the real world. So they rely on other people having done the real world work, but those other people are working under the same constraints and incentives they are, so do the minimum real world work possible. Then they all have to compete with algorithms that work just well enough to keep the money flowing, and “keep the money flowing” doesn’t seem to require any real world at all, so competing with it is a race well past the bottom.
Maybe one of the untold stories of the 'Browser Wars' was how Microsoft went from 80% to ~0% partially because their home page was all awful tabloid trash. Nothing new for MSN.
Sadly, in today's era of "get stories out as quickly as possible" style journalism (and quickly declining traffic + wages for the industry as a whole), actual fact checking is far less common than it needs to be. If a story looks remotely credible, then a lot of publications will think that's 'good enough' as a source, no matter how obvious the problems would be with a bit of further investigation.
I'm lazy enough to not bother to change the home page (or default browser) on one of my computers, so it's MS Edge and this junk is the home page. It's really shocking how bad it is.
Part of the problem is the "legitimate" sources they choose to syndicate are barely distinguishable from the outright frauds. This is not a comment about political bias, the BS spans all kinds of politics.
I doubt BNN Breaking is the only blatant fraud either. I often see headlines that make me think there is zero chance the story is real.
I think the problem is MS wants to show ads on the home page at all, and because it's low value space, they're forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel for content (the ads are terrible too).
Chrome's default page is infinitely better because it just doesn't have much on it (I also never changed this from the default). For me, it's just a google search bar, and some of my bookmarks/recently visited pages. MS needs to just stop attempting to monetize this kind of space. I'm assuming google was on to something by deciding it wasn't worth it.
This happens all the time in the news now. They're too busy trying to catch a story as soon as they see it and take no time to confirm. I've caught plain nonsense before within 5 minutes of investigating the story that just broke. The other side of the coin is, stuff like the war in Syria, and even Ukraine, I'm fully aware of it happening before the mainstream breaks the stories.
They said the other news outlets linked to the stories, not syndicated. I checked the Politico and Guardian links, they were linking to BNN stories to support their argument. The Guardian piece is at least labeled as opinion, which I think means anything goes these days. If it's all wrong it is just fodder for the next opinion piece calling it rubbish.
>Kind of surprising that someone as mainstream and reputable as Microsoft got wrapped up in this fraud.
Wow, people really think there is some magic about corporations 'not doing bad'.
You know they are full of regular humans?
Kind of amazing. I've seen people say stuff like: "Nooo Apple doesnt Astroturf!". Buddy, Aldi astroturfs, you better believe that the best companies in the world at marketing are astroturfing(or outsourcing it). Its foolish to think they are perfectly moral, but maybe it makes it mentally easier to be a customer/fan to be so idealistic.
> In August, MSN featured a story on its homepage that falsely claimed President Joe Biden had fallen asleep during a moment of silence for victims of the catastrophic Maui wildfire.
> The next month, Microsoft republished a story about Brandon Hunter, a former NBA player who died unexpectedly at the age of 42, under the headline, “Brandon Hunter useless at 42.”
> Then, in October, Microsoft republished an article that claimed that San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston had resigned from his position after criticism from Elon Musk.
Kind of surprising that someone as mainstream and reputable as Microsoft got wrapped up in this fraud. Don't they vet their suppliers? Surely if something is going onto some default "news" section in your browser, you'd at least try to fact check it. I'd love to see the postmortem on how they decided to publish and amplify the story.
EDIT: Further in the article, it looks like other reputable companies, like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian, chose to syndicate this crap. Does nobody even spot-check their suppliers anymore?