Journalist identities hijacked to spread fake news – Axios

Bad actors are hijacking journalist names, photos and bylines to help give credibility to fake storylines or hoaxes on the internet.

Why it matters: Even when platforms try to police this type of content, memes and fake stories often still circulate indefinitely, making it hard for victims to fully recover from the hoax.

Driving the news: Joe Gould, a Congress and Industry reporter for Defense News, tells Axios about how his identity was hacked to fuel a right-wing meme conspiracy that the incoming Defense Secretary planned to outsource U.S. defense systems to China.

Gould later found that the meme was rapidly spreading on bigger platforms like Facebook. Frantically, he started to search for the meme using key words noted in the fake article and to contact people who posted it to try to get them to take it down.

The big picture: These types of identity hacks have become more common in recent years. As tech companies get better at detecting fake accounts, bad actors have to hijack real identities to give disinformation legitimacy and to avoid detection.

Between the lines: Gould tells Axios that it's been nearly impossible to get the meme wiped off the internet, especially as it continues to pick up steam on less visible channels like Telegram, where the virality seemed to take off.

Be smart: The democratization of the web means that any bad actor has the power to completely shift a narrative, or wreck a person's reputation, with a single meme.

The trend also represents a misguided fear around things like deep fakes. Situations like these support data that shows that the vast majority of misinformation and disinformation don't involve manipulated media, but rather, manipulated context.

The bottom line: Anyone with perceived institutional expertise is a target, especially journalists and commentators, or even academics and researchers.

Go deeper: Election influence operations target journalists

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Journalist identities hijacked to spread fake news - Axios