Political disinformation was outsourced to low-cost global labor markets

Evidence

This collaboration revealed a more dystopian form of globalization: Powerful political forces outsourced disinformation campaigns to low-cost labor in developing countries. For the teens, it was all business. “We can’t afford anything,” one content farmer explained, “and if the Americans can’t tell the difference [between real and fake news], it’s their fault.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 485

This collaboration revealed a more dystopian form of globalization: Powerful political forces outsourced disinformation campaigns to low-cost labor in developing countries. For the teens, it was all business. “We can’t afford anything,” one content farmer explained, “and if the Americans can’t tell the difference [between real and fake news], it’s their fault.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 485

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s thesis about the ‘omnivore monoculture’ — this is a case where attention itself, stripped of cultural context, became a globally tradable commodity. — connects to: Post-truth politics in the US has reinforced European distrust of media institutions — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 38; Paid digital mobs were a cheap, high-return political tactic worldwide — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 698
• ADDENDUM: The ‘death of the sellout’ idea and this outsourcing story both hinge on the collapse of status signaling as meaningful in a globally flattened attention economy — relevant to the omnivore monoculture thesis.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 485