BOTS BITE MAN
I LEARNED OF Alec Baldwin’s death on the subway, deep beneath Manhattan. I’d started reading a New York Times editorial about the proliferation of fake news in the age of Donald Trump. Scrolling down on my phone, I saw what looked like a related Times headline: “Baldwin: Gone at 58.”
Of course, Baldwin and his Trump impersonation were very much alive. The fake news of his death had appeared, via third-party advertising code, within the very piece damning this phenomenon. It felt ironic, but I knew the problem was algorithmic: Keywords in the article had sent signals to an ad server, which performed its functions exactly as planned. In the digital world, attention is currency. That false but enticing Baldwin headline drew lots of clicks, and so it proliferated.
In other corners of the internet, bogus claims were circulating about the Earth cooling and
