Hopefully readers will leave it on the shelves.
Payton believes the hacker just wants to do the right thing.
What I don't get is why they are protecting the name of the company that funded all this and all their properties? If you want to stop people from doing this sort of thing in the future, it helps to know who to hold accountable.
In the meantime, the comment section on Ars is delivering in equal parts rage and comedy.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/terrorism-hoax-ontari...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9958679/BBC-admits-...
Stories 1 and 3 are about one fantasist who managed to trick a bunch of regular news outlets.
Story 2 is about a single flawed report from the BBC.
You can sit back and complain that not enough checking is being done by reporters and editors at mainstream media sites, and you would be right; the pressure is always on reporters and editors to get the story out and move on to the next one; the news cycle has got shorter and at the same time budgets have got tighter.
But an occasional failing to meet high standards like that is a million miles away from deliberately setting up a ring of supposedly independent web sites with the intent of pushing lies 24x7 and carefully calculating how to get as many people as possible to believe in those lies.
Not to mention the secondary industry of fake reviews latched onto that.
Not really meant as what about, because at the end of the day it is the same annoying shit almost everybody seems to accept as necessary evil, that's just the way it works, yada yada.
edit: Put another way, every channel is oversaturated with noise. No Signal anymore, except for Virtue maybe. I don't give a shit. Just bad entertainment.