ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the various types, ranging from teenage pranksters to commercially adept manipulators of social media, to more politically motivated conspiratorialists such as Alex Jones. It discusses capacity for social media to be used in the way by dishonest or politically motivated fakers has placed great pressure on big platforms such as Facebook and Google to improve their systems of moderation, filtering and screening of malevolent fakery. The chapter shows that Jones has been active on cable and then digital media since the late 1990s, disseminating conspiracy theories about events such as 9/11 and the Sandy Hook school massacre of twenty children and two teachers in October 2012. Alex Jones and Infowars, present a more familiar stereotype of fake news with his gleeful dissemination of conspiracies, myths and fantasies about everything from 9/11 to the Newtown massacre.
