Monetisation of Fake News in the Cyber Domain: A Roadmap for Building Domestic and International Cyber Resilience

Abstract

The online domain has witnessed the proliferation of fake news in the past few years all over the world. This overwhelming amount of (dis)information has created incentives for the proliferators of fake news to benefit from ongoing political developments across the world, due to the courtesy of the existing model of online revenue generation on the Internet. The unregulated, liberal and open nature of the Internet has created an unintended consequence of incentive maximisation for fake news. This paper takes an analytical look at the relationship between revenue generation model in the cyber-domain and how content producers of fake news benefit from it. This paper postulates that the existing online advertisement model remains lucrative for fake news publishers particularly in regions such as South Asia. Its interplay with social media platforms enables further monetisation and spreading of fake news to Internet users. It analyses the relationship between these factors and suggests cross-sector solutions for de-incentivising and countering fake news in the cyber domain.