Christopher Blair takes a sip of his coffee.Then he carefully focuses on one of the three screens in front of him.
克里斯托弗·布莱尔啜了口咖啡，然后仔细地盯着面前的三块屏幕中的一块。
He’s in his home office, 45 minutes outside Portland, Maine, on the US East Coast.
他正在自己家中的办公室。这里位于美国东海岸的缅因州，距波特兰45分钟车程。
Stroking his thick beard, he looks at his bookmarks bar.
他一边看着网页的书签栏，一边抚着浓密的胡须。
He takes another sip before his coffee goes cold, inhales long and hard, then logs into the back end of one of his many websites.
在咖啡冷掉前，他又啜了一口，猛地长吸了一口气，然后进入了他众多网站中的一个网站后台。
He begins by choosing a subject. Which “lucky” politician will be on the receiving end of his attention today?
第一步，挑出主角。哪位“幸运的”政治人物会是他今天的关注对象呢？
Bill Clinton? Hillary Clinton? One of the Obamas?
克林顿？希拉里？还是奥巴马家族中的一员？
Or maybe the subject of his story won’t be a person, but a policy. Gun control? Police brutality? Feminism? Anything that will push buttons.
或许，故事的主角不是一个人，而是某个政策。控枪？警察暴行？女权主义？只要能让人们点击阅读的，都可以。
Next, the details.
下一步，想出细节。
Perhaps he’ll make up a controversial incident, a crime, a new law or a constitutional amendment.
也许，他会编造一个争议事件，一场罪行，一项新的法律或宪法修正案
“Changing” the US constitution is particularly fun - he’s already written more than 30 fake amendments. (There are only 27 genuine ones.)
“修改”美国宪法尤为有趣—他已经编造出了30条“假宪法修正案”。（真正的宪法只有27条）
Blair sits back in his chair and focuses intently on the screen. He leans forward, places his hands on the keyboard and starts the same way he does every time.
布莱尔靠着椅背，专注地盯着屏幕。他身体前倾，将手放在键盘上，像往常每次一样开始写作：
Caps lock. BREAKING. Colon...
大写。‘突发！’。冒号。
BREAKING: Clinton Foundation Ship Seized at Port of Baltimore Carrying Drugs, Guns and Sex Slaves
“突发 ：克林顿基金会的船只在巴尔的摩港因缴获毒品、枪支和性奴隶被扣押”
The words flow from the thoughts in his head. Unconnected to reality, he needs no research, and no notes.
字句从他脑中徐徐流出。由于写的东西与现实毫无关系，他不需要做任何笔记和调查。
His fingers rhythmically tap the keys. Letters form into words, words into sentences and sentences into a blog of about 200 words.
他有节奏的敲着键盘。字母汇成了词语，词语合成句子，句子组成了一篇200多字的博客。
It doesn’t take long to write.
写这些花不了多长时间。
Publish.
他点击发布。
Blair sits back in his chair and watches the likes and shares roll in.
布莱尔靠在椅背上，看着“赞”和“转发”纷至沓来。
Christopher Blair grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, a city on the northern outskirts of Boston.
克里斯托弗·布莱尔在马萨诸塞州的罗威尔长大，位于波士顿市郊区。
His stepfather was a committed Democrat who once ran for the Massachusetts state senate.
他的继父是一位忠实的民主党人，曾参加过马萨诸塞州议员竞选。
Blair spent more than two decades as a construction worker, a trade that took a toll on his body. So in the late 2000s, when the Great Recession hit and his industry slumped, he started looking for another source of income in liberal political blogging.
建筑工地上二十多年的劳作对布莱尔的身体造成了很大损伤。因此，当2008年经济大萧条使建筑行业陷入衰退时，他不得不借自由政治话题的博客另辟收入来源。
He found he loved to write and had a real flair for making words come alive. He began a blog, the first of many. There was a liberation in being able to say what he wanted - arguing in favour of a range of positions on the left-hand side of American politics.
他发现自己十分喜欢写作，同时还有着让文字跃然纸上的天赋。于是，他开通了自己的首个博客，后续又开设了更多。在博客上，他想说什么就说什么——主要发表一些支持美国左翼政治的看法。
But although it was fun and a few people started reading, blogging didn’t pay.And so he tried another tactic. He began to write fabricated, made up tales that looked like real news headlines. Streams of consciousness flowed from his head to the keyboard.
虽然博客上的内容很有意思，也吸引了一些读者，但是发博客并不能变现。因此，他又试了一招，即尝试开始编造一些很像真实新闻头条的故事。他才思泉涌，笔耕不辍。
When he saw the results online, the hundreds and thousands of likes and shares his posts were getting, he felt validated. Far more people were interested in fake news than Blair’s opinions or true stories.
看到网上成百上千的点赞和分享，他觉得受到了读者的认可。读者对他写的假新闻的兴趣明显高于对他的评论和真新闻。
Not everyone was convinced.
但是，并不是所有人都这么好说服。
“You’re wasting all this time,” his wife told him. “It will never amount to anything.”
“你这样是在浪费时间，”布莱尔的妻子对他说，“这件事不会做大的。”
But once his fake news started to get clicks, he was able to use Google’s advertising platform to convert page views into money. In 2014, he quit his day job completely.
然而，当他的假新闻开始积攒点击量时，他便能借助谷歌的广告平台利用页面浏览量来获利。2014年，他辞去了工作。
He took on the personas of patriotic Americans outraged at President Obama, liberals, feminists, the Black Lives Matter movement and more.
他扮演了一系列美国爱国者的“角色”，“他们”对奥巴马总统、自由主义者、女权主义者、黑人维权运动等感到非常不满。
He delighted in people who took the lies for the truth and shared the stories as if they came from real news websites.
Blair的目标受众是那些会把谎言当作事实的人，他向读者分享这些看起来就像是来自真实新闻网站一样的虚假故事。
看到有人把他的假新闻信以为真，还和真新闻一样四处分享，他乐不可支。
The success of the fakes led Blair to create a Facebook page called America’s Last Line of Defense. It was dedicated to fake news stories aimed at staunch Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump.
编造虚假新闻的成功促使Blair创建了一个名为“美国的最后防线”的Facebook页面。该网站专门报道假新闻，以对付共和党人和特朗普总统的支持者。
The headlines were sensational and sometimes even offensive. They had one aim - to provoke an emotional response that would get people to share them.
这些头条新闻耸人听闻，有时甚至具有攻击性。它们的目的只有一个——激起人们的情绪化的反应，促使人们分享他的故事。
Blair himself describes the headlines he writes as “racist and bigoted”.
Blair自己形容他写的标题是“种族主义和偏执的”。
But they went viral, and those shares turned into clicks, which turned into cash.
但这些新闻像病毒一样迅速传播开来，分享变成点击量，点击量又转化成了金钱。
By early 2017, there was a lot of talk about the rise of Facebook-enabled fake viral news stories. But that didn’t mean that social media companies were doing anything about it.
到2017年初，依赖Facebook而兴起的病毒式假新闻故事引起了了广泛讨论。但这并不意味着社交媒体公司采取了相应措施。
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had famously scoffed at the suggestion that the fakes could sway voters.
众所周知，Facebook首席执行官马克·扎克伯格曾对假新闻可能影响选民这一说法不屑一顾。
“Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook... influenced the election in any way - I think is a pretty crazy idea,” he said just after the 2016 presidential election.
他在2016年大选刚刚结束时表示: “我个人认为Facebook上的假新闻……在任何程度上影响了选举—都是一个相当疯狂的想法。”
But the frenetic political climate in America meant fake news writers like Blair were more successful than ever before. He hired other writers to churn out the fakes. And the money kept flowing in.
但美国狂热的政治气候意味着，像布莱尔这样的假新闻写作者比以往任何时候都更成功。他他雇佣了其他写手大量炮制假新闻。盈利源源不断。
“It was every day, all day,” he says. “We were getting results with what we were doing.”
“每一天，每一刻都是如此，”他这样说。“我们的工作颇有成效。”
But the good times couldn’t last forever. The political winds began to turn against him.
但好日子不可能永远持续下去。政治风向开始对他不利。
Blair, a committed liberal Democrat, was being lumped in with a whole host of people accused of peddling lies to inflate support for President Trump.
布莱尔，一个坚定的自由民主党人，被指控兜售谎言以扩大对特朗普总统的支持。
In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey tore through Texas, killing dozens and causing billions of dollars of damage to Houston and the surrounding areas.
在2017年8月，飓风哈维袭击德州，造成数十人死亡，给休斯顿和周边地区造成了数十亿美元的损失。
Across the country in Maine, Blair sensed an opportunity to use his creative writing skills.
在缅因州的全国各地，布莱尔注意到了可以让他施展创作技巧的机会。
He made up a story about a fictional imam in a fictional mosque in Texas. The imam, he wrote, refused to shelter non-Muslims during the storm.
他编造了一个故事，虚构了一位在德州一座清真寺任职的伊玛目（对穆斯林祈祷主持人的尊称）。他写道，此人拒绝在风暴中为非穆斯林提供庇护场所。
Satire - not news, not opinion, and not propaganda - is how Blair describes his work.
布莱尔是这样描述他的作品的:讽刺——不是新闻，不是观点，也不是宣传。
His aim is to trick conservative Americans into sharing false news, in the hope of showing what he calls their “stupidity”.
他的目地是骗保守的美国人转发分享他的假新闻，暴露出他眼中的“愚蠢”。
As public awareness about fake viral stories grew, so did pressure on social media companies to do something about it.
随着公众抵抗病毒式假新闻意识的觉醒，运营社交媒体的公司的压力随之增加，不得不对此采取措施。
Mark Zuckerberg said his personal challenge for 2018 was to “fix” the social site, to combat hate and abuse, but also fake news.
马克·扎克伯格先前表示2018年他的个人挑战是“治理”社交网站，包括与仇恨言论、网络暴力以及假新闻做斗争。
In April, 2018, he was called in front of Congress to answer questions about a host of issues, the fakers on his platform being one of them.
2018年4月，扎克伯格在国会议员面前回答了一系列质询，其中就包括Facebook上的骗子的问题。
As a result, in July, Facebook announced algorithm changes designed to boost content from “friends, family and groups”. The company, realising it had an image problem, launched an ad campaign to reassure users that they would be protected from “spam, clickbait, fake news and data misuse”.
随之而来的是7月份脸书算法变更的通告，脸书将会更多地推送来自朋友、家庭、社群的内容。脸书官方意识到了他们的形象需要挽救，于是开展了一项推广活动，称会保护用户不受垃圾邮件，诱导点击，假新闻和数据滥用的侵害。
Some Facebook pages were deleted, while other publishers found that their posts were not travelling as far or as fast as they once had done.
一些脸书主页被删除了，其他的发布者或许发现他们的发表内容被限流了。
For Blair, the money began to dry up. Largely because of Facebook’s changes, he says he now makes a fraction of what he did at the height of the fake news boom.
对于Blair来说，他的钱变少了。这主要“归功”于脸书的算法变更。他说，相比在假新闻的“黄金时代”时能赚到的钱，现在收入简直只是个零头。
But he insists money was never the motivator, and instead he claims to be a “leader of the resistance” against President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
但他强调：赚钱不是他做这个事情的动力，他真正想要做的是引导对总统特朗普和共和党的抵抗。
“I’m not some monster. I’m a liberal,” he says. “The goal isn’t money.”
“我不是什么恶魔，我是个自由主义者，我的目的并不是为了赚钱。”
“There hasn’t been any money in six months. [But] go look at my page, I’m still active, I’m still doing it. I’m still writing.
“已经六个月没有钱入账了，但你看我的主页，我还是那么活跃，我还在坚持做这件事，坚持写下去。”
“I still believe and I always will.”
“我仍然相信，并且始终如一。”
新闻来源丨英国广播公司
图片来源丨英国广播公司
编译丨刘可圆 李昕瑞 徐炜 陈宁
排版丨陈宁
指导老师丨刘佳