Wow that's a good point: in the era of false news, getting someone to visit a site that covertly logs them as having visited suspicious domains would be pretty trivial.
Just publish some really divisive fake news about Brexit and that'll rack up the UK hits on Facebook.
It's so disgustingly trivially easy, I don't feel comfortable making even basic comments about how Id do that.
But I am going to try a few PoC ones later today. (On a private network, using all domains and computers I control.)
I... View a lot of use of digital records as the witchtrials of the modern era (eg, cases where people got charged for child porn because a coworker used their machine, but the logs say it was them!). The conclusions don't logically hold up, but reveal something about our reverance for technology (and assuming it worked right).
How did we get here? Many folks have surfed the web for 20 years, even more for 15, most for 10 --- now in 2016, surprise surprise, fake news abound! /s Almost as if coinciding with the calls for (or introductions of) related legislation..
Just a narrative being peddled [0]. The mainstream media lost their grip on "the people" so now need to brand anything that isn't themselves as "fake news". Google Trends shows how blatantly obvious the narrative crafting is. It's only suddenly an issue because the MSM needs it to be. So within a very short amount of time you see MSM like the NYT or WaPo posting articles about 'Fake News' and getting everyone to start talking about it.
The number of people online, the level of engagement, and the money being made in online advertising, is unprecedented. I don't know what impact it had on the election, but it was definitely something that has attracted more attention due to the campaigns. It's not unusual for a problem that has existed for a relatively long-time to suddenly come to the attention of the legislature when it rises in prominence.
Fakenews/webspam has been profitable for years. I've seen articles with titles like "Martin Sheen dead!" for a lot longer than the 2016 US Presidential campaign (which, granted, seemed like it lasted forever)
Just publish some really divisive fake news about Brexit and that'll rack up the UK hits on Facebook.
Christ, it's even worse than I thought.