Crowdsourcing fake news

A group of people may be used to "crowdsource" a set of fake news. Many events these days get their way to the crosshairs of Big Media only after being spotted and amplified by the blogosphere. Sometimes the media do not even bother to check the information thoroughly; a small example, a fake suicide bombing in California, here:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/09/bluewater/
Notice use of credible-looking US-registered Skype numbers, redirected to other countries.
See also couple wikipedia-related mishaps when the newspapers cited wrong information from there without checking primary sources.

The same tactics could be used for short-term manipulating of stock prices (and cashing in) by creating news about corporations, or for character assassination before elections (whether national, municipial, or for a corporate board). The people sourced for the task may or may not be aware of the true purpose of their work.

Operating in the open with lower risk of early detection could be achieved by working in a language different than English (and than of the target, if not English). Finnish, Czech, or Chinese/Japanese/Korean may be just a few examples of languages relatively few people in the common population, outside of said countries, understand; if obvious keywords are avoided, discussions may be pretty much invisible to English-speaking searchers.

For direct mass-scale influence, direct engagement of people on blogs and other discussions is required. Countering the unwanted opinions and drowning the voices in the ones peddling the party line. Three examples I mentioned elsewhere already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_diplomacy_(Israel) (the links dealing with the Internet)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing (a technique description with examples)

Amazon Mechanical Turk is an example of a service connecting people doing small tasks and people willing to pay small prices. This, or similar, service could be used for recruiting large amount of people at short notice for piecemeal simple tasks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk