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Yeah, the first idea you propose sounds like making an anarchist "Weekly World News", "The Onion" or "ClickHole". It gives you the freedom of being as silly, absurd and outlandish as you want with the premises. If the sense of humor and images are well done, many people would enjoy it. Maybe it could even inspire some real events.

The idea of a big-ish well-orchestrated one-time prank is also appealing to me. Like embarrassing some authority figure in front of a crowd of teens. Some people, like politicians, spend millions and years to build an image, and it can crumble in seconds. Encouraging mischief and trickery, specially in the younger formative years, is always welcome.

With respect to internet originated hoaxes, which there's an endless amount of unaffiliated trolls online, increasingly there will be hobbyist trolls which will get incentives of funding by state and non-state agents, in covert and overt manners. The boring job of "fact-checking" and knocking down false stories, spins or false flags before the begin, or quick response damage control, also has its place and value. But spending too much effort into these endeavors, is a huge time-suck. Ideally by keeping international, regional, and local networks of trusted online friends where you can quickly verify things, helps, and means you don't have to do it yourself, depend on any one outlet, or be everywhere at once.

Local knowledge is key to make hoaxes believable (or to debunk them). A hoax maker with local knowledge of the target site, operating from far away, has an advantage á la the so called "silo of russian trolls". This is an image that's made a bogeyman and attributed too much, but this type of activity by many different actors Russian. Chinese etc is one US Army is very concerned with and wishes to compete in and dominate as explicitly stated in recent unclassified documents. Their capacity in this area is not yet up to par (and same goes for other govs, which sometimes try to project a greater capacity than what they actually have), but they will soon make up for it and double down. Are @ prepared? Of course not, though some have had a head start.