{"id":30148,"date":"2016-11-18T17:47:30","date_gmt":"2016-11-18T22:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net\/?p=30148"},"modified":"2016-11-18T17:47:30","modified_gmt":"2016-11-18T22:47:30","slug":"facts-of-life-v-fakes-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net\/?p=30148","title":{"rendered":"Facts of Life v Fakes of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wasn’t entirely aware of fake news stories posted on Facebook, for one place–because I don’t read them or get them (I’m not even sure how I would if I were interested) and, mostly, because I know how to get facts out of the news. The real news.<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s shockingly obvious (reference the election) that a massive number of people in this country don’t know how to gather and weigh facts, and can’t distinguish between fact and lie.<\/p>\n

I’d been seeing on Twitter hints about the promulgation of fake news. I thank Mark Sumner, of DailyKos for this scary tale, most of which follows. My bolding.<\/p>\n

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News reporting is often slanted. During the election cycle, it was frequently galling to see the light coverage given to Donald Trump\u2019s astounding lies and hate speech, while the press devoted a million column inches to whether Hillary Clinton had seen a single letter \u201cc\u201d\u00a0nestled deep inside an email. But even biased news coverage generally involves events that actually happened. In this reality.<\/em><\/p>\n

However, as the election drew near, that form of news was displaced by something that goes beyond biased. Completely fictional news. \u201cNews\u201d that is simply\u00a0made up to create a response. [<\/a><\/em>Link to Buzz<\/a>Feed–a terrific (and terrifying) long story about fake news.]<\/a><\/p>\n

In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That means that things like the Pope endorsing Donald Trump, which didn\u2019t happen, got passed around and read more times than things like Trump groping a reporter, which did.\u00a0There\u2019s a reason why\u00a0post-truth <\/a>is the Oxford English Dictionary\u2019s \u201cword of the year.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Fake news had such impact over the last few months, and was so widely read, that there are\u00a0real (i.e. non-fake) reasons to believe that just\u00a0one man may have swayed the election.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common? For starters, they\u2019re all make-believe \u2014 and invented by the same man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he\u2019s British graffiti artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. \u201cSouth Park\u201d lawsuit last year.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Horner pulls no punches in describing the ease with which he\u2019s able to fool the public.<\/strong> Making money off ads placed within fake news? It\u2019s as simple as giving people\u00a0what they already want to believe. For example, Horner just released a story claiming that President Obama will invalidate the results of the election<\/strong>. That story has already been shared a quarter of a million times, and it\u2019s just getting warmed up.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore \u2014 I mean, that\u2019s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn\u2019t care because they\u2019d already accepted it. It\u2019s real scary. I\u2019ve never seen anything like it.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Me again. One thing Horner could do: stop with his empire of fake stories. Just because he succeeds at fooling so many “dumb” people doesn’t mean he’s a success.<\/p>\n

As 62 million of us know, after this election.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wasn’t entirely aware of fake news stories posted on Facebook, for one place–because I don’t read them or get them (I’m not even sure how I would if I were interested) and, mostly, because I know how to get … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1175],"tags":[1182,1176],"class_list":["post-30148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-facts-of-life","tag-fake-news","tag-the-facts-of-life"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t