Worried about whether you’ll get brainwashed by any of this?<\/p>\n
Don’t worry — not if you carry one particular philosophical banner which apparently conveys immunity from political lies.<\/p>\n
Can you figure out which philosophy? No? I’ll help you:<\/p>\n
Starting in November 2016, I began to collect disheartening and infuriating stories about pro-Trump\/anti-Hillary trolls, bots, kompromat, disinformation, lies, smears, et cetera et cetera and so forth.<\/p>\n
This information has become useful as I work on Part II of my book, How I Learned The Facts of Life.<\/em> (Part I is “The Facts of Life.” Part II is “The Fakes of Life.”)<\/p>\n In a section entitled “Meet Some Purveyers Of Fake News,” I write about some of the worst. Three of them, though, inadvertently provided some experiential proof that we are not all fools — to their chagrin but my great pleasure.<\/p>\n Here they are. I’ve bolded the stuff that should delight and buoy you up for our coming battle in November 2020:<\/p>\n \u2660<\/p>\n Jestin Coler said he was producing fake news to \u201cinfiltrate the echo chambers of the alt right.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s the fact of Jestin Coler\u2019s life? He produced fake news for the money.<\/p>\n I was introduced to Jestin Coler by Laura Syndell in her excellent, thorough, clear-minded post-election article, \u201cWe Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs: Here\u2019s What We Learned,\u201d from NPR.<\/p>\n Here are two paragraphs telling you pretty much everything you need to know about the audience for fake news.<\/p>\n During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. \u201cIt was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they\u2019re about to get served,\u201d<\/strong> Coler says. \u201cIt caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election.\u201d<\/p>\n Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals \u2014 but they just never take the bait.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2660<\/p>\n Now let\u2019s travel with the New York Times to Tbilisi, Georgia, in the November 25, 2016 article by Andrew Higgins, Mike McIntire and Gabriel J.x Dance, \u201cInside a Fake News Sausage Factory: \u2018This Is All About Income\u2019\u201d:<\/p>\n A computer science student in a former Soviet republic found there was money to be made in mixing real and made-up stories, as long as they were pro-Trump.<\/p>\n Here are the first two paragraphs. Do feel free to compare the statements made with that bolded statement from Jestin Coler up above:<\/p>\n Jobless and with graduation looming, a computer science student at the premier university in the nation of Georgia<\/strong> decided early this year that money could be made from America\u2019s voracious appetite for passionately partisan political news. He set up a website, posted gushing stories about Hillary Clinton and waited for ad sales to soar.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know why, but it did not work,\u201d said the student, Beqa Latsabidze, 22, who was savvy enough to change course when he realized what did drive traffic: laudatory stories about Donald J. Trump that mixed real \u2014 and completely fake \u2014 news in a stew of anti-Clinton fervor.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u2660<\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t entirely aware of fake news stories posted on Facebook, for one place, because I don\u2019t read them or get them (I\u2019m 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. And I don\u2019t get my news from Facebook.<\/p>\n It\u2019s now shockingly obvious after the 2016 election that a massive number of people in this country don\u2019t know how to gather and weigh facts, and can\u2019t \u2013 or don\u2019t want to \u2013 distinguish between fact and lie.<\/p>\n People who apparently were devoted to a guy named Paul Horner, who ran a fake news site on Facebook.<\/p>\n Reading about Horner\u2019s specific fake news stories today is bewildering. I don\u2019t remember them. Viral they may have been but that virus I didn\u2019t catch.<\/p>\n The Amish lobby? Gay wedding vans? President Obama canceling the election? The Pope endorsing Trump? The ban of the national anthem? They were all invented by Horner. \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>\n Horner died of a drug overdose. We educated liberals, who did fact-check everything, will not miss him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Worried about whether you’ll get brainwashed by any of this? Don’t worry — not if you carry one particular philosophical banner which apparently conveys immunity from political lies. Can you figure out which philosophy? No? I’ll help you: Starting in … Continue reading
\nHorner was a hoaxer, a spewer of viral fakery. He wrote crap, junk, garbage. He fooled people \u2013 whom he deplored:<\/p>\n