By Colin Taylor Posted on November 17, 2016
This past election was defined by the electorate’s engagement with social media and a rejection of mainstream news sources. The traditional sources of information were replaced by social-media based blogs, many of which offered news that was either vastly misleading or entirely false.
Those fake news websites ended up having a significant effect on the public perception of the election, and one of the primary culprits has admitted that his hoaxes may have helped give President-elect Trump his shocking electoral college victory.
Paul Horner, the founder of the fake website abcnews.com.co, spoke to the Washington Post about the role his website played in misleading a gullible electorate and how Donald Trump supporters truly will believe anything.
Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s 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’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.
My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
Why? I mean — why would you even write that?
Just ’cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at their rallies, and that’s just insane. I’ve gone to Trump protests — trust me, no one needs to get paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually believed it.
I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters — they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].
Read more
http://occupydemocrats.com/2016/11/17/pro-trump-fake-news-writer-just-told-eye-opening-interview/
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment