Propaganda! We live in a country of suckers who buy into the propaganda and turn our country into an Authoritarian Plutocracy because they don’t know what a fact is, they can’t tell truth from lies, and they’ll believe anything that stirs their emotions. I was really mad at HRC and President Obama when they did anything that helped support the biggest propaganda network of them all, FOX! We can’t win elections if our people keep legitimizing these freaken pathological lying propaganda networks.
Now Caitlin Dewey at the Washington Post has a very interesting interview with someone who created “fake news” throughout the campaign.
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’s British graffiti artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. “South Park” lawsuit last year.
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“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.”
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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.
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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].
I believe this is one of, if not the biggest problem we face. How do we counter the Tsunami of lies that rush over some really irrational people? Main stream news outlets like CNN (you assholes!) do their false equivalency thing every night where the have half of their panel shoveling bald face lies to the public like a farmer shoveling shit from a barn, while the other half tries to counter lies with truth and CNN says WTF, we’ll just let our viewers figure it out because this is entertaining and we’re making a big profit on it.
This is why I really don’t like this argument that we lost because of disgruntled white guys in the mid west were mad because their steel mill jobs went away 30 years ago. We better learn that there are plenty of people out there who when presented with the truth or a lie that stirs them up, they won’t be able to tell the difference and they’ll choose the emotional rush all the time.
If we’re going to win future elections, we better either figure out how to counter the propaganda, or build a coalition of people who are smart enough and have the empathy to listen to well reasoned arguments that will make our country much better than the future the irrational gullibles have in store for us.