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posted by janrinok on Thursday November 24 2016, @03:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the peeling-the-onion dept.

The Washington Post published an interview [...] with Paul Horner, who has made his living off of writing viral news hoaxes on sites like Facebook for the past several years. "But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump's son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner's faux-articles. His stories have also appeared as news on Google."

Although Horner compares himself to parody and satire sites like The Onion (though less obvious), he's now concerned about the influence of fake news. A few excerpts from the interview:

On why he has seen greater popularity recently:

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.

How he thinks people should treat his fake news:

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] they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything!

On the recent push by Facebook and Google to target fake news sites:

Yeah, I mean — a lot of the sites people are talking about, they're just total BS sites. There's no creativity or purpose behind them. I'm glad they're getting rid of them. I don't like getting lumped in with Huzlers. I like getting lumped in with the Onion. The stuff I do — I spend more time on it. There's purpose and meaning behind it. I don't just write fake news just to write it.

[...] I'm glad they're getting rid of those sites. I just hope they don't get rid of mine, too.

Related reporting from Alternet.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by fritsd on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:08PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:08PM (#432436) Journal

    Fake news doesn't exist.

    Reasoning:

    - There is an item of fake news
    - It corresponds to my belief of how the world works, therefore I accept and believe it
    - Later, people try to convince me that it was fake news
    - If it was fake news, then that implies that I was gullible to accept and believe it
    - I know for sure that I'm not gullible!
    - If I'm not gullible, and I accepted that news item, then that implies that the news item was real!
    - Ergo it wasn't fake news.
    - Furthermore, the people trying to convince me that it was fake news, are themselves gullible, or are trying to trick me.

    There, now wasn't that a nice piece of logic ;-)

    I'm curious what percentage of people really think like this.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:09PM (#432437)

    I had a sudden flashback to my college class on Shakespeare when I read your post.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Yog-Yogguth on Tuesday November 29 2016, @01:18AM

    by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 29 2016, @01:18AM (#434299) Journal

    Bet you didn't think you would get a reply saying the following :)

    Lots of people "think" that way (or similar) but thankfully not everyone all the time, you and I do it too at the very least once in a while even if we don't like to admit it because it's human nature to make such fallacies and it's human nature for a reason because in specific circumstances it's even (shock, horror) defensible or highly advisable despite being nothing but a string of disconnected fallacies.

    Was i wrong? :D

    I mainly wanted to point out that the point you're making is valid specifically because what you wrote isn't logic! Haha! X) Or at least not valid logic and not valid reasoning either :) People who don't believe me only have to learn actual logic and might find it helpful to get familiar with logic symbols such as these [wikipedia.org].

    And still sometimes (or often) despite all that it is not only useful but recommended as a short-cut to avoid wasting time on too much of the too noisy "information" which we're all swamped in. So thus while it's not valid logic and not valid reasoning it still ends up being rational! :D It really is horrific! And thus confirmation bias is born (and that's the rub, the other side of the coin, the loose ends that can turn into a noose).

    Yeah I'm trying to trick unsuspecting readers into going off and learning logic.. I'm really evil lol :3

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