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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: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:59PM (#432458)

    This guy thinks he's a satirist, but then he admits to specifically targeting right-wingers because they don't fact-check and are thus the most profitable. Satire isn't written to trick people, its written to skewer the people being satirized. If some damn fool is fooled, that's funny but that's not the intent. Before some genius says that fooling people is satirizing them, no its not because if you are one of the readers isn't fooled the article has nothing to say to you.

    BTW, anyone who listens to talk radio would never be surprised that right-wingers are suckers. For reasons I don't want to get into, I listen to right-wing talk radio at all hours of the day and all of the national ads on there are scams. Superfoods, herbal supplements, gold & silver traders and homeopathic cures. The left-wing barely even has ads, its 90% NPR which, at most, runs brand recognition spots. The other 10% like Pacifica don't run ads or only run ads from businesses local to the affiliate.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @08:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @08:23PM (#432562)

    For reasons I don't want to get into, I listen to right-wing talk radio at all hours of the day and all of the national ads on there are scams. Superfoods, herbal supplements, gold & silver traders and homeopathic cures.

    The pants are a lie!

    Or is Glenn Beck not shilling for that khaki shop anymore?

    And ISTR Hannity's radio show mostly advertising a steak house chain; I don't think they were spinning that as a superfood.

    What I'm saying is, either you've got a classic case of confirmation bias, or talk radio's sponsors have changed a lot over the past... decade?! (I didn't realize it had been that long until I stopped to think about it; maybe you're right.)