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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.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Thursday November 24 2016, @05:41PM
Information accumulates in bin 1 in a rigid fashion with new information and derived conclusions not perturbing earlier accumulations. Information in bin 2 might accumulate in a metastable fashion with reconfigurations in logical frameworks sometimes occurring when it results in conclusions with a greater explanatory value. Bin 3 may tolerate conflicting information but it also makes little use of derivations of conclusions of existing information, which means that this kind of accumulation is also stable.
These three modes of filtering the information coming from the world are generally stable under updates. They make use of strategies that typically have the effect of new information not undermining existing knowledge.
There is another update strategy that is also stable. Actually, it's a class of strategies. If you assign credibility to empirically derived information and you use a form of logic that is tolerant of contradictions imposed by low credibility information, you can make logical derivations on your strongest credibility information that are essentially internally consistent. Two methods of assigning credibility can both result in a stable worldview while assigning divergent credibility to the same pieces of information.
It is difficult to use information in Bin 3 as the basis for taking some kind of action in the world. On the other hand, using this kind of credibility-based updates for information that would otherwise end up in this bin yields conclusions supporting taking various actions. To the extent that the world requires that some choices be made (where doing nothing is also a choice), this becomes a necessary evil in human affairs.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.