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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, Insightful) by quintessence on Thursday November 24 2016, @07:47PM

    by quintessence (6227) on Thursday November 24 2016, @07:47PM (#432537)

    That's a pretty unsavory reading of people.

    People need accurate information to make decisions, and they know it. Too many falsehoods and you are not long for this earth.

    Internal biases play a role when evidence hasn't risen to the level of irrefutable, but for the most part I doubt people choose news that fits into their worldview as much as the perception of lying to them less.

    This whole notion of fake news has less to do with keeping people informed as much as further manipulating them through censoring "for their own good".

    I distrust anyone who would lord information over me, even false information. It's my mistake to make, and once a news outlet has proven to be less than trustworthy, *I* can make the determination not to bother with them anymore.

    Hence the disgust with the mainstream media across the board.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @08:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @08:01PM (#432548)

    > People need accurate information to make decisions, and they know it. Too many falsehoods and you are not long for this earth.

    That's only true when the feedback loop is short enough for the consequences to have an immediate impact.

    People are really good at responding to short-term results. But the more distance between cause and effect and the more we suck at addressing the cause. Look at all the people who continue to smoke cigarettes - everybody knows smoking kills. But plenty of people wont' stop smoking because the consequences of smoking the pack that's in their pocket right now are years in the future, but the reward is immediate.

    Same thing with fake news. People get an immediately emotional charge out of having their beliefs confirmed. But if turns out to be false, so what? Its not lie caused them to drive into a tree and get injured. It confirmed their view of the world and even if it was wrong, they are still right big picture. And then two months or two years down the road they make a decision based on their feelings without even realizing those feelings were informed by a multitude of lies over time. They choose what they think is right without deeply examining why they think its right.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by quintessence on Thursday November 24 2016, @08:31PM

      by quintessence (6227) on Thursday November 24 2016, @08:31PM (#432567)

      First, comparing fake news with addiction is just... no.

      People's beliefs aren't set in stone, and are continually modulated, even in small ways, with new information they get. And that's from all sources, not just the news. While there may be some issues people are particularly irrational about, if it was all confirmation bias the no news source would matter: people would just ignore any information that didn't correspond with their worldview, so censoring the news wouldn't matter anyway.

      We already see people tend to get more conservative with age. If new information had no affect on people, this wouldn't be the case, and in fact the last elections corresponds more closely with age differences than most other metrics.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @09:29PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @09:29PM (#432601)

        > First, comparing fake news with addiction is just... no.

        Well, that's a non-rebuttal. It is like addiction because dopamine response. But there are tons of other examples. Over-eating. Reckless driving. Unprotected sex with strangers. The list of stupid behaviors that people indulge in because the consequences are not immediately apparent is essentially infinite.

        > People's beliefs aren't set in stone, and are continually modulated, even in small ways, with new information they get.

        Eh, that's a cop-out. You are arguing that because confirmation bias is not 100% that it isn't a huge factor. And you are trying to black-and-white it by saying the only option is censorship. Except no one has said the government needs to get involved.